One Voice, Many Vaccines

By: | April 15, 2020
Mazes and Labyrinths (1922)

Twenty biomedical companies. Seventy nations. An aggressive search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is underway worldwide. Yet even 21st-century technology can’t match one man who curbed a major influenza pandemic spreading across the United States in 1957. 

Pioneering virologist Maurice Hilleman, now oft-forgotten, detected that pandemic from across the globe, convinced reluctant U.S. health officials to take notice, and single-handedly fostered a vaccine that became publicly available. All in just four months.

An irascible, no-holds-barred Montana farm boy born in the midst of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, Hilleman survived diphtheria and Great Depression-era poverty to earn a PhD in microbiology and chemistry at the University of Chicago. Practical and impatient, he turned down the prestige of academia and primarily worked in industry, at the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons and later Merck & Co, where he led vaccine research for 25 years. 

An iconoclast who slung swear words like the proverbial sailor, Hilleman helped develop an astounding 40 vaccines: to prevent measles, mumps, rubella, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis A and B, and other infectious diseases. The measles vaccine alone has saved an estimated one million lives a year. “Maurice’s genius was in developing vaccines, reliably reproducing them, and [taking charge] of all pharmaceutical facets, from research to marketplace,” biographer Paul A. Offit, MD, told the British Medical Journal for Hilleman’s obituary in 2005. The New York Times later noted that researchers credit him with “saving more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century.”

Hilleman worked under the public radar yet touched most people’s lives. He was chief of respiratory diseases at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research when a new H2N2 type of influenza, termed the Asian flu, hit in 1957—eventually causing more than 1 million deaths worldwide and killing an estimated 70,000 to 116,000 in the U.S. The number of American deaths could have reached 1 million, public health experts estimated, without the quick arrival of 40 million doses of vaccine that fall. With a reputation for emphasizing safety and reducing vaccine side effects, Hilleman nonetheless led that vaccine’s rollout by ignoring anyone who might slow him down, including federal regulators.

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Accidental closeness

By: | April 13, 2020
But are they six feet apart?

A couple weeks ago (or the other day, I’m not sure which since time all blends together now), I put a cup of sugar out for a neighbor who complained she couldn’t find any at the store. As I turned to go inside, I saw our mail carrier walking up the flight of stairs between the street and my house. We exchanged hellos. I was standing between her and the mailbox, so I offered to just take the mail from her so she wouldn’t have to walk all the way up to the box.

As she stretched out her gloved hand to pass me two envelopes, and as I awkwardly extended my arm to receive the mail, both of us straining to stay as far apart as possible, I realized my error. As she walked away, I’d broken the cardinal rule of isolation: unnecessary interaction with a human who does not live in my household. 

I wish I could say I remained calm about this extremely minor transgression, but my first reaction was panic. The mail could be infected! The carrier could be infected! I immediately ran into the house and washed my hands. For hours, I replayed the interaction in my head. Had I put the carrier in an awkward position? Had I exposed both of us? How many interactions like this has she been forced into every day? 

I thought about what I could’ve done instead. I could have said hello and darted into my house, but given how I was standing between the carrier and the mailbox, that would have seemed weird and rude. I could have asked the carrier to just drop the mail where she was and to back away slowly, as if she was a character in a shoot-’em-up action movie delivering the bounty to me, the mob boss villain, but that would be even more unhinged. 

Now that very little happens in my daily life (a highlight of this week: seeing a one-legged crow), I found myself talking about this interaction with friends. “I accidentally interacted with my mail carrier,” I would say. And friends knew exactly what I meant. They would tell me about their accidental interactions, too; a person who got too close at the grocery store, or a neighbor who reflexively inches closer and closer during a conversation held 6 feet apart. It is natural to be close to one another, to interact, but now, maintaining space is a form of politeness, conscientiousness. It will take us awhile to learn these new rules of interaction. 

As we’re adopting new ways of being, I’m heartened by all the efforts to care for each other even if we can’t be physically close. My neighbors left a note on our door offering to lend us their gas lawn mower, because they know we only have a push mower. A friend participated in a parade in which she and other teachers drove their cars through the neighborhood where their elementary school students live. Doctors are pinning photos of their smiling faces to their gowns to reduce the psychological distance from their patients and remind patients that underneath all that protective gear is a real person, there to care for them.

But I can’t help but wonder about the long-term toll of physical distancing. If just four weeks of isolation has bred enough paranoia in me that I felt anxious after a simple, low stakes interaction, what will another four weeks do? I can imagine a future me, relieved to be able to meet up with friends at a brewery again, reflexively hugging everyone as if we’d never been apart — but then feeling weird about it afterward. Or even worse, maybe future me will avoid those hugs and turn down friends’ offers to try sips of their beers, lest we swap the virus. Only time will tell, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this pandemic so far, we’ll get there when we get there.  

Image: Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Wikimedia Commons.

Clovis and the Virus

By: | April 10, 2020
Covid-19 distribution / Ice Age fluted point distribution

Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was made. I’ve held it in my hand, turning it over and over, one of the finer pieces of stonework I’ve seen. He found it, oddly, while picking up trash along a rural ditch. He figured it had to have been dredged up during modern history, dumped to the side, out of place, no known provenience, showing up here out of the blue. Maybe not entirely out of the blue, though, this point is part of a much bigger puzzle.

A week ago I snapped a shot of the coronavirus map for North America. This was before red dots merged and turned the US into a record breaking blot. Next to it, I placed a map of fluted projectile points from the Ice Age, dating to about 13,000 years ago. The two maps struck me as remarkably similar. What might be behind this?

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Guest Post: How to be alone

By: | April 8, 2020

I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something bracing or stupid, anything. The worse the news, the better. It feels more real somehow. “You can’t go on like this,” my wife told me during one recent bout. “It isn’t good for you. You can’t possibly read everything.”

Try me. My family lives in Seattle, where the outbreak in the U.S began. From our house we can see Kirkland, the suburb where the first coronavirus cluster bloomed out of a senior care center. Since late January we have watched as the virus spread in horrifying slow motion, the numbers ticking up, then leaping, and now who knows where or when they will stop.

A few weeks ago, when an epidemiologist tweeted that the virus had likely been creeping about the region undetected for weeks, I felt a strange giddiness that I took at the time to be relief. Covid-19 was among us and life as we knew it had not ended, right? But then it started to. All the schools closed, first for two weeks, then six weeks, and now for the school year; the libraries were next, which hit my wife especially hard, since she considers them the spine of a functioning society; then most of the stores, the playgrounds, the parks. Now we are locked down, allowed out only for essential business.

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Making a Renaissance

By: | April 6, 2020

This post is not implying a resemblance between the current pandemic and the perfect storm of disasters that hit Florence in the mid-1300s. Nor is it evidence for the half-assed notion that out of disaster comes good. It is only to say that sometimes beauty has deep roots. This first ran January 17, 2012.

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one below: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls, making a continuous low roar. Florence is in the Arno’s floodplain, so when it does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

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The Year Time Stood Still

By: | April 3, 2020

I have somehow become involved in wholesale Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement. That is not my job, and I know nothing about it, but the old rules no longer apply in this sudden new world. All it takes now, apparently, is to know some people with particular connections in China and all of a sudden you have state governments and federal agencies clamouring at your cellphone, lighting up your home screen with the photo of your cat on it. I sense the urgency of the world squeezing through a bottleneck of production capacity and I am glad to be merely a switchboard operator in that game, forwarding emails from my people to theirs, hoping I am helping.

Meanwhile time has, in other ways, stopped. Mortgages are frozen where I am, rent in some places is suspended. School has stopped, no matter what the three homeschoolers on my Facebook feed pretend. Many people’s incomes have stopped. That is not sustainable, but this will, nevertheless, go on. For the academic year or for the calendar year? I don’t recall anything ever being quite so up in the air.

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By: | April 2, 2020

Notice: due to distraction, the People of LWON are posting only Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays. We’ll be back in strength in the foreseeable, we hope, and meanwhile wash your hands and socially distance because we love you.