The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  The President was more engaged than usual, probably because he had nothing else on his schedule. He sat on one of the couches rather than at his desk. “Okay, where are we?” he said.

  “The Canadians shipped us five hundred thousand doses,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “Good,” the President said.

  “Didn’t they pledge two million?” the Strategist asked.

  “They’re monitoring their own situation and will release more if conditions allow,” the Chief of Staff said, consulting her notes.

  “That sucks,” the Strategist said.

  “India? Australia?” the President asked.

  “They’re both saying they need parliamentary approval to ship Dormigen out of the country,” the Chief of Staff explained. “It takes time, and obviously it would be public. We’ve cobbled together some smaller contributions from a number of countries: Israel, Mexico, Colombia, Latvia—”

  “Jesus Christ, did you just say Latvia?” the Strategist interjected. He was eating a Danish, and he chewed several times, though not quite enough, before continuing. “Latvia? If any part of our response depends on Latvia, we are completely fucked.”

  The President shot him a look, as if to say, “Dial it down.”

  “But seriously, Latvia?” the Strategist said, calmer for the moment. He took another bite of Danish.

  “It all adds up,” the Chief of Staff said. “It’s a numbers game.”

  “Latvia,” the Strategist mumbled, loud enough for those of us close enough to him to hear.

  “Speaking of which, where are we?” the President asked. He meant “the number.” We had bandied this concept around for several days, but the data were still trickling in, so for all the urgent talk we did not actually have a figure yet, much to the ongoing annoyance of the Strategist. Perhaps subconsciously we did not want to put such a fine point on the situation. It is hard for me to convey the surreal nature of the crisis. This was the opposite of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, when tragedy struck and the public demanded a response. We were watching the planes in flight, reckoning what would happen when they reached their targets. But nothing was burning yet. The public was having brunch on a sunny spring day. So rather than being forced to action, we had to press ourselves ahead when the natural impulse was to do as little as possible and hope the planes turned around.

  “We are pulling a model together,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “It’s not that hard,” the Strategist said. “There are only a handful of variables. I can do it on an Excel spreadsheet.”

  “We are doing some in-depth sampling to learn more about Capellaviridae,” the Director of the NIH offered.

  “Great, but you must have some assumptions now,” the Strategist said, more calmly than usual. “My understanding was that we were going to build this model right away—take our best guess at the situation and then update it as we get better data.”

  “That’s what we agreed to,” the Secretary of Defense said.

  “So why aren’t we doing that?” the Strategist asked. He was genuinely perplexed.

  “Let’s have that done for tomorrow,” the President suggested.

  The Secretary of Defense said, “With all due respect, sir, we are going to run out of ‘tomorrows.’ If we have the information, let’s put it together. I appreciate that we are dealing with a lot of unknowns here, but that’s always the case. I’ve never met a military planner who felt he’d started planning for anything too early.”

  “All we need is an Excel spreadsheet,” the Strategist repeated. He was sitting on the couch opposite me. As he spoke, he grabbed a laptop from a coffee table in front of the Chief of Staff, who was sitting next to him, and flipped it open. I could see her shocked expression. “What’s the password to unlock the screen?” he asked, oblivious to the strange looks around him.

  “White House one two three,” she said. “No capitals, all strung together.”

  “Wow, the Chinese will never figure that one out,” he said, typing. “Okay. When can we expect the next batch of Dormigen to be done?”

  The Chief of Staff looked at her phone. “April sixteenth,” she said.

  “I don’t care what the date will be. Just tell me how many days from now,” the Strategist said, shaking his head in exasperation.

  “Twelve.”

  He walked the room through the other variables: the doses remaining; the doses on hand solicited from other countries; the expected demand for Dormigen to deal with other illnesses. “Okay,” he said. “We’re reasonably confident of all that, yes?”

  “I think we can expect far more help from the international community,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “Fine. This will be a conservative estimate. Now I need some estimate of the number of Capellaviridae cases we are going to need to treat in the next twelve days, right?” There were nods of approval all around. “So what’s that number?”

  “We don’t know yet,” the Director of the NIH said. “We’re doing intensive sampling. We’ll have those numbers in two days.”

  “What’s our best guess now?” the Strategist said in a tone that bordered on mockery.

  “It would just be a shot in the dark,” I said.

  “Then give me a fucking shot in the dark!” he spluttered. “Come on, people, am I the only one who sees icebergs floating out there?”

  I said, “We can have our stats guy do an estimate tomorrow, maybe a couple of scenarios: best-case, worst-case, and so on.”

  “Tomorrow? Am I talking to myself here?” the Strategist asked the room. “Call him now.”

  “It’s Sunday morning,” I replied. “I have no idea how to reach him.”

  The Strategist ripped a sheet of paper from his legal pad. He thrust it at me. “Write his name down and whatever else you know about him.” I did as I was told. The Strategist took the paper from me without saying anything and walked out of the room. Even now I am not sure where he went.

  The rest of us looked at each other until the President broke the awkward silence. “He’s right. We can’t wish this thing away.”

  The Director of the NIH shifted somewhat uncomfortably in her seat. She and I made eye contact, acknowledging to each other that it would be more sensible to wait for better data. I raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “What should we do?”

  The Director of the NIH, to her credit, pushed back against the President. “We’ll have to treat this number with skepticism,” she warned.

  “We know that,” the Secretary of Defense said. “This number is not going outside this room. It’s a start. We’ll build a more sophisticated model when we get better data. For now it’s something, and something is better than nothing.”

  The Strategist walked back into the room. He handed the piece of paper back to me with a phone number scrawled on the bottom. “It’s a cell phone,” he said.

  I looked at the number, trying to make out the last four digits. The writing was tiny and childlike. “You can use my small office,” the President offered as I was trying to decipher the handwriting.

  “Is that a one or a seven?” I asked the Strategist, pointing at the penultimate digit.

  “Sorry,” he said, genuinely apologetic. “It’s a seven. Four-zero-seven-nine. Sorry.” At that moment, I had what I can only describe as a burst of awareness. There were many other times when the gravity and bizarreness of the situation struck me: the first time I walked into the Oval Office; the first time the working group looked to me for an authoritative opinion. But this was different—less intellectual and more emotional, like looking up at the stars on a clear New Hampshire night and feeling the incomprehensible size of the universe. Of course, any middle school graduate understands that the universe is enormous and expanding, but there is something about those special moments when a bright night sky makes one appreciate emotionally what it really means. And then the feeling passes, as quickly as it arrived.

  So it was as I tried to read the Strategist’s handwriting. His chicken-scratch pen
manship was so banal, yet the reason he had written down the number was so significant. The combination of the comic and the scary gave me this momentary emotional sense of what was happening. “You can use my small office,” the President repeated.

  I called what was apparently Tie Guy’s cell phone. It rang four or five times and then went to voice mail. I left a short, cryptic message telling him to call me back immediately. The White House operator had given me an outside line. I did not know whether the number would show up on caller ID as “White House” or “blocked” or maybe something else. On a hunch, I waited a few moments and dialed again. Tie Guy picked up this time. “Hello?” he said. I had not woken him up, but his tone suggested surprise, or maybe wariness. I tried to walk the line between urgency and panic, explaining that I needed him to give me some estimates for the likely trajectory of the Capellaviridae epidemic. “That’s why I’m doing the sampling,” he said. “I told you, I’ll have numbers on Tuesday.”

  “I need something now,” I said.

  “It’s Sunday morning,” he answered, more perplexed than annoyed.

  “I know. I’m in a meeting and I need our best estimate for the number of Capellaviridae fatalities if the virus were not treated with Dormigen.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “That’s not important,” I said with faux-authority.

  “Well, it’s obviously important to someone.”

  “The Director. She’s in the meeting. She wants numbers. Now.”

  “Is this some kind of terrorist thing? Is that what’s going on?” he asked.

  “No,” I said firmly. “It’s a lurking virus that has turned virulent. That’s what they do.”

  “Yeah, but a terrorist group could have figured out how to trigger the virus.”

  The thought had occurred to me, but there was no country, let alone a terrorist group, with that kind of scientific expertise. “No,” I said, with real authority this time. “Look, I’m in a meeting. The Director is literally in the other room waiting for me to get off the phone. I need you to give me your worst-case scenario, your best-case scenario, and what you think is the most likely fatality rate. Give me those three numbers.”

  “You want me to make something up?”

  “No. I want you to give me an informed inference based on what you have seen so far.”

  “Okay, can I think for a second?” he asked. His tone had turned modestly more cooperative.

  “Of course.”

  There was a brief silence. “But we have Dormigen, right?” Tie Guy asked.

  “Yes,” I lied. “We’re just trying to get our mind around the virus—to isolate what’s happening there. So give me your best estimate of what would happen without Dormigen.”

  Tie Guy gave me his numbers. I wrote them down on the same sheet of paper, right below where the Strategist had scrawled the phone number. I did not really process the numbers as I wrote them down. The conversation had meandered, and I was feeling pressure to get back to the meeting. Also, I was not privy to the Dormigen supply calculations (mostly because I had not asked), so the figures Tie Guy gave me had no context. I walked back into the Oval Office and handed the sheet to the Strategist. He looked at them, betraying no emotion, and then typed them into the spreadsheet.

  The Strategist read out the results with a similar lack of emotion, which is eerie in hindsight. “Worst-case: three-point-two-five million. Best-case: seven hundred thousand. Most likely: two million.” The room was silent, until the Acting Secretary of HHS asked, “I’m sorry, I’m the new guy here. Two million what?”

  “Two million deaths,” the Strategist said.

  “No, that’s not right,” the NIH Director said quickly. “Those figures have no basis in reality.”

  The Strategist looked at her. He started to say something and then stopped himself. The room went silent again. I had a feeling that the President was the only person who could speak next, which turned out to be correct. “We have commitments for enough Dormigen to deal with any of those scenarios,” the President said.

  “Commitments,” the Strategist said.

  “Mr. President, you need to start working the phones,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “Clear my schedule tomorrow. I’ll make the calls.”

  The Acting Secretary of HHS looked around the room. He had an uncharacteristically dazed expression. After a moment, he said, “Again, I know I’m the new guy here, but if I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing . . .” He paused to gather his thoughts. “Well, we’ve got a serious situation.” The rest of us had become desensitized to what was happening, the policy equivalent of the frog being slowly boiled alive. One meeting had led to the next, and while each one was serious, the progression left us oddly inured to the magnitude of what was going on. The Acting Secretary had just given the room a collective slap in the face. In that moment, I felt both terrified and relieved—terrified by the number of planes that might fall out of the sky, and relieved that I was no longer the only one seeing it.

  “These numbers are nonsense,” the NIH Director said.

  “Do you have something better?” the Strategist asked.

  “We will on Tuesday.”

  “What if Tuesday’s numbers are worse?” the Strategist replied.

  “You are creating needless panic,” the NIH Director said.

  “I would argue the opposite,” the Strategist replied calmly. “Now we know how bad this could get.”

  The Strategist and the NIH Director were slowly developing an antagonistic relationship. The Director was the heart of the group, always offering up an optimistic spin, even when the facts did not necessarily support her case. The Strategist was all brain. If anything, he tended toward pessimism. “Everything in this town turns out worse than you think it will,” he once told me during a break. We were standing at adjacent urinals. He turned to me and said that, apropos of nothing, and then went back to his business. I could not think of an appropriate response. I don’t think he was looking for one.

  The Acting Secretary was visibly shaken. “With respect, I’m the new guy here,” he repeated. “But I hope we can agree on a couple of things.”

  “Go ahead,” the President said.

  “First, I think we need more people in the room. Is this it?” he asked, looking to his right and left. “Are we the only ones who know what’s going on here?”

  The Chief of Staff answered, “We have several groups working on different pieces of the situation. There is a large team from the CDC and NIH working on Capellaviridae. We are learning more by the hour. And we have a team at the State Department who are gathering Dormigen commitments from across the OECD, India, other countries. But yes, the people in this room are the only ones who have a complete understanding of the situation.”

  “Given the magnitude of what I just heard, this just doesn’t feel right,” the Acting Secretary said.

  “I take your point,” the President said. “On the other hand, we can’t afford mass panic.”

  “What about the Speaker?” the Acting Secretary asked. The President leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, visibly frustrated, and then quickly regained his composure. I knew from reading the newspaper that the President’s relationship with the Speaker of the House was notoriously bad, sometimes openly hostile. His reaction suggested it might even be worse than that.

  “We’ll take that under consideration,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “What was your second point?” the President asked.

  “Maybe you’ve already discussed this, but it seems like somebody—maybe all of us—needs to think about what happens if we don’t have enough—enough Dormigen.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?” the President asked.

  “No, I mean if we come up short—”

  “That’s not going to happen,” the NIH Director said sharply. The Strategist exhaled loudly, causing everyone else in the room to look in his direction, at which point he rolled hi
s eyes.

  The Acting Secretary continued, “Yes, I understand we’re going to do everything we can, but in the event we were to come up short . . . well, who gets what we have?”

  The question just kind of hung there.

  21.

  THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE. WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW ABOUT: She was the meanest, most calculating person I have ever met. I know some nasty people, but most of them are a little thick and not particularly strategic. They are impulsively mean, often because they do not know any better. The Speaker of the House was mean in a strategic, long-term, highly intelligent kind of way, like one of those predators on the Discovery Channel that tracks its prey for hours before seizing exactly the right moment to leap from behind a bush and sink its teeth into the jugular. She rose in California politics as “a Latina small business owner.” There is nothing about that phrase—not the Latina part, not the small business owner—that was true in spirit. Both descriptions were technically accurate, I suppose, but I am shocked the media did not push back more aggressively on her political narrative. She grew up in suburban Connecticut, born to upper-middle-class parents. Her maternal grandfather, a Harvard Law School graduate and prominent appellate court judge, was Colombian. The Speaker of the House took from him a gift that kept on giving: a Hispanic surname. As a twenty-two-year-old graduate of UC Berkeley, an age when most of the rest of us are hoping to find some reasonably steady form of income, a rental apartment without roaches, and a roommate who is not psycho, she changed her last name from Ryan to Rodriguez. How many people are planning a political career at age twenty-two with that degree of seriousness?

  The small business part was arguably bogus, too. She and a business partner bought a large chain of California health food stores. The businesses were already up and running; she spent her days at the corporate headquarters, not behind the counter selling fish oil. Yes, each store was a small business, but to describe the Speaker as a small business owner was like saying that Henry Ford tinkered with cars. Everything she did was political, and I mean everything. The President could not stand her, and it was mutual. The Speaker had entered the 2028 presidential primary as the solid favorite of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She had California locked up. She built a solid organization and was a terrific fundraiser. The polls were saying that she could steamroll any centrist opponent in the Democratic primaries. Meanwhile, the Republicans had just split into the New Republicans and the Tea Party, leaving them without a candidate who could unite the two. The Speaker was convinced, not unreasonably, that she had a clear path to become the first female president, and, if you buy the narrative, the first Hispanic president, too.