The sequel no one asked for
David Quammen predicted the pandemic. His new book tracks the race against COVID-19.
David Quammen was right.
That’ll be chiseled someday into his gravestone.
For much of 2020, the great contemporary science writer — whose career started in Chicago more than 50 years ago, in a quite different space — watched as his 2012 bestseller, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” went from science-driven prophesy to science reality. With eerily exacting details, he nailed how the pandemic would play out.
“Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus,” his latest, is the inevitable sequel no one asked for, so to speak. It’s an account of the scientists trying to get ahead of SARS-CoV-2, as well as the variants and innovations that came out of that race. As an early draft of ugly, ongoing history, it’s remarkably zeroed in on the science; though unremarkably, it’s inviting and accessible. Indeed, it’s up for the National Book Award.
Quammen, raised in Cincinnati, has been one of our finest explainers of the natural world for decades, perfecting what writers like E.O. Wilson and Lewis Thomas started. Urban coyotes and smog, vegetarian piranha, mass extinction, cloning, molecular biology, the history of nutmeg, the upside of mosquitoes — Quammen has brought a rare patience and consistent informality to science writing.
At 74, he also just got over a COVID bout. We spoke on the phone from his longtime home in Montana. The following is a shorter version of a longer conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Q: Knowing how often you’ve heard that you called the pandemic exactly as it has played out so far, how actually different has it been from what you expected?
A: I make a point of disclaiming prescience. I credit that to the scientists I listened to back in 2009, 2010, 2011, when I was researching “Spillover.” They said, yeah, a pandemic is coming. Yeah, it’s going to be viral. Yeah, it’s going to be an RNA virus. Yeah, it could be an influenza or a coronavirus, coming out of a wild animal, probably a bat — possibly at a wet market in China.
We can talk about the level of uncertainty that remains with that last detail, but the level, in my view, is very low. How different has it been? Not very damn different. What surprised me most was how unprepared we were, globally and nationally. I expected real-time diagnostic testing at airport checkpoints. Scientists, ones I think highly of, were working on that. There would be a technology so they screen people for a new virus in the time it takes you to get your shoes out of a TSA bin. Didn’t happen. We had the CDC shipping test kits that were junk — as Sara Cody, the public health person in Santa Clara County (California) told me for “Breathless.”
We were disorganized and unprepared, but not at a scientific level, not at the level of public health officers, but within agencies and our national leadership.
Q: When did you first hear about the virus?
A: I have been a subscriber for 15 years to this ProMED internet service on infectious disease.
All 8,000 of us get their emails, five or 10 a day. A lumpy skin disease among water buffaloes. A child tested positive for avian flu in Hanoi. You get so many emails, all the time, you can’t focus. So, delete delete delete.
After this virus got going a bit, I heard from an editor at The New York Times Op-Ed (asking me) to write about it. I wrote we needed to take it seriously. But I wondered when I started to take it seriously. I looked at my ProMED traffic. There was an email on Jan. 13, 2020, that I had not deleted. It mentioned coronavirus, atypical pneumonia, Wuhan, China. That’s when I began to pay attention.
Q: Why, when you eventually wrote a book on the virus, did you focus on science alone?
A: Important tactical terms of support?
A: No, and I think that’s more interesting. Matt Wong in Texas (who designed a powerful tool to locate and connect genomic data profiles, linking samples) didn’t have a master’s degree. He was a hired gun. When I spoke to him he was attending a pool tournament in Las Vegas! That’s more interesting to me than if every person involved was a senior professor of molecular evolutionary biology with a $4 million grant from the NIH.
It’s hard to get funding for some of the things absolutely necessary in spotting the next virus at a very early stage, before it’s sickened 200 people. Say it’s an infection in one person working at a poultry operation in Iowa. How can we spot that guy? It’s hard to get funding to spot him. The other problem is funding the fieldwork to discover the reservoir host of a new virus after the horse is out of the barn. What happened to the reservoir host of Ebola? (Scientists) tell me once an outbreak is controlled, the money goes away.
Q: In fact, throughout “Breathless” is the question of the origin of the pandemic itself. But why does it matter ultimately if we know exactly how this all started?
A: That is a good question, and there are a couple of answers. Think of this as natural origins versus nefarious origins — meaning an engineered virus, maybe accidentally released. There’s a 98% chance the origin is natural, but also a 2% chance it’s nefarious — so why is that important? Because nefarious origins imply we need less science. Natural implies we need more science. We can’t have less science. If you subscribe to the theory of the nefarious origin, then you place it all on them. This whole mess is about them, because they caused it. If the origin is natural, well, then we have to acknowledge that this is on us. Maybe none of us individually are eating bats. But the disruption of tropical forests and ecosystems that bring about spillovers, that is on us.