Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

by Richard Preston

The director of the CDC, Dr. Tom Frieden, saw the news reports and called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIAID—the NIH institute that runs the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick. Frieden was upset, and he asked Fauci what was going on in Africa with this NIH researcher and this NIH drug. Anthony Fauci was taken quite by surprise. It seems he hadn’t known anything about it. If an experimental, unlicensed, untested drug is supplied by the NIH and is provided to a patient by an NIH employee, any decision to give the drug to the patient must be handled by top-level administrators at the NIH and must be overseen and authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. It seemed that Lisa Hensley had broken all the rules. The leaders of the NIH knew next to nothing about her. She was a lower-level scientist who’d been working at the agency for only a few months. The heads of the NIH began asking, in effect, Who is this Lisa Hensley person and what the hell did she do? Whoever she was, she seemed to have gone rogue.