Apathy prevailed. Many leaders in the health care field justified this disinterest by saying that technologically the science of producing and dispersing biological agents was beyond the capability of all but the most sophisticated laboratories. The fact that there had been no known incidents since World War II confirmed for them that there was little cause for concern.
D. A. Henderson, MD - Smallpox: The Death of a Disease
November 5th, 2025
TiSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSst!! 🐍,
Sorry to “tisst” at you all like a snake. It’s not a typical Vermont greeting, but tissing can be a very versatile way of code signaling or getting someone’s attention. Since it’s not an expression used in Vermont, it can be our code word for thissss.
Attention is scarce; everyone is busy. So we’ll get straight to it as directly as we can.
There may be a small problem in the future. It’s so small it may seem insignificant or non-existent, but it’s time to start considering the potential of this small problem―right about now.
The calculus of this problem has been well known for fifty years. This letter is a restatement of that calculus in our current context.
As we are latently aware, we are in a pandemic of apathy.
A lot of people are declining in mental health from a disconnection with each other and reality. Tech-goons are openly tweaking their apps to extinguish our sense of empathy and divide us along political and ideological lines. More and more people are being increasingly bombarded with disinformation, hateful rhetoric and depictions of violence. And the end result is showing up in real life interactions. More and more people have stopped caring or communicating with large groups of folks. A lot of folks are now retreating deeply into emotional connections with AI, far far away from the real world and real people.
Just a few years ago, we had the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. But it was actually us, as a society. We gave up a bit on engaging with our fellow citizens who had fallen prey to disinformation. A lot of folks developed an aversion to discussing masks and vaccines because a significant fraction of the population was so vehemently opposed and conspiratorial that we just ended up dropping those topics to avoid conflict.
And, of course, we got into this pandemic spiral largely because every safeguard and expectation for what SHOULD have happened to control a novel epidemic failed. The United States came in last in the world on a long list of metrics including being able to rebound like other countries did.
Finally, perhaps MOST dangerously of all, folks in our society with the means to intervene in a public health emergency were taught a truly terrible lesson. The lesson was that delay and inaction causes the potential financial reward for acting in an event to increase exponentially as the scale of the crisis grows. Leaders and industry titans learned how to turn public problems into exponential profit, which can be the terminal mechanic of countries in a downward spiral.
But our brave little state is special. We have an advantage, an advantage in time, for the near future.
If we can collectively spot a potential problem early enough, we could begin to stop it ourselves effectively for free, while it’s still an imperceptible speck. And we wouldn’t need billionaires or politicians to help us. (Their malicious actions and calculated delay would be less likely to harm us later too.)
So, where is this specific strand of danger and how do we stop it?
Whelp, we are back with the same leaders that failed us.
The pandemic playbook is back in the trash.
Our technical capacity, the key staff to prevent an outbreak from becoming an epidemic, are being fired or “traumatized”.
Things that we paid for and built to protect us are suddenly going missing.
At a certain point, we need to consider that overt malfeasance is malevolent.
And yet, we shouldn’t need to panic about every disease because for most of the vaccines we routinely use, we are mostly protected by herd immunity.
For example, there’s little measles and pertussis pockets popping up across the country, but those outbreaks won’t become endemic for decades because the general population is still immune. The math says that problem won’t “run” and become out of control overnight. (Although they’re obviously still dangerous on a local scale, especially in young populations.)
With polio, although we gave up the strategy of full herd immunity in 2000, the outbreak in New England in 2022 shows we can have sizable events with the new makeshift vaccine global strategy that are only easily observable from wastewater monitoring. The fecal oral vaccine is a pretty good stop gap (which is seeing more and more use globally).
None of the usual suspects circulating in the world should be disruptive to daily life in the immediate future, because the fraction of the population naive to them is small and only grows 1.1% annually.
An emerging disease could come out of the jungle or permafrost, which is always a devil we don’t know.
However, there is one idiosyncratic thing we forgot about. There is one pesky remainder to an equation nobody wants to think about, which we do actually have to solve for, now.
There is one very bad guy and a weapon that has become about 1.1% more potent for every year of the half century that it’s been in a freezer. And that danger is now about fifty times more deadly than the most recent reference point we have as a society.
When the world last put this DNA in a freezer, global cooperation and empathy had made it almost completely ineffective as a weapon. But every year we failed to destroy it, the potency of the danger returned. It is now the most dangerous string of molecules that has ever existed, to humans, in our brief time on this rock.
The bytes of this DNA sequence must also have been perfectly and continuously secured by the World Health Organization to prevent this weapon from being printed on a desktop CRISPR machine.
Even then, a tremendous amount of preparation would have to take place to make the weapon effective in a modern world. There would be obvious signs everywhere that people were being coached or prepped to facilitate it’s transmission in a planned attack.
The anti-vaccination and anti-mask campaign we just experienced was an iteration of a Soviet era disinformation campaign called Operation Denver, or INFEKTION . It was an effort to exacerbate the extraordinarily fatal AIDS pandemic during the Reagan administration by publishing false information in far flung news sources. While many conspiracies are fake, this one actually happened.
There have been many iterations of INFEKTION since, some more deadly than others. Each time, our enemies got better at using events to weaken the standing of the United States and cause needless pain and suffering throughout the world. 1
One person who has worked on all these campaigns, rose to the top of the pile in 1999 by bombing a civilian apartment complex as pretense for an invasion. The number of people he has killed in the last quarter century is on a scale most people would find uncomfortable to imagine. It’s difficult to quantify the scale of what he has done, but he is as far up the pinnacle of diabolical modern day evil as we have.
He is only one person truly qualified to know what he plans to do. The rest of us can speculate on the likeliness of what he may do based on inference of what he prioritizes. In any case, it’s not a matter of random chance.
Vermont is still a wonderful place full of incredible beauty and hardy people. It may be difficult to convey how terrible the surrounding world can be to people here. It’s horrible to have to consider such a terrible villain or idea in such an idyllic place, but we need to have the capacity to conceive of a person with no human empathy whatsoever to keep what we have and those we love safe.
His influence is already here with us, everywhere in Vermont.
To me, it is chilling and alarming to hear a Vermonter say, “I’m never gonna wear a mask again.”
It is chilling and alarming to hear so many Americans say, “I’ll never get a vaccine again.”
It was chilling to watch someone stand in front of our nation’s Capital and say “we should make this a super-spreader event”, to openly advocate for the indiscriminate transmission of disease as an after-thought, as they were simultaneously in the act of inciting a riot to disrupt the peaceful transition of power with a bull horn.
It’s incredibly dangerous that disinformation around public health originating from one of our most dangerous adversaries in history has been so completely absorbed by the political party now controlling every branch of our government.
Finally, it’s highly dangerous for anyone to downplay these threats, especially the risks that our frontline workers could be exposed to professionally.
But the math of a conspiracy involving hundreds of millions of people says it clearly cannot be a secret conspiracy.
We need to close this small vulnerability soon. Ideally, it should be fixed completely for all our healthcare workers within the next month.
Frontline healthcare professionals in Vermont need to get the one vaccine you all need in this brave new world, the vaccine nobody got because we dropped the old one in 1971.
Please consider seriously if we have a government, or an independent judiciary or a functioning Congress. And check your gut if those folks are ever gonna help us.
Stop believing fantasy fairy tales about what is supposed to happen. This is real life. We all need to be seeing what is happening in reality.
Ask yourself if an executive who campaigned on a promise of weaponizing disaster relief, who is weaponizing disaster relief in office, will continue that behavior in the future.
Please, ask yourself how it could feel to wait until the anti-vaccinationist in charge of our vaccine stockpile says it’s safe for you to get vaccinated, and authorizes your dose to be distributed in time.
Given the care someone devoted to making a significant portion of the US population vehemently anti-mask, is there a shape or color of mask you prefer that you’d like to buy for your personal strategic stockpile… just in case the national one turns up empty?
Where would exposed people living in densely populated areas go for refuge if the INFEKTION v9.0 machine starts amplifying “Lockdown” panic to make them flee?
Where, physically, would Vermonters who are truly committed to being anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and pro-disease be likely to end up? And what would happen if they don’t stop coming? What fraction of the population are we talking about?
There are very real, tragic and permanent consequences to under-estimating the scale of what these folks are capable of doing. We have seen some of those consequences. Those potential consequences can be much worse than what we witnessed five years ago. They are iterating. 2
We all need you to trust your own common sense and instincts to protect your own health. We all need you to look out for your number one.
Consider the potential risk of one more jab versus the potential risk of being immunologically naive in 2026.
Please don’t bet your life on a coin toss with the devil for no reason. We all need you all to stick around to pull out of this.
Even if you’re the only one who reads this and gets vaccinated, don’t underestimate the potential impact that one person who never stops having empathy can have on the world.
On logistics: at the moment, frontline workers physically control custody to the immediate vaccine stocks. They are the means of distribution. They are currently at the front of an empty queue. Reddit nurses! you need to collect the Facebook, FrontPorch and TicTok nurses, then start corralling everyone through to the basement and out the back. Be apprehensive of actors defying common sense.
Folks in the Press, Hi. The topic being alluded to above hasn’t been reported, so you know the drill: 🙈,🙉,🙊. If you want to fulfill the function of a free press in the future, you might consider calling to schedule a jab next week. There’s no scoop. You are being recruited for reasons that might become apparent later.
For the general public, the virus is not the danger. We can stop a virus without herd immunity. The danger is the disinformation controlling the mobile virus production units that have been pre-positioned in your community. We have to reach our neighbors with empathy and bring them back to humanity and the land of the living. We need to be able to inoculate our neighbors with the facts, and keep doing it after repeatedly failing until it works.
There is some information here to get started.
For the many challenges we are facing, empathy is perhaps the most powerful tool we have to turn the tide in our favor.
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