Feature

Leading the Fight Against SARS-CoV-2:

Dr. Robert L. Murphy

by Kallista Zhuang

Waking up at 5:45 a.m., Dr. Robert L. Murphy starts his days early. In just an hour and a half, he will hop on live television to answer coronavirus-related questions from viewers of Chicago’s WGN-TV morning news.

Even after 236 consecutive days (as of February 6, 2021) of voluntarily participating in the new station’s coronavirus segment, Murphy never runs out of questions to answer. This isn’t surprising, as Murphy has decades of experience in global health as a researcher, doctor, professor, and institute director.

However, similar to many accomplished academics, Murphy did not know he would end up here. In fact, after graduating high school, he first pursued aviation. With a family of engineers and jet pilots, Murphy’s choice to study aviation was nothing out of the ordinary. However, during the Vietnam War era, aviation opportunities were limited to the military. Instead, Murphy opted to go back to school to pursue his interest in science; this time, he would attend Boston University for a biology degree.

Unsure what to do with his biology degree, Murphy looked for future career paths and was drawn to medicine. Due to a physician shortage from the Vietnam War and other factors, there was a push to expand medical school spots and condense medical school curriculums. Thus, with only four weeks off per year, Murphy was able to graduate from Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine in 1978 within three years.

Wanting to stay in Illinois, Murphy came to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine for an internal medicine residency. It was during an infectious disease elective rotation at the Veterans Affairs hospital that he realized the appeal of studying infectious disease. Like detectives, infectious disease specialists work backwards to determine the roots of diseases. The profession employs critical thinking and is similar to solving a mystery, both of which appealed to Murphy.

Following this interest, Murphy began a three-year infectious disease fellowship in 1981. Within his first week, the first case of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was reported:

“I had read this little report MMWR, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from [Centers for Disease Control]. It comes out every week. They had talked about these 16 men. … A friend of mine had called me from the emergency room and said,

‘Hey! Maybe we have one of those cases here. This guy’s got a weird pneumonia and purple things on him.’ And sure enough, he was our first case. …We weren’t swamped with cases in that first year or two, but they grew exponentially.’’

Murphy unintentionally became an AIDS doctor and was treating a third of the AIDS patients in Illinois, he says. He recalls not only becoming the biggest admittor of AIDS patients at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital but also the biggest signer of “Just as quickly as death certificates due to the high death rates associated with AIDS. he had become the He felt that his physician role had physical constraints and combat- biggest admittor ted the epidemic indirectly, but he wanted to take a more active role for AIDS patients, in controlling the epidemic. Murphy remembers Thus, over the next ten years, Murphy switched gears and shift- admitting almost no ed into HIV and clinical research, continuously testing different an- patients in 1996.” ti-viral treatments and diseases related to HIV. When he was caught in a bad ski accident in 1994 and found himself no longer able to physically look after patients, he shifted even deeper into research.

Released in 1995, the triple or combination therapy (also known as the triple cocktail) was a drug therapy used to suppress HIV replication and dramatically slow AIDS

“There’s no place for politics with a pandemic and public health.” –Dr. Robert L. Murphy

progression. Just as quickly as he had become the biggest admittor for AIDS patients, Murphy remembers admitting almost no patients in 1996.

After attending a conference where Nelson Mandela spoke of the need for increased attention to the HIV crisis in Africa, Murphy became a visiting professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and started working in Africa. Through Harvard’s School of Public Health, he and few others were able to receive the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) grant under former President George W. Bush’s administration. To this day, the PEPFAR grant is the largest public health implementation plan.

Working in Nigeria, Mali, and South Africa, he eventually became the country director for Nigeria and facilitated the treatmet of 175,000 people at 53 different sites, according to a Northwestern Magazine feature. The position was soon given to a Nigerian physician, and Murphy became a consultant for the country for handling the AIDS epidemic.

Soon after, he became the administrative science director for Mali during the Ebola epidemic, running testing in Northern Guinea, which had thousands of cases, alongside Mali, which only had eight cases.

“I ha[d] never washed my hands with so much bleach before in my life,” he said.

Now, the next deadly infectious virus he is tackling is the SARS-CoV-2 that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. With its overuse, the word “pandemic” has lost its sensationalism and has been equated to a bleak reality. But for Murphy, the death rate and intensity of this virus is nowhere near ordinary. This pandemic in particular has had the most impact on his career as a global health professional. Not only is the virus dangerous, but the handling of it has also cost many lives.

“The United States has the worst statistics. We have the worst metrics because we’ve politicized the whole thing. It’s not supposed to be politicized; we’re all in this together. There’s no place for politics with a pandemic and public health. Unfortunately, that’s what happened,” Murphy explained.

Even with almost a dozen ongoing projects in Africa, Murphy still manages to make strides within the COVID-19 research realm locally.

In Evanston, he is currently working with students on a viral dynamics study as a part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics or “RADx,” a $500 million initiative launched by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to increase COVID-19 testing. As of February 2021, Murphy and his research group have tested dozens of devices and are currently letting students use a “Point of Care” (usually done at a doctor’s office) device at home to test for COVID-19. Within 15 minutes of using a nasal swab and buffer, students can find out whether they test positive or negative for the virus. This rapid antigen

test, BinaxNOW, was used as a supplement and temporary replacement for COVID-19 testing at Northwestern University during the shutdown of postal services from intense snowstorms and subzero temperatures in February 2021.

As a leader and a part of the program planning committee in the Northwestern COVID-19 Vaccine Communication and Evaluation Network (CoVAXCEN), Murphy aims to create a space for important discussions surrounding the logistics of the COVID-19 vaccine. With the live segment on WGN every morning, Murphy addresses COVID-19 related questions from viewers and hopes to quell the misconceptions around the vaccine.

According to a Pew Research Center study conducted in February 2021, 30% of the American public does not currently plan to get a vaccine. Although Murphy believes that there was mismanagement with the COVID-19 pandemic, he also believes the money put into the vaccine was useful and the majority of people in the last phase — college students — will be able to be vaccinated by summer 2021. He projects that a semblance of normality may be reached by fall of 2021, but that the disease will probably not go away for a few years, as other countries must control the disease, as well.

With still so much to learn about the disease and how long the antibodies generated by the vaccine last, we may never entirely eradicate COVID-19. Murphy also warns of the possibility of another pandemic in the near future. Many of these natural disasters are uncontrollable, so our response to these events are crucial for maintaining and improving the well-being of the people. ■

“According to a Pew Research Center study conducted in February 2021, 30% of the American public does not currently plan to get a vaccine.”