SV40 causes a pandemic

Polio vaccines: wonderful lifesavers of the early 1950s!

But grown in monkey cells. Filthy creatures, monkeys.

The early vaccine developers went to great lengths to make sure their monkeys were clean and virus-free. (Because when you develop a vaccine, you're just manipulating large masses of virus particles -- and if there are local virus particles in your culture cells, they can come along for the ride.) By the time the Salk vaccine was ready to test, they'd found 39 different viruses... and had, with much difficulty, ensured their monkeys were free of them.

Almost 10 years later, it was discovered that they'd missed one.

Simian Virus 40 gave the small world of researchers a hell of a nasty scare. When first introduced into cultured monkey kidney cells, it caused them to clump up, lyse and die. When grown and injected into baby hamsters, it caused them to develop grotesque, massive tumors which killed them horribly. And by late 1960, it was clear that much of the world's supply of polio vaccines had been contaminated with SV40.

But in the end a scare was all it was. In the Salk vaccine (the injected one that used dead viruses) it seems that the process used to kill the polio virus killed most of the SV40 particles too. In the Sabin vaccine (the later one that used an oral solution of live but weakened viruses), the SV40 survived, but it seemed unable to penetrate the digestive tract. Most of all, SV40 seems to be either harmless or mostly harmless to humans. (There's some debate over whether it may have caused a small number of exotic cancers.) Anyway, by 1961 new monkey cell cultures had been developed, so all vaccines since then have been completely free of any viruses except the ones that are supposed to be there.

Okay, so. Let's say [handwave] that SV40 is deadly as hell. Say further that it's not inactivated by the Salk process; it just gets slowed down a bit. Now it kills slowly, so that symptoms don't appear for a decade. In other words, in this TL the panic that gripped vaccine researchers for a few months in 1960 turns out to be horribly well founded -- within a year or two, people will start dying, and by the mid-1960s they're dropping dead at the rate of several thousand per day in the US alone.

One estimate is that around 10 million Americans -- all ages, but disproportionately children -- were injected with SV40- contaminated Salk vaccine; in this TL, they're pretty much all going to die between 1964 and 1970 or so. We can throw in roughly the same number of Europeans, although now things get complicated because different countries took up the vaccine at different speeds -- the USSR, for instance, was slow to adopt the Salk vaccine and then shifted early and quickly to the Sabin oral one, so it'll come through a lot better.

Anyway. The generation born between 1950 and 1960 is going to be hit hardest; In very round numbers, we're going to kill off about a sixth of them. So, take any European or American born in this period and roll a die: on a 1, they're gone.

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 
presumably the soviet union does much better since america and europe is weakened by the loss of its citizens
 
Gotta bump this one.

Is this supposed to be an "early HIV/AIDS WI"? I've noticed a few similarities between your WI and the OTL HIV epidemic. If so, I think there are several important differences/observations that need to be pointed out.

You mentioned a decade time span between infection through vaccination and symptoms. This asymptomatic period is similar to the typical asymptomatic span between HIV infection and AIDS. Also, there's the question of the effect of SV40 on the immune system. SV40 might attack the immune system in a way quite different than HIV. That difference might radically change the course of this WI.

Also you never mentioned the effect medication would play on such an epidemic. Would medications stem the tide? The question of medication also revolves around the ability of SV40 to mutate. If SV40 mutates slowly and with few changes, then it's more likely that counter-vaccination could occur. Also, even if SV40 could be stemmed by therapy or even cured, not all of the population will benefit from remedies. Developing nations might not have the same access to therapies enjoyed by developed nations. Hence the economic-therapeutic disparities seen in the HIV epidemic might also appear in an ATL SV40 epidemic. How would unequal access to medication change the equation?

Is this virus communicable? If not, then the social impact might take on a different hue than HIV/AIDS. WI the virus communicable by bodily fluid contact, especially sexual contact? If SV40 were in any part sexually communicable, then the social perception of SV40 would change dramatically. As is well known, HIV/AIDS has created an unjust prejudice towards certain members of the population based on assumptions concerning their sexual activities. These assumptions have often boiled over into sanctimonious rhetoric imo. Many prejudices have survived the statistical/scientific debunking of biased assumptions and have become part of the "culture wars" etc. Such social prejudices might not arise iff SV40 spreads through other means. Alternately, SV40 might start a different set of contentions based along other cultural fault lines.
 
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Well, this annihilates scientific research in America for decades, and perhaps in the entire world.

That said, this virus seems a bit magical; a bit too ineffective, as it were.
 
Interesting concept - as Faeelin said, this would likely result in quite a bit of anti-scientific backlash... who knows, perhaps back-to-nature groups could get a boost. Also, this would wipe away the Vietnam War and the whole '60s hippie thing... I can only wonder what it'd leave behind. Who knows, this could even get spun by some people as being a Soviet bio-weapon, or something... heck, that might even be believed, considering how effective it'd be.

Well, those are my thoughts, at any rate. As I said before, interesting concept.
 
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