Placebo Virus

Promising a cure-even hinting at a cure-will inflame the desperate.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Dean Worster barged into the office, pulled Professor Jordan from his desk chair by the lapels of his lab coat, and slammed him against a bookcase. Piles of journals cascaded to the floor. “What is going on out there?” demanded the Dean.

“I can explain!” Jordan held his hands out placatingly. Despite being six inches shorter, the Dean possessed considerable physical threat.

“Explain why a mob is besieging the Science building.”

Glass shattered as something broke a window down the hall.

“It’s the Placebo Virus Project, do you remember it?” asked Jordan.

“No.”

“You authorized it. People with autoimmune syndromes sometimes have symptom relief when they catch a cold or some other infection. We’re developing a virus which will trigger the immune system, but not cause any damage to the body. It should help with mitigating symptoms.”

“Where’d the mob come from?”

Jordan bent his knees a little to ease the strain on his lab coat. “The first prototype is ready for testing in a human. The Institutional Review Board gave permission for a study with six subjects. I’d asked for twenty, but they cut it back. So I posted in a local support group that we wanted volunteers, apply in person here at ten in the morning. First six to show up will be the study.”

Dean Worster looked at his Patek Philippe. It was 9:47. “You have more than six.”

“The group reposted our ad in a lot of other support groups. Some worldwide. These people are suffering, just a glimpse of hope has them so excited they want to give it a try.”

A campus police officer with sergeant’s stripes came to the door. He eyed Worster’s grip on Jordan but didn’t comment. “Sir, do you know if you can solve the problem soon? We can’t hold them much longer. I’ll have to call in the County SWAT Team, or just pull back and let them in the building?”

The Dean glared at the cop. “What, a bunch of sick old women are defeating your strong officers?”

“Sir, those canes can smart. They’re drawing blood. The boys can’t bring themselves to hit back. Plus, I have one man down with a broken leg. Those electric wheelchairs pack a wallop.”

“Professor Jordan is working on solving the problem. What is your solution?”

“That’s what I was doing when you—” Jordan hesitated, then chose “came in” rather than “assaulted me.”

“Oh?”

“I was emailing the IRB to request more test subjects.”

“An email? How forceful. The chairman is one floor up. Let’s go.”

Sweeping professor and cop along, the Dean charged up the stairs. The IRB chairman was in his office, watching the riot. His exalted status carried a window office. He flinched back as a bottle bounced off the glass. Fortunately, at this height the missile didn’t have enough energy to break it.

“There you are! This is your fault, Venkmann!” proclaimed the Dean.

“What? I’ve done nothing!”

“Yes, that’s the problem. Always is. Now you’re going to do something to fix it.” The Dean explained what he wanted, starting with Professor Jordan’s original request, and going on to include the several thousands of volunteers outside in stages.

“I can’t approve that by myself. It would take a vote of the board.”

“Call them!”

“No, it has to be a scheduled meeting with at least forty-eight hours notice.”

Dean Worster went around Venkmann’s desk, backing the man into the corner. “We will have approval by ten. Or the three of us will carry you out through the front lobby, tell the mob you are the man responsible for preventing them from signing up for the study, and throw you to them.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

Professor Jordan had never seen such an evil grin on the Dean before, not even in budget meetings.

“I’ll . . . I’ll make some calls.”

“You do that, Chairman Venkmann. Have approval by ten. Let me know if it’s not.” Worster swept out again, dragging the other two. He went up another flight of stairs, muttering, “Now logistics.”

They arrived at the Dean’s own office. His secretary sat at her desk in the foyer before it. “Good morning, Dean Worster. Is that mess outside taken care of yet?”

He gave her a bright smile. “Good morning, Julie. We’re partly there. I’m hoping you can help with it. We need a way to sign up all those people as volunteers. Do you have notebooks, clipboards, anything like that?”

Julie thought for a moment. “Do you need them signed up in a specific order, or is random acceptable?”

Worster turned to his subordinate. “Professor Jordan?”

“Um . . . random I guess. We’re well past taking the first six.”

She nodded. “Good.”

The secretary opened the bottom door in one of the storage cabinets against the office wall. After some rummaging, she emerged with a stack of cylindrical objects and heaved them onto her desk. “Raffle tickets. Purchasing makes us buy them in these ungodly lots. Should be four thousand plus the partial left over from the Christmas party. Tell them to put their contact information on their entries and keep the receipts. We’ll post the winning numbers.”

Dean Worster wore the biggest smile Jordan had ever seen on him. “Thank you, Julie. That’s perfect.”

Professor Jordan found himself carrying the ticket rolls while the Dean took the package of pens Julie had extracted from another cabinet. They went down the stairs as fast as they safely could.

The front lobby was rather battered. The floor to ceiling glass windows were cracked or smashed. A line of campus police stood before the doors, using their nightsticks to block canes aimed at faces and shins.

The mob didn’t look like a typical campus protest. They were almost all older than the students, many older than the faculty. No signs. The T-shirts all had slogans, but rather than political catchphrases they said, ‘Team Autoimmune: Nothing can kick my ass but me’ and ‘All We Want Is For You To Believe Us’ and ‘Autoimmune Disease: One Star, Would Not Recommend’ and similar jokes.

Dean Worster snagged a wood chair from against the wall and carried it up to the line of cops. He placed it right behind them. He turned to face Jordon. “Up you go, son. Give them your recruiting pitch.”

Professor Jordan eyed the chair warily, considered the threat Worster had made to Venkmann, and decided making a speech was the safest option. He clambered on the chair, putting a hand on the nearest cop’s shoulder for balance.

The cop eyed him, but kept his nightstick level.

The crowd eased up a bit, looking at the new arrival.

“Hi! I’m Professor Mike Jordan. I’m the Principal Investigator for the Placebo Virus Project. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

As he’d hoped, that drew a few laughs from the crowd.

“We’re hoping this can be a treatment for autoimmune disorders. Please note the word ‘hope.’ This is not a medicine. This is not something we’re asking for FDA approval for. This is pure basic research, trying something and seeing what happens. It could just kill the people we administer it to.”

Good, no laughs at that.

“The experiments in mice have gone well. That’s why we’re willing to experiment on humans. But this will be just that—experiments. We’re doing this to learn something. We may learn that our experimental virus kills people. We may learn it causes symptoms worse than what we’re trying to cure.”

Someone yelled, “It can’t be worse than what I have now!”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” snapped Jordan. “Things can go badly. Now. It worked for the mice. So I’m willing to try it on humans. I wouldn’t do that if I thought it would be bad. But I can’t make promises.”

Deep breath. “The concept is that since autoimmune disorders are your own immune system attacking your body, if we give it some work to do that will keep it from making those attacks. This is going to be hard to calibrate. Not enough work, the immune system keeps attacking you. Too much work, you’re actually sick from our virus. The only way to calibrate will be trying it on people and seeing what happens.

“This is why our Institutional Review Board, the people who make sure we’re behaving ethically, wanted to limit the number of test subjects. Your . . . enthusiasm has convinced them to allow more volunteers into the program.”

The crowd broke into cheers.

“Please, let me finish. We’ll let everyone sign up. We’ll choose people randomly for different stages of the testing. Each stage will have more people. If test results are good, we can start the next stage quickly. If people are hurt, or we have to develop a new virus, it will take longer between stages.”

An old woman called, “I could die still on the waiting list!”

Jordan didn’t flinch. “I’m sorry, but yes. There’s going to be a long wait for some of you. This is an early stage project. We need to scale it up slowly, or we won’t be able to use the data.”

An euphemism for ‘I don’t want to risk killing more people than I have to.’

He glanced back, saw the cops were now behind him holding raffle ticket rolls and pens. “We usually like to be fancier than this about signing people up, but you’ve rushed us. I hope some of you brought pens, we don’t have enough to go around. Each of you get a pair of tickets. Fill out the one with your contact information, keep the other. When we select a group of volunteers, we’ll contact you. We will also post selected numbers on our web page, in case we can’t read your handwriting. Start handing them out, gentlemen.”

Each cop tore off a pair from his roll and held it out. Eager hands snatched them away. The crowd started to churn, as those with tickets moved back to find a quiet space to fill out the form and others pressed forward to get their tickets.

“Professor!”

Jordan turned carefully around on the chair.

Julie was there with several other secretaries holding plastic boxes.

“Oh, right.” Jordan turned back to the crowd. “When you’ve filled out your ticket, please put in one of the boxes these wonderful ladies are holding.”

With that, the riot was over and there were just a bunch of people taking tickets. Dean Worster found some lab techs to take over handing out the tickets. When the cops faded out of sight the tension went away. People were almost cheerful. Professor Jordan found himself fielding questions from people who’d read his earlier papers on synthetic virus development, the kind of questions he could only answer with, “We don’t know,” or “There’s an experiment planned to examine that.”

Shortly after noon, all the aspiring test subjects had left, leaving only wheelchair tire marks in the grass and less trash than a typical campus protest.

Jordan wandered back inside and collapsed into one of the comfy chairs in the lobby.

Dean Worster came by to loom over him. “Good work.”

“Thanks.”

“Now you’d best get some solid results, or we’ll have a real riot here.”

“I can’t make promises.” If Jordan closed his eyes he didn’t have to look up the Dean’s nose.

“Promise me if the experiment fails, you’ll give me enough warning that I can be out of town when the lynch mob shows up.”

“Fine.”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.