Thankfully, the health secretary is a woman so she’ll be able to provide consistency throughout this crisis, but based on her questions, it quickly becomes clear that she has no concept of how long it will take to develop a working vaccine. I would be surprised if she has a grasp of eighth-grade biology. She was probably a lawyer or something before going into politics.
“Wait, so you’re telling me, hang on,” Mary interrupts the man making the speech about immunity—a professor of epigenetics at Imperial College London—and stands up. It looks like she’s going to walk out of the meeting, she’s so upset. The room collectively holds its breath. “You’re telling me that you, the people with the answers, the greatest minds in this country and beyond, have nothing. That I have to go back to the House of Commons and just say ‘Oh well, boys will keep dying, hug your sons, it might not be long!’”
I stand up too because it feels weird that she’s the only person standing around the table and everyone has gone silent. I suppose, even in the midst of the worst public health emergency the country has seen since the bubonic plague, she’s still their boss. I explain that the virus is incredibly powerful and mutates with a regularity that makes it far more like the HIV virus than the flu. There are three different ways that a vaccine against a virus can be created. Firstly, you can change the genes of the virus so that it replicates poorly. Secondly, you can destroy the genes of the virus so that it doesn’t replicate at all. Thirdly, you can use a part of the virus but not all of it, which means that it can’t replicate.
This virus replicates so quickly that the first two options are basically out of the question. That leaves the third option but that takes time. You have to identify the blueprint of the virus, all while it’s still mutating.
“Well, what about the men who are immune?” she asks. I try to ignore the break in her voice. “Surely they hold the solution. He’s just said he thinks around one in ten men are immune. There’s lots of men you can surely . . .” She trails off because she doesn’t understand the science and she’s essentially begging me to tell her that everything is going to be okay.
“They could be part of the solution,” I reply, trying to be as diplomatic as I can. “But there’s a lot of work still to be done. It’s no one’s fault. It’s the virus.” And that’s the end of her questions. She just sits through the rest of the presentations as if she’s a statue.
The meeting comes to an end with a whimper. Mary’s whisked away. Dr. Kitchen comes up to me, muttering apologies before stopping several feet away from me: social distancing 101.
“I am so, so, so sorry. She’d been talking for about fifteen minutes at the start of the meeting about how important international cooperation is and she interpreted my saying you would be here as more than it is.” He smiles a crinkly, tired smile. Despite myself, and still smarting from my panic earlier, I can’t help but like him. He has a kind face.
“Forgive me?”
“Forgiven, but only if you take me to lunch. Dr. Kitchen, I’m starving, and I have a lot of questions.”
“Done, and please, call me George.”
We leave the oppressive stillness of Whitehall and grab a table outside a pizza restaurant despite the freezing December weather. No man should be in a public enclosed space right now. George cleans the table with a wipe before sitting. I push my chair so we’re two meters apart. “I’m not going to eat if that’s all right by you,” George says as I head inside to collect my pizza.
A few minutes later I’m back. “So, how bad is it?” I ask.
“The risk of infection is high and this virus has an extraordinary staying power. It can stay alive on a surface for up to thirty-eight hours.”
I swallow a lump of pizza and try not to gawp at him. “Thirty-eight hours?”
“Indeed.”