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This video is about bricks.
Bricks, of course, come in a variety of colors, and today we’re gong to talk about why.
Now, when it comes to the common red brick, the color culprit is iron oxide—essentially
just rust—which is commonly found in the clay deposits used to form the bricks.
But, of course, not all clay is the same.
Yellow bricks are the result of a calcareous clay that has more lime.
And for brown bricks—well, you can thank manganese oxide for those.
To complement these different colors, there are even options for mortar color—gray or
white.
While gray is the more traditional color… ok there’s no way the feds would sit through
all that.
Let’s spill some government secrets.
So listen up: there’s something fowl going down in the US’ Department of Health and
Human Services.
No, not something foul.
Something fowl.
The United States government is maintaining dozens of secret chicken farms.
Why, you ask?
To save… your freaking… life.
You see, for about two decades, the United States government has, in between doing wars
on drugs, poverty, poor people, and cupcakes, been preparing for the possibility of a pandemic.
Now of course, it turned out we cared more about making the stonks go whoosh than stopping
viruses, but still, the US Department of Health and Human Services has, for a while, developed
several strategic stockpiles specifically sanctioned to stop spreads of viruses—stuff
like ventilators, respirators, masks, and… chicken eggs.
Now you might be wondering: what do deconstructed-omelets have to do with stopping a pandemic?
Well, it turns out chicken eggs are the key ingredient in producing the most common type
of influenza vaccine… and you need a lot of them.
According to HSS, to handle an influenza pandemic, you’d need 900,000 chicken eggs every day
for 6-9 months just to make enough vaccines for the United States.
That means you’d need 900,000 chickens, as traditionally, chickens usually lay one
egg a day—which is a lot.
As the great Popeye’s sandwich shortage of 2019 taught us, suddenly procuring a lot
of chickens is very difficult, so instead the government maintains a clandestine cache
of chickens, laying eggs, just in case we ever need them.
Of course you ask, why do you need chicken eggs to make a vaccine?
Well, that’s a great question, and the answer is… oh I’m sorry, I’m being told our
legal team needs to run a disclaimer.
Half as Interesting Incorporated’s scripts are not written by doctors, but by an unpaid
staff of rotund, diminutive jungle people.
For legal reasons, we cannot say what these people are called, but let’s just say it
rhymes with Roompa-Loompas.
Any complains about mistakes should be issued to our quality control officer—Brian McManus
at Real Engineering.
Alright, so, to make an influenza vaccine, you’ll first need to get some flu virus,
which you can get either from the CDC or by having Rudy Giuliani cough on you.
Next, you need to turn a little bit of virus into a big bit of virus, but because viruses
can’t reproduce on their own, you have to inject the virus sample into a fertilized
chicken’s egg, as they have cells that allow the virus to reproduce the same way it would
inside a person.
After ten days of incubation, you take a needle and suck out the egg white, which is now full
of virus.
Now, you can either sell that virus-filled egg white to McDonald’s, for their famous
Egg McMuffinfluenza, or you can put it in a centrifuge to get out any bits of shell
or debris, then take the virus-filled egg white, kill the virus, mix that with some
other fluids, and now you’ve got a vaccine—although the one I made kinda looks like meringue,
and my veins are starting to feel a little funny.
With the store-bought ones at least, the dead virus doesn’t hurt you, because, you know,
it’s dead, but it does trigger an immune response, which means your body develops antigens
against that virus so that it’s much less likely to infect you the next time you lick
Rudy Giuliani’s doorknob.
The classified chicken coops that provide these eggs exist as kind of a public-private
partnership between the US and various evil, money-hungry, corrupt… uhhhh, I mean benevolent,
live-saving, highly-ethical big Pharma companies—please Pfizer, I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m
an influencer…
I am an essential worker.
It’s all part of a hugely-successful, totally not-the-failure-of-the-century effort started
by HHS after an avian flu scare in 2001 to make sure the US is prepared for a pandemic—the
US helps fund and maintain the farms, so that these companies are able to suddenly ramp
up vaccine production at a moment’s notice.
Then, all we have to do is distribute the vaccines, and how hard could that be?
In 2005, the US classified the chicken barns as “critical infrastructure,” so there
are a lot of things we don’t know: how many chicken farms there are, where they are, how
many chickens are in them, what the chickens’ names are, who they voted for, etc.
Our best information comes from a 2010 article in the flagship newspaper of 50 to 70 year-old
male New Yorkers who own boats in Palm Beach and voted for Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal,
which reported that over 35 farms are involved, located in the "mid-Atlantic" region.
Unlike the American people, protecting these chickens from disease is a top priority of
the US government, so tight safety protocols are enforced: any vehicle driving on the property
has its wheels disinfected, and all visitors must wear hooded jumpsuits, take a sanitizing
foot bath, and be accompanied by an official at all times.
In the barns, much like Amazon warehouses, artificial lighting is used to trick the chickens
into working more in the winter—but unlike Amazon warehouses, humidity and temperature
in the barns are closely monitored, the workers’ health is looked after, and they are fed:
it’s a tightly controlled diet of millet or corn, with special attention paid to salt
levels, as salt can change the shape of eggs or the number of eggs laid.
Every day, trucks come to pick up the eggs and store them in tightly-guarded facilities
where festive rabbits can’t steal them.
There is one catch: these eggs are only useful for influenza vaccines: in a coronavirus pandemic,
for example, the eggs would be useless, as coronaviruses have different receptors that
prevent them from reproducing inside eggs.
But, hey, I mean, what are the odds of that?
If you wanted to calculate the odds of that, you could do so by learning statistics at
Brilliant.org.
Look: if you watch these videos, I have to imagine you like learning stuff—and that’s
what Brilliant does best.
I mean, Brilliant doesn’t learn stuff, Brilliant learns you stuff.
I mean teaches you stuff.
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