Public Relations Blog

COVID by Richard Van Anderson

CovidCoVid19 was not an accident. Its successor, the highly lethal CoVid23, is not a mutation of CoVid19. China would like us to believe the passage of 19 from animal to human was random and 23 is a mutation of 19. The United States wants us to believe 19 and 23 are weaponized strains of a coronavirus released during a botched Chinese bioweapons experiment. It will be up to Dr. David Aaronson, the new surgeon in Fallon, Nevada—home to ranchers and farmers, cowboys and indians, casinos and legalized brothels, and the US Navy’s TOPGUN training program—to tell the world what really happened. Revealing the truth will pit David against the commander of a US Army bioweapons laboratory, a narcissistic president obsessed with nationalism, and a supervirus poised to decimate the world.

“There were many things to admire about the supervirus. First, its simplicity. Its creation was complex—a noninfectious strain of the coronavirus upregulated by splicing new genes into its existing genome—but it was still just a virus, a particle consisting of a single strand of RNA inside a protein envelope.”

In COVID: A Novel of Surgical Suspense, Richard Van Anderson takes us to the small desert town of Fallon, Nevada where fugitive surgeon Dr. David Aaronson (formerly David McBride) is living a new life “witness protection” style. Soon after his arrival, he operates on a patient who comes to the ER coughing up blood then bleeds to death on the operating table from a disease process David has never seen. The mystery deepens when David learns that in the months preceding his arrival, twenty-three other patients died the same way, and adding to the mystery, not a single resident of Fallon or the surrounding county has tested positive for CoVid19—thus the reason the bars, casinos, and brothels are operating at full capacity with no regard for masks or social distancing.

“The second admirable quality of the supervirus was its ease of production, delivery, and propagation. The virus was easily mass produced, grown by the ton in giant bioreactors, then purified and dried into a simple white powder that behaved more like a gas than a solid, allowing it to go anywhere and everywhere.”

Although shocked that neither the state nor the CDC are investigating the unusual deaths, David is reluctant to get involved. This changes when he removes the hemorrhaging spleen of a young Shoshone woman and later learns that splenic rupture, along with massive hemoptysis (the coughing up of blood), are killing tens of thousands of Wuhan residents who have contracted a new variant of the coronavirus—CoVid 23. As David races the clock to find a cure for the young woman and a vaccine for the world, he battles a US Army colonel, the president of the United States, and an international shadow elite, all of whom are attempting to vanquish America’s enemies and create a new world order.

“And the third admirable quality of the supervirus? In animal studies it had a mortality rate of 100 percent. You breathe it in, you’re dead.”

CoVid: A Novel of Surgical Suspense
By Richard Van Anderson
Publication Date 9/18/2020
ISBN hardcover 978-0-9907597-6-8
ISBN paperback 978-0-9907597-7-5
ISBN e-book 978-0-9907597-8-2
360 pages