As soon as Australia’s most famous medical scientist, the veterinary surgeon, immunologist and Nobel laureate Peter Doherty, answers his phone, it dawns on me that it is probably the worst time of day to call him.
It is 11am on a Tuesday morning. Eleven o’clock! We all know what that means. More grim news about New South Wales’ Covid-19 caseload and deaths. A premier wanting us not to dwell on infection numbers or the many more who will die but, counter-intuitively, on freedoms that might soon come with increased vaccination.
“It’s okay,” 80-year-old Doherty says in a gravelly voice down the line from Melbourne. “I don’t watch it. My wife [Penny] usually does and she debriefs me later … There is a certain sameness to it isn’t there? And moments of stunning irrationality.”
Doherty, awarded the Nobel in physiology or medicine in 1996 and named Australian of the Year in 1997, has, perhaps, the most evoked name in Australia right now, as a fractious federation focuses on how and when to release half its population from lockdown and reopen internal borders. For “Doherty” has become synonymous with “modelling”. Indeed, the Doherty Modelling is referenced thousands of times a day in politics and media – shorthand for the outline put forward by the Peter Doherty Institute (PDI) named in his honour (with characteristic modesty he wanted it to bear nomenclature of a big philanthropic donor rather than his own) and of which he is still a patron.
Doherty had effectively retired by the end of 2019, reducing his commitments to the institute to one day per week so he could work on what he intended to be his seventh non-fiction book, titled, curiously, Empire, War and Tennis – a story about his two tennis-playing servicemen uncles, and the obsession of empire with the original sport of kings. That manuscript – which he has since submitted – is a “non-science” departure from his other books, which include the popular The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize and the prescient How to Survive a Pandemic.
“Empire, War and Tennis … That’s what I was obsessed with and I was thinking I was going to write yet more general stuff rather than about science because I was getting a bit to the end of it. And then this whole thing opened up.”
The “whole thing” is, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic which presented in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 but did not become a cold reality in Australia until the last dozy days of January 2020, when the then chief commonwealth health officer Brendan Murphy announced the first Australian case.
Doherty’s plans for near-complete retirement went out the window. Drawing on his impressive skills as a science communicator, he wrote a series of articles for his institute’s website and a range of publications including Meanjin about virology, immunology and Australia’s Covid-19 response. Those articles form his recently published anthology, Peter Doherty – An insider’s plague year. Another science book – yes – but one that chronicles history in the making in a frightening and globally momentous year that has challenged Australian cohesion and public health more than any since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919/20.
In March 2020 he began participating in the institute’s thrice-weekly strategy meetings. This gave him immediate insight into the pressure the PDI was under not only in terms of studying the disease and helping to develop vaccines and treatments – but also in communicating about it.
In his own words he became a “junior journalist”, writing coherently, elegantly and entertainingly for a popular audience on the fact-based medical ins and outs of the virus (chapters include: Pustules, poxes and World Immunisation Week; Slime, rhyme and snot in the time of Covid-19, and Antibody and the Y in immunology). Doherty also muses widely, with many allusions to the writers he admires (among them Shakespeare, Kafka, Orwell, Seamus Heaney and Kazuo Ishiguro) on everything from the potential for dogs to identify Covid, “ecocide”, environmentally sustainable living, the virtues of universal basic income, the disturbing social inequity of the pandemic and government responses and the scientific denialism of Trump.
As a chronology of threatened doom, medical science and political response, it is a gripping, compelling page-turner.
Asked how much he is still working these days to communicate about the virus, Doherty says: “I’m spending an enormous amount of time on it. Part of that time is taken up because I’ve got onto Twitter ... I think when this thing kicked off I had about 16,000 followers because I do comment on politics and all sorts of things … I treat it as a discussion and it can be quite interesting because you can get some interesting points from other people. You certainly hear from people who don’t think like you do and unless they’re abusive and want to send you straight to hell … it can be pretty helpful.”
On 27 April, 2020, Doherty – intending to make a Google search – accidentally typed “Dan Murphy opening hours” into Twitter, winning him countless empathetic hearts and tens of thousands of followers (he now has 86,000).
“You know, I’ve actually been on the wagon since last April. And I can tell you I’m sleeping a lot better. I now buy this disgusting non-alcoholic wine from the supermarket and just pretend,” he says.
Dan Murphy opening hours
— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) April 27, 2020
Why the wagon?
“Because I’m 80 years old and I’ve actually found that … a drink a day was affecting me badly. I wasn’t sleeping well and it really was not doing me any good at all. So, we tried Abstemious April earlier this year and we haven’t gone back to it. Because I feel a lot healthier. I mean it’s bad enough – the Covid thing is oppressive for all of us and it’s easy to get into a really dark mood about it, so I found dropping the alcohol helps. I was relieved to find I didn’t find it hard to stop at all.”
The Doherty of this book is complex – an aesthete with a strong social justice bent who abhors political humbug, the denial of evidence and social inequity. His contempt for scientific charlatanism is illustrated early when he writes about American medical scientists Anthony Fauci (“We can all see the guy’s a hero,” he says) and Deborah Birx, both of whom he first met when they were working on HIV/AIDS vaccine immunology in the 1980s.
“I felt enormous empathy for both Tony and Debbie as they tried to deal with Trump’s barrage of disinformation and deliberate ignorance, and was especially sorry for Debbie as she sat there listening to him speculate about the possibility that people could drink bleach. That practice killed at least one person, and probably many more,” Doherty writes.
Doherty recalls being in Seattle with his son Mike and his family for Christmas 2016, soon after Trump’s election.
“We just happened to be there back in late 2016 to join hands with Seattle residents who came together in silent grief at the results of the recent presidential election; there were more than enough people to circle the lake. And, as Covid-19 and other events have shown us, they were right to be despondent.”
After another visit to Seattle in December 2019, Peter and Penny Doherty returned to a burning Australia.
“[D]espite multiple warnings about the dangers of the extreme dryness and heat and requests for more resources, no exceptional measures had been taken by the national government to prepare for what was to happen. Many of us were, in fact, wondering if we were going down the same crazy road of evidence denial and lies that was the hallmark of the Trump administration.”
He says that while Australians are not as obsessed with personal freedom as Americans and are generally more willing to make collective personal sacrifices to enhance community safety, “people are becoming more tired of it and less willing to be told what to do – it’s [lockdowns] just gone on so long”.
“But then a lot of people are really scared about the possibility of opening up. I mean you get a lot of feedback about that on Twitter,” he says.
As state premiers, especially those in Queensland and Western Australia, resist interpretations of the Doherty modelling whereby lockdowns would ease and internal borders potential open with increased vaccination rates, Doherty says: “It’s understandable. If you’re the premier of Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia or heading the Northern Territory – why would you want to open up if you saw thousands of cases a day in the eastern states? It’s going to be an enormous political challenge, this thing.”
What about when vaccination rates hit 80%?
“Well 80% vaccination is just 60% vaccination of the population, I think! … I’d like to think we can do 80% down to [those aged] over 12 but the modelling is based on 80% down to over 16. You know, there’s a lot of assumptions in the modelling. Modelling is sophisticated thought experiment. You have to put a lot of assumptions in about rate of virus spread from vaccinated people and all this sort of stuff and we just don’t have very good data on a lot of that.”
This, you would have to say, is a cautious view of the future.
All the while more Australians – like Americans – are, compelled by conspiracy theorists and snake-oil promoters, experimenting with the bovine drug ivermectin to self-treat Covid-19, while new variants of the virus potentially challenge vaccine efficacy and raise the prospect of continuing mass infections, deaths, lockdowns and partial lockdowns.
“Now, we are dealing with something [the Delta variant] where one person infects five to eight people. We are barely controlling it. New South Wales has been less aggressive than we [Victoria] have been … and Victoria had kept it down. If they hadn’t [been so aggressive] they’d now be at 1000 a day. Victoria is only just holding it and we are much more rigorous in our lockdowns than New South Wales,” Doherty says.
“If the virus changes dramatically and the vaccine is no longer working, well, obviously we’ve got to lock it out of Australia until other vaccines are available. We can make new vaccines against variants … but we are all hoping that doesn’t need to happen. But there’s no guarantees.”
