Story Excerpt

Thank you, Mayor Stevens, and everyone on the Baltimore city council. It is a great honor to be here to dedicate this statue of my grandfather on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bird Flu Genocide. For those of you too young to remember the events of that horrific year, my grandfather saved the world.

At a time when a killer disease and racial hatred were about to destroy mankind, he ended the disease and the hatred. He didn't do it single-handedly; it took the work of thousands of unnamed heroes. Historians call grandfather 'the Paul Revere of our time.' Like the Revolutionary War hero, grandfather gave the call to action that motivated the thousands of heroes to fight back.

What few people have heard is the speech in which he uttered his world-changing rally cry. Before history forgets, I'd like to present his testimony in its entirety.

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I come to you today as one of the few healthy black men in America. If you, the surviving members of Congress, don't act soon, there won't be any people of color left in this great country. The diversity that makes us strong will be gone.

As the Speaker of the House said, my name is Dr. Garvey Samuels, and I lead the task force fighting the H5N1 influenza epidemic. H5N1 is the name of the virus causing the Asian Bird Flu, which has ravaged the world these last four months. I'm standing here today only because my position grants me access to an effective vaccination serum. Our poor people, most of whom are non-whites, are still being treated with surplus stocks of Amantadine, which is ineffective. The country is dying and we're trying to save a few dollars!

Experts like myself at EIS. That's the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service. Predicted the H5N1 virus could be as deadly as the 1918 Spanish Flu. Estimates put the death toll between 150 million people, on the low end, to 360 million people worldwide over a six-month period. Since the first reported fatality five months ago, the death toll is over 700 million and rising. The United States has been "fortunate" with only fifty-six million deaths. Those numbers are sure to climb, because estimates put infection rates among the urban poor at seventy percent or more.

According to our pre-epidemic models, once the virus mutated so human-to-human transmission was possible, it might spread around the globe. Modern air travel has always been the most likely vector for the disease. What we didn't count on was the calculated use of air travel to deliberately spread the disease. You heard me right, Congress members. The disease is being purposely spread around the globe.