David Ho, the man who tamed Aids, in race to find coronavirus vaccine

Jack Ma Foundation backs Taiwan-born American scientist to develop a drug or vaccine to halt the spread

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A transmission electron microscope image of an isolate from the first US case of Covid-19, with viral particles in blue. Photo: Getty Images

Robert LangrethandSusan Berfield

Published: 7:07pm, 10 Apr 2020Updated: 8:57pm, 25 Nov 2020

It seems obvious now that David Ho, arguably the world’s most famous Aids researcher, would get involved in seeking a treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. It seems obvious the Taiwanese-American would redirect the work of his several dozen scientists at the Aaron Diamond Aids Research Centre, in New York.

That he would, as he says, “rob Peter to pay Paul” to get started with funds meant for the lab’s HIV studies. That he would receive US$2.1 million from the Jack Ma Foundation, based in Hangzhou, in China’s Zhejiang province, without even asking, and an additional US$6 million from other private donors, among them a few very concerned businesspeople.

But in late December, when Ho was tracking reports of a few cases of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, it wasn’t obvious he would be needed.

“We were paying attention but didn’t think we would get involved,” he says. “It seemed rare – and over there.”

David Ho (centre) with fellow scientists Yaoxing Huang and Sho Iketani from New York’s Aaron Diamond Aids Research Centre. Photo: Bloomberg / Samantha Casolari

In early January, as his lab changed its affiliation from Rockefeller University to Columbia University and moved to Upper Manhattan, the situation in Wuhan had become worse. Ho still wasn’t sure if he should get involved.

“The scientists in China were already doing so much,” he says. Many of those scientists – in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai – are former students of his. “They could very well do the job.”