"It takes at least three months from isolation of virus to production of vaccine ... and another three or more until everybody can get a shot."
"Right-o, John. It must be done of course, but I'm going to tackle the problem in another way. Maybe we can shorten the time."
"How will you do it?"
Hallam turned to Pat. "I don't say we can do it. We shall try. If we could alter the virus enough, by physical or chemical treatment, to knock out only the sterility effect, we could let people have the flu. Then it would be necessary only to produce a limited amount of the new virus and start it going all over the country."
"That would eliminate all the processing of killed virus, sterilization and so on," Pat said excitedly.
"And everybody who had the virus would produce more and spread it, faster than the drug companies could make it," I added.
"Precisely ... if it works," Hallam said. "That's what we will concentrate on. Biochem is analyzing the structure of the virus. They are going to advise us when they get the nucleoproteins sorted out. We may be lucky. Sometimes substituting a methyl group by hydrogen or changing the positions slightly will make a tremendous difference in properties of the molecules. It will have to be rather a hit and miss program. There isn't time to work out the full formula of the virus. By the way, have you seen the paper this morning?"
"Not yet," Pat said.
"They have a new name for it now—Sterility Flu, or S-Flu for short."
"Yeah, short for flu but long for sterility," I muttered.