A hard work to classify. It sets out a bleak view of American healthcare in which politics has eroded a system that can, in principle, deal with large-scale medical emergencies – but which i practice has degraded to the point that it can’t function at all. In this telling, the covid-19 pandemic was an inevitable tragedy, one that the federal government and the president made worse by their actions (and inactions), but would have been unable to address in any case because the means of control, and of action, have degraded beyond the point of effectiveness. It’s especially scathing of the CDC and its false (in the author’s view) claims to authority and leadership.

But it makes, in my opinion, a mistake in trying to find a collection of heroes who can serve as independent counterpoints to the institutional failings. Perhaps that’s also inevitable in Lewis’ journalistic style, and (as always with his books) he does indeed find a cast of memorable and unusual characters. But he suggests that bureaucratic impediments serve no purpose or are malicious, where in fact they serve as important corrections on risk to the public: one may argue that the safeguards should be jettisoned in a pandemic, but not (I think) that their existence per se is unnecessary. More seriously in my view, Lewis inherently promotes the “great man” theory of science (although one of his protagonists is a woman): the idea that individuals can change the course of history, and are held back by the inertia of the scientific “establishment”, which in my experience doesn’t exist. He also seems to feel that capitalism and private investment are a way forward, despite detailing all the failures of private companies along the way, and despite the evidence from countries other than America as to the power of centralised, planned, government interventions.

4/5. Finished Sunday 19 September, 2021.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)