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

respected the German experts and didn’t want to offend them, but he gently urged them to give everyone at the hospital a second vaccination with the WHO vaccine. It couldn’t hurt to have two vaccinations and might help, he said, and they agreed. He also persuaded them to use the WHO vaccine for the larger vaccination in Meschede.
    The WHO maintained a stockpile of millions of doses of smallpox vaccine in freezers in a building in downtown Geneva they called the Gare Frigorifique—the Refrigeration Station. Much of the vaccine in the freezers had been donated to the Smallpox Eradication Program by the Soviet Union. The traditional vaccine for smallpox is a live virus called vaccinia, which is a poxvirus that is closely related to smallpox. Live vaccinia infects people, but it does not make most people very sick, though some have bad reactions to it, and a tiny fraction of them can become extremely sick and can die.
    A staff member from the Gare Frigorifique drove a couple of cardboard boxes full of glass ampules of the Russian vaccine to the Geneva airport—one hundred thousand doses took up almost no space. The vaccine did not need to be kept frozen, because after it was thawed it would remain potent for weeks. Thousands of smallpox-vaccination needles were also shipped to Germany. They were a special type of forked needle called a bifurcated needle, which has twin prongs.
    As quickly as possible, the German health authorities organized a mass vaccination for smallpox all around the Meschede area. This was known as a ring-vaccination containment. The smallpox doctors intended to encircle Peter Los and his contacts with a firewall of immunized people, so that the tiny blaze of variola at the center would not find any more human tinder and would not roar to life in its host species.
    Meschede came to a halt. People left their jobs and homes, and lined up at schools to be vaccinated, bringing their children with them. A fear of pox—a
Pocken-angst—
spread across Germany faster than the virus. People who drove in cars with license plates from Meschede found that gas stations wouldn’t serve them, nor would restaurants. Meschede had become a city of pox.
    Nurses and doctors gave out the vaccine. A person who was working as a vaccinator would stand by the line of people, holding a glass ampule of the vaccine and a small plastic holder full of bifurcated needles. The vaccinator would break the neck of the ampule and shake a needle out of the holder. She would dip the needle into the vaccine and then jab it into a person’s upper arm about fifteen times, making bloody pricks. You could have blood running down your arm if the vaccination was done correctly, for the bifurcated needle had to break the skin thoroughly. Each glass ampule was good for at least twenty vaccinations. As people passed in the line, a vaccinator could do hundreds of vaccinations in an hour. Each needle was put into a container after it had been used on one person. At the end of the day, all the needles were boiled and sterilized to be used again the next day.
    Each successfully vaccinated person became infected with vaccinia. They developed a single pustule on the upper arm at the site of the vaccination. The pustule was an ugly blister that leaked pus, and oozed and crusted, and many people felt woozy and a little feverish for a couple of days afterward, for vaccinia was replicating in their skin, and it is not a very nice virus. Meanwhile, their immune systems went into states of screaming alarm. Vaccinia and smallpox are so much alike that our immune systems have trouble telling them apart. Within days, a vaccinated person’s resistance to smallpox begins to rise. Today, many adults over age thirty have a scar on their upper arm, which is the pockmark left by the pustule of a smallpox vaccination that they received in childhood, and some adults can remember how much the pustule hurt. Unfortunately, the immune system’s “memory” of the vaccinia