Charles Wheelan - The Rationing

Middle school works that way, and so does Washington. There is a certain gravitas that comes from being able to stand apart from the day-to-day politics. The Acting Secretary of HHS had that figured out. If the President fired him tomorrow morning, he would be on the golf course with his grandchildren by afternoon—a point he repeated often, and to good effect. In fact, he would periodically elaborate on how much better his golf game would be if he had more time to practice chipping and putting. “It’s all short-game,” he said to me after one of these soliloquies. I recognized this comment as the finale to his public drama, so I nodded in agreement.

The Acting Secretary attended his first working group meeting on a Sunday morning. I remember it was a Sunday because the D.C. streets were sleepy as I walked out of the Metro (no transit strike yet) and toward the White House. The morning was sunny and already warm. Several cafés had set up outside tables that were crowded with young professionals having brunch outdoors before the day turned oppressively humid. In these days before the Outbreak became public, I was always struck with some variation of the same thought: They have no idea . Most of these people laughing over their eggs Benedict are carrying Capellaviridae . I am walking to the White House because we know the Dormigen stocks are going to run out. If we do not come up with a fix, some of you are going to die. Enjoy your eggs and wish me luck.

In the Oval Office, the principals were dressed casually, including the President, and I remember thinking that was strange, too. So arbitrary. The same people doing the same work in the same place, but one day a week none of us had to wear suits. It was the first time I had seen the Secretary of Defense out of uniform. The Strategist was wearing an interpretation of casual that one would have to see to believe: the pants from a pin-striped suit with black leather dress shoes and some kind of short-sleeve floral Hawaiian shirt. He had shaved, but not well; there was a small strip of whiskers running down one cheek.

The President was more engaged than usual, probably because he had nothing else on his schedule. He sat on one of the couches rather than at his desk. “Okay, where are we?” he said.

“The Canadians shipped us five hundred thousand doses,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Good,” the President said.

“Didn’t they pledge two million?” the Strategist asked.

“They’re monitoring their own situation and will release more if conditions allow,” the Chief of Staff said, consulting her notes.

“That sucks,” the Strategist said.

“India? Australia?” the President asked.

“They’re both saying they need parliamentary approval to ship Dormigen out of the country,” the Chief of Staff explained. “It takes time, and obviously it would be public. We’ve cobbled together some smaller contributions from a number of countries: Israel, Mexico, Colombia, Latvia—”

“Jesus Christ, did you just say Latvia?” the Strategist interjected. He was eating a Danish, and he chewed several times, though not quite enough, before continuing. “Latvia? If any part of our response depends on Latvia, we are completely fucked.”

The President shot him a look, as if to say, “Dial it down.”

“But seriously, Latvia?” the Strategist said, calmer for the moment. He took another bite of Danish.

“It all adds up,” the Chief of Staff said. “It’s a numbers game.”

“Latvia,” the Strategist mumbled, loud enough for those of us close enough to him to hear.

“Speaking of which, where are we?” the President asked. He meant “the number.” We had bandied this concept around for several days, but the data were still trickling in, so for all the urgent talk we did not actually have a figure yet, much to the ongoing annoyance of the Strategist. Perhaps subconsciously we did not want to put such a fine point on the situation. It is hard for me to convey the surreal nature of the crisis. This was the opposite of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, when tragedy struck and the public demanded a response. We were watching the planes in flight, reckoning what would happen when they reached their targets. But nothing was burning yet. The public was having brunch on a sunny spring day. So rather than being forced to action, we had to press ourselves ahead when the natural impulse was to do as little as possible and hope the planes turned around.

“We are pulling a model together,” the Chief of Staff said.

“It’s not that hard,” the Strategist said. “There are only a handful of variables. I can do it on an Excel spreadsheet.”

“We are doing some in-depth sampling to learn more about Capellaviridae ,” the Director of the NIH offered.

“Great, but you must have some assumptions now,” the Strategist said, more calmly than usual. “My understanding was that we were going to build this model right away—take our best guess at the situation and then update it as we get better data.”

“That’s what we agreed to,” the Secretary of Defense said.

“So why aren’t we doing that?” the Strategist asked. He was genuinely perplexed.

“Let’s have that done for tomorrow,” the President suggested.

The Secretary of Defense said, “With all due respect, sir, we are going to run out of ‘tomorrows.’ If we have the information, let’s put it together. I appreciate that we are dealing with a lot of unknowns here, but that’s always the case. I’ve never met a military planner who felt he’d started planning for anything too early.”

“All we need is an Excel spreadsheet,” the Strategist repeated. He was sitting on the couch opposite me. As he spoke, he grabbed a laptop from a coffee table in front of the Chief of Staff, who was sitting next to him, and flipped it open. I could see her shocked expression. “What’s the password to unlock the screen?” he asked, oblivious to the strange looks around him.

“White House one two three,” she said. “No capitals, all strung together.”

“Wow, the Chinese will never figure that one out,” he said, typing. “Okay. When can we expect the next batch of Dormigen to be done?”

The Chief of Staff looked at her phone. “April sixteenth,” she said.

“I don’t care what the date will be. Just tell me how many days from now,” the Strategist said, shaking his head in exasperation.

“Twelve.”

He walked the room through the other variables: the doses remaining; the doses on hand solicited from other countries; the expected demand for Dormigen to deal with other illnesses. “Okay,” he said. “We’re reasonably confident of all that, yes?”

“I think we can expect far more help from the international community,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Fine. This will be a conservative estimate. Now I need some estimate of the number of Capellaviridae cases we are going to need to treat in the next twelve days, right?” There were nods of approval all around. “So what’s that number?”

“We don’t know yet,” the Director of the NIH said. “We’re doing intensive sampling. We’ll have those numbers in two days.”

“What’s our best guess now?” the Strategist said in a tone that bordered on mockery.

“It would just be a shot in the dark,” I said.

“Then give me a fucking shot in the dark!” he spluttered. “Come on, people, am I the only one who sees icebergs floating out there?”

I said, “We can have our stats guy do an estimate tomorrow, maybe a couple of scenarios: best-case, worst-case, and so on.”

“Tomorrow? Am I talking to myself here?” the Strategist asked the room. “Call him now.”

“It’s Sunday morning,” I replied. “I have no idea how to reach him.”