Maurice Hilleman Predicts a Deadly Pandemic
In April of 1957, a new strain of a lethal respiratory virus emerged in East Asia, which caught local health authorities completely off guard. Today, in the age of Covid-19, the scenario sounds frighteningly familiar, and while more than an estimated 1.1 million would die worldwide, the early warning response by microbiologist Maurice Hilleman has been credited with potentially saving a million American lives.
Dr. Maurice Hilleman
Heading up the influenza monitoring effort at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Dr. Maurice Hilleman saw the problem coming and prepared the United States ahead of time.
“This one has the potential to become a pandemic, and it would soon be upon us.”
Dr. Maurice Hilleman
Believing he was looking at a novel influenza strain, Hilleman arranged for the U.S. military to ship samples of the pathogen from its origins in Hong Kong to his laboratory in Washington, D.C. For five days and nights, his team tested the virus against blood from thousands of Americans, discovering that the H2N2 virus was unlike any flu that humans were known to have encountered in the past.
US Government Dismisses Hilleman’s Prediction
Hilleman moved quickly to alert the government, going so far as to predict that the virus would hit the U.S. during the first week of September, right when schools were about to reopen. In the intervening years since the Spanish Flu of 1918, however, health officials had lost sight of the deadly power of aggressive strains of influenza viruses, prompting the U.S. Health Service to turn a blind eye on Hilleman’s warnings.
“I was declared crazy,” Hilleman would later recall. Fortunately, Hilleman held clout in the pharmaceutical industry, and after the government refused to act, Hilleman sent H2N2 samples to the six largest pharmaceutical companies, who responded by developing vaccines against the contagion.
While 116,000 American lives would be lost during the pandemic of 1957 and 1958, Hilleman’s swift and perceptive action against government inaction led one researcher to attest in a New York Times article, that Hilleman’s persistence saved the lives of one million Americans, making Maurice Hilleman a one-man army against the spread of pandemic disease.