Virus

By Johan Fundin

Inspired by author and scientist Johan Fundin's first-hand experience of frontline clinical work at a major metropolitan hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A new aggressive COVID-19 strain is wiping out Earth's human population. On a night of thunder and lightning, a man-made spacecraft from the futur

• Language: English
• Publisher: Asioni Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781999981778

Johan Fundin

Dr. Johan Fundin writes medical techno-thrillers and science fiction. He has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the top research-intensive Uppsala University and a background as a scientist at national and international laboratories and high-tech research facilities in several countries. Also, he has extensive experience of clinical work at a major metropolitan hospital.

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Praise for Johan Fundin and his

novels of suspense

Thriller lovers will be intrigued.

—San Francisco Book Review

Fundin spins a mesmerizing narrative.

—The US Review of Books

Johan Fundin excels in capturing the elements of top-notch sci-fi writers.

—Midwest Book Review

Fundin takes readers on a vertigo-inducing trip … Fans of Robin Cook will be spellbound.

—Kirkus Reviews

Wildly entertaining.

—Seattle Book Review

Michael Crichton scientific exploration.

—Hollywood Book Reviews

A fantastic author.

—Pacific Book Review

Titles by Johan Fundin

DISORDER

SCHIZOID

SPECIES

VIRUS

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ASIONI PRESS

347 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

VIRUS

Copyright © 2022 by Johan Fundin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by RL Sather

e-ISBN 978-1-9999817-7-8

ISBN 978-1-9999817-6-1 (print)

BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General | FICTION / Medical

Produced in the United States of America

Table of Contents

TOMORROW

COVID-19 DEATH TOLL: 76.9% OF WORLD POPULATION AND COUNTING …

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COVID-19 DEATH TOLL: 82.1% OF WORLD POPULATION, AND COUNTING …

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COVID-19 DEATH TOLL: 88.7% OF WORLD POPULATION, AND COUNTING …

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COVID-19 DEATH TOLL: 94.3% OF WORLD POPULATION, AND COUNTING …

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COVID-19 DEATH TOLL: 99.7% OF WORLD POPULATION, AND COUNTING …

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Virus is inspired by my first-hand experience of conducting fit testing of air-purifying respirators (air-filtration masks) for hundreds of students and fellow frontline clinical staff at a busy metropolitan hospital before and during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

J.F.

The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus.

– Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D.

Nobel Prize laureate

TOMORROW

COVID-19 DEATH TOLL:

76.9% OF WORLD POPULATION, AND COUNTING …

CURRENT GLOBAL POPULATION:

1.848 BILLION

1

The world fell apart the summer my wife-to-be and I moved to Chicago. I’m not implying a connection. As Giselle said, I only happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

My name is Dr. Raymond Lewis. I’m a biotech scientist at Monroe Medical Center, a stone’s throw from downtown. I specialize in high-tech systems for the operating room of the future, including 3D bioprinting, virtual reality technology, and genetic biorobotics.

Giselle is an anesthesiologist with the same employer. No one but Giselle calls me Raymond. To almost everybody else I’m Ray. A few buffoons call me X-Ray.

Scientists like myself are tracking changes in the virus that causes COVID-19. Our research is aiding other experts to see whether specific strains spread quicker than others, how they might impact our wellbeing, and how effective various vaccines might be.

Exponential growth accelerates over time and its power is astonishing. Many people misjudge how fast case numbers rise, a mistake known as the exponential-growth bias, and while it appears imaginary, it has overwhelming effects on people’s behavior.

Scientists began to study the bias not until the late 2000s, with research revealing that most people assume most growth is linear, steering them to underestimate the velocity of exponential increase.

On February 25, 2020, 15 days before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, some researchers already anticipated unstoppable spread of the virus.

By March 27, 2020, less than 12 weeks since the new disease was first reported, the virus could have infected 90% of the planet’s population and killed 40 million people if no mitigation measures had been implemented.

As a clinical staff member at a major urban hospital both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought, in January 2021, that I had experienced the scariest atmosphere I would ever know as a professional. I was wrong. Something even more sinister lay in wait.

The new strain, Gemini, cheated every vaccination program around the globe. Experiments demonstrate how its genetic alteration makes our antibodies powerless at counteracting the pathogen. Even though change is what viruses do, I couldn’t imagine how hostile this new variant turned out to be.

Gemini was humanity’s belated alarm clock. With three-fourths of people wiped out in less than two weeks, it is an unfathomable world for survivors to endure.

For the moment, the population of the remains of the United States is 50 million, the same as it was back in 1880. The current population of Europe is a mere 125 million.

No more than two million people live in metropolitan areas like New York City, London or Tokyo—and those population figures are diminishing.

Biotech firms are undertaking a colossal campaign to combat COVID-19. Something pioneering in science and bioengineering must be done, again, and soon, or humankind as a species is doomed to extinction.

With its supercharged aggressiveness and fatality, killing billions of people, Gemini surprised even the most experienced and jaded virologists and epidemiologists.

If mankind went extinct tomorrow, what would happen? What sort of planet would we be leaving behind? 99.9% of the species that have ever existed on Earth have perished, the vast majority in natural disasters.

The human species has never encountered an event of such immensity—until now.

It was my biotechnology background that helped me find a cure for COVID-19 back in June 2020, a feat I didn’t mention in my application for the Chicago position.

The reason I left it out was that my discovery wasn’t official, and still isn’t, and therefore, it has never been implemented anywhere. I had violated a politically correct route through the official drug development phases, as the lawyers told me.

Two kinds of COVID-19 competitions are on at the same time: a race for new vaccines and a race for new treatments. Often, I feel speed is pivotal. I tend to listen to my professional instincts. Experience is an asset as long as it doesn’t invite complacency.

As an experimentalist scientist, I’m an accustomed risktaker. Frontline healthcare is a never-ending battle. Dangers are ubiquitous. Time is precious. Decisions are forced on the spur of the moment. I’ve put the ordeal surrounding my cure formula behind me. I’m busy again in a new regime.

I love the Windy City and its citizens, and so does Giselle. This is the home of the deep-dish pizza, we’ve learned. And unlike apple pie, pizza is still available in America.

We’re Chicagoans but feel like tourists in our own neighborhood. We laugh about that.

We own a beautiful home in Lincoln Park. Each day is a new adventure, a journey of discovery. Even in the darkest of times, we must allow ourselves to find some level of happiness. Giselle makes me happy.

Sometimes I’m paranoid. When everything seems fine within this new-world frame of reference, I get scared. Why? Because if things can’t get any better, they can only get worse.

2

Monroe Medical Center is a multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art mega-hospital with physicians and nursing staff and scientists representing every medical specialty imaginable.

As a biotech specialist, I think I’ve found my dream appointment. MMC is one of the most technically advanced hospitals in the remains of the COVID-19-apocalyptic world.

Both Giselle and I are thrilled to work at this super hospital. Silverstein Businessweek dubbed Monroe Medical Center the billion-dollar hospital of the future.

This ultra-modern complex prides itself on ingenious, self-regulating smart rooms, where wireless robotics document and transmit patients’ vital signs and extra particulars to the system’s electronic medical databases.

The hospital also boasts up-to-the-minute imaging resources and presents intra-operative teleconferencing technology.

To Giselle’s amazement and appreciation, the patient care tower uses a robotic drug-dispensing apparatus with the capacity of supplying up to 4,500 doses per day.

With its cybernated ORs and high-tech diagnostic fulcrum, MMC became the first out-and-out digital hospital in the Midwest.

Leading services comprise computer-aided navigation surgery, biocompatible artificial joint surgery, and bloodless spinal operations.

MMC surgeons do hundreds of robotic cases every year, using robotic technology to treat heart disease, urological cancer, uterine tumors, and other conditions.

The hospital promises the country’s most futuristic robotic ORs, providing patients the least invasive, safest surgical treatment for complicated conditions in any discipline.

Patient registration involves looking into a biometric camera for 2.8 seconds.

Other momentous touches include virtual-visit-enabling robotic telepresence tools and seminal UV robotic room disinfectant gadgets. In the day and age of the Gemini variant, to prevent the spread of the killer virus within the hospital, robots do all red-zone cleaning.

Despite the grim COVID-19 death rate, in light of today’s circumstances, MMC meets the transitional healthcare needs of Chicagoland, augmenting premises, adding clinical programs, and delivering service to the community’s dwindling and dying population.

Medical research is unceasingly pushing the boundaries of healthcare and redefining what is and isn’t feasible. MMC is steadily updating its facilities and services to offer the latest in high-tech medical care.

MMC appreciates a teaching and service cooperation with Monroe University School of Medicine, a unification that gives patients access to forefront clinical trials and stimulates an excellent patient care ambiance, academic inquiry, and unparalleled research.

The medical school employs influential investigators in the arenas of infectious diseases, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurosciences, epigenetics and epithelial biology, nanotechnology and biomedicine, etc.

MMC has opened LifeBeat, the largest biomedical academic research building in the United States, and is the speediest-growing research enterprise among all US medical schools, mirrored by swift climbing in National Institutes of Health funding.

LifeBeat provides crucial research space to continue MMC’s projected objectives. In this facility, scientists are trailblazing a future that will influence the practice of medicine and transfigure healthcare to the extent that is demanded and continuously estimated in the COVID-19-apocalyptic America.

Here, researchers will accelerate the pace of lifesaving medical science that fuels the local and national economy, in proximity to first-rate campus partners, and in a global city with unrivaled opportunities for biomedical commercialization and entrepreneurship.

At the beginning of the pandemic, healthcare industry spending rose at a dramatic rate, with vaccine and drug manufacturers escalating expenditure by up to 20%—weighty percentage increases on what were already massive R&D budgets.

The mantra went like this: invest now to reach science superpower status.

Today, with the killer virus sweeping the planet, I can’t say I’m aware of where all the pumped money is coming from. But then, it’s not my job to keep track of it.

Monroe University already pulls in more than $740 million in sponsored research funding each year. LifeBeat will enable the university to increase that by $180 million annually or $1.8 billion in the next decade with the additional space and investigators.

It has also created 2,790 new full-time jobs in the new space and is expected to generate an additional $530 million a year in economic activity in Chicagoland.

To earn national recognition, irrespective of a dooming pandemic, hospitals and healthcare organizations must demonstrate continuous proof of clinical excellence.

US Data Focus ranked Monroe Medical Center among America’s Best. MMC has established itself as the number one hospital in Illinois and a top-ten hospital in the US.

With or without COVID-19 on my mind round the clock, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. At least, that was what I thought before a stranger by the name of Marcel Auer contacted me.

COVID-19 DEATH TOLL:

82.1% OF WORLD POPULATION, AND COUNTING …

CURRENT GLOBAL POPULATION:

1.432 BILLION

3

I conducted my successful work on a COVID-19 cure (and before that, my experimental next-generation vaccines) at Dynamico, my little biotech firm with which I keep myself occupied in my precious spare time.

Giselle thinks I might have become too maverick for my own good. Why do you have to be such a modern-day renaissance man all the time, Raymond? I’m not sure I know what she’s talking about, but that’s fine.

While the world was first excited, and quite rightly so, about the groundbreaking mRNA technology and its application in COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing, I was already busy looking into second-generation vaccines based on futuristic technologies.

Scientists are aware there is room for improvement in everything they do, so it was out of curiosity that I, like other fellow researchers, looked beyond the initial set of vaccines on the market early on.

Vaccinology was already changing toward synthetic RNA platforms. At Dynamico, I used three visionary approaches: self-amplifying mRNA (SAM); protein subunit (PS); and designed protein nanoparticle (DPN).

Similar to the first mRNA vaccines, SAM delivers to human cells synthetic genetic material that contains information about the SARS-CoV-2 signature spike (S) protein, teaching the cells to produce fake copies of that protein to trigger an immune response.

The innovation with SAM is that it has been refashioned to turn the body’s cells into machines that crank out S proteins on their own, making booster shots superfluous.

PS delivers to human cells synthetic copies of the actual S protein itself (rather than a viral vector or genetic material like mRNA). Unlike the first approved mRNA vaccines, COVID-19 PS vaccines can be stored at common refrigeration temperature, making them far easier to handle and distribute.

Another snazzy trick with the PS method is the addition of an adjuvant to the vaccine formula, a compound that boosts the body’s immune response to the virus’s S protein.

Like the PS approach, a DPN vaccine transports to human cells synthetic copies of protein from SARS-CoV-2. But instead of injecting the whole S protein, I focused on the receptor-binding domain (RBD), the segment of the S protein which interacts with a cell.

I made a DPN vaccine where RBD proteins were affixed to spherical nanoparticles. Those nanoparticles functioned as vaccine carriers.

My premiere interest in vaccines then shifted to the intriguing field of therapeutic vaccines. A therapeutic COVID-19 vaccine would be delivered after a person contracts the disease, yet it would still function by boosting the immune system’s response to COVID-19.

In short, a therapeutic vaccine is a cure. And that was how I hit the scientific jackpot.

Under extreme circumstances, like the current pandemic, the FDA may allow unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.

For my COVID-19 cure formula, I did invoke emergency approval. As things turned out, my invocation was rejected. I don’t know why, and I doubt I’ll ever know.

Maybe someone biased had pulled some strings. A player with certain connections to companies with multibillion-dollar stakes in the race on finding a