Smichael lewis, a bestseller was to be expected. The man is the author of Moneyball (WW Norton & Company Inc. editions, 2003, untranslated), on the baseball statistics revolution, and The Big Short (The Heist of the Century, Sonatine Editions, 2010), on hedge funds on Wall Street. So many books that have resulted in big budget movies.
This time, Michael Lewis unfolds the story of the fiasco of the United States’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Investigation, The Premonition. A Pandemic Story (WW Norton & Company Inc., untranslated), reads like a thriller. It features a group of visionaries grappling with the health bureaucracy: the ” Cassandre of the Covid “, according to the expression of New York Times. They sense that the United States is not ready to respond to the inevitable: a highly contagious disease. With every step they come up against a wall of denial, named Trump et al, but not only that, this is the real revelation of the book.
Released in May, the story was praised by the press as a work of public safety, or nearly so. The hierarchs of public health preferred to ignore it. As much as Trump, each of whom has followed the increasingly erratic response, it is indeed the CDCs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) that do poorly.
A credo: no alarmism, no rush
A source of national pride, sometimes to the point of arrogance, these institutions supposed to “control” diseases have shown themselves incapable of doing so. Error on the tests, when the CDC wanted to impose theirs, which turned out to be faulty; on masks, first declared not essential; on the tracing of the first travelers returning from China, of which only the arrival airport was recorded… Since Ronald Reagan, the CDC has become politicized, affirms Michael Lewis. Their credo is: no alarmism, no haste, and above all nothing that could harm the host of the White House. Result: with 4% of the world’s population infected, the United States has totaled nearly 14% of deaths.
The book opens in the early 2000s, long before the world was interested in Wuhan bats. In New Mexico, a teenage girl named Laura Glass works on a contamination prediction model for a school project. In San Francisco, the brilliant virus hunter Joe DeRisi has developed a method for sequencing pathogens. The heroine of the story is Charity Dean, 44, an infectious disease specialist and deputy director of public health from California. She also has the intuition in December 2019: ” That’s it. It started. ” Dr. Dean is now the head of a private lab that has designed software for virus detection and epidemic control: a start-up version of the CDC, of sorts.
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