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A review by culuriel
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis
5.0
Michael Lewis tells the story of a group of varied professionals, brought together during the Bush Jr administration, to brainstorm, model and plan strategies from stopping a pandemic from crushing America. Carter Mecher, especially, is depicted as the guy who figured things out and could quickly calculate the impact.
Lewis also reveals the sorry state of our nation’s public health as a system, showing how NO ONE is in charge should a pandemic occur. The nation’s public health offices will not act independently, scared of the political ramifications of asking the public to sacrifice should a pandemic fizzle out. The CDC never seemed to have received any of the original group’s pandemic planning, and might not have used it any way because they don’t have any real public health authority. So those with the authority were waiting for an organization that had no authority and was beholden to a political party not interested in fighting a pandemic anyway.
On the public health office side, Lewis describes the career and COVID efforts of Dr. Charity Dean, and how they led next to nowhere and really just to her resignation from public service.
Joe DeRisi, also someone Lewis spends multiple chapters on, trailblazed a way of spotting not just the virus but its genetic markers thru multiple generations, meaning super spreaders could be found with exact precision. But DeRisi’s innovation was undone by a tragic absence of nasal swabs.
As Lewis concludes, one realizes the tragedy of COVID- we could have been ready, as a society, but we chose not to be and usually so politicians wouldn’t have to tell their supporters something they didn’t want to hear.
Lewis also reveals the sorry state of our nation’s public health as a system, showing how NO ONE is in charge should a pandemic occur. The nation’s public health offices will not act independently, scared of the political ramifications of asking the public to sacrifice should a pandemic fizzle out. The CDC never seemed to have received any of the original group’s pandemic planning, and might not have used it any way because they don’t have any real public health authority. So those with the authority were waiting for an organization that had no authority and was beholden to a political party not interested in fighting a pandemic anyway.
On the public health office side, Lewis describes the career and COVID efforts of Dr. Charity Dean, and how they led next to nowhere and really just to her resignation from public service.
Joe DeRisi, also someone Lewis spends multiple chapters on, trailblazed a way of spotting not just the virus but its genetic markers thru multiple generations, meaning super spreaders could be found with exact precision. But DeRisi’s innovation was undone by a tragic absence of nasal swabs.
As Lewis concludes, one realizes the tragedy of COVID- we could have been ready, as a society, but we chose not to be and usually so politicians wouldn’t have to tell their supporters something they didn’t want to hear.