Michael Lewis follows a group of healthcare professionals who discovered the Pandemic before any of the Government agencies did. My favorite character is Charity Dean, a gifted California health official, who recognizes the threat of the Covid-19 virus way before the Centers for Disease Control had it on their radar. And Dr. Dean takes action, which the CDC avoids.
I also admire Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who were part of the pandemic planning team under the George W. Bush administration and continued to work on pandemic preparedness under the Obama administration. John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, fired Tom Bossert (the Homeland Security Advisor) and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team (p. 163). After that, the Trump Administration had no contingency plans for pandemics.
Michael Lewis shows how a country with advanced medicine and vast health resources completely failed to protect its citizens from the coronavirus. New estimates claim close to a million Americans died from Covid-19. Joe DeRisi, a brilliant biologist, estimated that the U.S. should have lost 180,000 if all the pandemic preparations had been put into practice. Obviously, they weren’t.
The Premonition is in some ways a sequel to Lewis’s last book, The Fifth Risk (you can read my review here). In The Fifth Risk Lewis showed how Trump loaded the Federal agencies with political hacks and incompetent staff. Lewis predicted that when things would go wrong, the Federal Government would be inept at meeting the challenges. Lewis was right.
The Premonition is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in 2021. It’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s real. I highly recommend it. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: The missing Americans — xii
PART 1
Prologue: The looking glass — 3
ONE: Dragon — 10
TWO: The making of a public-health officer — 23
THREE: The pandemic thinker — 50
FOUR: Stopping the unstoppable — 78
FIVE: Clairvoyance — 112
PART 2
SIX: The red phone — 135
SEVEN: The redneck epidemiologist — 160
EIGHT: In Mann Gulch — 186
NINE: The L6 — 209
PART 3
TEN: The bug in the system — 241
ELEVEN: Plastic flowers — 270
EPILOGUE: The sin of omission — 297
Acknowledgments –303
I’m afraid that even if the next pandemic (and there will be a next pandemic) is of Ebola-like symptoms and fatality rate, at least 40% of our population will label it a “liberal hoax.” Even if people are dying right in front of them with blood coming out of their eyes! Le sigh.
Deb, I agree with you. A certain segment of American live in an Alternate Reality where pandemics are hoaxes and sound epidemiology procedures are somehow bogus. But, as they will find out, there is a cost to ignorance…
I have a library hold on this but it will be a while before I get it. Deb is right. The worst plague in this country right now isn’t Covid, it’s stupidity. It affects more than a third of the population, and there’s almost nothing you can do about it. There’s no vaccine and no cure. We can blame loathsome scum like Trump and Tucker Carlson, and they’re certainly a major part of the problem. But without stupidity their insanity couldn’t get a foothold.
Michael, as Michel Lewis points out, the Coronavirus Pandemic exposed a lot of flaws in the American medical system. The CDC was slow to act. Local medical officials. starved of resources like PPE for years, were overwhelmed. And, of course, it was Pandemic deniers who engaged in Superspreader events that just made things worse.
And people like this must have always existed in these numbers but their wrong-headed beliefs weren’t fed as they are now. There so many peddlers of lies and our extreme politicization doesn’t help. We have forgotten how to engage in conversations about things other than political talking points.
Patti, social media has given wackos and crazies platforms to spread their conspiracy theories and false information. And a gullible audience who believes all this fake news.
Not just social media, but Murdoch media very much as well. And the degree to which quarter-truths and little kernels of truth within lies, and the obvious lies that more institutional politicians would insist upon for so long, laid a lot of the groundwork.
Todd, and as Michael Lewis showed in THE FIFTH RICK, Trump gutted most Government agencies and replaced professionals with political hacks. Then we all paid the price when the Pandemic hit and the response was inept…or non-existent.
I think Michael Lewis, Patti Abbott, Michael Padgett, Deb, and You are missing the point. There is serious money to be made by pandemic-denying.
People like Tucker Carlson get enormous salaries for spewing this stuff; they spend it on luxury houses, fine dining, and other evidence of success, and this money eventually trickles down to the Truly Deserving Needy. So by denying COVID, they are literally feeding the nation. Also, a Millionaire may often pay a hundred dollars or more in income taxes, which goes to build roads, hospitals, schools, and a vaguely-grasped concept called Mass Transit, which promises to keep poor people off roads so more expensive cars can use them.
Would you deny the pandemic-deniers the right to enrich themselves and throw a few crumbs to the rest of us?
Dan, a lot of people died unnecessarily during the Pandemic (and continue to die today) because of misinformation and deliberate confusion. Tucker Carlson claims millions of people are dying from the vaccines around the world–without providing any proof. I understand grifters grift, but when grifters are peddling Death, I have to draw a line.
IN some ways, people like Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis are worse than Trump. Trump is a total moron who is not playing “five dimension chess” but just acting and reacting totally on his instincts. Carlson is a cynic who clearly doesn’t believe in anything he says (OK, I could amend that to “doesn’t believe in anything, period”) but has followed the Alex Jones method of picking out whatever is likely to stir up his yahoo audience and lying and hyping it repeatedly. It isn’t that he doesn’t know that the stories about hamburgers or Kamala’s book are bullshit. It’s because he does know but doesn’t give a shit as long as it stirs up the boob-oisie. If you were to ask him the Joseph Welch question, the answer would be, “No. I have no shame. Totally, completely shameless and fuck you, loser.”
Of course, Deb is right, as usual. I’ve mentioned the woman in our building who told me that the ONLY way I would get Covid was from the mask. I just stared at her and she shut up.
Jeff, on weekends when I ride our recumbent bike, I switch the channel on our TV to FOX NEWS just to see what silly “news” they’re dumping on their audience. On Saturday, it was all about the falling Chinese rocket. The commentator made it sound like every loyal FOX NEWS viewer was being targeted by the Chinese! FOX NEWS loves to resort to fear-mongering to agitate their audience.
Just so you know my feelings, George, tht sonuvabitch Trump and his cronies have a lot to anwer for. (Actually I suspect you already knew how I felt.)
I am curious however: As the lunatic fringe grows under the Trump-Carlson-Alex Jones influence, has membership in such wacked-out groups like the Flat Earth Scoiety grown in proportion?
Jerry, good question! I know some Republican legislators here in New York State and they tell me that Trump and QAnon and other conspiracy groups are sucking all the donor money away from traditional politicians. Wacky groups like THE FLAT EATH SOCIETY have more competition for followers, too.
The crazy people do not only exist in the USA. On Sunday I met a remote relative, 50 years old, who told me clearly that he would not accept vaccination!
He said that all those deaths last year (we had around 80 000 in Germany) came from the stress that people had, caused by the rules for wearing masks, closed stores, bars, restaurants etc. etc.
It was only the stress, nobody died from the virus infecting him.
I didn’t know what to say so I kept my mouth shut but made a mental note about him – no contact.
The good news:
I took my stepdaughter to her first jab (Astra Zeneca like me) and the female doc (they are a very nice couple) told us that we could get our second jab in 6 weks – I wouldn’t have to wait 12 weeks, so I can join my wife again in Hungary – real soon!
I’ll call her in ten minutes – wait what she’ll have to say.
Wolf, we have millions of Americans who refuse to be vaccinated. The reasons vary, but until the U.S. reaches 80% vaccination rates, Covid-19 and its variants will remain a danger.
And apparently the CDC employee who was raising the alarm about COVID-19 the earliest has recently been fired.
Todd, the CDC needs a housecleaning.