Scientist came out of retirement to stop COVID
Lost his own battle against the virus
Thomas Hodge III logged on from his hospital bed for what would be his last weekly Zoom meeting with some 200 scientific collaborators. Gaunt and unshaven, he conferred with the group on how to defeat this country's latest surge of COVID-19 — the virus Hodge's body was battling a second time.
The prominent immunologist died two days later of complications from the disease. One state away, mere hours later, a beloved granddaughter succumbed to kidney cancer.
He was 69. She was 6.
“Dad hadn't been well, but he didn't want anyone focusing on him,” said Leslie Turner, one of Hodge's daughters and one of Izabella Bondell's aunts. “His spirit broke when he couldn't fix Izzy.”
Hodge, former director of immunogenetics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spent decades fighting diseases such as AIDS and Ebola. He opted out of retirement in early 2020 to focus on the latest global public health threat and co-founded the CrisiScience Collaborative, a who's who of research and medicine that has since met virtually almost every week to share insights and developments on the pandemic.
He was an ardent proponent of the mass vaccination effort in the U.S., yet he cautioned against relying too heavily on the vaccines. He also warned against abandoning precautions such as masking and social distancing.
“He wanted people to wake up, to observe how serious this pandemic is,” recounted his CrisiScience co-founder, Steve Winston, former chief scientist of the Idaho National Laboratory.
At his home on St. Simons Island, Ga., Hodge beat the virus last year. He hoped that bout would stave off a future infection, especially because a medical condition meant he could not get vaccinated.
Where he was again exposed to the virus is something his family will never know for certain. Despite his vulnerability, he was part of the vigil at Izzy's hospital bedside in Charleston, S.C., as her conditioned deteriorated. The little girl, who loved unicorns and butterflies, had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer 13 months earlier.
“Like many men of medicine and academia,” Hodge's obituary noted, “he confronted sobering truths about the limitations of the human body.”