https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/11/stanley-johnson-lands-book-deal-to-republish-virus-thriller-the-virus-coronavirus

The Virus, first published in 1982, will be reissued this summer after the PM’s father shrugged off accusations of cashing in on the coronavirus crisis

A long out-of-print novel about a deadly virus by Stanley Johnson, the father of UK prime minister Boris Johnson, is to be reissued this summer, two weeks after it emerged that he was trying to find it a new publisher during the coronavirus pandemic.

Having been pitched to UK publishers as “an urgent, exhilarating novel” by “a tireless self-promoter”, Johnson senior’s 1982 novel The Virus has been snapped up by Black Spring, an imprint of Eyewear Press, an independent publisher founded by poet Todd Swift. Originally titled The Marburg Virus, the novel follows an epidemiologist who must race against time to develop a vaccine when an unknown virus breaks out in New York. Based on a real event in Germany in the late 1960s, it also stars a US president desperate to come out on top.