The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston Read Free Book Online

doctors.
    Wehrle went down the hall to a double cubicle that was occupied by a tall, assertive medical doctor named Donald Ainslie Henderson. Everyone called Henderson “D.A.,” including his wife and children. D. A. Henderson was the head of the Smallpox Eradication Program. He was six feet two inches tall, with a seamed, rugged, blocky face, thick, straight, brown hair brushed on a side part, wide shoulders, big-knuckled hands, and a gravelly voice. Wehrle and Henderson discussed strategy, and Henderson made some telephone calls. The young man in the hospital at Meschede could start an outbreak across Europe. Henderson told Wehrle to go to Germany. Wehrle got a taxi to the airport, and that afternoon he was on a flight to Düsseldorf. Meanwhile, Henderson made arrangements to have one hundred thousand doses of smallpox vaccine shipped from Geneva to Germany immediately.
    WHILE PAUL WEHRLE was en route to Meschede, Dr. Richter and the German health authorities got Peter Los out of the St. Walberga Hospital—fast. The police closed off the hospital, and a squad of attendants dressed in plastic biohazard suits and with masks over their faces ran inside the building and wrapped Los in a plastic biocontainment bag that had breathing holes in it. He lay in agony inside the bag. The evac team rushed him out of the building on a gurney and loaded the bag into a biosafety ambulance, and with siren wailing and lights flashing, it took him thirty miles along winding roads to the Mary’s Heart Hospital in the small town of Wimbern. This hospital had a newly built isolation unit that was designed to handle extremely contagious patients. The Wimbern biocontainment unit was a one-story building with a flat roof, sitting in the middle of the woods. They placed Los on a silky-smooth plastic mat designed for burn victims, and he hovered on the edge of death. Construction crews began putting up a chain-link fence around the building.
    That same day, Dr. Richter and Dr. Posch organized vaccinations for everyone at St. Walberga, patients and staff alike. They were given a special German vaccine that was scraped into their upper arms with a metal device called a rotary lancet, and then the doctors and their colleagues conducted interviews, trying to find out who had come into contact with Peter Los. Anyone who had seen Los’s face was assumed to have breathed smallpox particles. Twenty-two people were taken to the Wimbern hospital and put into quarantine. Everyone who had been in the south wing of St. Walberga but had not seen Los’s face was placed under quarantine inside the hospital, and they were ordered to remain there for eighteen days. Folding cots were brought in and set up in the bathrooms, where the medical staff slept. There wasn’t enough room to hold everyone, so the authorities took over a nearby youth hostel and several small hotels in the mountains and put people there, too. After a hospital worker escaped from quarantine and went home to his family, the authorities boarded up the doors of St. Walberga and nailed them shut, and stationed a police cordon around the hospital.
    Paul Wehrle arrived in Meschede on the evening of January 16th, having traveled by train from Düsseldorf. He was met at the station by Richter and Posch. (Richter did the driving, since Posch had lost an arm in the Second World War.) They took Wehrle to a hotel, and they stayed up most of the night, planning a quarantine and vaccination campaign. The Germans wanted to vaccinate people with the special German vaccine, but Wehrle did not trust it. It was a killed vaccine that the German government had been using for many years, but the WHO doctors believed it didn’t give people much immunity. “The German vaccine had one small problem. It didn’t work,” Wehrle claims. “It was as close to worthless as a vaccine can be, only I couldn’t say that to the Germans and live, because they tended to be a bit protective of their vaccine.” He liked and