I had a dream last night that Michael Crichton was still alive and he wrote a book called “Two Weeks to Stop the Spread.”
The book’s main character was a megalomaniacal, narcissistic senior US health official who was using NIH funds to work with China to engineer a virus designed to wipe out the world’s elderly and infirm populations, thereby decreasing the public health and expense burden foisted on younger generations.
Other main characters included a wildly popular, populist US President who was destroying the trade imbalance with China and revitalizing the US economy (and who was running for a second term), a shadowy mastermind in the Chinese Communist Party, a secret cabal of major US news network executives and a consortium of US state governors from large, Democrat states.
The shadowy Chinese figure determined that releasing the virus into the wild would devastate the world economy, thus making the US President’s re-election unlikely (in favor of a dim-witted candidate whom China had been blackmailing for decades).
The shadowy Chinese figure called a meeting with the US network heads and the Democrat state governors where they agreed to wildly overstate the threat of this new virus, effectively grinding the US and world economies to a halt so that the 90 IQ, blackmailed Presidential candidate of choice could gain the Oval Office.
The story is told in the form of diary entries by the megalomaniacal, narcissistic senior US health official who lays out the whole plot from start to finish while constantly basking in the glow the network executives created for him.
The story has one hero, an enterprising and honest physician who constantly speaks out about the actual origins and effects of the virus, only to find his professional and personal lives destroyed for speaking truth.
Years later the megalomaniacal, narcissistic senior US health official’s diary becomes public, vindicating the enterprising and honest physician, except nobody apologizes to him or gives him his life back.
In my dream, nobody would publish the book, even though Michael Crichton was the author, because the story was too far-fetched and unbelievable.
Then I woke up.