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Nine days before that announcement, Frazier — in dress shirt, red tie, no jacket — was thinking of other things when he stood up from a table in his office, walked over to a collection of framed photographs, and picked up the one of him with Pope Francis at the Vatican. They met for 35 minutes, an opportunity Frazier calls "life-changing" and on a level of "spiritual resonance" matched only by the time he saw Nelson Mandela in South Africa in the early 1990s.

The Pope encouraged him to "help more people with medicines, people who can't afford medicines… Largely he was talking about the billions of people who live in poverty. And we've tried to do that." More than 30,000 people have received Merck's investigational Ebola Zaire vaccine — a product that holds no financial promise, from a commercial perspective — and Merck has committed to keeping a stockpile of at least 300,000 doses on hand for emergencies.

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