In February, the CDC sent the Army about 10 drops of blood from one of the first Covid-19 patients, a Washington state man in his fifties who was the epidemic’s first US death. Since then, the Army researchers isolated the virus and have been making more of it to ship to other labs designing a vaccine or treatment against coronavirus.
From the Rift Valley fever that struck Egypt in the early 1970s to the Zika outbreak in 2018, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases researchers have devised dozens of treatments and countermeasures, most recently an Ebola vaccine approved by the FDA and licensed to Merck in 2019. It’s also had its share of controversy.
Read the full story by Eric Niller at Wired.
