This video was made possibly by Brilliant. Learn something new every day for 20% off
by being one of the first 200 people to sign up at brilliant.org/HAI. 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. You get the point. Brilliant helps you advance your STEM education,
by breaking down subjects into approachable, bite-sized chunks, and having you actively
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you’ll get 20% off by being one of the first 200 to go to brilliant.org/HAI.
I wonder, what happens to the eggs?