Sars, swine flu, Covid – Jeremy Farrar has witnessed several outbreaks of infectious diseases. Now he will be the chief scientist of the WHO.
In mid-February 2020, Jeremy Farrar is sitting in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich; the security conference will start soon. The scientist drinks coffee and answers questions while his cell phone vibrates constantly in his shirt pocket. In retrospect, one will wonder whether this was perhaps the “Burner Phone” that he describes in his book “Spike”, published 17 months later. The disposable cell phone that was reserved for calls to scientists who, like him, suspected at the beginning of 2020 that the new virus could possibly come from a laboratory. In this confusing situation, they themselves did not rule out bioterrorism as the cause of the rapidly growing number of infected people.