What went wrong in the COVID pandemic?

In a full-page ad for Michael Lewis’ new book inside the front cover of the New York Times Magazine (May 9, 2021), the publisher asks, “Where did we go wrong? And how can we get it right?” After all, as the ad states, “In 2019, a panel of public health experts judged the U.S. to be more prepared for a pandemic than other G7 nations.” And we all know how that worked out. Michael Lewis explains why in just three hundred pages—and spotlights the heroic efforts of a handful of medical scientists working behind the scenes to move the country toward an effective response to the COVID pandemic.

It’s well understood that one of the principal reasons the United States fumbled the response to the COVID pandemic was the incompetence, denial, and foot-dragging of the Trump Administration, and the President himself. But Lewis, and the many public health doctors he profiles in The Premonition, make clear that other factors loomed large as well. Almost pathological risk-aversion and ass-covering by the Centers for Disease Control. The innate inefficiencies and distortions of the country’s for-profit health care system. The decentralized US public health care “system” that’s not a system at all. And resistance to essential public health measures by a disbelieving and sometimes hostile citizenry.

In his many bestselling books, Berkeley, California-based author Michael Lewis tackles big questions from a human perspective. He tells his stories by profiling a handful of individuals whose experiences illuminate the larger reality. And those individuals are rarely the famous and powerful people whose lives dominate the popular press and the history books alike.

Leave a Comment