Lost Immunity by Daniel Kalla (free reads TXT) 📕

Fiona smiles. “Maybe we’re both just good actors, huh?”

“Maybe. But acting only gets you so far.”

CHAPTER 21

Yolanda Stern sits at the back of the conference room, listening to the announcement. Unlike the other public-health nurses, she never speaks up at meetings. If she has questions, she saves them for later and emails her boss, Tyra, who’s always so conscientious about answering in a nonjudgmental way.

Her whole life, Yolanda has been a wallflower. By choice. She avoids public attention at all costs. Her therapist blames Yolanda’s mother for being overbearing and overprotective. But Yolanda knows better. She doesn’t like the sound of her own voice. And she’s never been comfortable in her own skin. If she could only shed those stubborn twenty extra pounds, she’s convinced she would feel more confident in group situations. The exercise and diets never seem to work out for her as billed, but that doesn’t stop her from endlessly trying.

Yolanda does have questions for Tyra, though. This new vaccine rollout has come out of nowhere and seems insanely ambitious, targeting fifty thousand people over the next three to four weeks. How can we possibly achieve that?

Yolanda already knows what her boyfriend, Max, will make of the vaccination campaign. She wants to tell him, but Tyra has sworn the staff to secrecy until the announcement is made public later today. Besides, Yolanda vividly remembers how much the news of the mandatory HPV vaccine enraged Max. She doesn’t want to add to his burden. The poor man suffers enough.

Yolanda was thrilled when she matched with Max online, six months earlier. She fell in love with the handsome doctor by the end of their first date. He listened to her in a way no man—especially anyone from a dating app—had ever done. And he was so interested in her career. Most of the other dates didn’t even seem to notice or care that she worked as a public-health nurse. But Max brought it up within minutes of their first meeting.

Yolanda had never met a naturopath before, but she was wowed by the breadth and depth of Max’s knowledge and the way he made her feel so at ease from the outset. She did have some serious reservations when she first learned about his fierce anti-vax beliefs. Vaccinations are an essential part of her job. And before meeting Max, she had never once questioned their necessity. But he was so persuasive. So dogged. He sent her scientific article after article, filled with data, to back up his passionate views. It was enough to make Yolanda question the value of some vaccines, like the one against HPV. It definitely gave her more sympathy for the anti-vax side, especially once she learned how much his poor son struggled with what Max blamed on a vaccine injury. Besides, she was already so smitten that Max could’ve probably told her the moon landing was faked and 9/11 was an inside job, and she still would’ve stuck with him.

“So tomorrow morning at nine a.m., we’ll open the first clinic,” Tyra announces, drawing Yolanda back to the moment. “It’s going to be all hands on deck. We’re hoping to get at least five hundred clients through. And there’s bound to be lots of kinks to iron out. After the first clinic, we’ll divide up and run multiple sites across the city.” Her gaze circles the room. “Tomorrow is our dress rehearsal, people. Let’s get it right.”

“Hey, Tyra,” calls Felix. He lifts a copy of the generic consent form that Tyra handed out before the meeting. “You expect us to go through this whole form with each client and/or parent before every single vaccination?”

“No vaccine without a signature.” Tyra wags her finger. “But that’s why there’ll be two of you at each station. One nurse reviews the consent form while the other labels a syringe and draws up a fresh vial of the vaccine.”

“Fun,” Felix grumbles.

“You get to swap halfway,” Tyra says. “And word around the office is that you love to swap, Felix.”

Even Yolanda laughs. Felix and his wife are devout Catholics, but the joke has followed him ever since they showed up at last year’s Halloween party—the theme of which was “come as you aren’t”—dressed as swingers.

“And while the vaccine is a huge priority for us, so is the continued contact tracing,” Tyra says. “We still need to follow up with every single new meningitis victim and ensure all their close contacts are started on appropriate antibiotics.”

A collective moan rises in the room.

Tyra blows them an exaggerated kiss. “This is why I love you folks so much! There’s nothing this team can’t do when we set our mind to it.”

But fifty thousand vaccinations in two weeks? Yolanda thinks. Oh my God, Max is going to lose his mind.

CHAPTER 22

“Have you called Mom yet??” Amber’s text reads.

Lisa can practically hear the accusation in her sister’s written words. The guilt creeps up again.

She peeks at the time. The communications team sent out a press release and launched the supporting social media campaign earlier in the afternoon, but the response from the media was so overwhelming they decided to hold a formal press conference. Lisa still has forty-five minutes before she has to face the reporters.

No time like the present.

Lisa picks up her phone and calls her mom’s number. It’s the landline for both of her parents, since neither of them carries a mobile. Something about cell towers and electromagnetic fields. She can’t even keep up with all her dad’s conspiracy theories.

Her parents still live on the same farm in eastern Washington, about forty miles outside of Spokane, where Lisa and her sister grew up. It began as a decentralized farming commune that was intended to be a self-sufficient nirvana for the enlightened and the disenfranchised. It bore all the stereotypical attributes of such a commune—or a cult, as she sometimes thought of it in her teen years: group parenting, potluck meals,