Lost Immunity by Daniel Kalla (free reads TXT) 📕

“More like toxic epidermal necrolysis. The poor girl is covered from head to toe in blisters.”

“Who is she?”

“Her name is Brooke Hogarth. Nineteen years old.”

Lisa jots the name on the notepad by her phone. “Do we know when Brooke got her vaccine? And at which clinic?”

“Two or three days ago, but I’ll have to get back to you about the where.”

“Never mind. I’ll be able to figure it out on my end.” She takes a slow breath. “Is Brooke going to make it?”

“Her blood pressure is very soft, and she swelled up like the Michelin Man.” He clicks his tongue. “But yeah, my gut tells me she’ll pull through.”

“That’s something,” Lisa says with relief. “I hear Mateo is slowly recovering, as well.”

“He is. Very slowly.” Edwin exhales. “Lisa, these are two of the worst rashes I’ve ever seen.”

“You don’t have to convince me.”

“But they’re still not half as bad as the meningitis cases we’ve been wrestling with.”

“No doubt.” The new reports of critically ill kids don’t affect Lisa as much as they did only the week before. Part of her worries she might be running out of capacity for more pity. “OK, Edwin, please keep me posted.”

“Will do.”

Lisa is about to hang up when she’s hit by an afterthought. “Can you save a sample of Brooke’s urine?”

“Her urine?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“All right.”

Lisa thanks him. As soon as she disconnects, she searches the vaccine database for the clinic where Brooke was inoculated. Her hope that it was one of the two clinics the other three victims attended are soon dashed. Brooke was vaccinated two days after Mateo.

Lisa calls the toxicology lab and tracks down Jimmy. “Perfect timing, Lisa,” the toxicologist chirps. “I was just about to call you.”

“There’s been another critical reaction,” she says.

“Oh? Do tell.”

“The patient’s in the ICU. If I can get you a sample of her urine, can you test it for the same medications you found in the syringe?”

“Definitely,” he says enthusiastically. “Nothing better for concentrating toxins than the old kidneys. If she got the tainted vaccine, we should be able to isolate most of the same contaminants in her urine that we found in the other syringes.”

“Syringes?” Lisa gasps. “As in plural?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” Jimmy says. “So far, we’ve run through about eighty of those used syringes. We were only able to extract enough of a sample to test about half. But among those, two more syringes have tested positive for the same six toxins we found in the first one.”

Lisa goes cold. “One in twenty, then?”

“Roughly, yeah.”

She thinks aloud. “So the toxins weren’t in the entire batch of vaccine.”

“Which fits with the rest of the picture. We’ve run screens on vials from every one of the unopened batches of vaccine you sent over. None of them are contaminated.”

“Whoever’s been poisoning them was doing it one vial at a time.”

“That, or one syringe at a time,” Jimmy cautions.

“And either the poisoner was tainting the doses at the clinic, or he or she was sneaking in tainted vials and substituting them for legitimate ones.”

“The logistics of smuggling them in seems way easier than tampering with them on-site.”

“I agree,” Lisa says. “There’d be too many eyes on him or her inside the clinic.”

“Probably.”

Lisa considers the situation for another moment. “There were four hundred people inoculated, give or take, at Mateo’s clinic. And so far, Mateo is the only one who’s had a major reaction.” She makes the calculation in her head. “If one in twenty doses were tampered with, that would mean that about twenty of the vaccines were poisoned at the clinic.”

“Does that math add up?” Jimmy asks.

“I think it does. No matter how many different medications you contaminated a vaccine with, only a fraction of those inoculated are going to go on to develop a life-threatening immune-mediated skin reaction.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy concurs. “That’s logical.”

“We now have four confirmed skin eruptions out of six thousand people vaccinated.”

“And if we’re assuming that one in twenty of the doses were poisoned…”

“Up to three hundred people might have been poisoned,” she says with a chill.

“How long after exposure might these people still react?”

“A week or two, probably,” she says. “But they would be at highest risk in the first few days after inoculation.”

“Holy! So a bunch more kids could still get sick?”

“Yeah,” Lisa says just as Tyra walks into her office and closes the door. “Thanks, Jimmy, for everything. I’ll make sure we send over that urine sample today.”

She hangs up the phone and immediately says to Tyra, “We have another vaccine reaction. And more poisoned doses. Potentially lots of them.” She walks Tyra through the estimates, and then asks, “Do you know how many nurses worked at the clinic Mateo attended?”

“Ten,” Tyra says. “But they worked in pairs. Each giving half the shots.”

“Four hundred patients divided among ten nurses, means each one of them gave forty shots, give or take,” Lisa thinks aloud.

Tyra’s eyes narrow. “So, theoretically, one nurse could easily have administered all twenty poisoned vaccines at each clinic.”

“One of our own? I can’t wrap my head around that.”

Tyra eyes her steadily. “I cross-referenced the two clinics involved. I emailed you the list.”

“How many nurses worked both clinics?”

“Eight in total. All of whom have been with us for at least a year. Three of them more than ten.”

“We can narrow it down even further, once we throw in the clinic the latest victim attended.”

“That might not be necessary,” Tyra says, wiggling a finger at Lisa’s computer screen. “I emailed you an article.”

“An article?”

“Yeah. It was written by one of the boyfriends of the eight nurses in question. Open it.”

Lisa clicks on Tyra’s most recent email and opens the attached hyperlink. Her screen fills with a blog post titled “Light Finally Shone on Vaccine Genocide.”

Just as Lisa opens her mouth to ask which nurse, the author’s name catches her eye: “Dr. Max Balfour, ND.”

CHAPTER 55

“Do you mind closing the door?” Lisa asks Yolanda as she steps into her office.

Yolanda is as