The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.

• Author: Spiegelman, Sam

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

Michael Lewis

New York: WAV. Norton, 2021, 319 pp.

In The Premonition, Michael Lewis (of Moneyhall and The Big Short) recounts the frantic efforts of those few who, in the decades prior to COVID-19, warned anyone who might listen that tire United States was not prepared for a long-overdue pandemic. Their warnings went more or less unheeded, and ... well, we know die rest. Lewis ascribes this failure to poor institutional tendencies that have become familiar targets in the growing heap of postcrisis postmortems. These include the stubborn adherence to existing practices (even inefficient ones) in the face of reform efforts, the hoarding of information that keeps actionable information siloed in the wrong agencies, and prioritizing resource allocation according to popular rather dian probabilistic analysis of risks. On these counts the Centers for Disease Control draws Lewis's most forceful criticism, depicted as more a vanity project for its wonky leadership dian anything else.

In Lewis's telling, these institutional biases were especially acute in pandemic preparedness because it had been so long since the last major plague. The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed more Americans than the Civil War, but by the turn of the 21st century it was a distant memory-a footnote alongside Kaiser Wilhelm and Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points." While die 2009 Swine Flu outbreak should have led die powers-that-be to take pandemics more seriously, its flameout had the opposite effect. President George W. Bush's brief flirtation with pandemic preparedness brought two of Lewis's protagonists to the White House. Doctors Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, the former apt to quote Cervantes and the latter a "redneck epidemiologist," made some headway among federal agencies-especially the Department of Homeland Security-before the next administration pulled the mg out from under them. The disappearance of Swine Flu placed pandemic planning on the back burner after a fleeting moment at the forefront.

Outside the halls of power, Hatchett and Mecher led an underground of doomsayers who watched with unease as the world lurched from one apparent biological conflagration to another. Meanwhile, in California, Santa Barbara County medical chief Charity Dean and bio-technologist Joe DeRisi, saw the next great crisis in nearly every cluster of this or that disease that appeared out of the ordinary-and thought many warranted sweeping measures...