- Dr. Ally Hextall: We've sequenced the virus, determined its origin and we've modeled the way it enters the cells of the lung and the brain. The virus contains both bat and pig sequences. The dark green is pig, and the light green is bat. And here you can see the crossover event. Bat, bat, and pig, bat. And here is a model of the virus and how it attaches to its host. The blue is virus, and the gold is human, and the red is the viral attachment protein and the green is its receptor in the human cells. These receptors are found in the cells of both the respiratory tract and the central nervous system. And the virus attaches to the cell like a key slipping into a lock. Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat.
- Dave: My wife makes me take off my clothes in the garage. Then she leaves out a bucket of warm water and some soap. And then she douses everything in hand sanitizer after I leave. I mean, she's overreacting, right?
- Dr. Erin Mears: Not really. And stop touching your face, Dave.
- Dr. Ian Sussman: Get away from here.
- Alan Krumwiede: Where'd it come from? Military?
- Dr. Ian Sussman: You're not a doctor and you're not a writer.
- Alan Krumwiede: Yes, I am a writer. Yes, I am.
- Dr. Ian Sussman: Blogging is not writing. It's graffiti with punctuation.
- Alan Krumwiede: I am a journalist and there's informed discussion on the blogosphere that this is a biological weapon.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: We're working very hard to find out where this virus came from. To treat it and to vaccinate against it if we can. We don't know all of that yet, we just don't know. What we do know, is that in order to become sick you have to first come in contact with a sick person or something that they touched. In order to get scared, all you have to do is to come in contact with a rumor, or the television or the internet. I think what Mr. Krumwiede is uh... is spreading, is far more dangerous than the disease.
- Dr. Erin Mears: The average person touches their face two or three thousand times a day.
- Minnesota Health #4: Two or three thousand times a day?
- Dr. Erin Mears: Three to five times every waking minute. In between, we're touching doorknobs, water fountains, elevator buttons, and each other. Those things become fomites.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: When was the last time you ate something that didn't come from a vending machine?
- Dr. Erin Mears: [Hesitantly] Taco Bell
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: You know where this comes from, shaking hands? It was a way of showing a stranger you weren't carrying a weapon in the old days. You offered your empty right hand to show that you meant no harm.
- Minnesota Medical Examiner: Well, the sulci are obliterated. Let's look at the base.
- Minnesota Medical Examiner: Oh, my God.
- Assistant Medical Examiner: Do you want me to take a sample...
- Minnesota Medical Examiner: I want you to move away from the table.
- Assistant Medical Examiner: Should I call someone...
- Minnesota Medical Examiner: Call everyone.
- Dr. Erin Mears: How fast it multiplies depends on a variety of factors. The incubation period, how long a person is contagious. Sometimes people can be contagious without even having symptoms. We need to know that too. And we need to know how big the population of people susceptible to the virus might be.
- Minnesota Health #4: So far that appears to be everyone with hands, a mouth and a nose.
- Jory Emhoff: Maybe I'm immune like you and I don't even need it.
- Mitch Emhoff: That's not a chance we're gonna take.
- Jory Emhoff: So instead we lose Spring, we lose Summer, we lose another 144 days that *don't* happen again. Why can't they invent a shot that keeps time from passing?
- Mitch Emhoff: It's gonna start getting normal again, Jory.
- First Haz-Mat: [Putting a body in a mass grave] When did we run out of body bags?
- Second Haz-Mat: Two days ago.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: How are you?
- Dr. Erin Mears: Yeah, I'm going into a meeting with...
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: No, Mears, I didn't ask what you we're doing, I asked how you were doing. How are you doing?
- John Neal: [on the phone] Jon Neal here. You just had sex with me in a hotel and left without saying goodbye.
- Beth Emhoff: Yeah, it ended up being delayed, so - Sorry, I was panicking.
- John Neal: Well, if I don't get to see you again, I just wanted to say it was nice to see you again.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: It's gonna be all over the news. What's your single overriding communications objective?
- Dr. Erin Mears: We're isolating the sick and quarantining those who we believe were exposed.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Okay, good. As of this moment, you and I are attached at the cell phone. If you need resources, call me. If you get into a political dogfight, call me. If you find yourself wide awake, staring at the walls at 3 a.m. wondering why you took the job, call me.
- Alan Krumwiede: My temperature's 101. Higher than it was earlier. My head hurts and my throat feels like it's closing. This is forsythia. I've been taking it since the onset of the symptoms. If I'm here tomorrow, you'll know it works. Truth Serum Now. I'm Alan Krumwiede.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Homeland Security wants to know if we can put a vaccination in the water supply, like fluoride. Cure everyone all at once.
- Dr. Ally Hextall: I'm going home now, Ellis. It's getting late. Merry Christmas.
- Dr. Erin Mears: How fast it multiplies depends on a variety of factors. The incubation period, how long a person is contagious. Sometimes people can be contagious without even having symptoms. We need to know that too. We need to know how big the population of people susceptible to the virus might be.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: So we have a novel virus with a mortality rate in the low 20s, no treatment protocol, and no vaccine at this time.
- Dr. Ally Hextall: That is correct.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: From here on out, I want no one working on this except at BSL-4. Last thing we need is for this to walk out of the lab on the bottom of someone's shoe.
- Dr. Erin Mears: [on the phone] I really need you to get off that bus. It's possible you've come in contact with an infectious disease and you're highly contagious. Do you understand? I want you to get off now. And stay away from other people.
- Reporter: Dr. Cheever, are you concerned that the CDC faces a credibility issue here after the perceived overreaction to H1N1?
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: I'd rather the news story be that we overreacted than that many people lost their lives because we didn't do enough. That's why we're here. It's also why the World Health Organization is sending an epidemiologist to Hong Kong. It's hard to know what it is without knowing where it came from. So our first job with these things is always to find ground zero. Figure out how it jumped into the population. We do know that a patient in Minnesota traveled to that part of the world.
- Minnesota Health #4: We're going to need to walk the government through this before we start to freak everybody out. I mean, we can't even tell people right now what they should be afraid of. We tried that with swine flu and all we did was get healthy people scared.
- Alan Krumwiede: Now it all changes. Sussman gets anointed by the National Academy of Sciences and every pharmaceutical executive gets a hard-on. They'll be growing the virus in every lab on Earth.
- Dr. Erin Mears: In 72 hours, we'll know what it is - if we're lucky.
- Minnesota Health #4: Clearly, we're not lucky.
- Funeral Director: The problem is, we just can't take delivery of the bodies. We have insurance issues with our own employees, with our union, not to mention the health of the mourners, to consider.
- Mitch Emhoff: I just - I wanna bury my wife and my stepson and have a service where our friends and our family can come and pay their respects and grieve.
- Funeral Director: I understand, and I am truly sorry about your loss.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: What's going on, Lyle?
- RADM Lyle Haggerty: There's a sick Congressman from Illinois in D.C. He was in Chicago over the holiday. They're using the pod to fly him home. Then they're closing down Midway and O'Hare. The Governor there is then calling out the National Guard. They're setting up roadblocks. They're shutting down the board of trade, public transportation. Even the Teamsters are pulling their drivers off the road.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: People are still gonna slip through. You know that.
- RADM Lyle Haggerty: Yes, they will. The Secret Service is moving the President underground. Congress is figuring out how to work online. When the word goes out - there will be a run on the banks, gas stations, grocery stores, you name it.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: People will panic. The virus will be the least of our worries. It will tip over now.
- RADM Lyle Haggerty: We just need to make sure that nobody knows - until everybody knows.
- Sanjay Gupta: There are stories circulating on the Internet now that in India and elsewhere the drug Ribavirin has been shown to be effective against this virus. Yet, Homeland Security is telling the CDC not to make any announcements until stockpiles of the drug could be secured.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Well, Dr. Gupta, there continue to be evaluations of several drugs. Ribavirin is among them. But right now, our best defense has been social distancing, No hand-shaking, staying home when you're sick, washing your hands frequently.
- Sanjay Gupta: Can you tell us, to date, how many people have died from this virus?
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Very difficult. We're still working on confirming that number. There are 50 different states in this country - which means there are 50 different Health Departments followed by 50 different protocols.
- Alan Krumwiede: Tell them what an R-nought of two really means, Dr. Cheever. Teach them some math. No? I'll do it. On day 1, there were two people with it, and then there were four. And then it was 16, and you think you've got it in front of you, but next it's 256, and then it's 65,000, and it's behind you, above you, and all around you. In 30 steps, it's a billion sick. Three months. It's a math problem you can do on a napkin. And that's where we're headed.
- Sanjay Gupta: Alan, today on Twitter you wrote that the truth about this virus is being kept from the world by the CDC, by the World Health Organization, to allow friends of the administration to benefit from it both financially and physically.
- Alan Krumwiede: There are therapies we know are effective right now, like forsythia, and they don't even appear on the CDC website.
- Sanjay Gupta: On your blog, you also wrote that the World Health Organization is somehow in bed with pharmaceutical companies?
- Alan Krumwiede: Because they are. That's who stands to gain from this They're working hand in glove. And the *hand* is reaching into our pockets.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: The CDC is exploring forsythia and other homeopathic treatments. But right now, there's no sciencet o back any of these claims.
- Alan Krumwiede: Or no way Dr. Cheever or the people who put him into power can profit from it.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: We're not ruling anything out.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: I thought you said once we could grow it, we could vaccinate against it.
- Dr. Ally Hextall: We tried using dead virus combined with several adjuvants to boost immune response.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: And?
- Dr. Ally Hextall: No protective antibodies. A lot of dead monkeys.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Are we even close?
- Dr. Ally Hextall: If we even had a viable vaccine right now, we would still have to do human trials, and that would take weeks. And then we would have to get clearance and approval figure out manufacturing and distribution. That would take months. And then training survivors to give inoculations. More months, more deaths.
- Dr. Ally Hextall: We have to try a live attenuated virus.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Like with polio?
- Dr. Ally Hextall: Exactly. The only danger with a live virus is the possibility that it will revert to wild type and kill the host.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: And when will we know about that?
- Dr. Ally Hextall: I'll ask the monkeys.
- Alan Krumwiede: After the Spanish flu in 1918, you know, people got rich. The Vicks VapoRub people, the Lysol people, look it up. One man dies, another man makes money off his coffin. One country culls all their chickens, red meat goes into higher demand.
- RADM Lyle Haggerty: We may never know where this disease came from. But we do know that this vaccine is the result of the courage and perseverance of a remarkable few.
- Hedge Fund Man in Park: Studies show that there is no proof that forsythia works.
- Alan Krumwiede: Who conducted the studies? What defines "works"? Against what strain of the virus?
- Hedge Fund Man in Park: Did you know about the studies when we met the last time? We can get in a lot of trouble.
- Alan Krumwiede: Do you really think this Dr. Hextall, CDC person, is Jesus in a lab coat? The government rushed the trials. The lawyers indemnified the drug companies. Maybe it causes autism or narcolepsy or cancer 10 years from now. Who knows? You - the - the swine flu vaccine killed people back in 1976. Nerve disease. So we're all guinea pigs, starting from today. Just wait, they'll start listing side effects like the credits at the end of a movie.
- Dr. Erin Mears: He could have gone to anyone with this. He came to us.
- Dr. Ellis Cheever: Why should we trust him?
- Dr. Erin Mears: We have no choice.
- Dennis French: Forsythia is a lie. It's a lie and you made $4.5 million for telling it. You wanna blog about that? You are going to go away, Mr. Krumwiede, and so is all your money. I can't even imagine all the civil suits people are gonna file against you and I have a pretty good imagination. Now you wanna tell people not to get vaccinated when that's the best chance they've got. If I could throw your computer in jail, I would.
- Dr. Erin Mears: [on the phone] This is Dr. Erin Mears in Room 821. I need you to get me the names of everyone who serviced this room in the last 24 hours. Also, you need to get in touch with the waiter who brought me my room service last night. I need all of their numbers. Home, cell, everything, yes.
- Sun Feng: They say the French and Americans have a cure. They're manufacturing it in secret. WHO knows, but they're in bed with the Americans.
- Dr. Leonora Orantes: Who says?
- Sun Feng: The Internet.