The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

America didn’t have the money to be America anymore. Or the guts.

DISEASES HAVE A history of stirring up conspiracies. Jews were held responsible for the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, and they were massacred in hundreds of European cities, including two thousand Jews burned alive in Strasbourg, France, on Valentine’s Day, 1349. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) first appeared, Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, charged that the new disease was a man-made synthetic virus that combined measles and mumps, although they are both paramyxoviruses and could not be the basis of a coronavirus. This fallible theory took root in China, which was loathe to assume responsibility for being the point of origin of the disease. A rumor spread like a contagion that only the United States was capable of genetically engineering such a disease, and that it had been deliberately seeded in China to retard its growth as a world superpower.

“Mr. Stevenson, how are you today!” Mary Lou said. She had been raised in the South and could affect an easy ebullience that stepped right over any sign of hostility.

“Fuck that. From what you say, this is our best hope for creating some kind of immunity. Washington is infested with this crap. We need to preserve the leadership.” What leadership? Tildy thought. The president had been almost entirely absent in the debate about how to deal with the contagion, except to blame the opposing party for ignoring public health needs before he took office.

people have always looked to the heavens for portents,” Majid said when Henry found him on the roof of his cousin’s palace in Taif, where they had taken refuge, peering through a telescope. The stars were dizzyingly brilliant. “Are you learning anything?” “For me, the messages are usually about my personal failings. The stars are my mothers-in-law.”

“A friend of mine once said that when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.”

“I’m not religious myself,” Henry said, “but I often think that if God made us the way we are, he made an animal that threatens to destroy his entire creation. On the other hand, if nature made us, as I believe, we’ve evolved into a species that is almost godlike in every respect. All the power we have, all the creativity, all the wisdom! But there’s a piece of genetic code inside us that wants to blow it all to pieces.”

Again and again one has to learn the lesson that animal models don’t always predict the outcome in humans. Thalidomide was safe in animals but in humans caused frightful birth defects. Fialuridine was a promising antiviral designed to counter hepatitis B. It was tested in mice, rats, dogs, monkeys, and woodchucks, at doses hundreds of times higher than would ever be tested on humans. Not a single animal showed a toxic reaction. But even minimal amounts of the drug were fatal to human volunteers, killing five of them; two others survived only after having liver transplants. Nothing in Henry’s experiments had suggested that his own agent would be lethal to humans—but that’s what human trials were for.

How inadequate we are in our attempts to bring nature under our control, Henry thought. How careless of us to believe that we can manipulate diseases to kill, rather than to cure. We’re like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we’ll burn the house down.