Capitol Hill Flu Briefing Was No Trick, and No Treat

Public-health types are always warning of doom and asking for more government spending, $5 billion to $16 billion in this case. It's possible that the virus will not learn to spread easily among humans, and it's likely the virus will grow less lethal if it does. But the medical experts, well-credentialed all, were alarmingly unified in their alarm. Their dire warnings proved gripping enough to silence the usual back-of-the-room chatter.

"This is real," said Shelley A. Hearne, executive director of the Trust for America's Health, as she kicked off the event.

"Death rates approaching this order of magnitude are unprecedented for any epidemic disease," contributed O'Toole.

This was difficult to top, but Poland tried. "I want to emphasize the certainty that a pandemic will occur," he began. "When this happens, time will be described, for those left living, as before and after the pandemic."

"The key to our survival, in my opinion, and to the continuity of government," he said, is vaccination. And "we do not have a licensed or approved vaccine."

Up next, Isaac Weisfuse, the New York City deputy health commissioner, provided some logistical fears to add to the medical ones. "We'll be inundated," he said. "We have no [antiviral] Tamiflu. We have no vaccine. . . . There is no cache of respirators."

There was little left unsaid for speakers lower in the program. Jeffrey Levi of George Washington University prophesied a panic of "millions and millions of people" trying to get antiviral prescriptions filled. Hanna struggled for superlatives: "We haven't even begun to conceive of, to understand, to comprehend what that may mean for our workplace."

That was ominous, but it did not approach O'Toole's apocalyptic fervor: "uniquely virulent . . . hospitals will be quickly overwhelmed . . . this time of peril . . . quarantine is not going to work."

O'Toole's speech quieted the room. People stopped munching on their smoked chicken. Moderator Hearne took the microphone: "And have a good day, right?"