Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs

by Mark Olshaker

Unlike Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a tornado, or any other natural disaster that wreaks massive destruction and then ends quickly so that recovery can begin, a pandemic spreads around the world and lasts for an extended period of time. It does not hit just one locale, leaving all others with the ability to come to its aid. A pandemic hits many locales simultaneously, all of them needing emergency assistance. It has a rolling effect as it hits first individuals, then civil authority, then business, then interstate or international commerce or both. The effects are immediate and devastating, the consequences long-term.

When everyone is involved in a pandemic, no one has extra help or supplies or food or medicine to send around, unless there was sufficient planning. There is a naïve belief that the kinds of supplies we need to respond to a pandemic, such as medical products, drugs, vaccines, and N95 respirators—commonly known as face masks—will be a click away on the Internet. Not so. Today, we live in a just-in-time-delivery economy where virtually nothing is warehoused for future sales, let alone stockpiled for a crisis situation. Not even the parts and components necessary to manufacture these critical supplies are warehoused or stockpiled. When a rolling global pandemic takes its toll on the working population of a city in Asia, for example, the products and supplies that come from that city—and perhaps nowhere else—that we need to respond to a rapidly growing pandemic will not be available. No amount of money can buy something that doesn’t exist. This is why the recently created World Bank Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility fund, which is intended to provide global financing for responding to a pandemic, will not work for a global emergency.

Only recently have we begun to realize how we as humans coexist with the global array of microbes—what we call the microbiome. Unfortunately, we still have a largely naïve view of that relationship, often shaped by popular media figures expressing their disgust when someone reports that samples taken from phones or door handles in our offices or homes are flush with germs. This simplistic view is like concluding that the only good plant is a dead one because you don’t want weeds in your yard.

For reasons we will discuss, the 1918 flu was an influenza strain like none other in recorded history. Could something like this happen again? You bet it could. In fact, you bet your life it could. But with all of the advances in medical science and communications in the past hundred years, would we be better prepared to deal with it? Don’t be too sure. The world is a far different place today than it was a century ago. In fact, the world is a far different place today than it was twenty-five years ago. And almost all of the changes that have taken place favor the microbe side of the war rather than the human side.

In 1954, Jonas Salk, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and developer of the first polio vaccine, became an international hero to the generations of parents who worried every summer when their children went to a playground, swimming pool, or movie theater—anywhere people congregated and the poliovirus silently lurked. They were haunted by images of row after row of iron-lung respirators and boys and girls in leg braces and wheelchairs. Now there was a prospect of those images disappearing from the modern world. On April 12, 1955, in what became one of the most famous quotes of the decade, legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow asked Salk on the live CBS program See It Now, “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?” With matter-of-fact modesty and a shy smile, Salk replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” That was it—the apotheosis from man to immortal. Jonas Salk was every parent’s selfless deliverer from fear.

As far as pandemic potential is concerned, the most dangerous places on earth are anywhere people, birds, and swine are crowded close together in large numbers—the food markets of China and Southeast Asia, for example, or the industrial farms of the American Midwest.

Here’s an even grimmer example. If 1 percent of those critical influenza victims need ventilators, we can probably handle it. If 3 percent need them, forget it; we just don’t have enough machines in the country, and neither does any other country. Even if they did, do you think they would lend them to us? That means a lot of people would die

We don’t know which, of all the influenza strains we’re watching, will emerge as a pandemic one, or whether it will be something we’ve never seen before. What we do know is that when it happens, it will spread before we realize what is happening. And unless we are prepared, it would be like trying to contain the wind.

The lead editorial in the next day’s Wall Street Journal disagrees with the president, saying, “The only thing we have to fear is a rampant and deadly influenza epidemic for which this country was totally unprepared and which this administration has been far too slow to respond to.” The editorial traces the 50 percent decline in American stocks since the beginning of the pandemic, with commensurate drops around the world, and the near collapse of the Chinese exchanges. Attendance plummets at sporting events, theme parks, and shopping malls. Most public events are now canceled. Major League Baseball is considering temporarily suspending its season. Retailers and park operators have to lay off large percentages of their already diminished workforce. National unemployment soars above 25 percent, while certain industries can’t find enough qualified workers. Many automobile dealers are now open only on weekends for new car sales, and their service bays are nearly empty. The Federal Reserve lowers the federal funds rate to zero.