Legacy

President's Trump briefing notes, March 19; "Corona Virus" changed to "Chinese Virus", Jabin Botsford, Washington Post

I am having a nightmare: I am taking care of a large, old house, and there is a water leak. The house is slightly reminiscent of a house my parents owned years ago, but it's as big as a hangar. Water is pouring down throughout the ceiling of the bathroom, and I really have to go. There are two maintenance workers helping me. They keep joking and chatting away, but they are trying to find the source of the leak while keeping the water inside tiled floor with towels. I run upstairs to the bathroom above the one being flooded, the toilet there is running; it's constantly flushing. The room is shockingly bright. As I approach the toilet, I am yelling down to the workers about what I've found. I really have to go. I move to open the tank, and suddenly, there are small, round, hairy, grey bugs all over my hands. I try to squash them, but they spring right back to life. They aren't doing anything, just crawling around my hands. I look down, and there is a white mouse on its back, a dead lab mouse covered with the same bugs. I wake.

It's dark and dry. I really have to go. I collect myself and realize I have a sore throat, too.

Of course, images of the coronavirus floating in my brain have flooded my dreams. I'm sure they have for many people. It's about five in the morning, and there's no way I'm getting back to sleep. After finishing in the bathroom, and thoroughly washing my hands, I go to the kitchen to gargle with salt water. I move to the living room, grab the iPad, and find this video at the top of my 'Recommended' list – How Inadequate Funding Slowed Coronavirus Vaccine Research:

It's an excerpt from a House hearing of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. It's the testimony of this medical researcher from Baylor University, Dr. Peter Hotez. He describes how we had a vaccine for coronavirus in the works, and might have been better prepared for this pandemic if there had been funding for clinical trials:

The bottom line is had we had those investments early on to carry this through to clinical trials years ago. We could've had a vaccine ready to go. So we've got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be to develop vaccines that are not going to make money.

My mind explodes. And then my heart breaks. I think of doctors and researchers involved in these kinds of communicable diseases – they know. They know that these drugs and vaccines can be developed, but they aren't. That the world could be in a much different place if our heath economy is geared to make medicine and not money. I consider how their hearts must all be breaking, too.

The full hearing video is below for context – Coronaviruses: Understanding the Spread of Infectious Diseases and Mobilizing Innovative Solutions:

Dr. Hotez is, of course, right – it's the ecosystem. 'Eco', in this case, is short for both ecologic and well as economic. The hearing drives home the idea that we can make room in our system for innovation and mobilization, we just don't. This is a pandemic-sized teachable moment. What will we take from it and how will it impact our health system so future generations have better tools?

I think back to my father, a medical researcher focused on motor-neuron diseases like ALS. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease on his sixtieth birthday. As he struggled and lost more and more abilities, he rushed to finish a series of projects that he intended to leave as a legacy. One major project was the translation of a book, from German, of a text by a Japanese doctor, on The Foundation of the Public Health System in Formosa (Taiwan). Its author, Dr. Tomoe Takaki, described how the Japanese intended to create a 'model system' on Formosa as a showcase for the world. Dr. Takaki passed this to a protege, Dr. To So-mei, who passed it to his protege, my father.

Amazingly, that system in Taiwan is now hard at work containing and mitigating the spread of SARS-CoV-2 on Taiwan with startling effect. The reason the video of Dr. Hotez popped into my 'Recommended' list is that I watched this video yesterday – Taiwan's COVID-19 Response Should Be A Model For The World:

We finished the translation of the book on June 18, 2016; that's the date on the PDF file. It was his eighty-sixth birthday. He passed away two years later.

Back in the day, while I was still in high school, I remember helping my father in his lab at West Virginia University. We had white rabbits that we would expose and euthanize. We had to remove the leg muscle, treat the sample, freeze it, slice it, and prep it for the scanning electron microscope. My father landed in West Virginia after he protested Martial Law and helped establish the Taiwan independence movement. He became stateless when he was blacklisted by the Kuomintang. But he was allowed to stay in the US after successfully lobbying Congressman Harley Staggers, who said he was "an important health scientist indispensable to West Virginia". He accepted a position at WVU and established a research lab there.

I think of those memories every time I hear another story with President Trump's race-baiting, calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'Chinese virus'. I wonder what researchers like Dr. David Ho, another Taiwanese-American, and his team at Columbia University think. They are leading the effort to create and test a vaccine to fight this pandemic. Click on this Bloomberg article and you'll see their names: Huang, Iketani, Chavez, Hong.

After a hot cup of coffee and some yogurt and granola for breakfast, my throat is feeling better. I cannot account for the soreness; maybe it's allergies. I realize, while writing, that I feel fine now.

Today, the world is nearing three hundred thousand cases, and twelve thousand deaths. There are over twenty thousand cases of COVID-19 in the US and nearly three hundred deaths. In Portugal there are over one thousand cases and six deaths. On Taiwan, there are over one hundred and fifty cases and two deaths.

cases: 278,472 global • 20,227 USA • 1,020 Portugal • 153 Taiwan

deaths: 11,554 global • 279 USA • 6 Portugal • 2 Taiwan

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Read the story of how the Ebola vaccine was produced.
Read an opinion piece on the sinophobia surrounding COVID-19.