Lewis has written a story which begins way before 2020. In fact it begins around 2005 when Bush read a book while on vacation by John Barry on the 1918 plague. Bush got alarmed by what he read and asked for a pandemic strategy to be formulated. That set in motion the giant, sleepy cogwheels of government bureaucracy. However more than the government, it is outsiders who in their individual capacity set things moving and contribute the most.
However the book is hugely flawed in that it introduces so many characters without weaving a coherent thread linking all of them together. There are so many determined people on whom good portions of a chapter, or even full chapters, have been written. But they just disappear when the chapter ends. Lewis fails to link convincingly their contirbutions to the ultimate pandemic of 2020.
But more than that, one is going to be shocked at the kind of malaise that exists in CDC, White House, and what not in dozens, if not more, kind of ‘directorates’ which exist and the paper-pusher mentality that exists in these departments. I am shocked that despite of all this, CDC has the kind of the reputation it has today. You read about how many bumpers those not-famous individuals have to go throug to make their strategy accepted in mid or late 2000s, and how that shaped the U.S. government’s response in 2020. That’s one of the reasons why schools / colleges were kept closed for such a long time, apart from the fact that children’t vaccines took longer to be developed.
It’s an okay read honestly, but surely an eye-opening one.