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People in their thirties tend to enter discos with great enthusiasm, but Fernando Polack set the bar very high one day in 2002. That day he walked through the door of Bar Rojo, a place in Buenos Aires that had just closed because its owner was disenchanted with the new love affairs she saw behind the counter, without the gallantry of yesteryear.
That businessman of the night thought that an era had ended.
“It was a big, dark club, with a bar with red leather and John Travolta's ball.
It had no windows, so it was perfect for setting up a medical laboratory, ”Polack, then a pediatrician working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, still enthusiastically recalls.
Thus was born the Infant Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching the most serious respiratory diseases in children.
Almost two decades later, that old nightclub has been an unexpected protagonist in the fight against covid in the world.
Polack, director of the foundation, and his colleagues have spearheaded two of the most pivotal clinical trials of this pandemic: the one that showed Pfizer's vaccine to be 95% effective and the one that suggested that blood plasma from patients already recovered can be a good treatment for the sick if it is administered very soon.
The pediatrician, born in Buenos Aires in 1967, remembers the November morning when he was having coffee at home when he received a call from his partner Gonzalo Pérez Marc with news.
"Did you hear?"
95%.
"95% of what?"
—The efficacy of the vaccine.
"Stop fucking around!"
What are you saying?
“I saw it and I couldn't believe it.
At first the feeling was completely unreality, ”recalls Polack.
“People are living a mirage with the coronavirus vaccines.
In general, respiratory vaccines work poorly.
And when they work well they don't exceed 60% efficiency.
No one at Pfizer dreamed of 95%.
Nobody, ”he says.
Polack is a world expert on another tiny killer, respiratory syncytial virus, the most common cause of lung infections in babies.
It kills about 120,000 children every year in the world, in outbreaks that are concentrated in the winter season.
Two decades ago, Polack decided to chase the virus around the world: he worked during the northern hemisphere winters at Johns Hopkins and during the southern hemisphere winters in Buenos Aires.
He lived in a coat all year.
"I should have dedicated myself to diarrhea, which is in summer," he jokes.
Fernando Polack is a world expert on the virus that kills the most babies in the world: respiratory syncytial
The pediatrician was collaborating with Pfizer on an experimental respiratory syncytial virus vaccine when the covid pandemic broke out.
Pfizer's vice president responsible for vaccines, Alejandra Gurtman, is also Argentine.
Polack proposed to cooperate against the new coronavirus.
The Infant Foundation quickly recruited more than 5,700 volunteers, who volunteered to receive the injections at the Central Military Hospital in Buenos Aires.
On November 18 the results came in: 95% effective.
"It was incredible," emphasizes the pediatrician.
“We have to see if that 95% efficacy means that the RNA vaccines [the new technology used by Pfizer] are extraordinary or that the virus is particularly strong.
I think this virus is clumsy, ”reflects Polack.
The pediatrician, "a football fan", usually makes a very illustrative comparison.
If the measles virus is the equivalent of Messi, due to its ease of transmission and its lethality, "the new coronavirus would be a central defender in a singles match against married people."
“Fernando Polack is a visionary”, says the Spanish pediatrician Quique Bassat, from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.
"He has been able to go out to see what happens outside the walls of the hospital," he adds.
Bassat is one of the fathers of a quick and easy technique to accurately identify the cause of death: the minimally invasive autopsy, performed in just half an hour with a fine biopsy needle.
Polack's team is applying it in the poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, such as Villa Fiorito, where soccer player Diego Armando Maradona was born in a shack.
Millions of children die each year in the world without knowing what they died of.
"We want to determine the social and biological factors that cause a child under the age of five who should never have died to die," Polack says.
“We are seeing that the main cause of death in these areas is the respiratory syncytial virus.
The virus is like a goat that climbs a snowy mountain and causes an avalanche.
In the developing world, the snowy mountain is a malnourished child, with a vulnerable family and an overwhelmed health system ”, explains the Argentine pediatrician.
Polack recalls a concept of the German philosopher Hannah Arendt: the right to have rights.
“They are social groups that seem to not even have the right to have rights.
It is not that they do not enjoy the privileges of other citizens, it is that they are not even in a position to think that they could do so ”, he laments.
"If everything were as easy as doing the new coronavirus vaccines, there would be no more diseases in the world," says Polack
The Argentine doctor looks to the future with optimism.
The team of American scientist Jennie Lavine has predicted this week that the covid will transform into a simple cold in the very short term, within one to ten years.
Polack thinks so too.
"We are all going to be infected 10 times with the coronavirus, what happens is that it will cease to be important, because the lung is no longer going to be infected, thanks to the memory of the immune system," he predicts.
The pediatrician wants to refocus on the search for the vaccine against the respiratory syncytial virus, the one that kills the most babies in the world.
The Infant Foundation was born in 2003 with five people.
This year it will be more than 80, but its old enemy is fiercer than the coronavirus.
“We have known the respiratory syncytial virus for more than half a century and no one has yet come up with an effective vaccine.
If everything were as easy as making the new coronavirus vaccines, there would be no more diseases in the world, ”Polack reasons.
The owner of the old nightclub continues to live on the top floor of the Fundación Infant.
His name is Ivan.
Polack draws him as a mix of Spanish actor Fernando Fernán Gómez and former Argentine soccer player
Loco
Gatti.
His Red Bar is today a laboratory full of young doctors, biochemists and biologists.
There is no longer the red leather bar to flirt with, but part of the solution to the pandemic has come from there.
“Iván became a friend of ours and comes down to chat about life.
It is very Argentine.
What you imagine of an Argentine ”, explains Polack.
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