Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

“I think that the idea is catching hold that we should move toward predict and prevent,” Burke told me back then, “rather than surveillance and response.” Of course, he noted, we would always need both. The challenge was balance and priority. The challenge was a finitude of money. And then he volunteered something that does indeed, by today’s hindsight, make him seem prescient. “If I were king, I would be investing in coronavirus diagnostics,” Burke said. “I would be investing in better studies of vaccines against coronavirus.”

America’s most trusted disease scientist, with his calming candor and his Brooklyn accent, thinking strategy like a nefarious virus—it was persuasive. Tony Fauci has so much steel in his spine and antifreeze in his veins, this compact man from Bensonhurst, a pharmacist’s son, director of a huge federal research agency (the NIAID) since 1984, veteran of many rough days testifying to Congress, that it seems he could just as well have bossed the Gambino crime family, if he weren’t so moral, or maybe served as superior general of the Jesuits. The force of his will and ambition echo forward from the fact that, in high school, at five-foot-seven, he captained the basketball team.

Santa Clara County in northern California, encompassing the city of San Jose and Silicon Valley, was one of the first areas in the United States to be hit. Sara Cody could see it coming. Cody, a physician and epidemiologist with degrees from Stanford and the Yale School of Medicine, and experience doing outbreak investigations for the CDC, served as health officer and public health director for Santa Clara County. “Forty percent of the people that live in our county were born outside of the U.S.,” she told me. Practicing public health in such a place, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, always felt like a globalized challenge. “There’s lots and lots and lots of travel, for personal and professional reasons, and I think that is probably the reason why we tend to see—as infections are emerging—we tend to see them here first.”

Meanwhile, people were dying. Two fatalities had occurred in Santa Clara County by February 25—the deaths of Patricia Dowd and another person—though not recognized as Covid-caused until months later. In Italy, of the 323 confirmed cases of COVID-19 by that date, eleven had proven fatal. China’s case count had exploded at the start, more than 78,000 by February 25, with 2,715 deaths. Soon afterward, thanks to draconian versions of nonpharmaceutical intervention, China would flatten its curve like a mesa. America’s curve over the coming months, into the following year, would resemble the Grand Tetons.

We’ll move beyond these letter-number jumbles, shortly, to some handier monikers. B.1.1.7, for instance, became the U.K. variant. Later, with more data available, more variants emerging, and for ease of public discourse, that received an even simpler name: the Alpha variant. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta: the four horsemen of the Covid apocalypse in its second phase.

And ivermectin is available over the counter, at your local pet store or feed store, or from Amazon with a couple of clicks—in tablet form, chewable tablets, pour-on liquid, or as an apple-flavored paste, all intended for deworming your dog, your horse, your cows, or your goat. That’s because it’s an important and trusted tool among veterinarians and livestock producers for treatment against lice, mites, and parasitic worms. Then again, the claw hammer is an important and trusted tool among carpenters, but it’s not recommended for use in dentistry.