Lost Immunity

by Daniel Kalla

  “Ours, too,” Tyra says.

  “And the national coverage is exploding,” Kevin says. “Fox News did a whole segment on the dangers of new vaccines this morning.”

  “Fox, huh? What a shocker,” Angela says. Her voice is subdued this morning. Beyond the ravages of her illness, she looks defeated to Lisa.

  Lisa looks around the table. “The next vaccination clinic is scheduled to open in less than ninety minutes…”

  “You’re going to cancel it, right?” Benning asks.

  “That’s what this group needs to decide.”

  “There’s not much choice, is there?” Angela asks. “Who’s going to show up?”

  “This vaccine works, though,” Moyes pipes up unexpectedly. “You saw the statistics. This meningitis outbreak has reached a tipping point. And the antibiotic prophylaxis failure represents another major vulnerability. More children are going to die. Probably many, if we halt the vaccination campaign now.”

  “You might be right, Alistair,” Lisa says. “But so is Angela. Between the news of the second reaction and those gruesome photos of Mia going viral, even if we do run clinics, people aren’t going to come.”

  “It’s odd, though, isn’t it?” he says.

  “What is?”

  “That there was no hint of any kind of delayed immune responses in all the previous Neissovax trials. Why are we seeing them now for the first time?”

  “It’s still a pretty rare reaction,” Lisa says. “Maybe we’re only now hitting the critical mass of subjects required to see the signal. After all, we’ve inoculated over six thousand. Four times as many as were enrolled in the pooled trials.”

  Moyes shakes his head. “Is it possible Delaware hid something in their initial results?”

  The question reminds Lisa of Max’s insinuation about the coincidental timing of the outbreak and the new vaccine, which dripped with similar conspiratorialism, but she pushes that out of mind. “Why would they hide a complication like that in the trials? It’s far worse for it to come out during the clinical rollout when it’s too late for damage control.”

  “At this point, we should consider all possibilities,” Moyes says. “Have we tested the vaccines involved in these two cases of skin eruptions?”

  “Fiona Swanson, Delaware’s director of product safety, has retested the batches they came from. There are no concerns.”

  “Not the batches, Lisa. I meant the individual vials.”

  “How would we do that? They’ve already been dispensed.”

  Angela sits up straighter. “There’d be residual vaccine left inside the vials.”

  Moyes nods. “Or inside the syringes themselves.”

  Before Lisa can answer, the door opens, and Ingrid leans her flushed face into the room. “So sorry to interrupt, Dr. Dyer,” she says quietly.

  Realizing that it must be important, Lisa hops to her feet and steps out into the hallway.

  “There’s a Dr. Sandhu looking for you,” Ingrid says. “He says it’s urgent.”

  The name means nothing to Lisa. “From where?”

  “The medical examiner’s office.”

  Lisa ducks back into the conference room to ask Tyra to finish chairing the meeting, before hurrying into her office. Ingrid patches the call through.

  “I am sorry to interrupt, Dr. Dyer,” Sandhu says in a British accent. “However, I felt this was rather urgent.”

  “What is, Dr. Sandhu?”

  “I’ve just completed an autopsy on a twenty-year-old male who died three days ago.”

  “Died how?” Lisa asks with growing alarm.

  “I’ve concluded the ultimate cause of death is Stevens-Johnson syndrome.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Darius Washington.”

  She doesn’t recognize it. “Did he die in hospital?”

  “He never reached the hospital. The swelling in his throat caused an acute occlusion of his airway. He died at home. Of asphyxiation.”

  “Oh my God…”

  “I’ve obviously followed the recent news. The reason I am calling, Dr. Dyer, is that I also discovered swelling over his left deltoid that is consistent with a recent inoculation.”

  Stunned, Lisa mumbles her thanks and hangs up. She immediately logs into the vaccination database on her computer. It takes only seconds to confirm that a Darius Washington received his Neissovax immunization at the first vaccination clinic on the campaign’s opening day.

  The same one where Mia got hers.

  Lisa clicks open the website that catalogs all the vaccination reactions. She searches for the names Darius and Washington but doesn’t find a match for either. Surely his friends or family would have known about his vaccination? Why didn’t anyone report him?

  With this third critical reaction, Lisa recognizes that any chance of the first two being coincidence has been shattered. Moyes was right. How could those rashes not have manifested during the clinical trials?

  She picks up her phone and calls Fiona.

  “There’s been a third case,” Lisa explains as soon as Fiona answers. “This one didn’t make it.”

  Fiona is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks, her voice is as fragile as crystal. “I see.”

  “This latest victim, Darius Washington… he got his vaccination at the same clinic as Mia Meyer did. Our very first one. Which means two of the eight hundred inoculated there reacted this way. And we could still see more from it.”

  “I’ve checked that batch repeatedly,” Fiona insists. “There were zero imperfections.”

  “What about the individual vials? Have you tested those for contaminants?”

  There’s another pause. “The spent vials?”

  “Yes, there should be enough liquid left inside to test them.”

  “Even if that were true, the first clinic was five days ago. Those used vials are long gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “We collect them and ship them back to Littleton for sterilization and recycling.”

  “How about the clinic where Mateo got vaccinated? That was only three days ago.”

  “I’ll double-check, but I’m sure the same is true.”

  “OK,” Lisa says, feeling increasingly despondent. “Thanks.”

  “Lisa…”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re sure this person died from a reaction to Neissovax?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Fiona says, her voice cracking. “There were so many scenarios I envisioned. Terrible ones, too. But this? I never expected anything like this.”

  “Why would you?” Lisa asks, as much of herself as Fiona. “But it’s happened. And now we have to limit further damage.”

  After she hangs up, Lisa’s mind keeps turning back to Darius. How could no one in his life have associated his death with the vaccine?

  She rises and heads back to the conference room but finds it empty. She heads over to Tyra’s office, where the program director sits typing at her computer.

  Tyra looks up at her. “There wasn’t much left to discuss after you left…” she begins, but stops. “What’s wrong, Lisa?”

  “There’s been a third reaction. A death this time.” Lisa goes on to update her about Darius.

  Tyra’s shoulders slump. “Now what?”

  “For starters, we cancel all the vaccination clinics. Immediately and indefinitely.”

  “They’ve won. The anti-vaxxers.”

  “No one wins here.”

  Tyra nods blankly.

  “I need to speak to Darius’s family. Urgently. Can you help me track down his next of kin?”

  “Will do.”

  “We have two people who reacted out of a single clinic. Statistically speaking, it just doesn’t fit, Tyra. Not if Delaware’s trial data is to be believed.”

  “None of this makes sense, Lisa.”

  “I already asked Fiona about the individual vials, but they’ve been recycled. What about the syringes thems
elves? What happens to those?”

  Tyra straightens, and her jaw sets with determination. “We round them up in sharps containers. Eventually we pool those into giant bins before they’re sent out for biomed waste disposal.”

  “How often do those go out?”

  “I’m guessing weekly, but I can let you know.”

  “So they might not be gone?”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  As Lisa wanders away from Tyra’s office, her thoughts drift to her niece. She feels a chill at the memory of Olivia’s trusting smile after she buried the needle into her shoulder. She lifts her phone and tries her sister again, but it rings through to voice mail. “Hey, how’s the little one feeling?” she says on the recording, trying not to sound as worried as she feels. “Call me, Amber, please.”

  CHAPTER 44

  The cargo doors to the warehouse are wide open. Three workers transfer a pallet from the back of the truck onto the waiting forklift. Despite the industrial nature of the scene, to Nathan, the whole experience feels more like a funeral. The ambience is the perfect fit for his current mood.

  As hard as the unanticipated skin reactions and cessation of the vaccine campaign have hit Nathan, Fiona appears to be taking all the developments even worse. With bloodshot eyes and taut lips, she has never looked more exhausted or dejected to him.

  “Twenty-five thousand extra doses that no one will ever see,” he remarks as he watches them unload the extra supplies that were shipped urgently only the day before from the plant in Littleton.

  “What do we do with them?”

  “Nothing. Store them with the others, for now.”

  “For destruction?”

  “Possibly.”

  “How could this have happened?”

  “Terrible luck? Or karma? Maybe it’s some kind of cosmic lesson for tempting fate as much as we did.”

  Fiona motions to the stacks of boxes on the warehouse floor. “We used the exact same product here as in the trials. Same dose, same equipment, even the same packaging. Nothing was different.”

  “We used more of it this time, Fee.”

  “That could statistically explain one, maybe two, never-before-seen reactions. But three? And two from the very same clinic? If that’s random, then it’s cataclysmically bad luck. Like being struck by lightning in a light rain. Twice.”

  Nathan stares at her. “What are you suggesting, Fee?”

  “Just that none of this makes sense.”

  “I agree. But that doesn’t help us. And it certainly won’t help Delaware’s bottom line.”

  “Who cares about that right now?”

  I still do. But he’s too ashamed to admit it. They lapse into silence as Nathan watches the workers pile more pallets on the floor that he realizes will likely end up back at the warehouse where they started from or in some massive incinerator.

  “What’s next?” she asks.

  “I’m going to go back to New York. Might as well face the board sooner than later.”

  “And me?”

  “I was hoping you’d stay here. Supervise our supplies until we’ve decided on the next steps.”

  She nods to the nearest security guard. “You want to assign me a door and give me a gun, too?”

  “You’re not the only one hurting here, Fee.”

  Her eyes lower, and her cheeks color.

  Nathan softens his tone. “We’re all just on edge.”

  She nods minimally.

  Nathan’s phone vibrates, and he pulls it out of his pocket. When he sees Peter Moore’s name on the screen, he answers on speakerphone.

  “Is it true?” Peter barks. “About the third one? A fucking John Doe?”

  “He’s not a John Doe, Peter,” Nathan says. “He just never made it to the hospital. The coroner was the one who made the connection.”

  “No one reported him before that?”

  “Not according to Public Health.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Peter growls. “This was supposed to be a fucking one-off. As in, no more goddamn reports!”

  Nathan takes him off speaker and brings the phone to his ear. “Did you hear what I said, Peter? The coroner reported him. And the hospitals reported the first two.”

  Fiona eyes him curiously, but Nathan waves away her concern.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Peter snaps. “This was your launch. Which means it was your mess to clean. More specifically, your mess to prevent.”

  “I didn’t make the vaccine.”

  “No, you just cleared it.”

  “That’s not exactly how I remember it.”

  “Pretty sure your business card reads ‘responsible for new product development.’ ” Before Nathan can reply, Peter adds, “I expect you in my office tomorrow morning.” He hangs up without another word.

  Fiona reaches out to Nathan, but her hand stops short of his arm. “Are you OK?”

  Nathan laughs bitterly. “I have this mental image of Peter’s office right now. The torn cardigan strewn on the floor. And his owl-shaped mug lying in pieces beside it. As shattered as that Zen-like persona he’s been putting on since his stroke.”

  Fiona eyes him with concern. “Peter is going to try to make you take the fall for this, isn’t he?”

  “How does that old expression go? ‘Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan’?” He groans. “At this point, I might as well throw on a curly red wig and call myself ‘Annie.’ ”

  CHAPTER 45

  “What’s going on?” Amber asks as soon as Lisa answers the phone.

  “How’s Olivia?” Lisa demands, spinning her chair away from the computer screen.

  “She’s OK,” Amber says warily. “But why do you keep checking in? What do you know?”

  Lisa hesitates. “We suspended the vaccine program.”

  “Why?” Amber asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

  Lisa tells her about the third vaccine reaction.

  “Dad was right,” Amber protests.

  The words cut, but Lisa doesn’t have the strength to argue. “I’m sorry, Amber. I didn’t know. Look, it’s still less than a one-in-a-thousand chance of—”

  “How long?”

  “For what?”

  “How long after the injection could Olivia still react?”

  “Days? I guess. Not more than a week.”

  “A week, Liberty?”

  “It’s all happening so quickly.”

  Lisa hears Amber’s stilted breath in her ear. She can tell that her sister is on the verge of tears.

  “We trusted you.”

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  “I got to go,” Amber snaps, and abruptly ends the call.

  The guilt gnaws like a rotting tooth. Never before has Lisa doubted her path since leaving home and choosing science over the unfounded beliefs and paranoia that rule her father’s world. But the realization that she might have exposed her niece to grave danger through her own stubbornness rocks her belief system to the core.

  She’s still obsessing about it as Tyra steps into her office.

  “You all right?” she asks.

  “Yeah, fine. Just thinking.”

  “If you say so,” Tyra says with a click of her tongue. “I followed up on our conversation from this morning.”

  “And?”

  “The bad news is that all used syringes from the first vaccine clinic have already been collected and destroyed, including, obviously, the ones given to Mia and Darius.”

  “And the good news?”

  “The same isn’t true of the clinic where Mateo got vaccinated.”

  “You found his syringe?”

  “Not only his. All of them from that clinic. They’re individually labeled, so it didn’t take us long to find Mateo’s. Even better, there was still a drop of liquid left in the hub of his syringe.”

  “You’ve sent it off to the state lab?”

  Tyra nods. “They’ve promised to run a full screen. They know it’s a top priority.” />
  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, I also have the number for Darius’s dad. That poor man. He’s in town making arrangements to have his son’s body flown home to Georgia.”

  “Can you text it to me?”

  “Will do,” Tyra says as she turns to leave.

  As soon as Tyra forwards the number, Lisa calls it, and a man with a gravelly voice answers. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Washington, I’m Dr. Dyer with Seattle Public Health. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

  “Not at this moment, Dr. Dyer,” he says in a Southern accent. “I’m tied up here at the morgue trying to sort out how to get my boy home.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Lisa says without giving him a chance to refuse.

  Lisa heads down to the garage and gets in her car. She turns on the ignition, and the voices on a radio talk show fill the interior. The host is interviewing an immunologist who specializes in vaccines, a soft-spoken man who’s doing his best to downplay fears over Neissovax. But the host keeps provoking him with leading questions and unfounded insinuations.

  Lisa changes the station, but the topic remains the same. “This is all about the insatiable greed of these drug companies,” a phone-in caller bemoans. “I heard the company behind this untested vaccine is making billions off flooding Seattle with their deadly crap.”

  “Maybe not billions, but no doubt they’re making a healthy profit,” the host replies.

  They’re giving it to us for free! Lisa wants to yell at the radio.

  “Not to mention the priceless advertising and free marketing opportunity they’re receiving,” the host continues. “At least, the opportunity they thought they were going to get before it all blew up in their faces.”

  The next caller is even more indignant, and she specifically calls out Lisa, although not by name. “Where is the leadership in Seattle Public Health?” the woman cries. “How could they have let this happen to our kids?”

  Lisa can’t help but keep listening, though she’s relieved when she pulls into the parking lot of the Seattle medical examiner’s office—to get out of the car and away from the radio’s vitriol.

  Inside the office, Lisa finds Darius’s father, Isaac Washington, in the otherwise empty waiting room. Wearing a suit and tie, the man, who looks to be in his sixties, is stocky with square shoulders and a dignified presence. But his expression is crestfallen as he fills in a form, which Lisa presumes represents some kind of legal release of his son’s body.