alarm that any doubts about mass vaccination were tossed aside. In September, the first inoculations for swine flu began. A month later, people began to fall ill—not from the flu, but from the vaccine, which was implicated in causing a paralytic disease called Guillain-Barré Syndrome. In December, the vaccination program was halted. During this time, no one else got swine flu. It was a political disaster for Ford and a caution to future political leaders. In 1918, the H1N1 flu killed between fifty and a hundred million people. In 1976, it killed only one.
For Henry and his colleagues, desperate for answers, a maddening feature of the 1918 pandemic was that there was so little record of it. For decades, it had been weirdly forgotten—buried in human memory, along with its secrets. What had made the virus so virulent? Why had it feasted especially on the young and vigorous—those who should have been the least susceptible to its killing powers? In 1951, the Swedish pathologist Johan Hultin traveled to an Alaska outpost called Brevig Mission, where, in 1918, influenza killed seventy-two of the town’s eighty residents. They had been buried in the permafrost, and Hultin gained permission to exhume several bodies and examine them. He was unable to isolate the virus, and the failure haunted him. Nearly fifty years later, in 1997, he learned of the work of Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology near Washington, D.C. Dr. Taubenberger had been attempting to reconstruct the 1918 influenza, using specimens preserved in wax from soldiers who had died during the pandemic. The then-elderly Hultin offered to return to Brevig Mission and look again. The only tool he took with him was his wife’s garden clippers. This time he dug up the remains of a woman, approximately thirty years old at her death, whom he called Lucy. Her extreme obesity had kept her lungs from being entirely destroyed. Hultin cut out her lungs with the garden clippers and took them home to San Francisco. He might as well have been carrying a hydrogen bomb.
Hultin mailed the lungs to Dr. Taubenberger. They were filled with viral material, enough to make a clone of the virus that killed Lucy. It was used to infect macaques, and within days their lungs were destroyed. Like Lucy, and like the French doctors in Kongoli, the monkeys drowned in their own fluids—a result of their overwhelming immune reaction.
Many people questioned the wisdom of bringing the Spanish flu virus back to life. No matter how carefully managed they might be, viruses sometimes escaped the confinement of the laboratory. Even at the CDC, one of the most carefully controlled labs in the world, eighty-four scientists—including Henry—had been accidentally exposed to a live strain of anthrax after it had supposedly been rendered inactive. Smallpox had escaped labs in England on multiple occasions, killing eighty people in total. Carelessness was an underestimated threat to civilization.
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BEFORE HE CAME to the CDC, Henry had worked the other side of diseases: he had created them. Fifty miles northwest of Washington, there still stood an old farmhouse set among famous Civil War battlefields. The grounds of the former estate had been fenced off with the highest security available. Fort Detrick, as the facility was called, comprised a number of medical missions, including the National Cancer Institute at Frederick, the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. It was here, in the middle of the Second World War, that the U.S. began its secret research into biological weapons.
There is a long history of enlisting pestilence in the waging of war, going back to the fourteenth century, when the Mongols catapulted the bodies of plague victims over the city walls of Kaffa, in the Crimean peninsula. The U.S. program tested anthrax and other dangerous diseases on human volunteers—mainly, conscientious objectors. After the Second World War, Nazi scientists who had experimented on prisoners of war and concentration camp victims were brought into the American research effort. They explored the use of insects, such as lice, ticks, and mosquitos, to spread yellow fever and other diseases. They studied the example of the Japanese in the war who had dropped plague-infested fleas into China, and poisoned more than a thousand wells with cholera and typhus, creating epidemics that lasted long after the war ended. In 1969, President Nixon outlawed the development of offensive biological weapons. Experiments with novel diseases continued, only now they were categorized as defensive