LANCE REDDICK: Deadly diseases that strike without warning
and spread across the planet.
BRYAN WALSH: The Black Death killed millions upon millions of people.
DR. RAJ DASGUPTA: Almost like a zombie death.
REDDICK: Lethal biological weapons of mass destruction.
MARK KORTEPETER: Anthrax, botulism, tularemia,
I call them "the chess pieces of doom."
REDDICK: And mysterious viruses
that may rival the worst plagues in history.
Hopefully, we'll conquer whatever happens together.
Throughout human history,
deadly pandemics have arisen, devastating local populations
before spreading across the entire world,
crippling economies, destroying societies
and leaving mass death in their wake.
Are these global pandemics simply acts of God,
caused by natural forces beyond our control?
Or does mankind bear much of the blame,
as well as hold the key to the ultimate cure?
Perhaps the truth can be found
in America's Book of Secrets.
♪ ♪
March 11, 2020.
The World Health Organization announces that
the outbreak of COVID‐19,
also known as the novel coronavirus,
has become a global pandemic.
As the number of cases and deaths caused by
the lethal virus surge higher and higher,
day after day, countries around the world
struggle to provide care
for the unprecedented wave of patients that need treatment.
The COVID‐19 pandemic is, honestly,
the biggest public health emergency of our lifetimes.
And it has been sobering to see how quickly a disease like that
can spread around the world.
DASGUPTA: I go to work and I see a line
outside of the emergency department.
When there's not enough ICU nurses, respiratory therapists,
even medications to help the patients who are suffering
from novel coronavirus.
KORTEPETER: The hospitals become overwhelmed,
and so the patients who need the care for COVID
may not get the best care.
And in addition, all the other patients who need care
may not be cared for appropriately.
DASGUPTA: When a pandemic starts,
so many people are going to be infected.
And unfortunately, many people will suffer and die.
So, being on the front lines,
I realized what a pandemic can do
to so many people, my colleagues and myself.
REDDICK: By October of 2020,
more than one million people had died from COVID‐19
worldwide, making it the worst pandemic
in more than a century.
The devastation caused by this disease is a sobering reminder
of the dire threat posed by viruses.
(coughing)
KIRSTEN FISHER: A virus is an intracellular parasite
that enters a host and basically hijacks
the host cell's machinery
to create more viral proteins and more viral particles,
and it spreads itself that way.
DASGUPTA: They take over our cells.
They use our own bodies to reproduce.
And then they'll cause destruction
in many of the organs in our body.
KORTEPETER: With COVID‐19, we were dealing with something
completely new, and so I think there's a lot
of lessons learned we have here.
I think we learned how important it is
to have rapid diagnostics.
I wrote an article not too long ago about
the military battlefield lessons.
We talk about the war against COVID.
You need to have intelligence preparation the battlefield.
You need to know what's the battle space.
The entire U. S. is a battle space.
You need to deny the enemy conceal and cover.
How do you do that?
You do that with diagnostics.
REDDICK: As the COVID‐19 virus raged across the globe,
and nations joined in an unprecedented effort
to contain it,
the answer to one daunting question
proved both mysterious and elusive:
just exactly where did this virus come from?
The best science that we have says that
the virus that causes COVID‐19 probably started in animals
somewhere in China.
Might have been a bat, might have been
some other type of animal.
KORTEPETER: It's very likely, in my opinion,
that this virus came probably from a bat,
because we know there are multiple coronaviruses
that circulate in bats.
And then from there, it went to humans,
and person to person spread and then amplified.
I think, actually, what would help to solve
this mystery is really to have
an international, unbiased team that actually
goes to try to trace back the origin of the virus
back to that first patient zero.
And that's the best way to solve this mystery.
But we'll have to see whether that'll ever happen.
Most human diseases that we're worried about
actually start in animals.
Some deadly viruses that infect humans,
that have animal origins, are Ebola, smallpox,
influenza, the virus that causes COVID‐19,
rabies, Nipah virus, which causes encephalitis
in some parts of the world.
And, honestly, the list goes on and on.
REDDICK: Despite the opinions of some that COVID‐19 spread
from animals to humans,
numerous experts, including Robert Redfield, the former head
of the CDC, have begun to speculate that it may have
escaped from an experimental lab in Wuhan, China.
If that is the case, then just how could
such a disastrous event occur?
There are four ways a pathogen could escape,
quote‐unquote, escape a lab.
The first would be through some type of aerosol release
through one of the vents
into the atmosphere.
The second is if an animal were infected,
and then somehow got out of the lab.
A third way would be if someone were intentionally
to try to steal something and take it out of the lab.
And then the fourth is that someone who's working
in the laboratory gets inadvertently infected,
and then they go out into the community
not realizing they're potentially contagious.
They get ill, they can spread it.
REDDICK: President Donald J. Trump tests positive for COVID‐19,
joining a growing list of world leaders
infected by the potentially deadly virus.
Although President Trump recovers within ten days,
his exposure demonstrates the grave risk
that diseases pose to heads of state.
And, in fact, national security experts are increasingly
concerned about the threat of pandemics
being used as weapons.
A bioweapon is an infectious disease agent,
like a bacteria or a virus, that somebody chooses to use
for what I call nefarious purposes.
So it's something that they might grow
and then try to expose people to,
either to cause fear and panic, or to get people sick.
There are certain properties that some pathogens have
that lend themselves more favorably
to serving as a weapon.
So, something that's available,
something that could be grown up
in large quantities,
something stable in the environment,
such that it can be released over a large population,
whether that's a battlefield
or a city environment.
The CDC calls them the category A threat agents.
Things like anthrax, botulism, plague,
tularemia, smallpox
and viral hemorrhagic fevers.
I call them "the chess pieces of doom."
The case fatality rates for these
different category A agents
range from tularemia, with about 30% death rate,
up to something like Ebola, which is 90% fatal
without countermeasures.
McQUISTON: Smallpox is a really interesting bioweapon
because smallpox has been eradicated.
It doesn't occur naturally anymore.
But we also have a population of people who really
have never been vaccinated against it,
and that makes us really vulnerable.
So smallpox is probably my number‐one worry,
and then anthrax is my number two.
Because there has been a previous bioterrorism event
in the U. S. involving anthrax.
In 2001, there was a bioterrorism attack
on U. S. soil.
The anthrax was spread in letters
that were sent through the U. S. Post Office,
and they got a lot of people sick.
REDDICK: But just how likely is the prospect
of a devastating virus being used as a bio‐weapon?
There are those who claim that not only is it possible,
but that it already happened centuries ago
during the deadliest pandemic
in recorded history.
REDDICK: Health officials report that 11 victims have died
from the bubonic plague.
The government moves quickly to contain the outbreak,
providing the sick with powerful antibiotics,
a treatment that didn't exist 700 years ago,
when the disease touched off
the worst pandemic in history.
The Black Death is really the pandemic that
eclipses all others.
I mean, it killed millions upon millions of people
in medieval Europe beginning in the 14th century.
HEATHER QUINLAN: The Black Death lasted from about
1347 to 1349, 1350.
Roughly a third of the European population died.
Italy was devastated.
England was, France was.
The stories behind it, just, they send chills up my spine.
It almost sounds like a‐an episode of‐of zombie death.
Big, orange‐like balls on their hands and arms.
The fingers were green.
We know now that this was something called
Yersinia pestis.
This is a bacteria.
So, it's easy for me to say now, it's Yersinia pestis.
They didn't know that back then.
REDDICK: Despite not understanding
the exact mechanism by which the disease spread,
people in the Middle Ages sensed that the Black Death
could afflict anyone who came into contact with it.
This knowledge gave rise
to one of the earliest‐known examples
of personal protective equipment, or PPE.
QUINLAN: The plague doctor outfit was essentially
a medieval hazmat suit.
It had a kind of very hard covering
so that the doctor wouldn't be sprayed with bodily fluids.
And then there was a beak which was filled
with flowers or herbs or anything that smelled nice
to keep the stench of death away from the doctor.
With the idea being that bad smells or miasma
is really what was causing people to get sick.
It was the best, uh, hypothesis they had.
REDDICK: The Black Death, now known as the bubonic plague,
has been studied by historians and scientists for centuries
in order to better understand its destructive power.
And it's a power that was actually unleashed
on a medieval battlefield, becoming
one of the earliest known forms of biological warfare.
(men shouting)
For three years,
this port city on the Black Sea, part of the Republic of Genoa,
as under siege from Mongolian Tatar invaders.
This is an old walled city, and inside the city
were Genoese, and Tatar invaders came and laid siege to the city.
So, they surrounded the city, but then there was an outbreak
of plague amongst the Tatars' ranks.
The Mongol population was starting to get very sick.
And whether this is a form of biochemical warfare,
psychological warfare, both,
what they ended up doing was catapulting the corpses
of their people over the walls of Caffa
and landing on the Genoese people repeatedly.
And then the Genoese defenders eventually started having
their own outbreaks of plague within the city.
WALSH: The Black Death was actually used as kind of
an early bioweapon, and that would be, actually,
incredibly efficient, because a town under siege
is a place where people are packed very closely together.
So that disease could spread from dead bodies
and spread to the defenders.
REDDICK: The use of the Black Death in warfare
underscores the deadly potential of a pandemic
being utilized as a bioweapon.
And today in the United States,
it is a scenario that some believe
the federal government must be ready for,
now more than ever.
If we had a very, very severe pandemic,
one that was extremely deadly, much more so
than what we face with COVID‐19, the continuity of government
would be one of the biggest questions we'd have to face.
The continuity of government apparatus is gigantic.
We don't see it, but it's made up of the airplanes
and the bunkers and the procedures
for moving the successors to the presidency
and the communication systems that nets it all together.
It's a multibillion‐dollar a year operation.
But that operation has really been created
to deal with two very distinct scenarios:
nuclear war or a terrorist attack on Washington.
That's it.
And so, when coronavirus came along,
I think that the people behind continuity of government
didn't quite know what to do.
This whole model had to basically be thrown away.
If members of Congress got sick, if the president
or the vice president got sick,
if the successors to the presidency
under the Constitution were unavailable,
what exactly were the rules?
It will be very interesting as we move forward
in the world of emergency preparedness
and continuity of government,
whether they deal with a pandemic
in a very different way.
That's the challenge of the future.
What would happen if a pandemic
were to strike down a country's leader?
Could it change the course of history?
Some historians argue that it has already happened
and helped to sow the seeds for the greatest war
the world has ever known.
REDDICK: Pathologist Dr. Johan Hultin excavates
an indigenous village graveyard, searching for something
that has eluded scientists for decades:
the cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic,
also known as the Spanish flu.
Johan Hultin had heard about a town
about 80 miles outside of Nome in Alaska
called Brevig Mission,
and it had had a population of about 80,
of which almost all of them had been killed from the 1918 flu.
So he got the approval to disinter
some of the bodies in the hopes that the permafrost
had preserved the flu virus and that they could research it.
And he found the corpse of a woman
who had been, uh, morbidly obese.
But it was, in fact, not the permafrost
that preserved the virus, but her fat storage.
DANIEL JERNIGAN: They removed some of that lung tissue,
and from that, they were able to then send that to the CDC
where we were able to understand it better,
sequence the virus‐‐ that is, understand
the genetic code of that virus.
REDDICK: After successfully sequencing the virus
that caused the Spanish flu,
scientists were finally able to unlock the secrets
of the most severe pandemic of the 20th century.
So the virus was able to, uh, reproduce itself very quickly,
um, and make the host sick very quickly as well.
Um, and, also, very readily passed between people.
But it was no one sort of magic bullet, I guess, if you will,
that made it incredibly powerful.
In fact, it was more like a perfect storm
of all these different features when put together
created this extremely virulent virus.
JERNIGAN: It was referred to in 1918 as Purple Death.
So, that was a terrible virus.
We were able to recover it, understand it,
and then from that we're able to make diagnostics, treatments
and vaccines that can help prevent that
from happening again.
REDDICK: However, while thankfully, medical science
has developed the technology to protect us
from the Spanish flu today, when it first struck in 1918,
it quickly spread across the globe,
leaving millions dead in its wake.
BARRY: The 1918 virus was much more dangerous,
much more virulent than COVID‐19.
People could die in as little
as 12 hours after the first symptoms.
In addition, the people who were dying were young.
The peak age for death was in the 20s.
Children were dying in enormous numbers.
So 95% of the... or so of the excess mortality
was people younger than 65.
Exactly the opposite of today.
The 1918 virus killed somewhere between 50
and a hundred million people.
If you adjust for population, that would be the equivalent
of 225 to 450 million people today.
In 1918, the U. S., of course, was at war,
and the focus of the government was entirely
on the war and nothing else.
The government was quite willing, to put it bluntly,
to lie and to put the best face on everything.
Woodrow Wilson, the president, never even made
any public statement of any kind about the pandemic.
REDDICK: Woodrow Wilson may not have taken the pandemic seriously,
but he was not immune to its effects.
Wilson contracted the influenza virus
during the Paris Peace Conference
at the end of World War I.
QUINLAN: Woodrow Wilson had put together,
uh, what were known as Fourteen Points
toward the end of World War I,
where the world leaders were meeting in Paris.
And his Fourteen Points were essentially
how we can work with Germany so something like this
never happens again.
And it was very progressive, especially for its day,
and he really stood by it.
Now, Woodrow Wilson also traveled to Paris
on the same ship that had previously
shipped many, many sick soldiers overseas.
So while he was in Paris, Wilson became very sick.
BARRY: Everybody around him remarked
on how his mind was affected.
How he couldn't function, he couldn't process information.
Uh, he was physically weak.
And he insisted on returning to the negotiations
while he was still sick.
REDDICK: During the peace talks,
President Wilson had argued that America and its allies should
not punish Germany by imposing a crippling war settlement.
But due to his weakened condition,
Wilson was unable to fight for a less severe punishment
than the one ultimately brought against the nation of Germany.
And the course of history was irrevocably altered.
BARRY: Clemenceau, the French prime minister, hated Germany.
Germany was blamed for the war,
had reparations, had territory, uh, stripped from it.
The peace treaty was so bad that almost every historian
says that the treaty was a significant force
in the rise of the Nazis,
and leading to World War II.
QUINLAN: You could definitely make an argument
that it then led to a person like Adolf Hitler‐‐
charismatic, nationalist,
dramatic‐‐ all the things that
people who are suffering,
who are poor, who are broke, who are starving
can look to someone like that and see a potential leader.
If the Spanish Flu of 1918 can teach mankind anything,
it's to always be prepared.
But how do we get ready?
Some say that to battle future pandemics
we would need to have an elite team monitoring the world
for emerging diseases.
They would race to the site of an outbreak,
delivering vital on‐the‐ground information to scientists
that could fast‐track treatments and vaccines.
Well, it turns out such teams do exist,
and they're known as
the disease detectives.
REDDICK: More than 2,000 U. S. military veterans gather
at the Bellevue‐Stratford Hotel
for an annual three‐day convention
of the American Legion.
In the days following the event, 182 of the legionnaires
fall ill with a new, unidentified form of pneumonia.
As doctors struggle to make sense of the mysterious
illness, 29 people develop severe symptoms,
and perish.
It was an unexplained pneumonia. It didn't...
We couldn't figure out what it was.
None of the normal things that cause pneumonia
turned out to be the cause.
REDDICK: To solve the mystery, the Centers for Disease Control
called upon America's first line of defense
against emerging pandemics:
the Epidemic Intelligence Service,
or EIS.
ERIC PEVZNER: The Epidemic Intelligence Service was established in 1951.
And the reason why we came to be is that there were concerns
about biological threats to the people of the United States.
And so the program was put together so we'd have
a workforce ready to deploy to investigate any possible
biological threats against the United States.
So, essentially, they are kind of like FBI agents, only
instead of going after criminals and terrorists,
they go after disease.
So when an outbreak,
especially a sort of outbreak
of unknown origin pops up in the U. S.,
or sometimes around the world,
the CDC will send in epidemiologists
from the service to figure out what's going on.
And the CDC's disease detectives are
the best in the world at this.
REDDICK: The Legionnaire outbreak in 1976
sparked nationwide fear about the unknown disease that had
claimed the lives of 29 victims.
So the disease detectives raced to solve the mystery.
They scoured the hotel where the legionnaires had
held their convention,
quickly discovered a mysterious bacterium
in the hotel's air‐conditioning system,
and took samples of it to be analyzed
at the Centers for Disease Control.
And so they sent those specimens to CDC and they were able to
characterize an unusual bacillus.
And they found this thing that's now called Legionella,
or Legionnaires disease.
And so that's something that, it's in water.
It's very different than other bacterial causes.
You can find it in cooling towers that are
on top of buildings.
You can find it in Whirlpool spas,
sometimes in swimming pools and other sources of water.
And when people walk past it, they breathe in those droplets,
and then they get the bacteria deep in their lungs,
and then they get a bad pneumonia, and it can be fatal.
PEVZNER: Our disease detectives are looking at
how can they intervene to ensure
upon the safety of the public?
And then, after they've investigated,
and they collected information,
and they think that they might know an intervention,
the next step is, obviously, to communicate that.
REDDICK: The rapid discovery of the Legionella bacterium
brought the potential outbreak to a halt.
Thanks to the information provided by
the EIS disease detectives,
air‐conditioning units and water systems across the country
were retrofitted to minimize the risk.
The program has evolved quite a bit since 1951,
when it was originally just physicians and all males.
Now we include not just physicians, but nurses,
veterinarians, PhD‐level scientists.
It's a real diverse skill set of people
that are prepared to deploy and respond to emerging threats.
REDDICK: EIS leaders have not only expanded
their membership to include experts in different fields
of research and technology,
they've also expanded where they operate,
all around the world.
However, they must accept potentially deadly risks
to their own health in the process.
There was an outbreak I participated in in Uganda
where I went in a cave that was
full of thousands and thousands of bats
that might be infected with Marburg virus,
which is a deadly virus related to Ebola.
And I really geared up when I went in there.
Not only was I wearing a battery‐operated
respirator to help me breathe pure air,
I had to wear a helmet because I might hit my head
on the rocks in the cave, and I actually had to wear
snake chaps, because there were snakes in that cave,
including spitting cobras,
that you wanted to protect yourself against.
And that's what has made it so particularly dangerous.
JERNIGAN: Disease detectives, myself, have been involved in
SARS in 2003, West Nile virus.
Ebola in 2014, '15. Zika.
And now, most recently, the emergence of COVID‐19.
They're the smart people we put out into the field in order to
figure things out as quickly as possible.
PEVZNER: For our disease detectives, collecting the most valid
and reliable evidence is their top priority.
Not collecting data for the sake of publication or fame.
They're collecting this information so that
there can be public health action taken.
They're ready on a moment's notice to deploy to any
new or emerging public health threat.
What happens if the disease detectives are too late,
and a major epidemic is already spreading?
Do epidemiologists have the means to predict
where a virus might go,
and contain it before it spirals out of control?
It's entirely possible.
And one of the most promising tools just might turn out to be
a video game.
Video game developer Blizzard Entertainment
introduces a surprise element to its popular online
role‐playing game World of Warcraft:
a virtual virus, with the potential to infect
characters within the game's fantasy universe.
They call the virus...
Corrupted Blood.
The Corrupted Blood experience in World of Warcraft was
essentially a new patch for the game.
Corrupted Blood was intended to be sort of an inconvenience
to these extremely powerful players
as they battled a demon in this particular
setting within the game.
And it was intended to slow these very powerful
players down, and make it more challenging to battle the demon.
However, uh, the Corrupted Blood feature did not stay contained
within that special battleground for very strong players.
In fact, it was spread unintentionally,
because players infected with the Corrupted Blood
would leave the battleground and then expose themselves
to other players that were less powerful.
And those players were extremely susceptible
to the Corrupted Blood, and then would die.
This Corrupted Blood episode was essentially a digital pandemic,
and it caught the players by surprise.
REDDICK: At the time,
the more than five million World of Warcraft players
around the globe were rocked by the Corrupted Blood virus
raging through the game,
as it began killing off their characters.
But curiously, scientists noted that there were
eerie similarities between this digital pandemic
and a real outbreak.
When you were infected with this virus,
you had to stay away from the other players,
you had to socially distance,
or else the other player would get infected.
And there are many different types of players.
Some have a lot of points.
Some didn't have a lot of points.
And when you had the virus,
your life force would deplete.
So, of course, the individuals that don't have enough points
were the first to pass away.
While individuals who collected more coins or points‐‐
they seemed to do better.
And no matter what happened in this game,
it seemed like the virus kept on spreading.
In fact, animals could even get infected in the game.
REDDICK: The Corrupted Blood pandemic lasted for nearly a month
before the World of Warcraft designers retooled the virus
to stop its spread.
A virtual vaccine, if you will.
But that was not the end of the story,
because in September of 2007, scientists from Tufts University
published a research paper which suggested
that virtual games like World of Warcraft
were an untapped resource in the study of pandemics.
FISHER: The unique thing about the World of Warcraft simulation
was that it was a potential new type of opportunity
to understand and maybe even predict the different ways
that human behavior might influence
the spread of a pandemic.
So for example, um, during the outbreak,
the developers imposed a quarantine
to try to get players to stay within, uh, particular areas,
um, to help slow the spread of the‐the Corrupted Blood feature,
uh, but they ignored it.
DASGUPTA: I think the take‐home message is that
what once was just a video game for entertainment
turned out to be something that maybe can be studied,
and that was interesting.
It wasn't just the game itself,
but how the players reacted to the virus,
how people thought during a pandemic.
What do they do?
REDDICK: In the years since the Corrupted Blood incident,
the use of computer simulations to help fight real pandemics
has evolved.
These sophisticated digital tools
are now referred to as mathematical models.
KORTEPETER: The model is really just trying
to predict the future using specific assumptions
about where the disease might be going
in terms of the outbreak.
So you take what's known, as best you can,
and look at various scenarios and numbers,
and you throw that into some kind of a formula
and it can give you some sense of where the outbreak is going.
FISHER: Mathematical models
can be used to, um, help predict things like
how fast a virus will spread,
um, how many individuals will be, uh, affected,
how efficacious these different sorts of methods
of slowing the spread might be, whether it's a quarantine
or just limiting certain types of services.
How much hospital capacity will be needed
in these different scenarios.
These are all things that models
can help public health officials gauge.
At their best, mathematical models
can only offer theories as to what might happen
as a pandemic spreads across the world.
But could a viral threat emerge for which no data exists at all?
How do we prepare for a virus
that's not of this Earth?
REDDICK: 900 miles southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
Four days after achieving their historic Moon landing,
the Apollo 11 astronauts splash down
inside their space capsule
and are safely recovered by the U. S. Navy.
But instead of being allowed to immediately reunite
with their colleagues and families to celebrate,
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins
are placed in a strict two‐week quarantine.
The reason?
NASA's fears that the men might possibly have contracted
a lunar virus and brought it back to Earth.
These were the first time astronauts were actually
going to another planetary body, staying there
and then coming back.
It's absolutely feasible that a biological contaminant
of some kind could come back with astronauts.
They quarantined the astronauts from that‐that first mission
and they also brought back Moon rocks,
and tried grinding them up, extracting them,
feeding them to every type of life that they could think of
just to see if there are any ill effects.
REDDICK: In the end,
concerns that the Apollo 11 astronauts brought back
any kind of lunar infection
thankfully turned out to be a false alarm.
But why would NASA worry that bacteria and viruses might exist
in the freezing vacuum of space in the first place?
The answer lies
in the controversial theory of panspermia,
which suggests that microbial life,
including potential viruses,
can be found throughout the cosmos,
including on moons, asteroids,
comets and alien planets.
CHANDRA WICKRAMASINGHE: Panspermia is essentially
derived from Greek roots‐‐
"pan," meaning everywhere, and "spermata," meaning seeds.
So panspermia essentially means "seeds of life everywhere."
The concept is that life seeds are distributed
widely across the entire universe.
And whenever conditions are correct or appropriate
on a planet, say, like the Earth,
then life is deposited and life gets started.
REDDICK: According to the theory of panspermia,
space microbes trapped in meteors and comets
regularly rain down on Earth.
WICKRAMASINGHE: We have some hundred tons of cometary debris
coming into the Earth's atmosphere all the time.
So, I think there had to be a continuing influx
of bacteria and also viruses.
And major epidemics throughout history
have started suddenly
and disappeared equally suddenly.
And I think the most reasonable explanation
is that bacteria, viruses and maybe
even other organisms could have been introduced
from outside and caused these huge pandemics of disease.
REDDICK: The idea that pandemics could come to Earth from space
is a fascinating and chilling theory.
However, the much more sobering reality
is that the grave threat of deadly, global infections
is alive and well,
a fact driven home by COVID‐19.
Every nation had to face an indisputable fact:
the virus was everywhere,
and the death toll was mounting.
Doctors, scientists and political leaders
focused on one critical goal:
developing a vaccine to combat COVID‐19.
KORTEPETER: There are multiple challenges to developing vaccines.
The most basic is identifying
the appropriate antigen or protein to use
that actually will be protective.
And if you think about it,
it took us 50 years to get the Ebola vaccine.
We still don't have a vaccine for HIV.
So, this can take a long time.
But we were very fortunate,
now that we identified the right virus.
We knew it was part of the coronavirus family.
It was new, hence the word "novel,"
but we knew what we wanted to fight against,
which was the spike protein.
Once we knew that, the science kicked in.
REDDICK: On December 11, 2020,
the world breathed a collective sigh of relief
when the U. S. Food and Drug Administration approved
the first coronavirus vaccine.
This breakthrough was quickly followed
by additional approved vaccines,
and hope for the future began to emerge
as hundreds of millions were immunized around the globe.
KORTEPETER: Actually when you have such
a concentrated effort and funding,
it's amazing to watch how quickly
we develop new vaccines for this brand‐new disease.
That's really incredible, having that will
and the money to do it, and the scientific basis.
If I had one wish from this pandemic,
it would be that everyone‐‐ including myself‐‐
we learn from our mistakes.
And, of course, we always need to work together
and not be divided.
Because if we don't communicate,
we'll never get the input of all the individuals,
whether it be the doctor who travels to Alaska,
whether it be the epidemiologist who plays a video game,
everyone's opinion counts.
So, hopefully, we'll continue to communicate,
and we'll be in this‐‐
and conquer whatever happens‐‐ together.
If recent events have taught us anything,
it's that the threat of deadly pandemics
may never be eliminated.
So, here are the questions that remain.
How will the next one arise?
Is it possible that we can prevent it before it happens?
And if not, will we be ready to contain it?
Some of these answers will only come with time,
while the others could remain hidden
in America's book of secrets.
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