Although I’m 63 and not yet eligible for the COVID vaccine, I’ve been watching as people I know have started getting the vaccine. The roll-out, of course, hasn’t been handled well and even if it were, the demand is much greater than the current supply. So, like many others, I am waiting and hoping, not only that more vaccines are on their way but also that they will protect me and everyone else against the virus’ many mutations (or at least protect me from getting seriously ill).
Stepping back for a second, it’s sobering to recall that at this time last year, the virus was still a worrisome rumor. The CDC, for example, first warned about local outbreaks on February 25 and the first reported death in the Seattle area was on February 29. The toll has been horrific and the response has been bungled, to say the least. Nevertheless, it’s amazing that a year later several vaccines have been developed and are being deployed.
The vaccine’s rapid development and deployment is due to many factors, including, I think the creation of a robust national system of medical research in the 1960s and 1970s. And that system emerged, in large measure, from the work of philanthropist Mary Woodward Lasker, who died on February 21, 1994 and who was famous for saying, “if you think research is expensive, try disease.”
”Mary Lasker is an institution unto herself,” said famed heart surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey noted in a 1985 article about Lasker that appeared in the New York Times. “Asking what her importance has been is like asking what Harvard has meant to this country.” In honor of the vaccine’s rollout and Lasker, today’s #stampoftheday is a 5-cent stamp, issued in 1965, touting the “Crusade Against Cancer,” which was one of her key causes.
Lasker wasn’t a scientist. Indeed, she once said, recalled “nobody would have me in their laboratory for five minutes. I couldn’t cut up a frog, and I certainly couldn’t perform surgery.” But, she noted, “I’m better at making it possible for other people.”
Her skill at this was so great and so important that she is a central figure in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s magisterial book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” In his author’s note at the start of the massive volume, Mukherjee notes: “two characters stand at the epicenter of this story-both contemporaries, both idealists, both children of the boom in America and both caught in the swirl of a hypnotic, obsessive quest to launch a national ‘War on Cancer.’ The first is Sidney Farber, the father of modern chemotherapy….The second is Mary Lasker, the Manhattan socialite of legendary social and political energy, who joins Farber in his decades-long journey. But Lasker and Farber only exemplify the grit, imagination, inventiveness, and optimism of generations of men and women who have waged a battle against cancer for four thousand years.”
Lasker, who had been a successful art dealer and collector, began her efforts to overhaul the American medical research system in the 1940s not long after she married Albert Lasker, a legendary advertising executive, who had overseen campaigns for such household mainstays as Wrigley’s, Pepsodent and Lucky Strike. She convinced her husband to bring his formidable skills to medicine and n 1942, they created the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and, a few years later, the Lasker Award for Medical Research and Public Service, which, after the Nobel Prize, are arguably the most prestigious awards in medicine.
Albert Lasker also jumpstarted her legendary lobbying career. ”I told him he should give me some money for medical research,” she recalled in a 1985 interview with the New York Times, ”and he said, ‘You need a lot for money for the kind of progress you have in mind. You cannot do that without involving the Federal Government.’ I said I don’t know anyone in Government.”
But since Albert Lasker, who had long been involved with politics for decades, did know people, so, Mary Lasker recalled, ”I got in to see people.” She proved to be very good at lobbying and continued to do so for decades after he husband died in 1952.. In fact, as the Times noted in a 1985 editorial celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Lasker Awards, “government would be far less munificent a patron of medical research were it not for years of concerted prodding by Mary Lasker and her allies.” DeBakey echoed that view, saying in the 1985 article about Mary Lasker, the National Institutes of Health has “flowered because in many ways she gave birth to it and nursed it. It was in existence, but it was she who got funding for it.”
”Today, a lot of people take my views for granted,” she said in the 1985 Times article. ”They don’t think I’m saying anything revolutionary.” Instead, she was pressing a basic message: research is vital in solving medical riddles and the Federal Government has an obligation to finance research.
Or, as she frequently said, ”Without money, nothing gets done.”
The lessons Lasker brought to the fight against cancer and other diseases are salient today. Nothing will get done without money. We cannot solve the pressing issues without the involvement of the federal government. And, as she often noted, “if you think research is expensive, try disease.”
Hopefully, we’ll get the funding and involvement that’s needed to deploy more—and effective – vaccines as quickly as possible.
Be well, stay safe, make things possible for other people, fight for justice and work for peace.