The infectious disease world has been without DA Henderson for exactly 5 years and his presence is something that is needed more than ever. i don’t think there’s every going to be a time when we don’t need his mind, his knowledge, his experience, and his wisdom.
Each year on the anniversary of his death I pose questions to him that I wish I could hear him answer. His booming voice, his certainty, his ability to see things exactly for what they were drawing on decades and decades of battling — and annihilating — humankind’s greatest scourges are a far cry from what we hear and see today. Given the current environment, I just wish he could take over the whole infectious disease apparatus and extinguish this pandemic, recalibrate public health, and silence politicians whose continual incompetence is to blame for over 600,000 lives.
Each day I have questions for DA and these are a selection of my latest ones.
How do you counsel the population about a new infectious disease that is going to become endemic? How do you dial down people’s sense of alarm to one in which they learn to risk calculate? You did this, I am sure, with the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics, Legionnaire’s Disease, HIV, and countless others.
This is a related question. How do you transition people away from an abstinence only message to one of harm reduction? This must have been something you thought about in the early days of the HIV pandemic. Harm reduction works but was jettisoned early on in the pandemic and stunted people’s ability to risk calculate — a skill they need to acquire immediately as COVID-19 is not going away
What is the value of chasing mild cases of COVID-19 in vaccinated individuals? How is there an end game if that becomes the goal? During H1N1 in 2009, I remember how quickly things changed when the severity was downgraded. Isn’t that what vaccination is doing to COVID.
This is less of a question but more of a request to be regaled with another of your innumberable stories bout how you put a politician, a president, a dignitary in their place when they were pursuing a policy you didn’t think highly of. These are my favorite WWDAD thought experiments. I am smiling thinking of the time the Secretary of HHS was waiting to speak at a conference and wanted to interrupt your talk and someone approached the podium the Secretary was there and you replied deadpan “I know” and continued your talk. We could use a lot more of that now.
What is going on with those melioidosis cases in 4 different states in which there is no travel history or linkage? Where do you think they came from? An imported product? A real mystery that is overshadowed by COVID
Is polio eradication in the new Afghanistan even possible? You were so skeptical it could be accomplished a decade ago and now the situation is way way worse. Should it be abandoned and just become part of regular disease control?
What do you think of the Ebola cases in the Ivory Coast? It’s the Zaire strain again not the Cote d’Ivoire or another strain. How do the different strains circulate ? How does one spillover and another doesn’t
These are just the first 7 out of an endless list of questions I have for DA. Tomorrow there’ll be a slew more new ones that occur to me.
One of the aspects of DA that is impossible for me to fully articulate is the feeling I got being around a mind like his. It was a feeling that allowed me to think that insoluble problems were soluble and that a human mind could tame the most wickedly virulent microorganisms.
If those of us that had the opportunity to work alongside him and be mentored by him could pool just a fraction of what he imparted to us, the world would look a lot different now. Emerging infectious diseases would be running scared with just a hint of our commander-in-chief.