Sublime

the federal government’s Bioshield program asked to screen hundreds of the rare mushroom strains in Stamets’s collection and found several that showed strong activity against SARS, smallpox, herpes, and bird and swine flu. (If this strikes you as implausible, remember that penicillin is the product of a fungus.)

she noticed when the CDC made a curious pivot, from downplaying the virus to behaving as if it never could have been contained. For the better part of two months, they’d repeated the same mantra: the risk to Americans is low, and there is no evidence of transmission inside the country. That fiction ended on February 25, when the CDC’s lab in

At the same time, a large-scale global epidemic—a pandemic—cannot be discounted. Vaccines cannot anticipate specific strains of flu, and it is possible that a particularly virulent form could emerge one season and quickly go global. By the time the influenza virus had been identified, it likely would have spread and taken root. During the Spanish

“If we aren’t able to set aside some personal freedoms to keep a million or more people from dying needlessly from a novel virus, and to keep our health care system from imploding, then heaven help us when climate change hits and the economy crumbles due to our hitting a series of environmental limits.”55