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HOLD YOUR BREATH Several months after experimenting with carbon dioxide therapy, I was at home reading the Sunday paper, flipping through the obituaries, and saw that Dr. Donald Klein had died. Klein was the psychiatrist who spent years studying the links between chemoreceptor flexibility, carbon dioxide, and anxieties. He was 90. It was Klein’s research that inspired Justin Feinstein to pursue the NIH-funded experiments in Tulsa. I wrote Feinstein with the news. He was crushed. He told me he’d been planning on reaching out to Klein in the coming weeks regarding what could be a “game-changing discovery.” It turns out that the amygdalae, those gooey nodes on the sides of our head that help govern perceptions of fear and emotions, also control aspects of our breathing. Patients with epilepsy who have had these brain areas stimulated with electrodes immediately cease breathing. The patients were totally unaware of it and didn’t seem to feel their carbon dioxide levels rising long after their breathing ceased. Communication between the chemoreceptors and amygdalae works both ways: these structures are constantly exchanging information and adjusting breathing every second of every minute of the day. If communication breaks down, havoc ensues. Feinstein believes that people with anxiety likely suffer from connection problems between these areas and could unwittingly be holding their breath throughout the day. Only when the body becomes overwhelmed by carbon dioxide would their chemoreceptors kick in and trigger an emergency signal to the brain to immediately get another breath. The patients would reflexively start fighting to breathe. They’d panic. Eventually their bodies adapt to avoid such unexpected attacks by staying in a state of alert, by constantly overbreathing in an effort to keep their carbon dioxide as low as possible. “What anxious patients could be experiencing is a…
Throughout all the festivities the next day at the White House surrounding the Phase One trade deal signing ceremony, the Chinese delegation acted as if there was no health crisis in their country that was in the process of spreading around the world; during their visit, the Chinese representatives didn’t say a word about the virus. Nothing. It was never brought up—by either side. It didn’t even occur to the US officials who were hosting the Chinese delegation to ask about the coronavirus. The Chinese officials left after a two-day visit marked by the trade deal signing and press conference, giving no warning about what they must have known at the time: that the emerging pandemic was much worse than publicly known—more contagious, more present in asymptomatic cases, and more out of control than they wanted to admit. Over the next ten days, Pottinger’s email inbox was flooded with messages from credible sources telling him the outbreak in China was far worse than the Chinese government was telling. He began to scour Chinese social media, picking up firsthand accounts of the outbreak in Wuhan as they appeared and then were quickly deleted by Chinese censors. Ai Fen, a senior doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, posted about the virus on WeChat. Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang also shared information. Both were admonished by the Chinese authorities for releasing information not previously approved by the government. The cover-up was already under way. Any Chinese health officials who publicly warned that the virus was more dangerous than the authorities would admit were forced to apologize or arrested. On the evening of January 24, Pottinger went to Dimon Liu’s house for a Chinese New Year’s dinner celebration. It wasn’t a formal Bingo Club event, but it was the same crowd. (I was out of town that weekend and missed it.) The Chinese dissidents at the party pleaded with Pottinger to investigate further, insisting that the crisis in Wuhan was far worse than advertised. Pottinger came home from the party rattled and immediately started reaching out to doctors inside China who had been his sources when he covered the SARS outbreak in 2003 as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. That public health crisis had marked the global debut of—and the first known pandemic risk from—coronaviruses, a type of pathogen that until then had been little studied and only poorly understood.
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
David and Goliath
Malcolm Gladwell
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