Task Force Consults the Data Before Consulting an Ecologist, in That Order, on Purpose

The government solved the bat problem. Then it solved the mosquito problem. The ecosystem has requested that nobody solve anything else.

WASHINGTON — The newly formed National Vector Rebalancing Task Force confirmed Tuesday that its three-phase plan to solve the bat-borne disease crisis is proceeding exactly as modeled, provided the model in question was built by the same team that once tried to fix a leaky faucet by removing the sink.

“Phase One was straightforward,” said Task Force Director Karen Ottoline, gesturing at a whiteboard that appeared to have been erased and rewritten four times. “We eliminated the disease-carrying bats. What we did not fully model was that bats also eat a frankly unreasonable number of mosquitoes nightly.” Removing them would, in Ottoline’s words, “solve the bat-borne disease crisis by trading it for a slightly worse crisis,” which is now printed on Task Force letterhead as a mission statement rather than a warning.

Phase Two, internally referred to as “the mosquito situation,” was addressed this spring with what the agency called “Phase Three: Ecosystem Jenga,” a program in which officials removed mosquitoes using a gene-drive technology while insisting, per an internal memo later leaked and then un-leaked, that “this block was never load-bearing.”

Not everyone on the task force agreed with the sequencing. Contractor Denny Faulkes, an ecologist brought in during Phase Two as what one email described as “a formality,” was escorted from the building in March after suggesting, in a meeting, that the bats simply be left alone.

“I said maybe don’t remove the thing that was already handling the other thing,” Faulkes said by phone. “They had security walk me out before I finished the sentence. I’ve since been added to a list. I don’t know which list.”

The gene-edited mosquitoes, for their part, were granted a temporary stay of execution last week by a federal judge reviewing the program’s environmental impact statement. Per courtroom observers, the mosquitoes used the delay to bite the judge twice before being escorted from the courtroom by the same security team that removed Faulkes.

Asked whether a fourth phase was being considered, Ottoline confirmed the Task Force was “looking into it,” while declining to specify what Phase Four would remove, replace, or accidentally reintroduce. A preliminary planning document, reviewed by this outlet, was titled simply “wasps???”

Findings cited in this report are drawn from the Task Force’s own self-published summary, which has not been peer reviewed, externally reviewed, or in one case, spell-checked.

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