What is funny-not-funny about Contagion is how real it feels - | Alex Berenson

What is funny-not-funny about Contagion is how real it feels - and how false it turned out to be.

The movie puts its thumb on the scale in ways large and small. Its “MEV” virus has an incredibly high infection fatality rate, up to 30 percent. Thus three out of every 10 people who are infected with the virus die - young and old alike. They go from well to sick to dead in a couple of days, but for most of that time have only mild symptoms. Thus the seizures. And thus the very high R0.

Contagion is also weirdly obsessed with the idea of fomites - transmission by touch. (The bigger a problem fomite transmission represents, the more effective “reasonable” social distancing is likely to be.)

The most accurate part might be the vaccine development schedule.

It goes like so: a successful test in one monkey, followed by a test in one human (the brilliant CDC researcher who came up the shot), followed by distribution to eight billion people! More or less how Warp Speed went. Only those guys were wise enough not to try the miracle jabs on themselves first.

Also I missed the part in the movie where drug companies made $100 billion selling shots with liability-free guaranteed contracts.