“It’s disturbing how much no one knows about this,” I say, at length.
“Welcome to science,” says DeRisi. “You don’t have to scratch too much below the surface here to realize you have reached the limit of knowledge.”
In the last week or so, word’s spread that the absence of nasal swabs is screwing up Joe DeRisi’s ability to save us from ourselves. The day after my visit he had a phone call from a UCSF donor. A big shot. “I know a guy who has some swabs,” the donor said. DeRisi was dubious: He’d already searched high and low, at every level of business and government, for the swabs. “I said, Really, you know a guy? Prove it.” The big shot said that he would have his friend overnight 5,000 swabs.
The next day DeRisi went to the UPS Store, and grabbed the package. “I pop open the box and there’s 5,000 of something in there,” he says. “They clearly didn’t just fall off the back of a truck. And they kind of looked like swabs.” But they weren’t packaged, or sterile, so they clearly weren’t medical supplies of any kind. DeRisi picked one up and studied it. It looked familiar. Then he realized: eyelash brushes. Someone had actually bought eyelash brushes, relabeled them as medical swabs, and was now selling them at a huge profit. The free market at work.
Michael Lewis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” “Liar’s Poker” and “The Fifth Risk.” He also has a podcast called “Against the Rules.”