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4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
Michael Lewis's ability to get to the heart of a matter as said matter is unfolding is as fascinating and prescient as always. In this case, he's interviewing pandemic specialists in the US government as the pandemic is starting to unfold, and profiling the people who gave us a fighting chance when bureaucracy and malicious intent were fighting against the public interest. The Premonition goes hand-in-hand with his last book, "The Fifth Risk", as both are about governmental ineptitude and what happens when you have an administration that doesn't understand the role of proper bureaucraxy and the people who make it their livelihood to run a country. It's slightly more hopeful than The Fifth Risk, as it's about the people who actually give a damn and who won't say no in the face of adversity. It makes you hope that for every 10 or 20 bureaucrats who don't do anything within a government, there's at least one person like those profiled in this book.
So if you asked me why the U.S. had a pandemic policy, I probably would have said something about Obama and I would have been wrong. The U.S. had a pandemic policy (although Trump defunded it) when the COVID-19 outbreak hit because of George W. Bush. Someone gave him John Barry's book on the 1918 influenza epidemic. He read it and asked his advisers about current pandemic policy. When the advisers told him there was no policy, he insisted on making developing a policy a priority. Lewis tells the story of how the policy was developed, the bureaucratic imperatives that rendered the CDC largely useless, and how the people who originally developed the pandemic policy during the Bush administration got to work when COVID hit. Great book.
I read this book for a library non-fiction discussion. It provides the backstories of people who worked in public health (California public health official, doctor in the VA health system, people who work on the pandemic task force set up by George Bush, etc.) who knew from the research and on the job experiences that a pandemic was inevitable. This book confirms how much politics rather than science and common sense caused a greater spread of Covid that early use of mitigations could have prevented. The author explains how the CDC went from a non-partisan organization where people moved up from the inside based on their achievements to a more political government agency where the leadership changed based on which party is in the White House.
informative
slow-paced
Michael Lewis's book are always good. Premonition is better than most. Just published this year(2021) Lewis looks at the Covid-19 pandemic and the failure of the US public and private health systems to protect us from it. While the refusal of the President of the United States to deal with it was a the largest part of that failure there were other causes as well. The privatized US health care system was part of the failure. Private labs charged high fees to run tests and were impossibly slow in providing results while making millions in public funds for their poor performance. The Center for Disease Control served more as a barrier to action than a help. Lewis focused on a few individuals who saw the pandemic coming and could have made it less of a disaster if they had not been blocked. A small group of public health including the Assistant State Health Director of California who was blocked from being truly effective by her immediate superior. So we know that 650,000 people did not have to die. And it's not over yet. The pandemic and climate change were turned into a political issue when they should have been treated as a threat to all. Do we deserve better leadership, or do we get the failed self-serving leaders who deserve .
This book makes no pretense of being a comprehensive examination of the covid-19 pandemic, which is probably for the best since we do not yet have the distance necessary for that type of reflection. Instead, the author expertly discloses a discrete slice of the story, which is an examination of the public health system (or lack thereof), and what that looked like going into this pandemic that has altered all of our lives. The journalism here is compelling, and the individuals featured will capture your imagination.
This book is certainly chalk full of science, epidemiology and more so it might take some a bit to process but so worth it. Eye opening from chapter one through the acknowledgements.
My mother referred this to me, so when I got a chance to read it, I took it. Lewis tells the story of experts in virology and public health who were trying to prepare for a future pandemic, and initiatives from the Bush administration and Obama administration to prepare for a pandemic, and the breakdown of all this in the actual implementation under the Trump "administration," as well as systemic failure of the CDC to actually address situations. In all, the book paints an infuriating picture of systemic failure and incompetence, and the betrayal of the United States to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. Reading this made my blood boil a little, but it was worth reading . . .
Okay. Initially, I gave this book four stars, but I've decided that it's worthy of five. Why the change? Because I think it's a book that everyone, regardless of their political persuasion, should read. Structured similarly to Lewis' The Big Short, this follows the careers of three people (and the people in their orbits) who refused to accept the "conventional wisdom" about coronavirus. Are they famous? Well, I guess they are now, but they weren't before. In addition to the premonitions of the individuals profiled here, Lewis also discusses throughout the book how risk-averse the culture at the CDC has become. At the very end, he tells us why he thinks that is so. Although the CDC eventually did the right thing, they were very late to the party.