The Virus (24 page)

“Thanks.” The enigmatic Mr Stevens had waved him goodbye. Cheek had watched the big black Pontiac pull out into the morning stream of traffic. Then he had mounted the steps to the Committee Room.

Well, he said to himself as Senator Matthews called upon him to speak, he had thought about what Tom Stevens had said, and it made sense. The old boy net was just as valid a way of communicating instructions in government as memoranda which followed the correct hierarchical channels, up and down, with copies to A, B and C and blind copies to X, Y and Z so that they could know what A, B and C knew without A, B and C knowing that they knew. Cheek had absolutely no doubt that, in the nicest possible way, he had been told what to do that morning. Whether he did it or not depended entirely on him.

“Chairman,” he began. “Gentlemen. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear before your SubCommittee this morning. I certainly appreciate the importance of the discussion you have just had and will be glad to answer your questions.”

Chairman Matthews came directly to the point.

“In your view, Dr Cheek, does the Administration’s proposed flu immunization program correspond to the needs
as you now perceive them
? I stress those last words deliberately. We need to consider the situation today; not as it was last January or February or March.”

Dr Leslie Cheek spent a full fifteen minutes giving his reply to that question. It was a masterly piece of evidence. He reviewed the motivations behind the Administration’s original proposal; he reviewed the status of A-Fukushima; he went into the question of the states’ capacity to carry out a major vaccination program with full Federal funding; he expressed his belief that much more was possible if only the resources could match the will and the will could match the resources.

And his conclusion, when he came to it, was a brilliant reordering of the evidence. He didn’t actually contradict or disavow his own people at CDC. What he did was to leave the strong, almost indelible impression on the members of the Committee that there was a real case for a rethink and that he and his people were in no way opposed to such a rethink.

“The CDC is in no sense doctrinaire, Mr Chairman,” he had affirmed. “We are not, in principle, for massive programs of immunization. We are not, in principle, against such programs. We are in favour of doing what is right and necessary to protect American lives and American health. If it is the considered opinion of this Committee that the new situation calls for a new program, you may count on our fullest cooperation. Thank you.”

There had been a round of applause as he sat down. Clearly he had gauged the mood of the Committee accurately.

The full report of the Senate SubCommittee on Health and Research was published at noon the following day. Staffers had worked overnight and the Printing Office had done a rush job.

“Dammit,” Senator Matthews had protested, “if they can do it for the Congressional Record and print up overnight God-knows-how-many pages of the nonsense my colleagues sometimes talk on the floor, they can do it for us.”

And he had got his way.

The wireservices ran the story immediately. AP and UPI both gave it prominence: ‘SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS MAJOR FLU IMMUNIZATION PROGRAM JAPANESE VIRUS A THREAT’ was AP’s lead; while UPI, whose Washington man was a good friend of one of Senator Matthews’ legislative aides, injected a more personal note: ‘SENATOR MATTHEWS (D: CA) CALLS FOR NEW EXPANDED FLU PROGRAM AGAINST JAP MENACE.’

“I’d stress the Jap thing, if I were you,” the legislative aide had advised. “That’s the way to put the point across to the American public. They’ll think of Pearl Harbor. Hell, we could be in a Pearl Harbor situation.”

The UPI man had looked sceptical. “Come off it, Jimmy. You can kid the public but don’t try to kid me. That Japanese line is a phoney. Matthews has his own reasons for wanting to push this thing. Isn’t that right?”

“You’re fishing, Bud. You’re fishing,” the aide had said. “But I’m not biting.”

Susan Wainwright was waiting for Lowell Kaplan in his office when he returned from lunch in the CDC’s cafeteria. In some undefinable way she felt that Kaplan had changed since his visit to Europe and Africa. He seemed to be under some internal pressure. Once or twice she had tried to draw him out, but his responses had been gruff so she had let it ride. She knew that Kaplan had suffered considerable anguish over the fate of the monkeys. But she wondered whether there might not be something else which could account for his tense and irritable frame of mind. When she had asked him how his encounter with Stephanie Verusio had gone, Kaplan had been positively brusque in his reply. And that for him was most unusual.

Susan Wainwright had now to deal with a particular problem in addition to this general concern for Kaplan’s well-being. She showed him the reports from Washington as they had come off the tape that lunch-time. (The CDC was following the deliberations of the Senate SubCommittee attentively since the Center would inevitably be heavily involved in any flu immunization program.) Kaplan read the accounts with astonishment.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “Are they out of their minds?”

“That’s not all. Read it through to the end. Apparently Dr Cheek testified in favour. Or at least made noises to that effect.”

When he saw what Leslie Cheek had said in Washington, Kaplan almost hit the roof. With the print-out still in his hand, he stormed through into his superior’s office.

“Did you read this?” he thrust the wire service report into the Director’s hand. (Cheek had caught the last plane from Washington to Atlanta the previous evening, while the Committee’s report was still being printed.)

The other man glanced at the print-out in a strangely off-hand way and tossed it on the desk.

“Yeah, I had a feeling that’s the way the Committee would come out. When a politician thinks there are some votes around, health
is
an absolute, whatever the cost-benefit boys may say.”

“How about your testimony?” Kaplan found it hard to keep an accusing note out of his voice.

“My testimony?” Cheek sounded wholly innocent.

“You spoke in favour apparently?”

“I didn’t speak in favour. I said the position was open.”

“It says in the report that you supported a new major flu program.”

Cheek was beginning to be irritated. “Lowell, when you’re up there on the Hill, you’re not operating in a wholly scientific environment. It’s a political environment. Things aren’t black and white. They’re grey. Different shades of grey.”

He had turned to his papers and Kaplan realized that the conversation was at an end. Inwardly fuming, he had gone back in his office and expressed his annoyance to his assistant.

“I don’t know what’s got into Leslie Cheek, Susan. We’re about to be saddled with a new flu program — they’re talking of 200 million doses — would you believe it — and he’s not going to fight it.”

He sat down heavily at his desk. Something was going on which he didn’t understand. The CDC’s position on the flu immunization program was clear. Cheek knew what that position was. He’d had the summary of the meeting, and he’d also had the detailed transcript which Kaplan had insisted on having made.

“Why did Leslie fluff it, Susan? That’s what I don’t understand.”

Susan Wainwright tried to calm him down.

“Ultimately, I suppose, it’s Dr Cheek’s decision, Lowell.”

“I suppose it is.” With an effort of will, Kaplan dismissed the matter from his mind. “It sure beats the hell out of me, though. Anyone would have thought we all had enough work on our plates at the moment.”

“Come in, Ed. Sit down.”

Irving Woodnutt addressed Pharmacorp’s Vice President for Research and Development in the friendliest manner.

“Have a cigar?”

“No thanks, Irving. Not before lunch.”

Woodnutt lit himself a large Havana. (Thank God the U.S. had more or less patched things up with Castro, he thought — at least you could get a decent cigar again.)

“Ed, we’ve got a job to do.” Woodnutt spoke through a cloud of enveloping smoke. “
You’ve
got a job to do.” He came straight to the point. “Assume you and your people were starting from scratch, Ed. Assume you’ve got a new live virus to work with. Assume that funds and facilities are no object and that you can devote maximum resources to the job. How long would you need to develop a vaccine? Could you do it in, say,” he paused, “three weeks, a month?”

Ed Werner, a balding fifty year old with a pale wrinkled face and narrow, ambitious eyes, looked at the President of Pharmacorp Inc. with something approaching amazement.

“Hell, Irving, it took Jonas Salk five years to come up with a polio vaccine!”

“Salk and Sabine were working in the dark, Ed. You know that. They had to identify the virus in the first place; they had to find a medium; they had to test.”

“Wouldn’t
we
have to do all those things? And even when you do, there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”

Woodnutt laid his smouldering cigar in an ash-tray. He leaned forward and pressed the tips of his pudgy fingers together expressively.

“This could be an emergency, Ed. We might have to take some shortcuts.”

Two hours later, when Ed Werner left Woodnutt’s office on the eighteenth floor of the Pharmacorp Building in downtown Pittsburgh, he was a shaken man. Woodnutt had refused to listen to any arguments; he had brooked no objections.

“Go after it. That’s my final instruction.” The President of Pharmacorp had been emphatic and he had hinted that if Werner succeeded in his task, then he would be the logical candidate to follow Woodnutt himself in the number one spot in the event that Woodnutt moved on to, say, the Senate.

“Believe me, Ed. You’ll have my support. I can carry the Board. As a matter of fact, if you’ve found the Marburg vaccine and we’ve pumped that vaccine into two hundred million Americans, it won’t be a question of carrying the Board. They’ll be falling all over themselves to have you.”

Ed Werner had, frankly, been staggered by the scope of the project.

“But, Irving,” he had protested, “how the hell can you vaccinate two hundred million Americans, when as far as the outside world is concerned — and, from what you tell me, that includes the American health establishment — the Marburg virus doesn’t even exist any longer?”

Woodnutt had looked at him with condescension.

“Don’t you read the papers, Ed. Didn’t you see that under congressional pressure, particularly from Senator Matthews’ SubCommittee, HHS just reversed itself on the flu immunization program.”

“You mean . . .?”

“Yeah, that’s precisely what I mean. They’ve handed Pharmacorp the contract to make the flu vaccine. We’re batching the eggs right now, as you know, and production will start this week. You come up with the Marburg vaccine and we’ll work it into a multipurpose unit. For $9 a unit, we give protection against flu, especially this new strain of A-Fukushima which has them so worried. That’s the cover. But Pharmacorp Inc. gets another $11 a unit for
building anti-Marburg protection into the dose at the same time.”

Ed Werner had said very little more for the rest of the interview. But in the elevator going back to his office, he muttered under his breath.

“The man’s mad. Stark staring mad. It just can’t be done.”

When he got back to his desk he sat there for a long time, thinking. He buzzed his secretary and told her that he was not to be disturbed. He had to make a decision. A difficult decision. As a scientist who had spent his life in R and D activities of various kinds he knew that what Woodnutt was proposing was next to impossible. You simply didn’t discover a new vaccine and put it into mass production from one month to the next. But as an ambitious businessman, who wanted to be President of Pharmacorp Inc. more than he wanted anything, he realized he had to give it a try.

He buzzed his secretary.

“I want Philip Mason of our Virology Unit to meet me downstairs in the lobby in ten minutes.”

Mason was already waiting for Werner by the time the latter reached the lobby. He was a young man, with reddish hair and a developed sense of humour. Werner had brought him into Pharmacorp some months earlier as his special protégé and had made him Head of the Virology Unit.

“Where are we going, Ed?” Phil Mason asked. “I was counting on an evening at home.”

“I’m sorry, Phil. Something has come up and it’s urgent. We’re going out to the labs and we may be back late.”

The rays of the sun were slanting into the summer mists that swirled over the Monongahela river and the last lab technician had gone home from Pharmacorp’s research laboratories, located some twenty miles west of Pittsburgh, by the time Ed Werner and Philip Mason were finally ready to start work.

The two monkeys, whom they had christened Sam and Griselda, were in isolation within Pharmacorp. Werner and Mason donned their pressure suits and masks before entering Pharmacorp’s own ‘Hot Lab’, a completely separate unit inside the research compound. Once inside, they released an anaesthetic gas into the airtight cages where the monkeys were kept. Only when Sam and Griselda were unconscious did they proceed with their work.

They began with the electron microscope. That was the obvious way to start. Werner and Mason took it in turns with the giant machine, whose invention had so dramatically revolutionized the science and practice of molecular biology.

Earlier that day, when he had been talking to Woodnutt, Werner had indicated that it would be useful if he could contact the CDC direct in Atlanta to discuss the results of their own EM examinations. But Woodnutt had emphatically vetoed the idea.

“Forget it,” he had said. “As far as CDC is concerned, Marburg no longer exists. However innocent sounding you make your enquiry, it will seem odd to them. We don’t want to excite suspicion.”

Instead Woodnutt had passed over to Werner the data sheets which had been constructed by the CDC at the time of the Marburg outbreak in the United States.

As they settled down to work, Werner read out some of the details.

“I’ve got Lowell Kaplan’s original report on Diane Verusio here, Philip. She was the first person to die, you remember. It was when he looked at the sample from Verusio that Kaplan made the Marburg identification. He says,” he consulted the notes, “that the morphology of the Marburg virus is unusual and that we should be looking for pleomorphic filaments of exceptional length. Straight rods, horseshoes, hooks, loops, b’s — we may also find dilation or branching in one of the poles.”