The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

 

Months after the beginning of the COVID outbreak, Michael Lewis looks at those medical professionals who foresaw the threat the pandemic posed and tried to manage an effective response only to be thwarted by stubborn bureaucracy. The visionaries include Charity Dean, a beleaguered California public health director who won’t settle for “no,” Carter Mesher, who formulated a federal pandemic response in the Bush years only to later be sidelined, and Joe DeRisi, a quirky lab director who once created a computer chip that contained data on every known human virus. Despite their ingenuity, a seemingly endless series of roadblocks – indifferent or incompetent state and federal agencies, slow-moving private labs, a lack of supplies, etc. – stood in their way.

 

From Moneyball to the Big Short, Lewis is a master of distilling complex subject matter into engrossing narratives, often by using a few colorful characters to bring readers closer to the action. This approach has raised questions about his accuracy and his allegiances, and as The Premonition follows the same formula, expect similar complaints to follow. Some readers may also question Lewis’s focus and wonder just how much remains untold.

 

That said, it is still an intriguing and insightful book. Lewis deftly connects George W. Bush reading an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic to the formation of a federal pandemic response, tragically undone in 2018 when John Bolton gutted biodefense. This and other aspects of the Trump administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude (i.e. Mike Pence’s insistence on tight messaging to the detriment of keeping the public informed) have been well-documented elsewhere. The Premonition, however, pulls back the veil on the Centers for Disease Control, revealing long-seated problems – a reluctance to act, a preoccupation with its own image, attempts to hamper state officials – that plagued the CDC long before Trump. Moreover, the book shows Dean effectively doing the job her boss (the since-deposed Sonia Angell) should have been doing without being allowed to take credit for it for the sake of giving Gavin Newsom political cover. Infuriating as this is to read about, it is also inspiring to see Dean stick it to everyone who underestimated her, to see Mecher labor doggedly behind the scenes to get people to take COVID seriously, to see several voices rise in opposition to the once-prevalent ideas that COVID was either insignificant or, later, untraceable and uncontainable.