But before I go, a finale episode of the PlagueCast – we discuss the two years of great work from Rupert Blue, the nature of our clean bill of health, and some final reflections.

Special thanks go out to Madoka Sakuichi, Yechunwo, and of course: J.J. Kinyoun and Rupert Blue. I might not still be here if it wasn’t for your efforts.

The Final PlagueCast

Goodbye, PlagueWatchers – I wish you all the best in your future lives!

Until now – QuakeWatch is on hold, since there is a more pressing matter at hand: the Plague has returned.

My earthquakk experience was largely boring, the great fires allowing my home to stay safe. I did not realize when I last wrote that it was as bad as it was, that the desolation would be so severe. However, I learned a great deal when I read Yechunwo’s Diary, a blog by a young nurse in Chinatown. Not only is there a whole slew of great details about the plague, but also news about the Earthquake.

Her words from just yesterday are most telling:

“In these camps I have seen much depravity, living conditions that have been far below what we should have. Those conditions have people living in filth, cooking in worse, and I started to see it happen. The illness.

But then it was an illness I had seen before, too recently to ever forget. It was as if the eartquake had torn up the ground only to release that which we had tried to bury, those things we could not see and thought we had eradicated rising from the open earth. It is with great sadness that I write that I believe plague to have returned.”

I trust her opinion – all of us who have lived in the world of plague know that people would never risk such a diagnosis without knowing for sure. The conditions out there are awful, as Yechunwo identifies, which is going to be an extreme challenge for the government. We here at PlagueWatch are hoping that the relief efforts for the earthquake might wake up some public officials to the devastation that has taken place even before the earth split open – we are still a city in tatters, and this must change.

I will not likely be blogging, as I have voluteered my services to help the people on the ground deal with these conditions. I will report back from there in time, perhaps once we have seen some progress.

For now, I must collect my belongings!

PlagueCast – “The Fallen of 1903″

PlagueMaster here, returning here to PlagueWatch with information that is of utmost importance. After the PlagueCast, Rupert Blue started to take control, and the plague has been fought to a stalemate. For once, the main events in San Francisco have been outside of our control: it was the labor riots that hurt us most, struggles which saw a change at City Hall and an impending change in the capital.

Now, this was out ultimate chance: I said in the PlagueCast that McKinley’s death may usher in a new era, but the change in these two offices should be a chance for new people who rise on the merits of their own. Instead, one has made things even worse for the city, and the other has chosen to ride out their final days wreaking havoc on the people inside of it.

In the first case, Mayor Schmitz is, well, a Schmutz. Here we have someone who may be a fresh ear, and yet he makes the first move by attempting to install a new and corrupt Board of Health. His attempts to claim that plague does not exist are a relic, the ugly views of the early merchants and companies who led the charge for the past two years. This kind of thinking is getting us nowhere, and the new Mayor needs to get his act in gear. I was dismayed that the plague wasn’t an election issue to begin with, but now the new Mayor is ignoring the facts in favour of getting into bed with business. We here at PlagueWatch have no such aspirations, let me assure you.

On the other side of the coin, Governor Gage lies impotent after bungling the labor situation, but his impotence in other areas has no deeper meaning beyond his own second-rate character. Everything has been for show, from his pathetic attempts at cleaning up Chinatown (Far inferior to Blue’s efforts) to what Mark White, currently in charge of things in Rupert Blue’s absence, believes is the deliberate hiding of the plague, a problem alluded to earlier. That this is continuing only shows his inability to deal with this scenario in a realistic fashion.

So, here we are at a crucial point where plague is re-emerging a year and a half after it first arrived, and we have two figures holding us back. Let’s hope that something shakes them up: Wyman has made a move for the Marine Hospital Service to emphasize public health, and this might be the jolt we all need.

Listen to the PlagueMaster discuss the arrival of Rupert Blue and the challenge of Chinatown, the Assassination of President McKinley, and the potential progress in solving these cases that have fallen in these early fall months.

When Dr. Joseph Kinyoun arrived in San Francisco, he was here to help this city deal with what it felt could become a plague outbreak. He toiled at his lab on Angel Island, and we here at PlagueWatch followed his progress closely when the cases began to break. All of a sudden, he was managing a crisis of epic proportions, and around him he needed people who supported him.

Unfortunately, those people never materialized. And as Kinyoun is tied to a railcar by his superiors, this state, and its media, we should look back at the tragedy that has taken place in this fine city.

Kinyoun, perhaps out of malice, has made public his once personal thoughts, spreading them to the world via a friend. I am proud that he is willing to finally tell his side of the story. His blog, Kinyoun’s Diary, is an exercise of frustration, an attempt to reconcile the world around him. I am hoping that people will read it, and understand the work he had done – of course, the papers are likely to just call it another package of lies.

In his year-end address, Gage placed the nail in Kinyoun’s coffin, a piece of slander so volatile that the damage was done before the words finished leaving his mouth:

“Could it have been possible that some dead body of a Chinaman had innocently or otherwise received a post-mortem innoculation in a lymphatic region by some one possession the imported plague bacilli, and that honest people were thereby deluded?”

If I was with Governor Gage right now, I would punch him in the face. His corruption knows no bounds, and he represents the type of person that is keeping the plague from being eradicated nearly single handedly. Perhaps the greatest sin of all of this is that these people will walk away scot-free, Kinyoun’s departure having given them the high ground in the eyes of the people.

Well, not in my eyes: I didn’t agree with everything Kinyoun said or did, but I think his heart (Yes, he does have one) was in the right place. Even in his frustration with moving west (Don’t we all agonize over relocation, of change?), you can sense that he is an intelligent person who is open to discovering the truth:

“The distant threat of Chinese plague does not require an expert in the field to counteract, and I fear that my research career will be forfeit. Perhaps there is more to this, lurking silently beneath the surface.”

There was more lurking beneath the surface, and it is a pity that all it brought Kinyoun was exile and a future of struggling to regain his credibility. In the eyes of this PlagueMaster, he still has it: hopefully, if people read this, maybe they’ll start to come around, even if it’s too little too late.

I will not attempt to know what you are going through, and I do not in any way blame you for taking action to remove the quarantine against your people. Plague is a tricky thing, and a scary one, and I too am occasionally in a position wherein I feel that the government is making mistakes.

However, I believe that there is a time for cooperation, and I feel as if we are reaching it. I am appalled at the actions of certain other media outlets in villainizing your people, but I am concerned that the response has been to villainize the actions of those who are trying to help eradicate this illness.

There are clearly concerns amongst your population regarding the plague and whether or not it exists: your paper, the Chung Sai Yat Po, has gone on the record attacking many diagnoses, and part of me doesn’t blame them. The other part of me, however, goes back to the words of Madoka Sakuichi, who early on her blog had the following advice:

” My heart is torn, truly to lose one’s home and the bulk of one’s possessions is extremely painful- but we can not allow the disease to run rampant through our streets.”

This is a person who has seen the devastation of plague first hand, and I feel that there are some Chinese who have done the same within your neighbourhood. I am not suggesting you ignore your skepticism, as critical thinking is an important element of any process, but rather that these efforts cannot operate in direct opposition with the efforts of Kinyoun.

He is beginning to be known as the Wolf Doctor, a title I’m not sure that we here at PlagueWatch can actively support. He is not crying wolf, but crying foul: of government efforts, of important assistance in the fight against this disease.

I write this letter today to confirm that the quarantine and these efforts were not simply an attack on your people, nor is this disease a fabrication to justify such actions: yesterday, I can confirm that there was the first case of plague outside of the Asian population. The reaction was of Joseph Kinyoun was not to silence this news in order to continue persecuting your people, but rather to treat this case as any other, and try valiantly to find a cure.

Kinyoun is a busy man – he is inspecting hundreds of boats which come into the city, and the pressure must be insane. I am not saying that he has not make mistakes, as many of you have pointed out: rather, I am saying that he is human. He is also capable of getting plague, capable of all of this: let’s see if we can’t come together and cooperate.

I don’t know if this will be popular, but I feel it had to be said: if the standard newspapers only wish to eradicate your homes from the map, then I had to step up and make my thoughts known. I hope that you take this to heart, and know that my own is with all of you during this trying time.

Sincerely,

PlagueMaster

PlagueMaster here with news that his has blood boiling as if he himself had the plague – word has reached PlagueWatch that the Call and the Chronicle have signed a mutual pact of silence on the plague. They have called on us to remember “that the Call and the Chronicle agreed to omit publication of the seasonal doings of the Board of Health and the Chief of Police.”

Maybe it’s only me, but this is one of the most outrageous statements I’ve ever seen – ignore the actions of the people protecting the people of this city from disease? In what universe is that a proper course of action for a newspaper?

For all of my hatred of the Examiner for its own inability to take the plague in a serious fashion, at least it is willing to admit it exists. Awareness is the most important thing, at this point – people need to know it is here so they can take matters into their own hands, but this exclusion is only damaging the situation.

Perhaps if the media was less silent and more adamant about the true concerns of plague that have been illuminated by Kinyoun and the situation in Hawaii, Mayor Phelan would never have been so derelict to dispatch telegrams claiming that San Francisco was plague free. I don’t necessarily blame the merchants who petitioned for this, as they have livelihoods to protect and children to feed, all reasonable if perhaps misguided obligations considering the loss of life at hand.

But I do blame the papers: their insistence on government corruption is not surprising, perhaps, but it is coming at the worst possible time. We here at PlagueWatch know for a fact that new plague cases are popping up as we speak, having spoken to various sources, and yet here is the world thinking that the opposite is true.

The Sacramento Bee was the first to break the story that the Governor and the Surgeon General had signed a pact of silence: I expect this type of pact from those sorts, but not from my fellow journalists who are not slaves to the same people that politicians are – the Bee is doing its job, why can’t the San Francisco papers do the same?

Well, consider this San Francisco’s lifeline: I’ve told our sources deep within these important bodies that when they need something to get to the public, we will be there for them. This PlagueMaster, for one, doesn’t deny the truth.

And we’re pissed off about it.

I visited the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Fransisco Bulletin, appalled at their insistence that this was all just a sham. The pundits claimed it was all a cash grab, which leads me to believe that they’ve done no research: if they had heard the stories we have out of Hawaii, surely they would understand that not even the most corrupt government doctors would be willing to raise this alarm out of malice towards people.

Dr. Kinyoun, in the view of this PlagueMaster, is doing what a sensible person would do – prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. This presumption that he desires to create plague for financial gain goes against every logical sensibility, and despite his less-than-cordial tone at times his work on the docks has been necessary and vital to these efforts.

But the papers won’t admit to this: they are unable to resolve the apparent injustice of quarantines and barricades with the need for medical security. I’m not saying this is easy, but having heard so many stories out of Hawaii I think it is necessary to remember the lessons learned there. The papers, however, don’t want to listen: not to Kinyoun, not to PlagueWatch, and not to a sense of morality I thought was inherent in all by lawyers and politicians.

It’s too bad that journalists are now joining this list. The Examiner celebrates the removal of the blockade not because it signals an eradicated plague, but because it admits it was all a sham and now their Chinese labour can return to the kitchens of the city.

This kind of ignorance I won’t even respond to, so Randolph Hearst can kiss this PlagueMaster’s ass until he does something about this.