DEADLINE open thread. Have a party.

Dr. Abbey's far too lovable to be evil. I reject your implications and substitute my own.

...huh?

I wasn't implying anything about Dr. Abbey.

There was never an insect vector before now, and Dr. Abbey has put KA into insects, so one could draw a conclusion that she's the one who built and released those mosquitoes.
Which I reject.

If anyone is releasing a new vector of infection I'd assume it was the same people behind the CDC plot, really. They've been releasing new strains from the beginning, it sounds like.

And I still don't understand WHY, what it is they're trying to accomplish. I feel stupid.

Dr. Wynne seemed to want to eliminate any form of KA that either would 100% zombify you or could 100% be cured. Without further work, I'd suspect KA would speed the development of people like George**, reduce the number of people who spontaneously amplify, and in general be a disease that's still dangerous but more in the range of HIV-2010 than... well, HIV-1980 with zombies. Which would make it harder to go for the head since, well... she might get better, and the sticky ethics of exposing your infants to active-KA -- they might develop immunity, or they might amplify as soon as they hit 40-60 pounds.

I suspect other agents like the state of the US population (read: obsessed with seeming safety, afraid of everything, and easily controlled), since it makes post-9-11 look like an anarchy, and that the tobacco/plastic/whatever companies are suddenly happy that 'carcinogen' isn't a big deal any more (though maybe Big Tobacco less so so now that the southeast is being firebombed to clear the zombies...)

** And Shaun, if anything about his body eased his apparently acquired immunity (working hypothesis, given Seanan's comments).

Now it's occurred to me to wonder if Rick is also possibly immune since his wife had ovarian KA.

And finding out wouldn't be fun for Rick.

I favor the conclusion that what one person can create, a bureaucracy can duplicate, even if only by accident. My guess on this is that in the process of tinkering with K-A, they created a version that can be carried by mosquitoes, then released it in Cuba for another test run.

Whether they knew this would happen or not is a little past my ability to speculate. I'd like to assume that it wasn't the case, partly because hurricanes aren't something people can schedule. On the other hand, there might have been some researcher watching Fiona's track on The Weather Channel, and swearing fit to break the screen, because she thought everything would be fine...

Nonono.

It's more like "If Dr. Abbey could do it, another scientist could do it too."

Nah, that's not what I meant by coincidence. And anyway she didn't put KA into insects. (The spiders yes, the millipedes no.)

The coincidence is the *timing*...

Thing is spiders aren't insects. Neither are millipedes. :-)

Well...she put it into arachnids, actually. And she's pretty far away from Cuba, so she's not the likely suspect.

Now, given *other* things that happened right before all Hell broke loose...