the pockets of his protective overalls, his shadow reaching across the floor of the barn. He abruptly turned and left.
When Emily and Mary Lou finished their sampling, they went back to the tarp beside their truck and reversed their procedure. They stood in a footbath, and then wrapped up their protective garments in a garbage bag, which they sprayed with disinfectant. They also sprayed the tires of their truck. They wiped their hands and face with Purell. And then they raced to the FedEx store in St. Cloud to send their samples to the USDA lab in Ames, Iowa.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Mary Lou said.
19
It’s Not a Vaccine
“Day after day we get the same report from you,” Tildy said, scolding Lieutenant Commander Bartlett, who had become an ominous fixture at the Deputies Committee meetings—like the Ghost of Christmas Future, with grim visions delivered in a laconic southern drawl. “No vaccine,” Tildy recited, counting on each finger. “No treatment. No cure. You have to tell us something positive! The American people are beside themselves with worry.”
Bartlett responded with a look that Tildy instantly recognized as pity. “We have plans, ma’am. We’ve had plans for years, at the CDC and NIH and Johns Hopkins and Walter Reed, we’ve had lots of plans. We just haven’t ever been given the resources and personnel to carry them out. Like ventilators. We figure that maybe 30 percent of hospital patients reporting severe influenza symptoms will need to be ventilated. Right now we can accommodate about one percent of patients who require them. Meantime, people are dying of other treatable diseases because we have no stockpile of essential medicines. They’re all made in India or China, which are also suffering this pandemic. We’re running out of syringes, diagnostic test kits, gloves, respirators, antiseptics, all the stuff we need to treat patients and protect ourselves.”
“Honey, I don’t think you understand.” A deep voice suddenly broke in. The vice president was a former governor and radio host known for his tough demeanor. The president had made him the official point person for the pandemic, and recently he had begun attending the Deputies Committee meetings. Once he started coming, the room filled up with staffers and note-takers jammed against the walls. “We need deliverables! And I mean today! The president wants action, and he wants it now!”
Bartlett stiffened. “I know what you people want me to say, but that’s not my job, is it? I am supposed to be giving you information. Real information. What you do with it is your job. Now, if you had been doing your job and providing us with the resources we asked for, maybe we wouldn’t be sitting here sucking our thumbs while people are suffering and the economy is going to hell and the graveyards are filling up and all because people like you didn’t care enough about public health to pay attention to our needs.”
The vice president looked like he’d been hit with a crowbar. For a moment, everyone was afraid to speak.
“Mainly, we have to give something to the president that will project a sense of calm,” Tildy said gently. “Of hope. Of progress. Like that soon people will be able to get a shot and they’ll be protected.”
Bartlett shook her head ever so slightly. The pity thing again. “Even if we had a vaccine, the question is, who gets the shot? It takes months to ramp up production, and it won’t even start unless the drug companies are protected against liability. I mean, we don’t have time to do standard human safety testing. And let’s say we get ten thousand doses the first week, and a hundred thousand the week after, and five hundred thousand the next week, and so on. It’ll still take months to scale up to the point where we’ll have enough material to create some kind of herd immunity. Even then, you may need two or three doses to be safe.”
While recovering his dignity, the vice president had put on reading glasses and busied himself by leafing through a briefing folder. “What’s this about antiserum?” he demanded.
“NIH is testing the serum of surviving victims to see if it can be used to provide passive immune therapy,” Bartlett said.
“Well, can it?”
“Some. Temporarily. In theory.”
“Can we have the president say that a vaccine is in development?”
“It’s not exactly a vaccine.”
“What exactly is it?”
“It’s a monoclonal antibody. It’s something that the immune system makes by itself after an infection or vaccination, but we can make