Before I turn off the light to sleep, I do something I’ve been meaning to all day. I read all the headlines from the big English news sites. The Guardian: “Department of Health assures public it is working on a vaccine.” The Telegraph: “Marty Denhold says to stay calm; death toll reaches 100,000.” The Sun: “You Try and Stay Calm, Mary, Men Are Dying.” The Times: “Amanda Maclean follow-up: The doctor who raised the alarm accuses the WHO of negligence.”
I try to sleep but despite the heaviness of jet lag there’s a fog of panic. My thoughts are circling. Dad. Vaccine. George. Mary. No vaccine. Just starting. Dad. Dad. What will happen to my dad?
PANIC
ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST ON DECEMBER 15, 2025
“The Plague is here and someone should have warned you”
by Maria Ferreira
This article is not going to be like any other article you’ve ever read in this paper or, most likely, in any other. I might as well get that straight here at the beginning. It is going to be told in the first person even though this is not the Comments section. It has not been edited by the editor or deputy editor because I went above their heads to seek permission from the owner of this paper to publish it. Now that’s out of the way, I’m going to set out my credentials so you know the kind of journalist you’re dealing with here. I’ve been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice （a prize that, I guarantee you, is not going to go ahead this year or next year or the year after that for reasons you’re about to read）， I have a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, I am a former science editor for this paper and I have carried out more than twenty investigations into thorny, difficult issues with corruption and secrecy at the heart of them.
After seventeen years as a journalist, this is the most terrifying article I have ever had to write. The basic message is that your dad is going to die, your brother is going to die, your son is going to die, your husband is going to die, every man you’ve ever loved and/or slept with is going to die. Let me take you back to the beginning. This all started in early November 2025, not that most of you, our US-based readers, will know this. I knew there was something big going on because Twitter and Facebook over in the UK were hives of anxiety and panic. If you take one thing from this article, let it be that we should all have been talking about this a lot earlier. A doctor in Scotland named Amanda Maclean wrote in to newspapers, posted online, generally screamed into the void that there was a pandemic starting. She originally identified the virus and treated the person who is informally referred to as Patient Zero.
Amanda had a letter published in The Times on November 12. Now, immediately I thought that was weird. What kind of respected, senior ER doctor has to write in to a newspaper to tell the population about a pandemic? It shows that there’s something being covered up. The letter was published on the newspaper’s website and went viral on certain, often paranoid, parts of Twitter and Reddit.
I asked the CDC to make a statement on November 16 and received a “No comment” response. That was the second oddity about the whole situation. If someone’s got their facts mixed up, you can just release a statement saying that they’re wrong. But they didn’t do that or say any of their usual comforting lines about “Confirming in due course once we have more information,” or even “There is no reason to panic.” Not being told not to panic made me panic.
Then, on November 20, Amanda Maclean was interviewed in The Times. She used the term “the Plague” to describe the virus affecting, by that point, much of Scotland （only the Highlands were so far largely unaffected）; a virus, she claimed, with an almost guaranteed mortality rate, only affecting men but carried by women, easily transmitted and beginning with two days in which men were asymptomatic. The UK press went into meltdown at the news.
You might be wondering why I didn’t report on this before now, and the answer is that my boss, the editor of the Washington Post, didn’t want me to, which is ironic when you consider the fact that he is the one at risk of dying from this disease, not me. He didn’t want to risk panicking people unnecessarily, especially as national and international institutions haven’t made statements. And there’s a lot of domestic political drama going on at the moment and he wants me to dig out a past indiscretion for every congressman from Texas to Ohio. Normally, I love that stuff. Hold powerful men accountable for their past transgressions? No problem. Burn down the patriarchy one corrupt politician at a time? Sign me up!