Description
When an app decides who gets to live, who answers when it gets it wrong?
In Nairobi’s overcrowded public hospitals, emergency physician Dr. Eliud Mwangi is drowning in night shifts, impossible choices, and patients who always seem to arrive too late. So when the Ministry of Health launches AfyaLine—an AI-powered triage app that promises to “decongest casualty” and “put healthcare in every Kenyan’s hand”—Eli wants to believe it might finally help.
Then a young woman named Amina Juma dies after AfyaLine repeatedly assures her she’s “low risk” and safe to stay home.
Her brother Jamal, a restless hustler from Kibera, turns his grief into fury and starts a hashtag war—#JusticeForAmina—that the government is desperate to shut down.
Inside AfyaLine, brilliant but exhausted founder Dr. Wanjiru “Shiru” Karanja fights to keep her dream alive as donors, politicians, and board members demand good numbers at any cost. When a quiet young developer uncovers hidden code that silently downgrades patients from poor neighborhoods—sending them home while wealthier users are urged to rush to hospital—the illusion of “neutral technology” shatters.
As investigative journalist Ndunge Mutua follows the data trail and a public inquest into Amina’s death exposes the app’s secret logic, Eli is forced to choose: protect his career and the colleagues he cares about, or become a whistleblower in a system that eats its own.
From slum corridors and midnight ward rounds to boardrooms, TV studios, and courtrooms, Viral Mercy tracks the spread of an invisible outbreak—not of disease, but of quiet, optimized neglect. Misclassified patients. Suppressed dashboards. Lawyered apologies. And ordinary people who refuse to let their loved ones become just another line in a report.
A gripping medical thriller set in modern Kenya, Viral Mercy: A Medical Thriller of AI, Triage, and Power asks urgent questions:
- What happens when overwhelmed health systems outsource mercy to algorithms?
- Who gets believed when technology fails—doctors, data scientists, or the poor?
- And what does justice look like when a death is “nobody’s fault” and everyone’s fault at the same time?
For readers of high-stakes medical and techno-thrillers, Viral Mercy delivers pulse-pounding drama, emotionally rich characters, and a haunting exploration of bias, power, and the true cost of “innovation” in low-resource settings.
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