You hear of them all the time, seeing them screaming on the interwebs, doing podcasts, videos, protesting when new vaccines show up. When the immunoflu was invented, they screamed even louder. That is when the "pure lifers" started. The ones who kept themselves in the equivalent of "bubbles" to avoid them, and their children, ever catching the immunoflu. A large number of them went to a planet to settle in and live. The planet was, if not for the terraformed domes, uninhabitable. But inside the domed cities, it was very pleasant. Until that one visitor. They had kept themselves isolated for four generations, then that one visitor came, a man from the Alliance. They'd never let anyone into the dome before without the person in question, even tourists, being forced to wear hazmat suits to make sure that nothing the person carrying ever got in, but accidents always happen, eventually.
He was in a crowded mall, everyone knew it was an accident. But that didn't help how angry the people were. He was sitting, reading a map, he'd been lost. Several teenagers were roughhousing when one was shoved into him and he crashed backward into a crystalized statue. The hazmat suit already had some unseen potential flaws, was badly damaged. The immunoflu he carried got out into the community. This was a "Pure Life" society.. and now they were having to deal with being immunized whether they wanted to be or not.
(notation - In a nutshell a society that eschews all vaccinations even ones from the immunoflu, like real life modern day antivaxxers, build their own society. They're cut off from the biome of the rest of the galaxy, and then.. there's an accident.) -- DaniandShali
Disasters don't have to be instant. The worst of them happen in slow motion. To the tune of For Want of a Nail, a nation, a polity, an identity, or a culture can die. Dependant on the culture, this can be beneficial to those who formerly held it dear.
For want of immunity, lives were lost... Once upon a time, there was disease. Smallpox, measles, mumps... diseases that could maim. Diseases that could kill. Some people hit on the idea of deliberately infecting children with a weaker disease so that there wouldn't catch the more menacing one. They named it after the animal that the weaker disease came from. Vaca meaning cow, for the cowpox that forestalled the attacks of smallpox.
One would expect that such a breakthrough would be welcomed with open arms and cheering in the streets. No such luck. There was widespread panic, misunderstanding, and fear of the new process. Over the intervening years, very little changed. For every new intervention, there was an equally opposing reaction. Confusion and fear abounded. Someone, somewhere, drew a correlation between these vaccines and the rise in diagnoses of autism. Many people feared a mental disorder more than they feared the maiming and killing diseases that the vaccines prevented.
Within a decade, diseases that were almost wiped out came back. They started killing again. The people against science ignored this, and doubled down on their assorted shenanigans. Arguments like, "We can't catch these diseases, we're healthy," kept being repeated in spite of solid, scientific, documented evidence to the contrary.
So, in an effort to preserve the species, gengineers invented the immunoflu. A simple, harmless, common rhinovirus that could infect people naturally and give the immune system the patterns of more hazardous diseases. The news of this breakthrough should have been welcomed with open arms and cheering in the streets. No such luck. As usual, there was widespread panic, confusion, and disinformation taken as gospel by those who automatically distrusted anything new, scientific, or both.
Entire communities sealed themselves off from possible infection by the immunoflu, ironically using all the quarantine procedures that they had ignored in the face of literally any other disease. They spread misinformation, scarelore, and rumours to the detriment of a purely beneficial disease worse than they spread any of their other numerous plagues. Finally, at last, they banded together to create a world in their own image.
Terra was finally safe from their ill-thought ideas, misinterpretation of scientific evidence, and assumptions in favour of remaining "pure" and "natural". At least they'd terraformed their colony planet to be habitable before they moved in[1].
They were allowed to continue their disease-ridden history in peace, with their own narrative concerning how vaccines were poison, so were genetically modified organisms, and that being "natural" and "pure" were the only ways to combat disease. They degenerated into mediaeval levels of superstition and pseudo-magics within three generations.
When the Galactic Surveys found them, they were greeted as if they were demons. Telepathically contacted by a benevolent Melil, the recipient thought they were possessed by a malevolent spirit trying to teach them falsehoods, and the poor Human instantly demanded a painful and inevitably fatal exorcism rite.
Obviously, they were not ready for Galactic Contact.
Decades passed before another Human colonial entity breached the walls of ignorance and, unfortunately for everyone involved, they were Dereggers out for a quick profit. They ignored every rule set against such contact and also ignored basic infection prevention protocols. The Dereggers were immune to everything the Anthivass had. The Anthivass, on the other hand, had little protection from the things the Dereggers carried.
It could have been a global tragedy. Instead, a miracle of sorts, as the Dereggers only carried recent editions of the immunoflu with them.
The Anthivass were unaware of what was spreading from citizen to citizen, unconcerned with a light summer cold that was gone through in less than two of their seven-day weeks. They didn't notice for the better part of a year that their other waves of infections stopped after that particular rhinovirus circled the entire planet.
The children stopped catching common childhood diseases. The regular rounds of measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and even shingles ceased. Polio, once a life-threatening plague, ceased to be an occurrence. The mortality rate plummeted. Babies lived to childhood. Children lived to adulthood. The population sprang upwards, and the economy boomed. Technology began to spring ahead as more time was available for educations. Science was invented anew.
The people learned about things all over again. Their pseudo-magic was brought forward into a new age of reason. Hypothesis, antithesis, testing, thesis... all became a regime.
When the Dereggers came again, they came with a Galactic, who brought more science with them. It was a careful selection of shiny new toys and educational material that would entice the Anthivass, step by baby step, into the modern era.
When they were told, at last, that their ancestral beliefs had lead them to isolate lest they catch an "artificial plague," their leader scoffed. "We didn't," they crowed. "We made it through all of it by naturally building our immunities. Now we can't catch anything more than a cold because we're already healthy!"
The Galactic Alliance decided not to inform them any further.
[1] There was one colonial entity so determined to remain "pure" and "natural" that they elected to forgo even the most elementary of terraforming processes in order to "bond with their new world as nature intended." The horror of what happened there remains part of the mandatory education for any other colonists with similarly daft ideas.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Kateryna_Kon]
If you like my stories, please Check out my blog and Follow me. Or share them with your friends!
Send me a prompt [85 remaining prompts!]
