The CDC's "Zombie Pandemic" Blog & Graphic Novel
A 2011 foray into the entertainment business to condition young people
By John Leake
In 2011, the CDC made a foray into the entertainment business by creating a “Pandemic Preparedness” blog post and graphic novel, purportedly to instruct the public on how to respond to a natural disaster. While the blog post has been taken down, curious readers can still download the graphic novel from the CDC website.
Because young people didn’t seem interested in “dry” factual information about preparedness for an infectious disease outbreak, the CDC decided to grab the public’s attention with a sensational scenario in which the infected didn’t just fall ill, but turned into brain-eating zombies.
As noted in Wikipedia:
"Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse" is a blog post by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that uses a zombie apocalypse to raise public awareness of emergency preparedness. In a blog post titled "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse", the director of the CDC's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, Rear Admiral Ali S. Khan writes: "Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That's right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency." Comparing the upcoming hurricane season and possible pandemics to "flesh-eating zombies" from the horror film Night of the Living Dead and the video game series Resident Evil, Khan recommends Americans prepare for natural disasters as they would have prepared for "ravenous monsters..” ‘‘‘
The blog post generated Internet traffic that eventually crashed the CDC website. Usually, CDC blog posts get traffic between 1,000 and 3,000 hits per week. 30,000 hits were reported by the evening of May 18. The post, oriented at "a young, media-savvy demographic", was read by so many that "by Thursday, it was a trending topic on Twitter". Initially the tweet with the tagline, If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you're ready for any emergency got 12,000 followers; overnight the number of followers increased to 1.2 million, or 100 times the initial number. … the number of followers of the CDC's zombie apocalypse tweets was comparable to the number of followers of the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
To be sure, I’m getting a bit old and stodgy, but the graphic novel (which I read last night) strikes me as stupid, manipulative, dishonest, and tasteless in equal measure.
The CDC claimed that the zombie plot device was “to raise public awareness” of what to do in the event of an infectious disease outbreak, but the message is one of cartoonish simplicity—i.e., stay home, lock your doors to keep out the zombies, and wait for the vaccine that is being developed at breakneck speed.
It seems that many who read the blog post did not understand the “as if” qualifier of the scenario, and thought the CDC was literally preparing the public for the eventuality of a Zombie Apocalypse. The most frequent question submitted to the CDC website was what weapons the agency would recommend to fight zombies.
I’ve often thought that the trouble with military combat video games is that they condition boys and young men to have a distorted conception of what war is really like. The“Video Game” concept of the world divorces the mind from reality. Lacking knowledge of reality, the mind is vulnerable to all manner of manipulations and deceptions.
As historical artifacts, the most notable thing about the “Zombie Pandemic” blog and graphic novel is that they were clearly intended as a means of conditioning young people to believe that in the event of a real infectious disease pandemic, the ONLY solution would be a new vaccine. With zombies roaming the streets, looking for prey, all we can do is hunker down at home and WAIT FOR THE VACCINE.
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"Take a vaccine" is the official answer to every crisis these days. Or, every crisis is used to push vaccines.
The conditioning is to mistrust your inner authority and outsource everything to the outer authority. The conditioning is to outsource your immunity to a battery-metaphor subscription plan.
The conditioning is to mistrust your God-given immune system and your own better judgement in favor of the medical-pharma-defense-industrial complex to tell you what to do like a big parent.
The conditioning is digital entertainment enslavement fear-porn addiction and distraction, so that the voice of your inner knowing is hard to hear.
The Zombie blog is another example of public health eclipsed by the vaccine solution, brought to you with religious, Crusade-like fervor, casting people into right or wrong, believers or anti-believers.
What happens when we unplug, get still and access our inner wisdom?
We might think independently. We might seek individualized, nuanced, multi-factorial, health solutions including therapeutics, supplements, nutrition, nature, sleep, TCM, Ayurveda or many others to "boost" our immune system instead of "boosting" pharma profits. We might choose some vaccines some of the time for some of the people, instead of all the time for all of the people.
Is it too late to counter the conditioning of this generation?
How do we counter this conditioning in the next generation?