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Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ed-George-W-Bush-read-1918s-flu-pandemic.html
Geeks who saw Covid coming: They were a team of virus experts hired by George W Bush after he read about 1918's flu pandemic. Disbanded by Obama, they secretly acted after hearing about Wuhan - and could have saved many lives if Trump hadn't ignored them
By Michael Lewis For The Mail On Sunday
Published: 17:05 EDT, 8 May 2021 | Updated: 17:44 EDT, 8 May 2021
Carter Mecher had only ever wanted to be a doctor. He'd grown up in a big, working-class family in Chicago where his toolmaker father had encouraged him to tackle problems with the same confidence that he shaped steel.
Carter's mind would lock into a problem in the same way it did when he was fixing a car engine. That was when he was at his best.
An inability to pay attention to anything except that which you find totally riveting might not sound the most promising trait in a medical student. But almost by process of elimination, it led Carter to his calling: critical care.
From the moment he walked into an intensive care unit, he sensed it was where he was meant to be.
If you didn't allow yourself to become numb, the place kept you alive to the complexity of life, and its sanctity.
In October 2005, the US government wanted someone who could think 'outside the box' to join a small team devoted to pandemic planning. To staff at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, one name came to mind: their colleague Carter Mecher.
He was surprised by the call from the White House, and even more surprised by what they wanted him to do.
Carter had learned a lot about infectious disease by treating it in various intensive care units. Yet he knew nothing about pandemics.
'But it was the White House calling,' he said. 'I figured, 'Yeah, yeah, what the hell.' '
The pandemic planning team had been set up in the wake of President George W.
Bush's 2005 summer holiday reading ? The Great Influenza, a book by historian John Barry about the 1918 flu pandemic.
Bush was determined that America would be better prepared next time there was a major virus outbreak. He demanded to see his government's sketchy pandemic plan ? and immediately dismissed it as 'bulls**t'.
After commissioning a report by Rajeev Venkayya, a young doctor in the Department of Homeland Security, Bush went to Congress and got $7.1 billion to spend on pandemic preparedness.
RAJEEV said: 'The US took this on as a national priority before anyone else. We invented pandemic planning.'
Rajeev, Carter and five others set up their base in Washington.
The solution would be a layering of multiple strategies ? like the way you lay slices of Swiss cheese on a sandwich, so that the holes don't align.
Carter had no formal training in epidemiology, but he had a nose for data, an ability to squeeze meaning from it and a gift for quickly figuring out what to do in a crisis.
He was always the first to identify, and make sense of, a new infectious outbreak.
When not in Washington, his emails were typed from a desk just off his bedroom. Quite possibly in his underpants.
For more than a decade, these seven doctors came together behind the scenes each time the world faced a biological threat.
In flurries of phone calls and emails, they sought to figure out what was going on and decide what each of the group might do to save lives.
'Most of our calls start with: 'Carter, what are you thinking?' said Duane Caneva, who, in January last year, was chief medical officer of the US Department of Homeland Security. 'He's like a savant on all this stuff.'
Sure enough, it was Carter who first mentioned the existence of coronavirus in Wuhan in an email to colleague Richard Hatchett on January 9 last year.
Just days later, their colleague James Lawler, a Navy doctor who ran the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska, wrote to the others, asking: 'Is it likely that the virus outbreak was much larger than what we are seeing?'
The team had a nickname ? the Wolverines, after the resistance group in the 1980s dystopian Cold War film Red Dawn, in which the Soviets successfully invade the US.
With the Wolverine approach, you don't worry about finding the perfect answer. There might never be a perfect answer.
To this day, no one knows how many people in Wuhan were infected on January 18, 2020. But the calculation made by the Wolverines was more or less correct...
Geeks who saw Covid coming: They were a team of virus experts hired by George W Bush after he read about 1918's flu pandemic. Disbanded by Obama, they secretly acted after hearing about Wuhan - and could have saved many lives if Trump hadn't ignored them
By Michael Lewis For The Mail On Sunday
Published: 17:05 EDT, 8 May 2021 | Updated: 17:44 EDT, 8 May 2021
Carter Mecher had only ever wanted to be a doctor. He'd grown up in a big, working-class family in Chicago where his toolmaker father had encouraged him to tackle problems with the same confidence that he shaped steel.
Carter's mind would lock into a problem in the same way it did when he was fixing a car engine. That was when he was at his best.
An inability to pay attention to anything except that which you find totally riveting might not sound the most promising trait in a medical student. But almost by process of elimination, it led Carter to his calling: critical care.
From the moment he walked into an intensive care unit, he sensed it was where he was meant to be.
If you didn't allow yourself to become numb, the place kept you alive to the complexity of life, and its sanctity.
In October 2005, the US government wanted someone who could think 'outside the box' to join a small team devoted to pandemic planning. To staff at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, one name came to mind: their colleague Carter Mecher.
He was surprised by the call from the White House, and even more surprised by what they wanted him to do.
Carter had learned a lot about infectious disease by treating it in various intensive care units. Yet he knew nothing about pandemics.
'But it was the White House calling,' he said. 'I figured, 'Yeah, yeah, what the hell.' '
The pandemic planning team had been set up in the wake of President George W.
Bush's 2005 summer holiday reading ? The Great Influenza, a book by historian John Barry about the 1918 flu pandemic.
Bush was determined that America would be better prepared next time there was a major virus outbreak. He demanded to see his government's sketchy pandemic plan ? and immediately dismissed it as 'bulls**t'.
After commissioning a report by Rajeev Venkayya, a young doctor in the Department of Homeland Security, Bush went to Congress and got $7.1 billion to spend on pandemic preparedness.
RAJEEV said: 'The US took this on as a national priority before anyone else. We invented pandemic planning.'
Rajeev, Carter and five others set up their base in Washington.
The solution would be a layering of multiple strategies ? like the way you lay slices of Swiss cheese on a sandwich, so that the holes don't align.
Carter had no formal training in epidemiology, but he had a nose for data, an ability to squeeze meaning from it and a gift for quickly figuring out what to do in a crisis.
He was always the first to identify, and make sense of, a new infectious outbreak.
When not in Washington, his emails were typed from a desk just off his bedroom. Quite possibly in his underpants.
For more than a decade, these seven doctors came together behind the scenes each time the world faced a biological threat.
In flurries of phone calls and emails, they sought to figure out what was going on and decide what each of the group might do to save lives.
'Most of our calls start with: 'Carter, what are you thinking?' said Duane Caneva, who, in January last year, was chief medical officer of the US Department of Homeland Security. 'He's like a savant on all this stuff.'
Sure enough, it was Carter who first mentioned the existence of coronavirus in Wuhan in an email to colleague Richard Hatchett on January 9 last year.
Just days later, their colleague James Lawler, a Navy doctor who ran the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska, wrote to the others, asking: 'Is it likely that the virus outbreak was much larger than what we are seeing?'
The team had a nickname ? the Wolverines, after the resistance group in the 1980s dystopian Cold War film Red Dawn, in which the Soviets successfully invade the US.
With the Wolverine approach, you don't worry about finding the perfect answer. There might never be a perfect answer.
To this day, no one knows how many people in Wuhan were infected on January 18, 2020. But the calculation made by the Wolverines was more or less correct...
