The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  The President was not, however, dismissive of Congress the institution. He had a group of legislators whom he and the Chief of Staff referred to as “the adults.” Every once in a while, he would turn to her and say, “Let’s run it by the adults.” As best as I could infer, this was a group of ten or twelve senators and thirty or forty House members whom the President respected a great deal. The group, which studiously avoided publicity, had coalesced near the end of the Trump presidency when a handful of serious legislators across parties began to believe that American governance had become dangerously unhinged. Some of the more impressive legislators in each chamber—former governors and Rhodes Scholars and CEOs and even a Ph.D.—began meeting informally after yet one more threatened government shutdown. There was no formal membership, just a series of relationships among serious people who sought to transcend the rancor and futility that had engulfed Washington. There was no ideological litmus test; the group included several committed progressives and one hard-core libertarian. What the participants had in common was a genuine commitment to civility and an aspiration to govern. In that spirit, they called themselves the “Conventioneers,” after the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the group of Americans who came to Philadelphia in 1787 representing an array of regions, interests, and ideologies and, over the course of a long, hot, arduous summer, managed to compromise their way to one of the greatest political documents ever written. No one ever told me why the President called them the “adults” rather than the “Conventioneers.” I do know that the Congressman from Kentucky with the prosthetic leg was not one of them.

  The “adults” were not powerful enough to pass legislation by themselves. Too much of what had to be done in Washington involved medicine the country was not prepared to take. They could, however, derail the very worst ideas. They could also generate momentum for an idea whose time had come. The press and the nation’s opinion leaders respected their collective wisdom. Most of the members were sought-after guests on news programs, not because they yearned for the spotlight (many were openly disdainful of it) but because media outlets were keen to have guests who could offer a modicum of depth. (Ironically, the legislators most eager to get on such programs were typically the least-favored guests.) The Conventioneers were not miracle workers; they had to win elections like everyone else. Then again, so did the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The President’s informal liaison with the “adults” in the Senate was the Majority Leader, who had earned that position because of his decades-long reputation as a legislative workhorse. In the House, the President typically called Gail Steans, a particle physicist who had run for her first term in Congress when she was well into her fifties.

  The President reached out to the adults before his formal briefing to Congress, both to ensure their support and to get feedback on his proposed remarks. He contacted Representative Steans first. She was a feisty woman, short and wiry, with a husky voice, who seemed perpetually annoyed that human beings did not act as predictably as other elements in the universe. She had been elected as a Democrat but left the party and became independent when the Speaker started trying to tell her what to do. (After the President was elected as an independent, it gave cover to a small but influential group of legislators to ditch their party affiliations. Three senators and eleven representatives had also been elected as independents.) The scuttlebutt in the capital was that Representative Steans did not “play nice” with her Washington colleagues. That was misleading, as she was a delightful and courteous person who happened to have zero patience for political nonsense. “I’m too old for that crap,” she would often remark. In fact, she was well liked by her fellow Conventioneers, who often looked to her for guidance on scientific matters.

  “How are you holding up, Mr. President?” Representative Steans asked when the President called her on the way to a town hall meeting in her home state of Maryland.

  “I’ve had better stretches.”

  “You wanted the job,” she said. This was a statement of the obvious and could pass for small talk, but there was a slight edge in the remark, as if to remind him that others in his seat had faced worse. “What’s the latest?” she asked. The President walked her through the situation: the amount of Dormigen left, the fatality projections, and so on.

  “First thing,” Steans said, “you need to get yourself back to D.C. This whole flying west stunt has played itself out.”

  “We’ll be wheels-up right after I give my address,” the President replied. He had met with the Australian Prime Minister and other Asian leaders while on the ground in Canberra. They had recommitted themselves to the South China Sea Agreement before posing for a group photo, fourteen heads of state effectively facing down Chinese hegemony in the region. The President did not land on an aircraft carrier—it felt wrong in light of developments stateside—but the group photo had been taken on one of the disputed South China Sea islands, which broadcast the same message to Beijing.

  “Why don’t you speak from Air Force One in flight?” Representative Steans asked. “That will give you some extra drama. Very presidential.” Her tone was not facetious. Rather, she acknowledged the effectiveness of these political gestures even as she wished they were unnecessary.

  “We had some problems with the broadcasting technology, but yes, I think I can do that now,” the President said. “What’s the tenor on the Hill?”

  “A lot of noise, mostly. The Tea Party jackasses are talking about impeachment.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Who knows, who cares?” Steans said dismissively.

  “They all voted against any public funding for Dormigen in the first place,” the President complained.

  “Of course they did. Government is the problem for those morons until they call 911 and no one answers. Ignore them. That’s a sideshow.”

  “And elsewhere?”

  “I think you’ve got decent support on Capitol Hill in the places where you need it,” Representative Steans said thoughtfully. “Other than the Speaker and her minions, I don’t think anybody thinks we should kowtow to the Chinese. We’ll see how that sentiment holds up when people start dying . . . Is there no better deal to be struck there?”

  “We’ve been working that one hard,” the President answered. “They’ve come back with some better offers, but they all involve walking away from the South China Sea Agreement. I just don’t see them dropping that condition.”

  “What about postponing it? President Xing could save face and we’d still get the agreement.”

  “We tried that. No go.”

  “What a waste,” Representative Steans said, sighing audibly. “People are going to start dying here and they’ll have warehouses full of Dormigen there.”

  “World War I was a waste, too,” the President said. “If you think about the big picture, we need to push China toward becoming a more responsible global power. That’s why the South China Sea Agreement is so important. It’s like Germany and Japan after World War II. We need China as a force for good.”

  “Hmm, I suppose that’s right.”

  “We do have one more potential diplomatic option,” the President offered.

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t say anything more, but I’m cautiously optimistic.” Representative Steans knew better than to pry; the President was not one to play coy. After a brief silence, he offered, “We may have a breakthrough on the virus front, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The NIH folks can brief you better than I. My understanding is that they have some new insight into why the virus turns virulent.”*

  “I wouldn’t expect too much on that front,” Representative Steans warned.

  “Why is that?”

  “We have, what, a handful of days until the Dormigen supplies run out?”

  “My understanding is the scientists may be able to come up with some kind of antidote.”

  “I’m skeptical,” Representative Steans said. “Scientific br
eakthroughs don’t happen in days. I certainly would not say anything about that in your remarks. What you need to be doing now is setting expectations for how bad it could be.”

  “Cecelia Dodds is helping us with that,” the President said.

  “What a needless tragedy,” Representative Steans said. “There’s nothing you can do?”

  “I’ve tried.”

  Representative Steans exhaled audibly. “That’s what we’re facing on a massive scale,” she said. “You don’t want to create panic, but complacency might be just as dangerous.”

  “I understand.”

  The President took her advice (reiterated by many others) that he should address the nation from Air Force One on his way back to D.C. The technology on board had been fixed and double-checked (and triple-checked after the President growled at the Chief of Staff, “It better fucking work”). The word went out that Air Force One would be departing shortly. As the last supplies were loaded on board and the doors were closed, the Strategist had not boarded. The Secretary of State had gone missing as well.

  67.

  THE NIH WORKING GROUPS WERE ENERGIZED BY MY THEORY of how lurking viruses might work, but the response was still less robust than one might think. The working hypothesis was that proximity to the dust mite was somehow protective against the virulent form of Capellaviridae. To stick with the earlier analogy, the dust mite is the extortionist; humans are the hostages; and somehow Capellaviridae is the weapon the dust mite uses to advance its own interests. One can imagine the dust mite holding the Capellaviridae “gun” to the head of its human host, saying, “As long as I stay fed and comfortable, nobody gets hurt.” If humans start to wipe out the pesky dust mite, however, things would turn ugly. (My hypothesis was that moving away from an area with dust mites to one without them somehow sent the signal that the dust mite was under siege, kind of like the protagonist in a western saying, “If I’m not back safely in an hour, kill them all.”)

  “I understand all that,” the NIH Director told me, “but I need you to understand that it takes time to test a hypothesis that is still only half-baked.”

  “Half-baked?” I asked incredulously. “Have we got any ideas that are fully baked?”

  “I’m sorry, that was a poor choice of words,” she said. “I’ve been talking to people at the FDA all morning. A clinical trial typically takes months, if not years. You’re asking me to do something in days that usually takes years, and to be honest, it’s not even clear what we’re testing.”

  I paused for a moment before responding. For most people, that involves some kind of cooling-off process. Unfortunately, I was heating up. “First of all,” I began, trying to project anger and seriousness without any hint of hysteria, “I’m not asking you to do anything. The people who are likely to die from Capellaviridae are asking you to do something. Second of all, what we’re testing here is really simple. Just expose people who’ve become sick to the North American dust mite. The hypothesis is that somehow repeated exposure to the dust mite protects against Capellaviridae turning virulent. I can’t tell you how or why that will work, and frankly we shouldn’t care at this point. We can figure that out five years from now and we’ll all share the Nobel Prize. We just need to try this very simple fix because we have nothing else.”

  Now it was her turn to pause and sigh. “It’s not that simple,” she said in a tone that suggested I probably would not get it anyway, like a high school girlfriend who says pityingly, “Oh, you’ll never understand . . .”

  “Which part of just letting people get bit by dust mites is not simple?” I asked angrily.

  “Let’s start with ‘who,’ ” she said. “Who is in this trial? We have no federal protocol for this kind of situation. We have a treatment that is one hundred percent effective—Dormigen. Anyone who is sick now or becomes sick in the next few days will receive Dormigen. Meanwhile, we have a completely untested theory that involves exposure to biting insects—something that hasn’t even been tested on rats. Would you volunteer for that clinical trial? Would you enroll your children? ‘Oh, no, Bobby doesn’t need Dormigen, let’s try the biting-bug cure.’ ”

  “That’s not fair—”

  “I’m not done yet,” she snapped. “We can’t test this on people without their knowledge, obviously.” I was being reminded that the Director was tough and smart; one does not get to be the head of a federal agency without heavy dollops of both of those attributes. Also, she had had as little sleep as the rest of us, maybe less. “Now let’s talk about ‘how,’ ” she continued. “Even when Capellaviridae becomes virulent, the body fights it off about ninety-nine percent of the time. So to determine if a treatment is effective with any degree of statistical confidence, we need a huge sample. And I just finished telling you that we’re having some trouble finding anyone who would be in that sample.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, raising the white flag. “We’re on the same team here.”

  “Then stop telling me how to do my job,” she said angrily. My apology worked to soften her tone, but she needed to wind down, like an engine that continues to run for a few seconds after the ignition has been turned off. “Also, I have to deal with that French asshole.”

  “Giscard?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he’s here.”

  “Like in D.C.?”†

  “Yeah, he took it upon himself to fly over when he heard the news,” she offered. “He got in last night.”

  Lionel Giscard was—by science standards—a global celebrity. He was the lead author on not just one, but two of the key papers that led to the development of Dormigen. He had won about every major science award and was dusting off a place for the Nobel Prize medal (which is typically awarded near the end of one’s career). Within the scientific community, Giscard was considered a lecherous asshole, for lack of a politer way of saying it. He had been married four times; after his most recent divorce, he was photographed cavorting with a former graduate student of his who was younger than all of his children. His starter wife was a doctor; they had met at university. Each subsequent relationship involved a search-and-replace process in which he sought out the most attractive graduate student and made her the new Madam Giscard. He stunned a conference of microbiologists—I mean, left a room of two hundred just stone-silent—when he opened a talk on cell longevity by saying, “I must have found the key to eternal youth, because the woman I am married to never seems to get any older.”‡ There was not even uncomfortable laughter.

  Giscard eventually found his way to Harvard, where the university built and funded a laboratory for him. This became a cause célèbre on campus, as Giscard’s pattern of behavior was already well established before Harvard recruited him. (Yes, he had married some of his protégés, but most of the attractive graduate students who had been the recipients of his amorous advances had no interest in becoming the next Madam Giscard.) He made it barely four months in Cambridge before a laboratory assistant alleged that he had pressed his body up against her and smelled her hair while she was looking at a microscope. This was a tough case to make, as people do bump into one another in close quarters, and sniffing hair (wildly parodied in the Harvard Lampoon) is not generally a firing offense. Still, Harvard’s president decided this was not a work environment that should be encouraged. Perhaps more important to the resolution of the situation, Giscard decided he was not happy at Harvard, either. In a remarkably telling comment, he told a reporter at the Harvard Crimson, “No one has ever complained before.”

  There were no quibbles over Giscard’s scientific talent. He was not a brilliant theorist; rather, he had a brilliant ability—and I am not using the word “brilliant” lightly—to absorb a theory and digest it into smaller, more actionable pieces. This was his contribution several times over in the development of Dormigen. On the other hand, Giscard’s colleagues did quibble—more than quibble, actually—about his prodigious ability to appropriate credit for major breakthroughs. When teams of researchers were tackling similar problems at
different universities, as is often the case in academe, Giscard’s papers always seemed to get published first, often with the results advertised to the press before the peer review process was complete. And when those papers were published, he always demanded to be first author, regardless of his actual contribution. It was not negotiable.

  I would see all of this play itself out—every single one of Giscard’s extreme personality traits—over the next thirty-six hours.

  68.

  THE U.S. AMBASSADOR TO INDIA IS ONE OF THE UNSUNG heroes of the Outbreak. Early in the crisis, our request to the Indian government to “borrow” any excess Dormigen had been firmly rebuffed. The Indian Prime Minister was a prickly populist, keenly sensitive to being perceived as the junior partner in the U.S.-India relationship. He was facing an impending parliamentary election and feared that sending Dormigen to the U.S. would be perceived by the Indian masses as putting U.S. health interests ahead of India’s own massive challenges. Hence, the Indian Prime Minister had offered to sell Dormigen to the U.S. only for a ridiculous sum. Subsequent discussions had gone nowhere productive; State Department diplomats reckoned that India was not a likely source of Dormigen as long as: (1) the Indian Prime Minister was concerned primarily about his party’s electoral prospects; and (2) he believed that any assistance to the U.S. would be perceived by Indian voters as bad for India.

  Once the Outbreak became public, however, American diplomats on the ground in New Delhi noticed a subtle undercurrent in Indian public opinion that presented an opportunity. It began with a newspaper column by a prominent journalist. If China is exploiting America’s desperate situation, the columnist asked, does this not represent an opportunity for India to transform its relationship with the United States? India and China, the world’s two most populous countries, had been eyeing each other warily for decades. They were each trying to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, albeit with radically different approaches to governance and development. They had gone to war once, just a month-long conflict in 1962, but the border dispute that had precipitated the shooting remained unresolved. Three years before that, India had welcomed the Dalai Lama when he fled from Tibet; he has resided in northern India ever since—a constant source of irritation for Beijing. Over time, the India-China rivalry had morphed into an ideological battle: Democracy or autocracy? And, like two needy siblings competing for parental affection, each jockeyed on the world stage to gain a strategic advantage via its relationship with the United States. There was a strain of thinking in New Delhi—perhaps oversimplified but not necessarily incorrect—that China’s loss must be India’s gain. While China was being demonized in Washington for clumsily exploiting the crisis, would this not be a natural opportunity for India, the world’s largest democracy, to deepen its ties with the U.S., the world’s most powerful democracy?