The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

Building 40 of the main campus of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, houses the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. On the second floor is the laboratory of Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory and Translational Science Core. He studies how viruses cause disease and designs vaccines to defeat them. The first thing you notice about Barney Graham is that there’s a lot of him. He’s six-foot-five, with a gray goatee and a laconic manner. Graham’s boss at NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said, “He understands vaccinology better than anybody I know.”