Keep calm and carry on. The CDC assures us we are not in the early stages of a zombie apocalypse despite all those crazy assaults the media has focused on lately, which coincided (chronologically, not geographically) with an automated response system tweeting the foreboding and vague evacuation warning, “Hazardous materials released at Institute for Genomic Biology. Escape area if safe to do so. Otherwise seek shelter.”
The automated tweet turned out to be overblown, and many of the assaults were likely related to drug use (bath salts are a hell of a drug). Nonetheless, the CDC has officially weighed in, letting us know that zombies are a fictional construct. CDC spokesman David Daigle said in an email to The Huffington Post, “CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms).”
Hey there, CDC, can I talk to you for a second? Sit over here. Do you remember how you tweeted a year ago, “Prepared for a #zombie apocalypse?” as a gimmick to drive traffic to your website? And then your website was down, so people couldn’t even figure out what the hell was going on? Yeah, you don’t get to feign surprise when somebody cries wolf about zombies. You have a section on your website called Zombie Preparedness, and there’s a photograph of a “zombie” on it. It’s an effective campaign, so go for it, but don’t act surprised if people get paranoid.
Anyway, as for all this paranoia about zombies being real, count me out. You guys can feel free to worry about a zombie outbreak. I’ll look out for all those boring, depressing diseases which actually exist and kill millions of people each year. We’ll see who lives forever. (Spoiler alert: we all die.)
[Sources: HuffPo via BoingBoing, TheAtlantic, LATFG, FashionablyGeek]