The second paragraph explained that the White House was going to “extraordinary measures” to procure sufficient doses of Dormigen to deal with the virus threat. Near the bottom of the page, the release explained that Capellaviridae was “spread by the bite of a common dust mite found in most—” I stopped reading. “We can’t say ‘spread.’ You’ve got to redo this.”
“It’s gone out,” she said, mildly annoyed, as if I did not appreciate the magnitude of what was going on. “I was told to get something out immediately.”
“We can’t say ‘spread,’” I repeated. “We cannot have people thinking that they’re going to catch this thing. It’s not contagious… You’re either going to get it, or you’re not. We can’t—”
“I can do an update. What am I supposed to say?” she asked.
“I don’t have my phone, so you need to change the contact number anyway.”
“Fine. Tell me what to write.”
“Just say…” I was thinking as I spoke, but not fast enough. “Say it’s not contagious,” I instructed. “Leave the dust mite out. Just tell people… say it’s not contagious. Say that nearly all Americans are infected by—no, don’t say ‘infected.’ Say that many Americans are hosts to Capellaviridae, and in the vast majority of cases, the virus is benign.” She was just staring at me. “Write this down,” I said sharply. Neither she nor I had a pen. As I patted my jacket pockets, the guard, who had been standing near us the whole time, offered a ballpoint. I continued, “Say that we are—that scientists, the nation’s top scientists, are working around the clock to determine why Capellaviridae turns virulent—”
“No one knows what virulent means.”
“Fine, say ‘dangerous.’”
She offered her phone to me. “Take this,” she said. “We’ll use my number as the contact number on the updated release.” Just as she handed me her phone, my secure phone beeped with a text from the Chief of Staff: Get to the CNN studio. The Communications Assistant read the text at the same time I did. As I stood there paralyzed, she grabbed her phone back from me. “I’ll get you a car,” she said.
44.
ON BOARD AIR FORCE ONE, THE PRESIDENT AND SENIOR staff monitored the news after the release of the White House statement. News directors all over the world had been waiting for any information from the White House, so they rushed out the first thing to come over the wire. The revised statement, issued after my exchange with the Communications Assistant, was ignored. Almost no one noticed the absence of the word “spread” in the second release, and once we had mentioned the dust mite, there was no way of unringing that bell. Sure enough, CNN broadcast a huge graphic of the North American dust mite, just like the one Tie Guy had been so enamored of days earlier. Prime-time anchor Linda Schuham was alone on camera, presumably having been roused from bed and rushed through makeup. (When I appeared on camera forty-five minutes later, I would not look so put-together.) The electronic banner below the anchor desk read, “Bioterror Attack?”
“At least now we have a question mark,” the Strategist commented sardonically. The Communications Director was calling news outlets, one after another, demanding that they remove any reference to terrorism. His smashed phone—which had been cleaned up, but for the occasional piece that turned up on the carpeted floor—was turning out to be a huge problem. That phone had all his contact numbers; worse, it was the number recognized by the people who needed to be answering his calls. Now he was fighting his way through layers of gatekeepers with each call, screaming things like, “I’m standing next to the President, you fucking peon! Put me on with your producer now or you will never work in the news business again!”[9]
Fox was now running a banner at the bottom of the screen: “White House denies terror attack.” In focusing on the terror angle, however, we had made no progress in disabusing the nation of the belief that Capellaviridae was spreading. By six a.m. on the East Coast, over two thousand school districts had canceled classes. Universities were telling students to stay in their dorm rooms and avoid common areas—even as students rushed to common areas to watch the news warning them to stay out of common areas.[10] Americans in the Midwest woke up to reports that most schools and workplaces in the East were closed, further embedding the notion that some kind of plague was sweeping across the nation. Fox News cut to a “Contagious Disease Expert” via satellite, a well-coiffed woman sitting at a desk in an academic office. She explained to viewers, “The dust mite bites an infected person and then bites someone else, thereby passing along the deadly virus.” The Strategist, holding the remote control, was shaking his head no as he listened.
“What advice would you offer?” the anchor asked earnestly.
“Obviously you stay away from other people, since we don’t know who is already infected.”
“And what about the dust mites?”
“Vacuum anyplace they might be found. Wash all sheets and towels in hot water and bleach.”
“Would it be better to burn them?” the anchor asked.
“That’s a good option, if you can do it safely,” the expert advised.
The President roared,[11] “Where’s our guy? Why are we not on-screen?”
The Communications Director looked at his watch and answered, “He’ll be up on CNN in about four minutes.”
The Chief of Staff said, “Mr. President, we are going to be in Hawaii in an hour. We have broadcast facilities set up at the air base. We need to start drafting your remarks.”
“I want to see this,” the President said, looking at the television.
The Strategist changed the channel to CNN, where the anchor was talking to a terrorism expert, and then changed it again, this time to MSNBC, which was showing aerial footage of a massive backup on the George Washington Bridge as drivers rushed to leave New York City. “Where do they think they’re going?” the Strategist asked no one in particular. Of course, we now know the answer. Many of these drivers would show up at campgrounds in Vermont and Maine—not willing to risk a motel—where they set up tents or slept in their cars, often completely unprepared for the cold. A young couple from New Jersey wandered into the woods north of Bangor, where there was still snow on the ground, and died of exposure hours later. Hikers found their bodies in June. This urge to drive somewhere was one of the stranger aspects of the Outbreak. An urge to move. To do something. And then there were the gun deaths. A high proportion of Americans believed that repelling Capellaviridae was somehow like fighting zombies. More than three hundred people died from gun accidents in the three days after the Capellaviridae news broke. How exactly was one supposed to fight a lurking virus with a shotgun? People tried, apparently. There were also tragic homicides as paranoid individuals shot neighbors who had come to check in or offer help. Another fifty or so people died in house fires after they tried to burn “contaminated” sheets and towels indoors, sometimes in the bathtub.
Last year Princeton University convened an interdisciplinary conference on the Outbreak: public health officials, virologists, national security experts, and so on. I spoke on some panels, but I also sat in on sessions with scholars who had examined the crisis through a different lens. A psychology professor from the University of Illinois[12] spoke about the unique nature of the Outbreak, namely that all Americans perceived themselves at risk, but none, save our political leaders, were in a position to act. One passage from her paper (which she summarized at the conference) has stuck with me, as it helps to make sense of the country’s utter craziness in those first hours:
10
Sociologists would later note a sharp reversal in a decades-long trend: Americans were more likely to gather news related to the Outbreak in those early days on television rather than from the Internet. They speculated that the nature of the crisis was such that humans felt an unconscious need to share the news with other people as the situation unfolded.
11
The President himself described “roaring” at aides throughout the Outbreak: Robert Evan Steans,
12
Simran Shankardass, “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There: The Emotional Need for Volition During the Outbreak,