The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  The story was packaged beautifully for global attention: the mad scientist perpetrator; the privileged CEO victim, waiting anxiously for the antidote; the bizarre ice-cream cone request. The situation grew weirder still when authorities realized that strawberries were not yet in season and none of the ice-cream shops in the neighborhood had strawberry ice cream. When informed of this snafu, the scientist apologized for being difficult and said that chocolate almond would be fine. CNN’s Jake Tapper would later say this was the single most bizarre news development he had ever reported on air. Camera crews followed the scientist and police as they strolled several blocks to a small ice-cream shop, where a terribly nervous young girl with bad skin stood behind the counter. (All of the customers had been cleared out.) The police commissioner asked her for a scoop of chocolate almond ice cream.

  “Might I have two scoops?” the scientist interjected.

  “Of course,” the police commissioner replied. (Even this decision would be debated later, with one semi-hinged Fox pundit declaring that it validated his assertion that giving in to the ice-cream request would lead to escalating demands.) The poor young ice-cream clerk stood there paralyzed. The police commissioner said more emphatically, “Two scoops of chocolate almond, please.”

  The young girl stammered, “In a cone or a cup?”

  “A cone, please,” the scientist answered politely. As she scooped, her arm trembling visibly and with millions of people watching live around the globe, the scientist reached into his pocket and put a one-euro coin in the tip jar. By this time, his family had contacted authorities to inform them what they were already beginning to suspect, namely that the man was unbalanced but harmless. The syringe had been rushed off to a laboratory for analysis, and just as the mad scientist was finishing the last of his sugar cone, a laboratory official called police to tell them it contained nothing more than saline. The CEO’s nausea (he had been vomiting repeatedly) was entirely psychosomatic, which one can understand given the circumstances.

  The mad scientist was transfixing. The video clip of him ordering ice cream was viewed over twenty million times. The phrase “Might I have two scoops?” entered the lexicon; young people used it in an ironic way in all kinds of circumstances. There was even a temporary surge in the popularity of chocolate almond ice cream. More serious people recognized the cleverness of the scientist’s fake scheme: infecting a victim (or millions of victims) and then using the antidote as leverage. The press clamored for evidence that the Capellaviridae was not a similar terrorist plot, leaving the Communications Director with the impossible task of proving a negative. “We have no evidence whatsoever that any human actors are involved in any criminal actions related to Capellaviridae,” he declared at an impromptu press briefing at the rear of Air Force One. “None. No ransom request, no biological evidence—nothing.”

  “But it’s possible?” a Fox reporter asked.

  The Communications Director, who had been sleeping even less than the President, snarled back, “Look, it’s possible this virus came to earth on a secret spaceship from Mars. I can’t prove it didn’t.”

  Upon reading this exchange, a new and very young Ukrainian correspondent failed to recognize the Communication Director’s use of satire to make his point and reported earnestly back to her national news wire that the White House now believed it was possible that aliens may have introduced Capellaviridae to our planet. Several Ukrainian radio stations reported the story before the State Department set them straight. Meanwhile, the Onion—still the best source for real fake news—found dark humor in the Outbreak. The headline of the most recent issue proclaimed, “God Says Capellaviridae Is Punishment for Bears Not Winning Super Bowl.” The Bears had lost to the Broncos in a Super Bowl blowout a few months earlier; the Bears coach was a very religious man who wore that religion on both sleeves. Before the game, not only did he lead his team in prayer on the sidelines, but he told reporters, “I am certain that the Man Upstairs will lead us to victory.” In fact, God allowed the Bears defense to give up over five hundred passing yards and forty-one points. The Onion had been mining this humor trove for some time, beginning with the first headline after the game: “Man Upstairs Apologizes to Bears Fans for Crappy Pass Rush.”

  Ellen was understandably eager to talk about what was happening. She was curious about the work I had been doing, and, like everybody else, she wanted to know how worried she should be about Capellaviridae. “I get it now,” she said, which I took to be an all-purpose apology for our squabbles in recent days, most of which had to do with my absences and general lack of attention. I wanted to sleep more than anything else, but I realized I owed Ellen at least a cursory discussion of the situation. “You met the President?” she asked.

  “Just about every day,” I said.

  “What’s he like?” she asked. I did my best to describe the President and the other senior officials with whom I had been interacting. Ellen had relatively little curiosity about my work but great interest in the people I had been doing it with. If I had been less exhausted I might have been more charitable, but I remember wondering if Ellen was going to have me describe their outfits, including the designers.

  At about this time, I got a short text from Jenna: “Did you see the ice cream cone thing?”

  “Sorry,” I said to Ellen. “I have to reply to this.” I felt awful in that moment, knowing I had exploited the situation to flirt with someone I had known for less than twelve hours. At the same time, I realized—and Jenna would later tell me that she had realized—that those three hours beginning on the bench were more than just three hours on a bench. Jenna was the person I wanted to be speaking to at that moment. I texted back: “Amusing but also a reminder that the guy with antivenom gets the ice-cream cone!” In hindsight, this was not as clever as I thought it was. (I have no future career with the Onion.) I went to bed thinking about Jenna and knowing that I should have been thinking about Ellen. But that is not the larger point here. I also went to bed with the German mad scientist on my mind. I remember thinking, The guy with the antivenom gets the ice-cream cone! was the kind of chippy thing Professor Huke would say.

  In fact, it was exactly the kind of thing that Huke would say. Because it finally got me thinking like a virus (after eleven more hours of sleep).

  64.

  THE PRESIDENT AWOKE SHORTLY BEFORE AIR FORCE ONE touched down in Canberra. The exuberance of his exciting takeoff to the west had dissipated; the senior staff realized there was no plan once they arrived in Australia. As expected, the Chinese had made a new offer via the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but they were still demanding that the U.S. walk away from the South China Sea Agreement, as well as an array of other unacceptable concessions. The press—both on board Air Force One and back home—had moved beyond the U.S.-China showdown and were asking the right questions: When would the Dormigen supply be exhausted? Who would be given priority as the supply ran out? And what would be the public health implications? The President asked for basically the same information upon landing. The Chief of Staff gave him a short briefing. “The Dormigen supplies have been secured,” she said, consulting the notes on her yellow legal pad. “We have tightened the prescription criteria so that no one is getting Dormigen who does not absolutely need it. That seems to be working okay.”

  “Cecelia Dodds?” he asked.

  “She’s still in intensive care. It’s a nasty infection. She’s tough and they’re doing what they can.”

  “Tell me if she gets worse.”

  “I will.”

  “What about this high school principal in Arkansas?” the President asked, waving a copy of his daily press clips (a compilation of news stories from around the world that the White House Press Office felt would be of interest to the President). The Washington Post–USA Today had run a front-page story about a fifty-three-year-old man who arrived at a hospital with failing kidneys. He was correctly diagnosed with a raging kidney infection. He also had a serious heart condition that got less attention.
Per the new guidelines, he was started on a traditional antibiotic rather than Dormigen. The infection responded to the antibiotic, as doctors had hoped, but his failing kidneys put unexpected strain on his heart and he died of a heart attack. The man, Paul Gannett, was a prominent member of the local community and his death had been a shock. Hence the national news story.

  “He should have gotten Dormigen. It’s going to happen,” the Chief of Staff said. “Even that may not have saved him.” The President nodded in acknowledgment and she continued. “At the current run rate, the Dormigen supply will be exhausted in about five days.”

  “How many deaths?” the President asked.

  “The low end of the projection is now forty-five thousand.”

  “What’s the top end?”

  “A hundred and fifty.”

  “Jesus.”

  The Communications Director had been sitting in on the meeting. He interjected, “The NIH has been working up some new numbers. There is a way to dress up the figures—”

  “They’re dead. How do you dress that up?” the President snapped.

  The Communications Director, impervious to the President’s tone, continued. “Most of the projected deaths are people who are already old or ill.”

  “So they don’t count?”

  “Kind of. I was talking to one of the senior guys at NIH. He explained something to me that’s kind of intuitive, if you think about it. Most of these people were going to die anyway, right?”

  “Get to the point,” the President said wearily.

  “If we measure incremental deaths over a longer period of time, say a year or two, the number is going to be a lot lower.” The President frowned, took a bite of toast, and said nothing. The Communications Director continued, “The number of deaths will spike when we run out of Dormigen, but then the death rate will be below average for the next three to six months. That means over the next year, the number of incremental deaths will be much, much lower—close to zero.”

  “People aren’t really being killed by the epidemic, they’re just dying early,” the President said sarcastically. “Why don’t you call Cecelia Dodds’s grandchildren and explain that to them? ‘She won’t be at your wedding because she died early.’ ”

  “This is straight from the NIH,” the Communications Director said defensively.

  The Chief of Staff said, “People are going to go to the hospital, they’re going to be denied Dormigen, and they’re going to die. It doesn’t matter how we tally the deaths, that reality is not going away.”

  The President added, “Maybe Hallmark can do a new card: ‘Sorry for your loss, but she was going to die in the next twelve to eighteen months anyway.’ I can send one to the Dodds family.”

  “I’m just trying to get through today,” the Communications Director said, displaying some impatience of his own.

  The cable news stations had developed fancy graphics and names for the crisis: the Dormigen Countdown; the Dormigen Debacle; and so on. The new NIH projections had not leaked, but some of the old ones had. The media had a decent idea of when the Dormigen supplies would run out, as well as a crude projection for the virulence of Capellaviridae. Overall, their estimates were not wildly wrong, no doubt because some of the concerned scientists on our team were feeding information to the press. The President also suspected the Speaker had been strategically leaking information to create support for the China option before that deal blew up and made her collateral damage. In any event, the public would soon have a more refined sense of the situation. Congress had (rightfully) demanded a full briefing on the situation. With the President in Australia, the Acting HHS Commissioner was tapped to do the congressional briefing. That briefing would be private, but anything said in there would leak immediately. The Communications Director recognized the White House needed to get out in front of the leaks to put its own spin on the situation. (Hence his reference to just getting through the day.) The President would do a national television address immediately after the “closed” congressional briefing.

  The President’s senior advisers were feeling the same sense of doom that had descended on me the day before. At previous junctures in the crisis, we could imagine developments that would bail us out: Dormigen from allies; China; a scientific breakthrough on the virus. Each of those options was now gone, or dwindling away. The bravado of the takeoff to Australia had bought some political breathing space, but it had done nothing to improve Cecelia Dodds’s condition. The hourly update from that Seattle hospital now became a barometer of the nation’s future. Meanwhile, the press had begun to ask what the President could accomplish in Australia. And whatever goodwill the President had amassed by standing up to China would dissipate immediately as Americans began dying in serious numbers. The Chief of Staff would later describe the mood as “an oppressive anxiety as we internalized the reality of what was likely to happen.”

  “I need to draft remarks for the congressional briefing,” the Communications Director said. He looked around the room for some general guidance to get him started. Curiously, the Strategist had gone missing. The President’s more substantive advisers typically considered the Strategist an irritant, not just because of his irreverent demeanor, but also because he was a constant reminder of the messiness and tawdriness of politics. He was the one who explained impatiently why high-minded policies would have “absolutely no fucking support” in most of the Midwest, or how information could be cleverly spun to obscure, confuse, or persuade. He had famously called the Secretary of Energy a “total moron” for using the word “tax” to describe the administration’s carbon tax proposal. One might assume that the word “tax” was an accurate and efficient way to describe a policy that was, in fact, a tax on carbon emissions. “It’s a pollution fee,” the Strategist yelled during a staff meeting. “Tell the jackasses at the EPA to stop calling it a tax.”

  “Which part of it is not a tax?” a young economist from the Council of Economic Advisers had made the mistake of asking. The Strategist had literally thrown a bundle of papers across the conference table at him.

  “Read that, you smug prick!” the Strategist screamed. Behavior aside, the public opinion data he had thrown across the table confirmed his point. Only 23 percent of the American public supported a carbon tax. But when the exact same policy was described as a “fee on polluters,” support climbed to 68 percent. “If you want to sit alone in your office doing mental masturbation, go back to Harvard,” the Strategist told the young economist (who was from Stanford). “If you want to improve American energy policy, don’t use the word ‘tax.’ Not fucking ever.”

  The more cerebral members of the President’s team bristled at the manipulation, clinging to the politically naïve notion that a policy was just a policy, regardless of the words one used to describe it. They would appear on the Sunday morning talk shows, awkwardly trying to explain how the President’s proposed tax on carbon was not a tax. The host would probe relentlessly: “If the government imposes a charge on the emission of carbon, how is that not a carbon tax?”

  The Secretary of Energy or the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers or the head of the EPA would parry uncomfortably: “What we are proposing is a fee on polluters.”

  “What’s the difference between a tax and a fee?”

  “A fee is a charge levied on some activity, such as registering a car. The most elegant part of the President’s proposal is that the biggest polluters will pay the largest fees.”

  “How is that any different than the income tax, where those with the highest incomes pay the most in taxes?”

  “Because this is a fee, not a tax.”

  And so it would continue. The cerebral advisers would apologize to their erstwhile academic colleagues for such silliness. The fact that the Strategist was generally right on these matters was no salve for wounded academic dignity. Congress eventually passed a modified version of the “carbon emissions fee,” with many members declaring to their constituents that they were supporting
it because it was not a tax.

  Now, with the Communications Director trying to put a positive spin on a minimum of forty-five thousand deaths, the senior advisers were looking for some guidance from the Strategist. “He needed some rest,” the President said, explaining the absence unconvincingly.

  “We all need some sleep,” the Communications Director said. “Can we at least test the language?”

  The Chief of Staff, sitting nearby but not following the conversation, said to no one in particular, “It’s my daughter’s birthday.”

  The President ignored her. “Just draft a straightforward statement,” he instructed the Communications Director.

  “Excuse me,” the Chief of Staff said as she got up and walked out of the cabin.

  The Communications Director looked around the room. “We’re talking about a minimum of forty-five thousand premature deaths. What am I supposed to say?”

  “We need to prepare the country for the worst,” the President replied. He outlined a rough plan. The Acting HHS Secretary would brief Congress on the basic details: the state of our Dormigen supplies; the nature of Capellaviridae; the steps that had been taken to minimize the adverse effects of the Outbreak. Those details would be released to the public immediately following the briefing and the President would address the nation after that. “This is the reality of the situation,” the President stated. “We shouldn’t try to sugarcoat it.”