The best defense against a viral disease, like COVID or rabies, is a good offense — get rid of it before it strikes. Modern medicine has just such a strategy in the form of vaccination but what do you do when you have a population that will not allow voluntary immunizations? In Switzerland they have just such a situation — not with people, the Swiss are very publicly minded – with foxes.
Foxes are difficult to inoculate as they’re not often domesticated but in 1982, Switzerland was experiencing an epidemic of rabies in its wild fox population. The problem is how do you find, capture, and vaccinate a population of wild animals?
Well, foxes like to eat chickens and the Swiss used this fact to the advantage of public health. Health officials dropped tens of thousands of chicken heads into the areas where foxes tended to live, providing the animals with a tasty, crunchy, and flavorful snack. But these weren’t ordinary chicken heads. Hidden inside was the rabies vaccine. This unorthodox immunization plan worked, and by 1998, Switzerland declared that it was officially rabies-free nationwide.
So, given the resistance of Trump supporting antivaxxers (AKA morons) in certain parts of our country, I propose that we drop buckets of KFC in locations of high concentrations (like Kentucky and Texas). Like the Swiss plan, we need to lace these with the J&J vaccine but we already know their orange idol can’t resist anything fried (burgers, chicken, Ted Cruz , …) so it’s likely to work at least as well as with Swiss foxes. Of course, foxes are known to be sly….
Michael Carver -- Historical Interpreter/Reenactor 