A new idea for how to fight pandemics came to David Fedson as he walked through Lausanne on a sunny spring afternoon in 2004. That a global catastrophe was on Fedson’s mind even as he made his way along the Swiss city’s scenic streets was not unusual. Fedson, who studied medicine at Yale and trained at Johns Hopkins, had served on a number of national vaccination committees in the United States.

Prior to his retirement in 2002, he’d been the director of medical affairs at the now defunct French vaccine company Aventis Pasteur MSD, where he’d helped to launch an international pandemic vaccine supply task force. A global catastrophe had been on his mind for much of the previous 30 years.

If Fedson was uniquely knowledgeable about the importance of vaccines in fighting pandemics, he was also uniquely aware of the limitations of the approach. He knew that the doses of a vaccine needed to fight a deadly new virus, like the H5N1 “bird flu” that had resurfaced in 2003, would far surpass the world’s industrial capacity. Antiviral drugs, if they worked at all, would be in short supply in wealthy countries. Poorer countries would be left to fend for themselves. It wasn’t a problem of molecular biology, Fedson told a biosecurity journal, but of arithmetic.

By 2004, Fedson, now 82, had reached a scientific dead end. But, as he walked through Lausanne, his thoughts rerouted sharply. If it would never be possible to stop a pandemic viral infection with vaccines and antivirals in some countries, maybe the virus itself was the wrong thing to treat. Maybe it made more sense to treat people’s bodies, once they became infected, so that they could withstand whatever the virus had in store for them.

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There would never be vaccines available on the first day of a pandemic, at least not for the vast majority of people on the planet, but there were already cheap generic drugs that appeared to act on the very cellular mechanisms that malfunction in deadly respiratory infections. The supply chains needed to distribute these drugs to hundreds of countries were already in place. And the generic drugs were already known to be safe, meaning that if one or more proved effective, it could be rolled out immediately without the risks of unanticipated side effects that come with newer drugs.

One drug might bolster the delicate cells that line the inner surfaces of our blood vessels so that they would leak less fluid into the lungs, another could dampen the overactive immune response, a third might enhance metabolic function throughout the body. The virus would keep landing its blows, but, like a resilient boxer leaning against the ropes, the body would endure for one more round, long enough for its own immune system to win the bout.

Ever since the idea came to him, Fedson, an American who lives in the countryside of Eastern France with his wife, has been a literal voice in the wilderness. He says he has repeatedly discussed his ideas with officials at WHO and the CDC. He has reached out to private charities and has written one scientific article and “letter to the editor” after another, calling for the experiments that would put his idea to the test.

While some generic drugs seem promising based on population and laboratory studies, the randomized clinical trials that could actually determine whether Fedson’s plan could save lives have never been done. Until about a month ago, very few people seemed interested in Fedson’s thinking at all. Then, late last year, some 15 years after Fedson’s memorable walk through Lausanne, people in central China starting dying of a mysterious respiratory illness.