WASHINGTON — Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.

Casting the decision in ideological terms, Mr. Meadows would tell people: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.”

For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.

On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. Boston and Chicago are two weeks away from the peak, she cautioned, but the numbers in Detroit and other hard-hit cities are heading down.

A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today as the virus surges anew.

Even as a chorus of state officials and health experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states. The government issued detailed reopening guidelines, but almost immediately, Mr. Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.

Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.

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He and his top aides would openly disdain the scientific research into the disease and the advice of experts on how to contain it, seek to muzzle more authoritative voices like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and continue to distort reality even as it became clear that his hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.

Mr. Trump had missed or dismissed mounting signals of the impending crisis in the early months of the year. Now, interviews with more than two dozen officials inside the administration and in the states, and a review of emails and documents, reveal previously unreported details about how the White House put the nation on its current course during a fateful period this spring.

• Key elements of the administration’s strategy were formulated out of sight in Mr. Meadows’s daily meetings, by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies and were taking their cues from the president. Officials in the West Wing saw the better-known White House coronavirus task force as dysfunctional, came to view Dr. Fauci as a purveyor of dire warnings but no solutions and blamed officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for mishandling the early stages of the virus.

• Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.

• The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing, a vivid example of how he often waged war with science and his own administration’s experts and stated policies.

• Mr. Trump’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and other state officials scrambling to deal with a leadership vacuum. At one stage, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was told that if he wanted the federal government to help obtain the swabs needed to test for the virus, he would have to ask Mr. Trump himself — and thank him.

• Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proved wrong. Even now there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said the president had imposed travel restrictions on China early in the pandemic, signed economic relief measures that have provided Americans with critical assistance and dealt with other issues including supplies of personal protective equipment, testing capacity and vaccine development.

“President Trump and his bold actions from the very beginning of this pandemic stand in stark contrast to the do-nothing Democrats and radical left who just complain, criticize and condemn anything this president does to preserve this nation,” he said.

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The president had a decision to make.

It was the end of March and his initial, 15-day effort to slow the spread of the virus by essentially shutting down the country was expiring in days. Sitting in front of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office were Drs. Fauci and Birx, along with other top officials. Days earlier, Mr. Trump had said he envisioned the country being “opened up and raring to go” by Easter, but now he was on the verge of announcing that he would keep the country shut down for another 30 days.

“Do you really think we need to do this?” the president asked Dr. Fauci. “Yeah, we really do need to do it,” Dr. Fauci replied, explaining again the federal government’s role in making sure the virus did not explode across the country.

Mr. Trump’s willingness to go along — driven in part by grim television images of bodies piling up at Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York City — was a concession that federal responsibility was crucial to defeating a virus that did not respect state boundaries. In a later Rose Garden appearance, he appeared resigned to continuing the battle.

“Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won,” Mr. Trump said.

But even as the president was acknowledging the need for tough decisions, he and his aides would soon be looking to do the opposite — build a public case that the federal government had completed its job and unshackle the president from ownership of the response.

The hub of the activity was the working group assembled by Mr. Meadows, who had just taken over as chief of staff.

Joe Grogan, the domestic policy adviser, had come around to Mr. Trump’s view that the reaction to the virus was overblown, a position shared at that point by Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and a frequent participant in the meetings. Russell T. Vought, the president’s acting budget director, was there to address the pandemic’s mounting costs.

Chris Liddell, a deputy chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, acted as the group’s procurement and supply-chain experts.

Hope Hicks, the protector of Mr. Trump’s brand, was a regular participant. Kevin A. Hassett, a top economic adviser, came at times to help assess the numbers and also participated in a 9 a.m. meeting three times a week with Mr. Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on the economic aspects of the pandemic.

Then there was Dr. Birx, the response coordinator of the coronavirus task force. Unlike Dr. Fauci, who only stopped by the White House to attend meetings, she was given an office near the Situation Room and freely roamed the West Wing, fully embracing her role as a member of the president’s team.

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By mid-April, Mr. Trump had grown publicly impatient with the stay-at-home recommendations he had reluctantly endorsed. Weekly unemployment claims made clear the economy was cratering and polling was showing his campaign bleeding support. Republican governors were agitating to lift the lockdown and the conservative political machinery was mobilizing to oppose what it saw as constraints on individual freedom.

At the meetings in Mr. Meadows’s office, the issue was clear: How much longer do we keep this up?

To answer that, they focused on two more questions: Had the virus peaked? And had the government given the states the tools they needed to manage the remaining problems?

On the first question, Dr. Birx and Mr. Hassett were optimistic: Mitigation was working, they insisted, even as many outside experts were warning that the nation would remain at great risk if it let up on social distancing and moved prematurely to reopen.

Mr. Meadows thought of himself as a data-driven decision maker, and in addition to models and infection numbers from the states and the C.D.C., they looked at traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike (the volume of cars coming in and out of New York City was down by 95.2 percent); payroll and credit card data, and the number of people who were reporting to have self-quarantined.

If the point was to sustain a monthlong lockdown, the numbers told them, the administration succeeded. If it was to squelch the virus to containable levels, later events would show the officials were oblivious to how widely it was already spreading.

The members of his group believed they had succeeded on the second question, too, although shortages of protective gear continued in some places (and would flare again months later).

A one-time anticipated shortage of more than 100,000 ventilators had been overcome; now there was enough of a surplus that the United States could lend them to other countries. A ban on elective surgeries meant there was plenty of bed space — and no more need for the Navy’s hospital ships.

The group thought governors should no longer have trouble getting what they needed for hospitals, doctors and first responders. And they grew increasingly frustrated by what they saw as politically motivated complaining about a lack of federal help and the inability of some states to make effective use of the supplies they were receiving.

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On April 14, the country passed what the group saw as a milestone, administering its three millionth test. Inside the West Wing, Mr. Kushner was insistent on that point: Given their assumption that infections would not surge again until the fall, there was enough testing ability out there.

Those outside experts who disagreed were largely brushed off. In mid-April, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, urged a top administration official to embrace his call for conducting 500,000 coronavirus tests a day — far more than was happening at the time.

The official, Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the administration’s testing czar, who had been delivering upbeat descriptions of the nation’s growing testing capacity, eventually conceded to Dr. Jha that his plan seemed to be needed. But he made clear the federal government was not prepared to get there quickly.

“At some point down the road,” is what Dr. Jha said Admiral Giroir told him.

“My take is that Jared Kushner believes that this is not something that the White House should get too involved in,” Dr. Jha recalled. “And then the president believes that it is better left up to the states.”

Their critics notwithstanding, White House officials came to feel that they had in fact accomplished their job: giving governors the tools they needed to deal with remaining outbreaks as infections ebbed.

The wind down of the federal government’s response would play out over the next several weeks. The daily briefings with Mr. Trump ended on April 24. The Meadows team started barring Dr. Fauci from making most television appearances, lest he go off message and suggest continued high risk from the virus.

By the beginning of May, word leaked that the daily meetings of the task force itself would be ended, though Mr. Trump, who had not been told, backpedaled after the coverage caused an uproar.

On testing, Mr. Trump shifted from stressing that the nation was already doing more than any other country to deriding its importance. By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

But during the middle weeks of April the president’s decision to largely walk away from an active leadership role — and give many states permission to believe the worst of the crisis was behind them — came abruptly into public view.

On April 10, Mr. Trump declared that, in his role as something akin to a “wartime president,” it would be his decision about whether to reopen the country. “That’s my metrics,” he told reporters, pointing to his own head. “I would say without question it’s the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

Three days later, he reiterated his responsibility. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be,” he said.

The next day, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci presented Mr. Trump with a plan for issuing guidelines to start reopening the country at the end of the month. Developed largely by Dr. Birx and held closely by her until being presented to the president — most task force members did not see them beforehand — the guidelines laid out broad, voluntary standards for states considering how fast to come out of the lockdown.

In political terms, the document’s message was that responsibility for dealing with the pandemic was shifting from Mr. Trump to the states.

On April 16, when Mr. Trump publicly announced the guidelines, he made the message to the governors explicit.

“You’re going to call your own shots,” he said.

Birx’s Influence

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Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.

Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.

In his decades of responding to outbreaks, Dr. Fauci, a voracious reader of political histories, learned to rely on reports from the ground. Late at night in his home office this spring, Dr. Fauci, who declined to comment for this article, dialed health officials in New Orleans, New York and Chicago, where he heard desperation unrecognizable in the more sanguine White House meetings.

Dr. Fauci had his own critics, who said he relied on anecdotes and experience rather than data, and who felt he was not sufficiently attuned to the devastating economic and social consequences of a national lockdown.

As the pandemic worsened, Dr. Fauci’s darker view of the circumstances was countered by the reassurances ostensibly offered by Dr. Birx’s data.

A renowned AIDS researcher who holds the title of “ambassador” as the State Department’s special representative for global health diplomacy, she had assembled a team of analysts who worked late nights in the White House complex, feeding her a constant stream of updated data, packaged in PowerPoint slides emailed to senior officials each day.

There were warnings that the models she studied might not be accurate, especially in predicting the course of the virus against a backdrop of evolving political, economic and social factors. Among the models Dr. Birx relied on most was one produced by researchers at the University of Washington. But when Mr. Hassett reviewed its performance by looking back on its predictions from three weeks earlier, it turned out to be hit or miss.

The authors of the University of Washington model spoke to Dr. Birx or members of her team almost daily, they said, and often cautioned that their work was only supposed to offer a snapshot based on key assumptions, like people continuing to abide by social distancing until June 1.

“We made clear that to get the epidemic under control and bring it down to effectively zero transmission required the social distancing mandates to be in place,” said Christopher J. L. Murray, the director of the modeling program. “April 22 — somewhere around that period. That’s when the tone shifted. They started to ask questions about what will be the trajectory and where with the lifting of mandates?”

Some state officials were also alarmed by the administration’s use of the University of Washington model.

Colorado health officials wrote to the administration on April 10, pleading that the White House not use the model to allocate supplies to the state, saying its predictions were rosier than the grim reality they were encountering. (When those concerns were relayed to her, Dr. Birx replied that decisions on allocating equipment were based on factors beyond the one model.)

Dr. Birx declined to be interviewed. A task force official said that she had only used the University of Washington model in a limited way and that the White House used “real data, not modeled data, to understand the pandemic in the United States.”

The official said the White House “immediately reacted to the early signs of community spread” by working with governors in the affected states.

But despite the outside warnings and evidence by early May that new infections, while down, remained higher than anticipated, the White House never fundamentally re-examined the course it had set in mid-April.

Dr. Fauci, a friend of Dr. Birx’s for 30 years, would describe her as more political than him, a “different species.” More pessimistic by nature, Dr. Fauci privately warned that the virus was going to be difficult to control, often commenting that he was the “skunk at the garden party.”

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By contrast, Dr. Birx regularly delivered what the new team was hoping for.

“All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as having hit its “peak” around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right direction. “We’re behind the worst of it.” She endorsed the idea that the death counts and hospitalization numbers could be inflated.

For Dr. Birx, Italy’s experience was a particularly telling — and positive — comparison. She routinely told colleagues that the United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, which had huge spikes before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.

“She said we were basically going to track Italy,” one senior adviser later recalled.

Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, talking to Mr. Kushner, Ms. Hicks and others, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.

Dr. Birx began using versions of the phrase “putting out the embers,” wording that was later picked up by the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and by Mr. Trump himself.

By the middle of May, the task force believed that another resurgence was not likely until the fall, senior administration officials said.

The New York region appeared well on its way to driving new infections down to levels it could handle — it was the one area of the country that did resemble the Italian model. But the models and analysis embraced by the West Wing failed to account for the weakening adherence to the lockdowns across the country that began even before Mr. Trump started urging governors to “liberate” their residents from the methodical guidelines his own government had established.

Later, it was clear that states that rushed to reopen before meeting the criteria in the guidelines — like Arizona, Texas and Alabama — would have among the worst surges in new cases.

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.

The difference was critical. As communities across the United States raced to reopen, the daily number of daily cases barely dropped below 20,000 in early May. The virus was still circulating across the country.

Italy’s recovery curve, it turned out, looked nothing like the American one.

The Consequences

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The real-world consequences of Mr. Trump’s abdication of responsibility rippled across the country.

During a briefing on April 20, Mr. Trump mocked Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a fellow Republican, for the state’s inability to find enough testing. Dr. Birx displayed maps with dozens of dots indicating labs that could help.

“He really didn’t know about the federal laboratories,” Mr. Trump told reporters with mock astonishment. “He didn’t know about it.”

But when Frances B. Phillips, the state’s deputy health secretary, reached out to one of those dots — a National Institutes of Health facility in Maryland — she was told that they were suffering from the same shortages as state labs and were not in a position to help.

“It was clear that we were on our own and we need to develop our own strategy, which is very unlike the kind of federal response in the past public health emergencies,” Ms. Phillips recalled.

In California, Mr. Newsom had already experienced firsthand the complexities of getting help from Washington.

After offering to help acquire 350,000 testing swabs during an early morning conversation with one of Mr. Newsom’s advisers, Mr. Kushner made it clear that the federal help would hinge on the governor doing him a favor.

“The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, had to call Donald Trump, and ask him for the swabs” recalled the adviser, Bob Kocher, an Obama-era White House health care official.

Mr. Newsom made the call as requested and then praised Mr. Trump that same day during a news conference where he announced the commitment, giving Mr. Trump credit for the “substantial increase in supply” headed to California.

Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, a Republican, said that the White House approach had only one focus: reopening businesses, instead of anticipating how cities and states should respond if cases surged again.

“It was all predicated on reduction, open, reduction, open more, reduction, open,” he said. “There was never what happens if there is an increase after you reopen?”

Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level, including national testing strategies and contact tracing to track down and isolate people who had interacted with newly diagnosed patients.

“These things were done in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, Vietnam, in Singapore, in New Zealand and in China,” said Andy Slavitt, a former federal health care official who had been advising the White House.

“They were not secret,” he said. “Not mysterious. And these were not all wealthy countries. They just took accountability for getting it done. But we did not do that here. There was zero chance here that we would ever have been in a situation where we would be dealing with ‘embers.’ ”

A New Surge

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By early June, it was clear that the White House had gotten it wrong.

In task force meetings, officials discussed a spike in cases across the South and whether any bumps in caseloads were caused by crowded protests over the killing of George Floyd. They briefly considered if it was a fleeting side effect of Memorial Day gatherings.

They soon realized there was more at play.

Digging into new data from Dr. Birx, they concluded the virus was in fact spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were opening up with Mr. Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring victory.

With the benefit of hindsight, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, acknowledged this week in a conversation with the Journal of the American Medical Association that administration officials — himself included — severely underestimated infections in April and May. He estimated they were missing as many as 10 cases each day for every one they were confirming.

The number of new cases has now surged far higher than the previous peak of more than 36,000 a day in mid-April. On Thursday, there were more than 75,000 confirmed new cases, a record.

Mr. Trump’s disdain for testing continues to affect the country. By the middle of June, lines stretched for blocks in Phoenix and in Austin, Texas. And getting results could take a week to 10 days, officials in Texas said — effectively inviting the virus to spread uncontrollably.

Dr. Mandy K. Cohen, the top health official in North Carolina, contacted the Trump administration after a surge in June, asking the government to quickly open 100 new testing sites in her state, in addition to the 13 it was then operating.

“We will keep those 13 open for another month — you are welcome,” Dr. Cohen said, mocking the response she received.

It was a devastating situation, said Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, who watched as the Covid-19 cases at intensive care units at area hospitals jumped from three in mid-May to 185 by early July. Mr. Adler had a simple plea for the White House.

“When we were trying to get people to wear masks, they would point to the president and say, well, not something that we need to do,” he said.

Mr. Suarez expressed similar frustrations with Mr. Trump’s dismissive approach to mask wearing. “People follow leaders,” he said, before rephrasing his remarks. “People follow the people who are supposed to be leaders.”

Each workday morning in March, Noe Mercado drove through the desolate streets of Boston to a tall glass building on Blackfan Circle, in the heart of the city’s biotech hub. Most residents had gone into hiding from the coronavirus, but Mr. Mercado had an essential job: searching for a vaccine against this new, devastating pathogen.

Parking in the underground lot, he put on a mask and rode the empty elevator to the tenth floor, joining a skeleton crew at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Day after day, Mr. Mercado sat at his lab bench, searching for signs of the virus in nasal swabs taken from dozens of monkeys.

The animals had been injected with experimental vaccines Mr. Mercado had helped create. The monkeys then had been exposed to the coronavirus, and now Mr. Mercado was finding out whether any vaccine had protected them. One morning, after he loaded all the data into a software program, a single telling graph set his heart beating: Some of the vaccines, it appeared, had worked.

Mr. Mercado hurried around the lab to share the news. Given the times, there were no hugs, no high-fives. And he did not bask in glory for long. Making a vaccine demands patience, attention to detail — and a tolerance for bitter failure.

“Yeah, I’m excited, but I’m also thinking about the next step,” Mr. Mercado later recalled. “What if it doesn’t pan out?”

The coronavirus has now infected about 13.8 million people worldwide and killed at least 590,000. Millions more may die. The only hope for a long-term protection, literally the only shot at a return to normal life, is an effective vaccine.

In January, researchers at the vaccine center dropped everything they were doing to find one. The man heading up the effort is Mr. Mercado’s boss, Dr. Dan Barouch, the director of the center and one of the world’s leading vaccine-makers.

Now they are about to take a major step forward. Janssen Pharmaceutica, a division of Johnson & Johnson, has been collaborating with the Beth Israel team to craft a coronavirus vaccine based on a design pioneered by Dr. Barouch and his colleagues ten years ago.

Next week, clinical trials of the vaccine will begin in Belgium. Dr. Barouch’s team will soon start up a trial in Boston.

The past six months have been a blur of long weeks and late nights, of strict safety measures and scarce lab supplies. “Everything has been orders of magnitude more challenging than in the pre-pandemic era,” Dr. Barouch said.

Researchers around the world have been making vaccines of their own, some with dead viruses, others with protein fragments and strings of DNA. As of July, there are over 135 vaccines in preclinical tests, and another 30 in clinical trials on people. Never have so many vaccines moved so quickly into trials for one disease.

Since January, Dr. Barouch’s team in Boston has run experiments in cells and monkeys, while Janssen’s researchers in the Netherlands have raced to find a recipe for producing the new vaccine in huge quantities. Already they have started producing a batch for the clinical trials.

If the vaccine proves safe in initial tests, a trial for efficacy will launch in September. If that experiment is successful, Johnson & Johnson will manufacture hundreds of millions of doses for emergency use in January. Over the course of next year, the company plans to produce up to a billion doses.

While Johnson & Johnson is one of the world’s biggest companies, with a market capitalization over $370 billion, it’s a fairly small player in the vaccine market. On July 1, its Ebola vaccine received approval from the European Commission. The company’s vaccines for other diseases are still in clinical trials.

Even so, the United States government has given $456 million to Johnson & Johnson, funding from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed; the company has invested another $500 million in the coronavirus vaccine project.

Dr. Barouch and his colleagues are now finishing up tests of the final formulation in monkeys. In the next few months, they will begin to see how people respond to the injection.

It is a monumental task to develop a vaccine so quickly against a pathogen that no one had heard of before this year. But, Dr. Barouch said, “I’m even more optimistic now than I was several months ago.”

Forty-One Cases

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Late afternoon on Jan. 10, the temperature in Boston was in the low 50s, almost 20 degrees above normal. Dr. Barouch had spent the day hosting the lab’s annual retreat on the top floor of Boston’s Museum of Science.

Out the tall windows, the scientists could see cars streaming across the Charles River. During breaks between presentations, they crowded together for group photos, with big, unworried smiles.

At the end of the meeting, they discussed news of a mysterious cluster of 41 pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. “Forty-one cases seemed like a lot at that point,” Dr. Barouch said.

The new cases reminded them of SARS, a disease caused by a coronavirus, which had appeared in China in 2002 and had spread to 29 countries, striking 8,096 people and killing 773, before it was halted. Chinese scientists had just reported that another coronavirus was on the loose.

“We thought, maybe we should make a vaccine for that,” recalled Jinyan Liu, a staff scientist at the center. But without more information about the new virus, there was nothing they could do.

Everything changed that night. At 9:41 p.m., Dr. Kathryn Stephenson, the director of the center’s clinical trial unit, sent Dr. Barouch a short email from her iPhone: “This was released today — saw someone link to it on Twitter.”

The link led to an open-access virology site where scientists based in China had posted a file containing the entire genetic sequence of the new coronavirus. “Please feel free to download, share, use, and analyze this data,” wrote Yong-Zhen Zhang, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai and the leader of the consortium.

Five minutes later, Dr. Barouch emailed Dr. Liu, Mr. Mercado and Zhenfeng Li, a research assistant at the center: “Can one of you extract the new coronavirus sequence from this file?”

Soon the four scientists were poring over the sequence, a series of 30,000 genetic letters that no one had seen arranged in exactly this order before. “We worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday, day and night,” Dr. Liu said.

By the end of the weekend, they had a good idea of what they were up against, and how to defeat it potentially. On Monday, the scientists returned to the lab, ready to start on the most ambitious endeavor any of them had ever undertaken.

But the researchers would not have to create a vaccine from scratch. They would be working from a playbook that Dr. Barouch had been writing for 20 years.

By 2004, when Dr. Barouch opened his first lab at Harvard Medical School, he had gained a reputation as an ambitious young researcher. He immediately set a suitably daunting goal: a vaccine against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The virus had been found in 1983, but two decades of vaccine work had led to one disappointment after another. The standard ways to train the immune system to recognize a virus failed when it came to H.I.V.

Dr. Barouch decided to try something different: a vaccine made from another virus. They chose adenovirus serotype 26 — Ad26, for short — a relatively rare virus that causes mild colds but is very effective at invading human cells.

To create the vaccine, they collaborated with Crucell, a Dutch company that was bought by Johnson & Johnson in 2011. The researchers disabled the Ad26 virus so that it could only invade cells but not multiply in them.

Then they added a gene from H.I.V. Cells infected with Ad26 would make H.I.V. proteins that drifted in the bloodstream, priming the immune system.

In experiments on monkeys, the vaccine offered protection against H.I.V. In trials on people, the vaccine was safe and triggered a strong immune response against the virus. But the trials to see if it effectively protects against the virus are still underway.

In 2016, amid the Zika epidemic, Dr. Barouch and his colleagues quickly retooled their Ad26 vaccine to make Zika viral proteins. They got as far as trials that showed the vaccine was safe in people and generated a long-lasting immune response, but shelved the project when the Zika epidemic retreated.

As the new coronavirus began to spread in January, the lab already knew how to make a vaccine for a sudden outbreak. What they needed now was a way target to the new virus.

Previous research on SARS and other coronaviruses made the choice clear. They would prime the immune system to attack the so-called spike proteins that cover the surface of the new coronavirus.

‘A War We Could Win’

As January wore on, Dr. Barouch realized that Covid-19 was going to be far graver threat than SARS.

“We would not be able to stop this virus by traditional public health measures,” he said. “It was absolutely clear that we needed a vaccine.”

He emailed to Johan Van Hoof, the head of vaccines at Janssen. “I am writing today because the coronavirus outbreak in China is looking bad,’” Dr. Barouch wrote. “Are you interested in making a rapid Ad based vaccine like we did for Zika in 2016-2017?”

Two minutes later, Dr. Van Hoof replied: “Would a call work now?” And four days after the call, they signed an agreement to collaborate.

The Center for Virology and Vaccine Research has a staff of dozens of researchers, ranging from medical doctors and senior scientists to postdoctoral researchers, grad students and assistants just out of college. Dr. Barouch’s team turned away from projects on H.I.V. and other diseases, and divided up the work to make a coronavirus vaccine.

Mr. Mercado and his colleagues fashioned copies of the coronavirus gene that directs production of its spike protein. They came up with ten variations to see which would produce the best immune response.

Meanwhile, Katherine McMahan, a research assistant at the center, worked on the team building a test for spike antibodies in the animals that would receive the vaccine. Creating it took up most of her waking life. On some days, she didn’t get around to eating lunch till nighttime.

In late February, researchers injected the spike genes into mice and then sent Ms. McMahan blood from the animals. Ms. McMahan’s test confirmed that they were making coronavirus antibodies.

Ms. McMahan was near tears: “It began to feel like a war that we could win.”

Outside the lab, though, there was no sense that a war was coming. She urged family and friends to stock up on food and other supplies, without much luck.

“Many of us were having a Chicken Little experience,” she said. “You’re saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to take this seriously,’ and getting blown off.”

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The nasal swabs that Mr. Mercado examined revealed that some versions of the vaccines only partially protected the monkey, but others worked much better. As the investigators reported in the journal Science, they couldn’t detect the virus at all in eight of the 25 monkeys who got experimental vaccines.

The results gave Dr. Barouch hope that one of his team’s vaccines — or one of those developed by another group — might work. “It’s the real deal,” he said.

More monkeys were injected with the Ad26 virus, now equipped to produce the spike gene. Dr. Barouch predicts that this vaccine will induce higher levels of antibodies than the prototypes did.

The experiment will also provide crucial clues about how the immune system responds to the Ad26 vaccine. Some vaccines confer protection mostly by triggering the body to make antibodies that attack a virus. But others can stir virus-hunting immune cells to join the attack.

The results of the latest round of experiments will be published within a few weeks.

For all the progress made by Dr. Barouch’s team, the Ad26 vaccine has its skeptics. John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College, said other types of vaccines tested in animals have produced higher levels of antibodies. These vaccines, made of viral proteins, would be his choice for a weapon against the coronavirus.

Six companies have already launched human safety trials of their protein vaccines. “That’s what I’d be doing,” said Dr. Moore. “It’s freaking obvious.”

One drawback of viral-protein vaccines is that they take more time to produce in huge quantities. Other vaccines, like Johnson & Johnson’s Ad26, will come more quickly, and Dr. Moore acknowledged that they may work well enough to provide protection.

If so, there may not be a need for a better but slower vaccine. “If Plan A works, then you don’t need a Plan B,” Dr. Moore said.

A Virus Seed

While Dr. Barouch and his colleagues were testing the vaccines on animals in the United States, a team of Johnson & Johnson researchers was gearing up to manufacture them in the Netherlands. Scientists there took advantage of their years of experience with Ad26, which they have used to make vaccines for H.I.V., Ebola and other viruses.

Making an Ad26 vaccine requires remodeling an adenovirus and then creating vast quantities of the new version. But Ad26 cannot multiply in ordinary cells. It must infect specially engineered ones.

Johnson & Johnson’s technicians produce batches of these cells in huge vats filled with a nutrient-rich broth kept at a constant temperature and stirred to pull in oxygen.

“It’s to make the cells feel happy and comfortable, to make product,” said Paul Ives, the senior director of drug development at Janssen.

Once a batch of these nurturing cells has grown sufficiently, Dr. Ives and his colleagues infect them with the modified Ad26 viruses. Each cell churns out thousands of new viruses, which are removed and purified so that they can be used as vaccines.

Dr. Ives and his colleagues have been measuring how quickly various versions of the revamped Ad26 cell can multiply. Some reproduce more easily than others, the scientists have found.

Even a slightly slower reproduction rate could leave Johnson & Johnson with a huge shortfall in vaccine doses. “It can mean you have 300 million vaccines or 30 million,” said Paul Stoffels, the chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson.

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Dr. Ives and his colleagues recently chose the best virus for the vaccine and turned it into their “master virus seed.” They created gallons of frozen virus stock. A batch of this seed will become the vaccine used in the clinical trials.

And if those trials show that the vaccine is effective, the factory will use the same master virus seed to manufacture an emergency supply that would be distributed at the start of 2021. “We can theoretically produce 300 million vaccines,” Dr. Stoffels said.

The company has formed a partnership with an American vaccine maker and is also setting up two more plants in Asia and Europe, “so that we can come to a manufacturing capacity north of a billion vaccines,” Dr. Stoffels said.

Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, wonders if Johnson & Johnson can live up to that promise, given that it has never made Ad26 at anywhere close to this scale.

“Making a couple of million doses over several years for clinical trials is very different than producing hundreds of millions of doses within months for the market,” he said.

Johnson & Johnson has said it will distribute the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis. Speaking in March to the Belgian newspaper De Tijd, Dr. Stoffels calculated a cost of ten dollars per vaccine. In a follow-up interview, he said that the price would not be set until the company finished making an initial supply.

Amid a pandemic, critics say Johnson & Johnson should not be allowed to set the terms. “If we get a vaccine, it should be free and available to everybody,” said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P. and a critic of Johnson & Johnson’s drug pricing.

“How do you get these big, massive awards to produce a vaccine without any rider on the money saying it must be used in a way that it’s affordable to everybody?” he asked.

For now, no one knows if the vaccine will actually work. Dr. Barouch and his colleagues are getting ready to inject the Ad26 vaccine into hundreds of volunteers in Boston in late July. Researchers will not only observe whether the vaccine is safe but also look at the antibodies it prompts the volunteers to make. If those trials produce promising results, Johnson & Johnson will run a march larger one in the fall to see if the vaccine is effective.

At the same time, Dr. Barouch and his colleagues are planning a third round of experiments on monkeys. They want to inject the animals with antibodies against the coronavirus and then infect them. By giving different monkeys varying doses, the investigators hope to figure out what level of antibodies in the human body are required to prevent Covid-19.

And so, even as Boston is starting to reopen, Dr. Barouch and others at vaccine center continue to work nights and weekends.

“I keep a series of Post-it notes at my desk, which I update each day with the number of lives lost to Covid,” said Ms. McMahan. “When I’m feeling drained, I look at that number.”

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For most of her life, Mary L. Trump was shunted aside by her own family.

Her uncle, President Trump, for years looked down on her father — his own brother, Fred Trump Jr., an alcoholic who died when she was a teen.

Her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., hated her mother, whom he blamed for Fred Trump Jr.’s drinking, court papers say. Her aunt, the president’s sister, once accused Ms. Trump and her brother in a legal deposition of being “absentee grandchildren.”

Even when Ms. Trump shared Christmas with her family, her grandfather was often annoyed by what he took to be her disrespectful nature. Her crime, court papers say: She showed up wearing a baggy sweater.

Ms. Trump’s status as an outcast culminated in 1999 when Fred Trump Sr. died, and she discovered that she and her brother had been cut out of his will, depriving them of what they believed was their rightful share of untold millions. A dispute over the will devolved into a court fight, its details shielded by a confidentiality agreement that Ms. Trump has adhered to for nearly 20 years.

Now, however, the story of that fight — and other new allegations — has been thrust into the spotlight with the publication of Ms. Trump’s memoir, a copy of which The New York Times obtained on Tuesday. The book, along with a number of court documents that have never been reported, sheds new light on a decades-long saga of greed, betrayal and internecine squabbles, laying out what Ms. Trump has described as her family’s legacy of darkness and dysfunction.

Her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” which is set to be released next week, has ended up in court itself: The Trump family has sought to stop its publication. Ms. Trump has countered that the secrecy provision that has kept her silent until now is unenforceable and based on financial fraud.

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The book makes a number of allegations that Ms. Trump depicts as family secrets, among them a claim that a young Donald Trump paid someone to take his SAT, the standardized test used for college admissions. It also alleges that Mr. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, a former federal judge, considered him “a clown” who had “no principles” and that the Trump family left Fred Trump Jr. unattended at a hospital on the night that he died.

In her book, Ms. Trump seeks to explain how Donald Trump’s position in one of New York’s wealthiest and most infamous real-estate empires helped him acquire what Ms. Trump has referred to as “twisted behaviors” — attributes like seeing other people in “monetary terms” and practicing “cheating as a way of life.”

Ms. Trump, a clinical psychologist, calls her grandfather — the president’s father, Fred Trump Sr. — a “sociopath” who damaged his children. His father’s behavior, she concludes, led the president to adopt bullying and other aggressive behaviors to mask his own insecurities.

While several close associates of Mr. Trump have published exposés of him and his time in office, Mary Trump, who is 55 and lives on Long Island in New York, is the first member of the family to have broken ranks by writing a book.

Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the book was in Ms. Trump’s “own financial self-interest.” She said the president has described his relationship with his father in warm terms and called the allegation about the SAT “completely false.”

A lawyer for Mr. Trump’s family, Charles Harder, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

John Barrengos, one of Ms. Trump’s oldest friends, said that he believed the book was her response to a family that she feels tried to silence her and an attempt to shed light on her uncle, whose politics she strongly opposes.

“I think trying to tell the story as she sees it is a way of again claiming her voice not just in the construct of the family, but in the context of what our country is going through,” Mr. Barrengos said.

A turbulent family

The seeds of Ms. Trump’s alienation began before she was born, with her father’s relationship to his family, and continued through her childhood before bursting open when her grandfather died, according to her book and court documents, some of which remain under seal.

Ms. Trump and her younger brother, Fred Trump III, were the only children of Fred Trump Jr., the oldest sibling of Donald Trump, and Linda Clapp Trump, a onetime flight attendant who did not win her father-in-law’s approval. The couple had their son in 1962. Mary Trump was born three years later.

Fred Trump Jr. was not inclined to the family real-estate business, so Donald Trump stepped into the role of his father’s successor. The eldest Trump sibling became a pilot and struggled with alcoholism.

In her book, Ms. Trump writes that her uncle Donald watched her grandfather mock her father, learned from the ridicule to become Fred Sr.’s favorite son and joined in it. Donald Trump told his brother, referring to his career as a pilot: “Dad’s right about you: You’re nothing but a glorified bus driver.”

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For a child of one of New York’s most successful families, Ms. Trump had a turbulent upbringing. Her father was clashing with his own father and younger brother, she writes, drinking and smoking heavily. They lived in a drafty apartment in Highlander Hall, a Trump building in Queens, and at one point she was hospitalized with pneumonia.

Her father started to spiral downward. He had tried to buy a house but could not get a mortgage. “Our family was effectively trapped in that run-down apartment in Jamaica,” she wrote. “At 29 years old, my father was running out of things to lose.”

On one occasion, young Mary woke up to her father laughing while aiming a gun at her screaming mother’s face, she wrote in her book. By 1970, her mother told her father to leave, and he would never live with them again. They divorced in 1971. Fred Trump Jr. died of a heart attack in 1981 at age 42.

His children, who had already been given $400,000 each in trust by their grandfather, inherited a 20 percent stake their father had been granted in Trump apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens, several ground leases and other revenue-producing businesses.

Long after their father’s death, Mary Trump and her brother continued attending family events, including a Mike Tyson fight in Atlantic City with Donald Trump, their grandfather’s birthday party at Peter Luger Steak House, Ivanka Trump’s eighth birthday party and weddings, holidays and visits with their grandmother.

Still, they remained at the edges of the family. Fred Trump Sr. never liked Linda Trump, according to testimony in a battle over his will, and worried that any money left to his two grandchildren would end up in her hands.

“He had a tremendous dislike for their mother,” Donald Trump said of his father in a deposition obtained by The Times. “He felt the mother was the cause of Fred’s difficulty.”

Fred Trump Sr. also looked down on Mary Trump and her brother because of what he perceived as a poor work ethic fostered by inheriting their father’s money, according to testimony in the will dispute by John Walter, Donald Trump’s cousin.

“He knew what Fred III was doing,” Mr. Walter testified. “He knew what Mary was doing. He knew what their father had done before them.” Fred Trump III, Mr. Walter said, was “not working hard enough.”

Although Mr. Walter said that Mr. Trump Sr. did not expect Mary Trump, as a woman, to work in construction, he did not think either of the children was fulfilling their potential.

A fight over inheritance

When Fred Trump Sr.’s will was revised in 1991, he left $202,000 to each grandchild, including Mary Trump and Fred Trump III. The bulk of the Trump fortune would pass to his four living children. His other grandchildren stood to eventually inherit their parents’ portion. But Mary Trump and Fred Trump III — without their knowledge — were cut out of a 20 percent share of their grandfather’s estate that they might have received had their father lived.

“This is tantamount to disinheriting them,” an adviser told the Trump patriarch in a memo before the will was finalized. “You may wish to increase their participation in your estate to avoid ill will in the future.”

After Fred Trump Sr. died on June 25, 1999, Mary Trump and Fred Trump III learned that they had been cut out. Nine months later, they contested the will in court in New York, arguing that their grandfather had been suffering from dementia and that his children had manipulated him to influence the way the will was written.

A week after they went to court, a Trump family company cut off health insurance to Mary Trump, her mother, brother and her brother’s family, including Fred III’s 9-month-old son William, who had suffered from seizure disorders and would be diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Donald Trump acknowledged the termination of the insurance was related to the fight over his father’s will.

“When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?’” he told The Daily News at the time. Mary Trump told the newspaper that by contesting the will she was fighting for their father to be recognized. “He existed, he lived, he was their oldest son. And William is my father’s grandson,” she said.

Litigation over the will and the health insurance became the vehicles for the Trumps to hurl insults and raise grievances that had hung in the air for years.

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Robert Trump, in his own affidavit, called William’s 24-hour nurses “highly paid babysitters.”

Fred III said he was shocked that his family would trivialize his son’s medical care.

“My loving aunts and uncles, in an expression of their undying concern for William, were more than willing to jeopardize his care in order to punish me and my sister,” he said in his affidavit.

Those aunts and uncles had not visited William at a hospital a short cab ride from their Manhattan apartments, though in a restaurant Donald Trump “yelled across the tables that he had heard my child was sick,” Fred III later said.

‘Absentee grandchildren’

The fight over the will was equally bitter.

“They live like kings and queens,” Donald Trump said of his niece and nephew in his deposition. “This is not two people left out in the gutter.”

Maryanne Trump Barry, for her part, testified there was “no relationship” between Mary and Fred III and her father, calling them “absentee grandchildren,” even as she acknowledged that they had attended Christmas at her parents’ house and other family events.

“They often came and left very early,” she said. “On each time they came Freddy was never wearing a tie, which drove my father bananas, and Mary was in pants and a baggy sweater, which drove him bananas as well.”

Mary Trump, in response, gave her lawyer a long list of the events they had attended.

In her book, Ms. Trump accuses Robert Trump of telling her and her brother during the will battle that if they did not settle, the family would bankrupt one of the companies in which they had inherited a stake and saddle the two of them with the bill.

Ms. Barry and Robert Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

The Trumps settled their disputes in April 2001, court records show. As part of the deal, Mary and Fred III received an undisclosed cash settlement, and they agreed to turn over the 20 percent stake in Trump assets they had inherited from their father, including seven apartment complexes, ground leases and stakes in a public housing complex and in the company Robert Trump had purportedly threatened to bankrupt.

After The Times reported on the family’s questionable valuations of its real-estate assets in 2018, Mary Trump concluded that she and her brother were duped in the settlement, she has claimed in the run-up to publishing her book.

Even as the court fight over the will was starting to be resolved, Ms. Trump tried to establish her own life.

After working on a master’s degree in English at Columbia University, she switched directions and in 2001 started taking psychology courses at Adelphi University, not far from her home. In 2003, she earned a master’s degree, and by the end of the decade had finished her doctoral studies, writing a dissertation that examined the qualities that made people vulnerable to being stalked by their partners.

Around the same time, she entered into a romantic relationship. Ms. Trump and her partner raised a daughter before separating several years later.

When her uncle Donald announced that he was running for president in June 2015, Ms. Trump did not take it seriously, assuming, she wrote, that he “simply wanted the free publicity for his brand.” Throughout the campaign, which was marked by scandals like the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, Ms. Trump did not speak out, fearing that her voice would not be heard and that her views would make no difference, she wrote in the book.

She stayed in touch with her aunt, Ms. Barry, whom she quotes as saying about the presidential race, “He’s a clown — this will never happen,” during one of their regular lunches in 2015. Ms. Barry was particularly baffled by support for her brother among evangelical Christians, according to the book.

On election night, however, Ms. Trump took to Twitter, writing, “Worst night of my life.” She also wrote: “We should be judged harshly,” adding, “I grieve for our country.”

Ms. Trump has grown apart from the brother with whom she had been aligned in the family conflict years ago. While she has chosen to speak out against the family, he has taken a different path, nurturing a relationship with their uncle. In a statement released through the Trump family last month, Mr. Trump III distanced himself from his sister’s book and said their legal settlement had been generous and his son well-provided for.

SEATTLE — On the streets next to a police precinct in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, protesters and officers spent a week locked in a nightly cycle of standoffs, at times ending with clouds of tear gas.

But facing a growing backlash over its dispersal tactics in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the Seattle Police Department this week offered a concession: Officers would abandon their precinct, board up the windows and let the protesters have free rein outside.

In a neighborhood that is the heart of the city’s art and culture — threatened these days as rising tech wealth brings in gentrification — protesters seized the moment. They reversed the barricades to shield the liberated streets and laid claim to several city blocks, now known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.”

“This space is now property of the Seattle people,” read a banner on the front entrance of the now-empty police station. The entire area was now a homeland for racial justice — and, depending on the protester one talked to, perhaps something more.

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One block had a designated smoking area. Another had a medic station. At the “No Cop Co-op,” people could pick up a free LaCroix sparkling water or a snack. No currency was accepted, but across the street, in a nod to capitalism, a bustling stand was selling $6 hot dogs. It was dealing in U.S. dollars.

On Wednesday night, President Trump tried to portray the scenes in the city as something more sinister. He called for government leaders to crack down on the protesters, declaring on Twitter that “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle.”

“Take back your city NOW,” Mr. Trump wrote in a tweet directed at Mayor Jenny Durkan and Gov. Jay Inslee. “If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”

Ms. Durkan responded with a tweet of her own: “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”

The protest zone has increasingly functioned with the tacit blessing of the city. Harold Scoggins, the fire chief, was there on Wednesday, chatting with protesters, helping set up a call with the police department and making sure the area had portable toilets and sanitation services.

“I have no idea where we’re headed,” Mr. Scoggins said in an interview. “We’ve been working step by step on how to build a relationship, build trust in small things, so we can figure this out together.”

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The demonstrators have also been trying to figure it out, with various factions voicing different priorities. A list of three demands was posted prominently on a wall: One, defund the police department; two, fund community health; and three, drop all criminal charges against protesters.

But on a nearby fence, there was a list of five demands. Online was a list of 30.

While Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis drove most of the energy in the streets toward ending police violence and racial injustice, some of those here in recent days have pushed for a wider focus. Some of the messages mirror the 2011 Occupy movement and seemed aimed at targeting corporate America for its role in social inequities.

“The more we encourage and focus on the race thing, the greater our attention is not focusing on the fact that this is class warfare,” said a 28-year-old protester and self-described anarchist who identified himself only by his first name, Fredrix.

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But some of those who mobilized here over race and policing have begun to worry that these broader priorities could cloud the agenda at a time when vital progress for African-Americans seemed within reach.

“We should focus on just this one thing first,” said Moe’Neyah Dene Holland, 19, a Black Lives Matter activist. “The other things can follow suit. Because honestly, black men are dying and this is the thing we should be focusing on.”

The city prepared for the possibility that the street demonstrations could linger. On Wednesday, a team from the Seattle Department of Transportation came through and hoped to remove some of the orange barriers — including one marked with the message “People’s Republic of Capitol Hill — and replace them with planter boxes filled with coral bells and other plants to give the new pedestrian zone an air of permanence.

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But when the crews went to remove the barriers, some of the protesters objected. The crew stood down, and Rodney Maxie, a deputy director at the transportation department, told his team they might return later, after further talks with the demonstrators.

“This is good practice for the 9.0 earthquake,” he told his team.

The protesters also had differing opinions about how long the autonomous zone would last. Some wondered if the police department would try to reclaim the territory. Others said they expected the barriers to be up for weeks, until state and city leaders had done enough to meet their demands.

John Moore, 23, said he hoped to see the autonomous zone become legally recognized. Mr. Moore wore a stethoscope and paramedic apparel in a makeshift health center set up on the patio of a taco restaurant. The medic team was looking for a more permanent space to provide health services, and Mr. Moore said they had dozens of people with a range of qualifications, from C.P.R. certifications to experience in a Level 1 trauma center.

Mr. Moore said the experiment in a place without police could work.

“We are trying to prove through action and practice that we don’t need them and we can fulfill the community’s needs without them,” he said.

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