…he owed me money
The Doclopedia #2,430
Game Changers: Stalin’s Curse
As we have all learned in recent years, nothing changes things like a worldwide pandemic. Unless, of course, it’s a much deadlier, longer lasting pandemic.
On Earth 2-G, shortly after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of 1939, Stalin, who in that reality wisely did not trust Hitler, ordered his general to develop some plan to wipe out Germans in large numbers when, not if, the Nazis broke the pact. Naturally, they all jumped right on it, including one young science oriented officer, Captain Alexi Federov.
Federov gathered a small team of doctors and scientists and sent them to the tropics of Asia, Africa, and Central & South America. They had one job: get samples of every deadly disease they could find and return them to the secret underground research facility being built on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
By late 1940, after more or less combining various viruses and letting them intermingle and swap DNA (although the scientists knew nothing about DNA), Russian scientists had four deadly diseases that Federov thought showed great promise. Even better, his scientists were very close to developing a vaccine for two of them. Things were going well and Stalin called him home, with reports and samples, in February of 1941.
To cut to the chase, when Germany attacked in June of 1941, Stalin send out small units with pressure tanks of the two viruses that they would soon have vaccines for. Six units successfully released the viruses behind German lines. But one unit wrecked their vehicle just two days out of Leningrad, releasing the viruses well inside Russia.
And then, two weeks later, there was a strong earthquake in Kamchatka and the lab took serious damage releasing all the viruses. A scientist grabbed 12 vials of the vaccine, used one on himself, then told a pilot how screwed they all would be and would the pilot fly him to America in exchange for getting vaccinated? The pilot agreed and landed them in Anchorage, Alaska two days later. A month later, the scientist and the vaccines were in Washington, DC meeting with VERY interested people.
The main virus was the most effective at killing, with a 50% kill rate among men between 16 and 30. That jumped by 15% for men between 30 and 45, another 15% for men between 45 and 60, and a 98% rate for men over 60. For women, the death rate was about 25% between 16 and 50, and double that for older women. Prepubescent children had a death rate of about 5%.
The virus spread fast. By December of 1941, both Germany and the Soviet Union were brought to a standstill by the pandemic. World War II in Europe was effectively over, but Japan, where the pandemic was just getting started, still attacked Pearl Harbor, but with fewer planes and ships. America, reacted much the same as in our reality, but the pandemic had reached North America by then, especially in the South.
The pandemic of 1941-1944 was dubbed “Stalin’s Curse”. Even with US and Canadian mass production of a vaccine, the vaccinations did not start in a big way until September of 1942. Vaccines got to other countries a few months later. By March of 1944, the pandemic was declared over.
The world population was estimated at about 1.1 billion, a bit less than half of what it would have been in our reality. Furthermore, women outnumbered men 2.75 to one, and were on average 15-20 years older. This meant women moved into all of the jobs vacated by men, including government. Free of the patriarchy, women set about dismantling the tools that had let men run the show for millennia.
You would barely recognize the United States Constitution of Earth 2-G in the current year 2022. Or the society in the US, for that matter.
Same goes for every other country.
And there hasn’t been a war anywhere since the early 1940’s.
THAT’S a game changer.
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