Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => The Secret History => Topic started by: Ogrebear on <02-05-15/1855:13>
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Looking into VITAS, I was struck by the odd way it was handled- an epidemic virus strikes the world in 2010, causing govt collapse, panic etc- in short a Zombie Apocalypse style event with over 2 Billion dead, but it seems to vanish again quite quickly in 2011. Where did the cures come from? Did the UN just sweep in somehow?
How did the Western Powers survive? Given the panic we have seen over Ebola and the tiny number of dead that has caused I would imagine that something like VITAS which killed so many so quickly would almost cripple the US, UK etc as people panicked. I don't recall martial law or other such emergency powers being used?
Also VITAS seems downplayed in the history- almost a footnote, but I can see it being 'the event' that really drives home Extraterritoriality, and the realty of the 'Megas as countries' as employees turn to their Corp for shelter, and the fact they can kill anyone trying to get in.
Thoughts please?
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Apparently VITAS wasn't particularly difficult to heal as they already had vaccines in 2011, not even one year after the initial infection.
That would be the reason why I'd guess it didn't cause a panic. You can control the media to downplay such a situation.
"Another local outbreak of VITAS claimed at least 2 million victims this morning in Africa and South America and yet there is still not enough money to supply the needy people in these regions
with the necessary medications. Experts say there is no risk for the US, though if you experience one of the symptoms you should go to a doctor soon: ... . This was Ms. Blah and now Mr. Bloh with the weather."
It's only danger is that it spreads extremely fast and thus hit areas with bad medical supplies / hygiene really bad.
It's also said that vaccines were deliberately held back to weaken tactical valuable targets.
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While I can't remember for sure, I'd assume the first wave of VITAS wasn't cured just by, you know, a cure. It killed off a sizable fraction of the world's human population in a very short amount of time, while leaving the people who were resistant. Basically, it probably would have killed itself off by slaughtering viable hosts faster than it could infect them. This is one of the biggest issues with biological warfare, actually; you have to balance mortality, contagiousness and a number of other factors (incubation time, symptoms, etc.).
They probably survived by implementing martial law and other methods of control while the chaos was all around them, and then put the pieces back together after. As the reconstruction efforts moved on, I bet the megacorporations and their predecessors were snapping up every opportunity to get money and concessions out of the world's governments. Keep in mind, a lot of nations still fell apart later on, and I would bet my britches that VITAS was a factor, even decades after. Would the NAN have been so successful if such a disaster hadn't weakened the States? Would Japan have had the motivation to go back to their Imperialistic roots without such a disaster bringing a need for the past back? A lot of factors come to mind.
I wouldn't say VITAS is played down all that much, at least in comparison to other epidemics and pandemics that took place in the past. I mean, folks barely remember typhoid epidemics, the Spanish Flu, polio, smallpox and even the Black Death is generally a paragraph or two unless you're researching more thoroughly. People tend to forget that kind of thing, excepting the ones who lived through it.
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While I can't remember for sure, I'd assume the first wave of VITAS wasn't cured just by, you know, a cure. It killed off a sizable fraction of the world's human population in a very short amount of time, while leaving the people who were resistant. Basically, it probably would have killed itself off by slaughtering viable hosts faster than it could infect them. This is one of the biggest issues with biological warfare, actually; you have to balance mortality, contagiousness and a number of other factors (incubation time, symptoms, etc.).
Play Plague Inc. and you'll learn about that ;)
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Another reason VITAS could be downplayed a bit is well... the Awakening Happened and everything that entails.
2010-2011: VITAS!!!
2012: OMFGDRAGONS.
2015: Exploding Volcanoes!
2021: WAAAAAUUUGH!!
2022: Waaugh brings vitas 2? OMG
And so on.
Even so the death toll *WAS* horrific ( some 20% world population mortality discounting Africa). Mexico City burned down as did Calcutta in riotous response. That said I'd imagine a signicant number wiped out people in more Rural areas where disease control and the medical facilities are lacking especially given few people are expected to survive past 24 hours without expert assistance.
And honestly, not all Western governments survived. Mexico dissolved in the wake of VITAS and the Awakening.
http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/2010 Shadowrun wiki does have a decent overview of events though if you're interested.
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Here's the thing: the CDC went apeshit over VITAS, ten or a hundred times more psychotic than over the bird flu from a few years ago. (My wife was on the emergency internet site team for that, so I got a thirdhand-inside-look, so to speak.) Did they go after a cure? Well, viruses can't be cured, but they can be immunized against, boosters to the body can be applied, etc. etc. Anyhow, the kicker here is that the immunization shots went out, worldwide - but they went out to governments and people in positions of power. In the places where VITAS hit hardest, it wasn't that the immunization shots weren't shipped there - it's that the people who got them either a) hoarded them for their own people, letting their rivals die, or b) sold them to the highest bidder(s) and made as much money off them as they could before they skipped town.
In short, except maybe for India where it started, human nature (greed and hate) killed millions of people - it's just that VITAS was the weapon of choice instead of guns.
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In the same wiki in the year 2023 (http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/2023 (http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/2023)) they talk about VITAS2 serum. So probably the 'cure' for VITAS is simply to take blood from those who survived the disease, isolate the serum with the antibodies and inject that into other patients. They did the same with some of the ebola patients last year. It's a very effective method, although it doesn't grant immunity to the disease (your body doesn't make memory B-cells) and you can't make the serum in large quantities, as it has to be extracted from survivors and not everybody is suited as a donor.
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Where did the cures come from?
Depending on how canon you consider Chrom & Dioxin, the Swiss GENOM Corp allegedly played a major role.
Otherwise, from the same place the replacement population came from, FASAnomics ;)
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Where did the cures come from?
Depending on how canon you consider Chrom & Dioxin, the Swiss GENOM Corp allegedly played a major role.
Otherwise, from the same place the replacement population came from, FASAnomics ;)
I don't exactlz where I read that but I once read that modern cures like magic and yeta/interferon are very effective against VITAS (It's used against the local outbreaks that still occur in 2070)
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Magic does work on VITAS, which is pretty much the only reason Africa survived as it did; places like Lagos had a near to complete 100% mortality rate, but others had their tribal healers discover effective healing magic and start using it to cure their people.
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Only for VITAS II.
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I was wondering how they cured it so quickly, globally in under a year - pre-warning? Was it manufactured in the first place so XX corp had the cure waiting and it just needed distribution?
If VITAS had been longer would we have been looking at a zombie apocalypse type scenario? Major WWZ type Great Panic? Could that have been the catalyst for the Indian roundup, Balkanisation, Corp Extraterritoriality and the 'we love the Corp' mentality in SR?
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I was wondering how they cured it so quickly, globally in under a year - pre-warning? Was it manufactured in the first place so XX corp had the cure waiting and it just needed distribution?
If VITAS had been longer would we have been looking at a zombie apocalypse type scenario? Major WWZ type Great Panic? Could that have been the catalyst for the Indian roundup, Balkanisation, Corp Extraterritoriality and the 'we love the Corp' mentality in SR?
I'm still pretty sure the disease wiped out the people who were most susceptible and slowed down in time for the 'cure', and if I remember right the cure was a pre-existing drug (that had to be mass-produced).
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If you have a disease that's killing 90% of the people who contract it, and it's spreading like, well, the plague, and your cure - which isn't literally a cure, but an inoculation, because we still after all cannot actually cure any viral infection - triggers the disease in 5% of the people who receive it, you can either go with losing 4.5% of your population or 90%. All the places that are most likely to have it spread like wildfire (highly mobile, requiring highly industrialized, societies) are the ones who are most likely to be able to generate the inoculation. Generating an inoculation is really a relatively easy thing; you start with someone who's survived the disease to acquire antibodies, and go from there. They do this with multiple flu variants every year, with lead times of 3-6 months or less.
Functionally, VITAS I wasn't cured; it burned out. Effectively, the same thing happened with VITAS II. At the level at which industrial societies are, however, inoculation production can swing into effect pretty damn fast, which means you can form 'firebreaks' of inoculated people against an outbreak pretty quickly. But the idea that industrialized nations can't generate these things without knowing ahead of time is excellent conspiracy fodder, which means there's plenty of people out there who mutter in corners about corporations planning the whole thing.
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There are also other methods to treat a viral infection after the person is infected. They are generally termed Anti-viral Agents/drugs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug). So the impact of VITAS 1 & 2 may have been stymied into burning themselves out, giving the doctors and scientists time to develop inoculations.
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I found this simulator online and while Smallpox is not VITAS I thought it might be of interest: http://collapse-thedivisiongame.ubi.com/en/ (http://collapse-thedivisiongame.ubi.com/en/)
Also given how quickly society collapses in the scenario presented (approx 30days) then how did the Shadowrun world survive VITAS? Esp in the West in heavily populated places like New York, London etc?
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Simply put, the writers in the 80's - hell, anyone in the 80's - didn't know as much about epidemiology as we do today, nor anticipate how insanely quickly an event on a pig farm in China can become a worldwide epidemic.
If you care to go for a somewhat coherent explanation, simply put it wasn't quite as contagious as everyone thought it was. Given enough time, the CDC and the WHO can come up with an inoculation for almost anything - yes, even the viral nasties. Problem with some of those is that the infection rate from the inoculation can be pretty dangerously high - 5+% - and when you have a plague that kills 80% of those infected, well, that means you have 10M * .05 * .8 = 400,000 dead in a metroplex of 10 million, just from inoculation. Sure, it's better than 8 million dead, but it's still pretty horrifying. However, the government will impose it, if it looks like something seriously nasty has grabbed a hold and is gaining speed. And IIRC, the inoculation for VITAS had nowhere near such a tragic infection rate - which means First World countries with stable governments came through relatively unscathed.
In less stable places, governments DID collapse. Entire towns were wiped out. Sub-Saharan Africa really got the shaft. Otherwise, well, see above.
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One of the best comparisons, in all honesty, is the SPanish Flu of 1918, of which we're overdue for a repeat of. That sucker blew up in about 18 months, killed more people than World War I did, and was so horriffic that society as a whole kinda came together and said, "We don't takl about this."
It damn near *vanishes* from the historical record, and getting info about it is still kinda tricky in some cases. For instance, it often turned people blue, or even black, as the victims had their lungs disolve and couldn't keep oxygen in their bodies. In other cases, the lungs would perferoate, and thousands of tiny airbubbles would leak outinto the body, moving around organs, until they'd come up under ths skin like blisters. Patients with this condition would make stuccato popping sounds when rolled over like rice krispees iin milk.
Society collapsed around the cities that were worst hit as people were terrified to go outside, gravediggers had a high mortality rate, and they ran out of coffins ... dead bodies were piled in the street, and trucks would come by, picking the corpses up with pitchforks, tossing them into the back, and dumping people into mass graves. It's kind of unimagineable for most of us in the modern age to understand the impact this had on people, but, again it was so terrible everybody just sealed the knowledge up and walked away rather than revisit it.
There are some amazing books about the period, My personal fave is The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry:
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Pandemic-History/dp/0143036491/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456669386&sr=8-1&keywords=spanish+flu
Read that thing and you'll be just kinda going, "Guh."
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Staccato. And Rice Krispies in milk ...
... man, you come up with the best metaphors for the sickest things. ;)
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Agreed, Wyrm.
Yeah, nobody gives the Spanish Flu much notice, when it was one of the worst outbreaks of the 20th century (if not ever, though the Black Death has it beat). It killed an estimated 3 to 5% of the world's population. They called it the Purple Death because of those symptoms. I only saw one mention of it in some military history books before I joined up; I learned more about it studying CBRN than anything else.
As far as VITAS goes, you could treat it with tetracycline antibiotics, at least for the first strain. A specific vaccine wasn't needed to treat those infected (and vaccines don't help you once you're sick anyways). The problem was the massive infection rates. People ran out of stocks immediately, people with connections started hoarding, etc.
Wyrm is right about Africa; the first strain of VITAS killed 75% of the continent's population. One neighborhood of Lagos had a 100% fatality rate, and corpse-burning sites around the city are still the astral equivalent to nuclear dump-sites. Feral Cities goes so far as to say it was more influential than the Awakening, possibly the most influential event in the last few centuries, and that people are flat-out paranoid of illness. Sneezing in the wrong company can get your ass killed, and being a magical healer is practically a get-out-of-jail-free card due to the respect offered to them.
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I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the African mortality rates are exaggerated, but, again going to teh Spanish Flu, there were situations in Alaska where it'd hit a village, the natives had no defenses, and while not everyone would fall down and die, everyone *would* become bedridden and sick. And after four to six days of not being cared for or fed, the dogs would break in and find no one able to defend themselves.
When rescue teams/medical personnel finally made it up there, they'd find whole communities without a single living person and only 1-3 dogs left, tugging over bones and scraps.
Africa likely saw some similar results, and also had a large exodus situation, where rumors of safe places would cause a lot of movement.
That said, I hope to explore the Ethomalian Territories more about this in the future. There, the plagues had lasting psychological effects where people retreated from flesh and the shamans who were able to use magic to cur ethings became modern priest-kings. Now you have a society where the less flesh you have, the more 'holy' you are, with cybernetic replacements seen as a GOOD thing, and the top of society are these people who dress in long black attire topped with spooky masks.(You can see more about it in Chrome Flesh, plug plug.)
I'm a comedy guy, so I don't get to bust out the horror writing very often, but it's a nice change-up every now and then.
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Well, let's be honest. Darkest Africa is lazy as shit, but it's also as common in fiction as, well, the common cold. Shadowrun is no exception.
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VITAS (Virally-Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome) was a virus inducing severe allergic reactions in those without allergies, many of the treatments used by allergy sufferers stood a good chance of increasing survivability by reducing the severity of symptoms.
Kind of a "the meek shall inherit the Earth" situation as it were.
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Theoretically, yes. Practically, however, no - because in a location where there isn't a network in place to properly distribute medical goods, there usually isn't the over-the-counter medication available to handle such minor issues. Antihistamines (diphenhydramine is still the best) aren't generally going to be found in Third World villages - and even a pseudo-Seven-11 in a Third World city isn't going to carry much more than a few dozen packages - which will last only a certain amount of time, because these chemicals usually have a 4-6 hour stay in the body. Which means the 'treatments' are easily as likely to prolong the agony as save your life.