How a premier US drug company became a coronavirus 'super spreader'
The Biogen meeting was one of the earliest examples of how the virus spreads.
New York Times
Last Updated: Apr 14, 2020, 08.46 AM IST
By Farah Stockman and Kim Barker
BOSTON: On the first Monday in March,
Michel Vounatsos, chief executive of the drug company
Biogen, appeared in good spirits. The company's new Alzheimer's drug was showing promise after years of setbacks. Revenues had never been higher.
Onstage at an elite health care conference in Boston, Vounatsos touted the drug's "remarkable journey." Asked if the
coronavirus that was ravaging China would disrupt supply chains and upend the company's big plans, Vounatsos said no.
"So far, so good," he said.
But even as he spoke, the virus was already silently spreading among Biogen's senior executives, who did not know they had been infected days earlier at the company's annual leadership meeting.
Biogen employees, most feeling healthy, boarded planes full of passengers. They drove home to their families.
And they carried the virus to at least six states, the District of Columbia and three countries, outstripping the ability of local public health officials to trace the spread.
The Biogen meeting was one of the earliest examples in the U.S. of what epidemiologists call "superspreading events" of coronavirus, where a small gathering of people leads to a huge number of infections. Unlike the most infamous clusters of cases stemming from a nursing home outside Seattle or a 40th birthday party in Connecticut, the Biogen cluster happened at a meeting of top health care professionals whose job it was to fight disease, not spread it.
"
The smartest people in health care and drug development — and they were completely oblivious to the biggest thing that was about to shatter their world," said John Carroll, editor of Endpoints News, which covers the biotech industry...
