All that to say: people who don’t work at the CDC have a tendency to assume everyone there knows one another, not realizing perhaps that employees of the CDC number more than ten thousand. Meanwhile, people who work here might not know anyone outside their branch, let alone someone from a different center. Not to mention the fact that recognizing someone only from the nose up is harder than you might think.

It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that I had no idea of the identity of the person who’d just offered me a salute as we crossed paths in the hallway. “Keep the faith, Dr. M,” he yelled from behind his mask, not breaking stride.

That was . . . a lot of energy for so early in the morning. Still, I was grateful for the support. My new visibility had resulted in quite a bit of downside. Now that I’d appeared several times on television, every armchair virologist in America felt as if they not only knew me but were qualified to weigh in with their opinion on my opinions. Given that most of their opinions seemed to have hatched from the bowels of some anti-government sociopath on Twitter, this had become unpleasant.

Early on, Wally and I had been summoned to a virtual task force meeting with the CDC Washington director, the chief strategy officer/COO, and the deputy director of the whole shebang, along with a slew of other luminaries, in which we’d been informed that the federal government was arranging for us to have a security detail. Immediately, we’d both protested. Wally, especially, seemed to find this proposal emasculating.

“I’m grateful, of course,” he said, his face reflecting anything but gratitude. “But . . .” I glanced at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This conference was chock-full of M.D.s, Ph.D.s, M.P.H.s, and people with obscure military titles; they constituted some of the most powerful people in Washington and Atlanta. None of them looked as if they possessed a sense of humor. Wally, on the other hand, was renowned for his practical jokes. Once, on an EIS investigation of a mysterious sickness at the Republican National Convention (nonlethal; non-terrorism), he’d sent the team a box that turned out to contain three tiny mechanical elephants that marched around trumpeting to the tune of a popular country music song until, suddenly, they fell over and died with their legs sticking straight up. This was in poor taste, but it paled in comparison to some of his other pranks. How Wally had survived the quasi-militaristic bureaucracy of the EIS followed by the bureaucratic bureaucracy of the CDC without getting himself sacked, or at the very least reprimanded, was a mystery for the ages.