Scientists are shouting into the void
He was the boy from Balclutha who went to a one-room schoolhouse and played hooker in the first XV. And now Professor Robert G. Webster, 85, lives in Memphis, Tennessee, as one of the world’s greatest and most celebrated virologists — and is watching his life’s work come to pass in the form of Covid-19.
Webster established that fatal influenzas, including the coronavirus, are spread from wild animals to humans. His team identified the avian strain of H5N1, or bird flu. In 2018, Otago University Press published his actually quite exciting memoir of his scientific breakthroughs. In the final chapter of The Flu Hunter, he wrote, “The question uppermost in my mind . . . is whether another pandemic with a deadly and disruptive impact on society is possible. The answer is yes: It is not only possible, it is just a matter of time.”
I called him at his home in Memphis, and he said, “This is that time. Indeed it is.” Webster didn’t claim any measure of prescience. He was simply stating that this was bound to happen.
“Politicians have been ignoring science, particularly in the United States. And so Mother Nature has been sending a message, as it were. And that message is, ‘Do you have to have the angel of death coming to really take notice?’ And I think you do. At the moment, it is drawing the world’s attention to the possibility that many people are going to die.”
Webster knows what he’s talking about. He works in infectious diseases at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. He has studied the Spanish influenza of 1918, which killed at the least estimate 24 million people, and his book The Flu Hunter also deals with subsequent pandemics in 1957 (1.5 million dead) and 1962 (1 million). I prodded Webster to estimate the number of lives that Covid-19 would end. He said, “Hopefully it’s going to be less than a million.”
In The Flu Hunter, he speculated about exactly this kind of pandemic going loose in the world, and wrote,
Webster was more interested in questions of virology. Such as: “Is the virus in Italy a subvariant of the original that is particularly virulent? Mutations are appearing every day but we don’t know the significance of them.” And: “The big question every virologist in the world is asking is, will there be a second wave? Korea, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan — they’ve done all the social distancing, and they’ve been successful at reducing the cases. But it could be that the virus will come back in again, and away it goes. We don’t know.”
Webster has added his name to a letter about to be sent to the New York
Times, signed by eminent scientists around the world, urging the US to hasten trials on a vaccine.
He said, “They say it’s going to take a year or more to get a vaccine. Or a year and a half. We’ve got to cut some of the red tape through safety testing and get it out there. Hopefully we can get it out in less than a year. Maybe 10 months. Six months would be a dream.”
He was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about efforts to combat the virus. But he was angry — livid, in fact — that nothing had been done about it in the years before Covid-19 entered the world.
He said, “It’s really very disturbing that the world has not taken notice of what scientists have been saying through the World Health Organisation for years and years and years. We said, ‘It’s time to be prepared’. But the politicians of the world have not listened to us. And now we are paying the price.”
I asked, “How could we have prepared for a virus that didn’t exist?”
He shouted, “Do we have enough ventilators? Do we have enough protective clothing? Do we have enough masks? Bloody hell. We don’t have these things.
“There should have been stockpiles of these straightforward things. Like you stockpile ammunition for a war. People talk about this being a war. Well, where’s the ammunition to fight this bloody war? We have to rush around now and get it made. Come on!”