The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Michael Lewis
Rating: ★★★☆☆
I love Michael Lewis as an author. He’s one of those rare writers that can take a nonfiction story and write it into a gripping tale that reads like a novel. But on this one I was a little disappointed: I doubt there’d be a time in the last 100 years when one wouldn’t have been able to find an epidemiologist (or group of them!) who wasn’t warning of the next pandemic around the corner that’s going to bring the globe to it’s knees. Indeed, as a statistician who works with financial markets, I’m innately familiar with the plethora of pundits calling for the next bear market in the coming year, but in the last 100 years the’d have only been correct six times. Lewis basically sensationalized the story of a handful of obscure health officials and – with 20/20 hindsight – turned their predictions into what reads like a premonition with 100% certainty. It’s a well written book and I enjoyed it, but I’d hope for a more thoughtful and less sensationalistic message from Lewis… (But then I guess he wouldn’t sell so many books!)
Goodreads: For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.
Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.
The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.
Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.