The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
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.
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Community Reviews
"PROLOGUE The Looking Glass"
7,5/10
Very strong intro. I like it. It’s about a girl who has an academic dad who helps her with her research school projects and together they are creating simple pandemic spread models and having fun with it. Frankly, this is how school should be! Unfortunately we don’t have nearly enough of these free group projects where you can deep dive into a topic of your choice.
ONE Dragon
6/10
A woman, Dr. Dean, is responsible for pandemics in a county in Califonia. She newly divorced a rich surgeon and hates men so she just spends the chapter complaining about some men while calling them girly and chicken. Not really relevant to Covid-19. The focus is on her not being taken seriously by men supposedly because she's hot, blonde, very small, motivated and a woman. But that's just her own perception. We never hear anyone else say any of this.
"TWO The Making of a Public-Health Officer"
7,5/10
Dr. Dean here doesn’t come off as a sexist asshole which is an improvement. She’s still power hungry and dictatorial, but frankly giving public workers this extreme power will surely in most cases end this way so it’s not really that unique. It is surprising how much she adores her power and brags about having unrestricted power even as a plain health officer. Most people who abuse their power try to hide it, not her. She visits a clinic and just shuts it down on the spot. She doesn’t do a clear investigation. She seemingly doesn’t fill out papers. She doesn’t ask for advice or follow ups. Just shuts it down on the spot. It's not that she is wrong. It's just that we see a judge, jury and executioner. She just looks around and judges.
In the last part of the chapter we move to another woman doing yet another job. So far we just jump from woman to woman largely bragging about how important their job is. It feels a bit confusing as they are mostly just described as doing their job, but otherwise are the same. Race, looks and other things are rarely mentioned when he describes women. Lewis has shown that he can write good chapters, in Flash Boys he does that. So it's weird that all these women are so badly presented. But I think it's because they are just not as interesting or important as the men in Flash Boys. Here all the women are sorta the prototypical whining academic feminist personality. Just a bit plain and boring. And then the men in his other books are powerful go-gethers as they work in the private industry and create companies. Here the public workers constantly talk about rules, lazy workers, bureaucracy, papers, bad agencies. They are in a system where everyone is fighting to do as little work as possible, but then a few are trying to just gain as much power as possible too so you have this weird conflict between lazies and dictators. All these public workers are trying to abuse their power in different ways and once you understand that you can bully you way through the system you may see the public sector as an easy way to gain an amount of power you would never be close to in the private sector where the quality of your work and your knowledge matters much more. For the left-winger Lewis the government systems largely still work despite all of this. He could have been more critical, but it's not the story he wants to tell.
"THREE The Pandemic Thinker"
6,5/10
This feels like it’s getting closer to the Covid-19 stuff, but unfortunately we are still not there. Now we follow some men, especially one doctor. Unfortunately Lewis is still writing boring characters. The issue is that we are kinda just reading about doctor stuff overall. It’s hospitals, sicknesses and a doctor who works with sick veterans and looks into how to fix doctor errors. It’s fine stuff if you want to read about hospitals, but feels a bit irrelevant in a book on Covid-19. Later this doctor is hired by the White House to write a pandemic plan. George W. Bush has read about pandemics and when he asked about what plans the country had in case of a pandemic the answer was that they didn’t have any plan. So he set up a committee to write a plan, but apparently these committees write boring and pointless plans where you basically can do anything in case of a pandemic. So it feels like a waste of time and money.
"FOUR Stopping the Unstoppable"
6/10
The WHITE HOUSE called some random researcher way before Covid-19 and then… he wrote a report for them. Don’t worry, this is not the only story in this chapter. A female nurse gets a call from THE WHITE HOUSE… OMG… and then she… helps write a report for them. Rinse and repeat with a ton of these people doing the same thing just writing and rewriting the same pandemic response report. In reality some research is interesting. People striving for progress and doing experiments is a really fun topic. But some bureaucrats asking someone to write a summary on a topic is not that exciting. Doesn’t matter that it’s the White House. It’s still just public office papers- the most boring thing in the world. There are zero actual large scale pandemics in the book so far. And now we even have to read about theories about them without seeing anything being used in practise. These public workers write papers and do very small stuff that’s not about towns, cities or countries, but rather about single sick people. I think the book needed to give us just some lines about Covid-19. Just anything.
FIVE Clairvoyance
7,5/10
Obama takes office and the George W. Bush experts who wrote all the reports are either kicked out or shut out as they are not the new “Change you can believe in” group. A guy stays as he can't find a new job, Carter. They rename his agency
Curiously, Obama's White House butches a pandemic response worse than Trump, yet is very lucky that the pandemic is not bad at all. Nothing is shut down. CDC barely reacts. Schools stay open. It reminds me of how WHO kept telling everyone that masks were useless and that borders should stay open. Later following such advice killed millions of people and WHO started to change their Covid-19 guidelines. But not failures are punished.
"SIX The Red Phone"
6/10
It’s not a bad chapter. It just bored me a lot. It’s mainly about studying viruses in snakes. So it’s actually one of the most relevant chapters it just didn’t grab my attention. I didn’t feel like I needed to know about such small non-Covid-19 experiments right now. I want to know about how pandemics spread. But then again, I think most people will find it interesting enough if they don't have a need to read about the pandemic itself.
"SEVEN The Redneck Epidemiologist"
6/10
Covid-19 finally starts in this chapter… finally. Yet the chapter suddenly jumps away from American corona focus to firefighters fighting a fire. Yet again it’s a mix of a ton of personal anecdotes unfortunately. The Covid-19 story by itself would be interesting enough. They find out at the very start that China is messing with the numbers and that the virus is actually spreading much faster than you would expect from the official China numbers.
Curiously it's not Trump making stupid decisions but the various organizations just like during Obama. CDC for example says it's not a pandemic even though it kills thousands of people, because it's not a pandemic in USA yet. But many of the people Lewis interviews are the Bush and Obama people not the Trump people so they are not really part of the active investigation group for the White House. So obviously they are just criticizing things from the outside just being thankful that the old viruses were weak and therefore didn't make the former presidents look bad. It would be interesting to instead see what the current CDC people say. Why did they make the bad decisions? You can blame a lot on Trump here. Just like you can blame Obama for his virus screwups. But many of the old organizations are still lead by the same old people. Only a few Trump people are in power. And Trump doesn't get the best Covid-19 data anyhow as CDC is still as dysfunctional as during Obama. So at the start he couldn't do anything else.
Unfortunately this outside looking in stuff doesn’t quite work for me. Lewis has interviews with a lot of people bragging about themselves and their amazing expertise and will to fight. None of them make any great mistakes. Yet everyone they mention in the government are clueless, lazy, stupid, egotistical and greedy. It may be, but it doesn’t really explain the problem. Why did the CDC not get any good info on China? Why didn’t CDC try to give the White House good info? Why did they mess up? It’s just curious that no one Lewis interviews has any part of the blame. Curious! Of course this doesn't mean they are all lying. Lewis may have asked hundreds of people and then everyone who knew they were at fault just refused to give an interview for the book. That would make a lot of sense too. Also, don’t forget that people who constantly make every virus seem extreme were just luckily right this time around. One of the leading Covid-19 researchers in the UK government constantly predicted that these viruses would kill millions and was always wrong until Covid-19 came along. This is how you can seem like a genius while actually having horrible predictions on average. He later quit because he ignored the Covid-19 guidelines himself while having a sexual relationship with a married woman.
"EIGHT In Mann Gulch"
6/10
When the author is using words like ”mansplaining” to describe what a Trump worker is doing he is not really remaining neutral or trying to be fair. The Trump and “they were all men” claims in this and former chapters make for some bad and maybe even sexist arguments. It just makes it look like he doesn’t have any better stories and claims to dismiss their ideas with. Instead he calls them out for being sexist. Yet you can’t actually know if they were mansplaining or just explaining. These people are experts. No matter if you agree or disagree with them they do have statements and opinions to make that we need to listen to. If the OPINIONS are stupid we need to counter them directly instead of just attacking the messengers.
"NINE The L6"
6/10
Same as chapter 8 pretty much. I do have quite a few fallacies in the book I want to point out as this chapter takes it to an EXTREME.
I have an issue with the typical Lewis thing of making everyone he interviews into a hero. Here it’s often women so the enemies are: men, Trump workers, lazy bureaucrats, mean girls. The term “mean girls” is actually used in this chapter. I get why a woman would want to build herself up like this and why Lewis wants heroes. But this is just lame and often a bit unbelievable. It just seems a bit suspicious that everyone he interviews is basically a mix of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel or a mix between Einstein and an AI if they are men. I don't doubt these few people actually believe they saved USA from Covid-19 all by themselves. I just doubt it's true. But then it’s not completely clear that they are all just bragging. One expert White woman was sought out for a leadership job. Suddenly the Democratic governor in California hired an unqualified Latina instead and the White woman was told that she would never be considered for the job as she wasn’t a minority. Unfortunately the Latina was completely clueless and this made it very hard to even study Covid-19 as she tried to shut down the supposed fear-mongering research. Of course the White woman, who was initially bullied by the Latina, was actually forced to lead. And later the Latina was moved to a basic race issues job by the governor who tried to avoid an investigation.
"TEN The Bug in the System"
6,5/10
Tuberculosis chapter. Why? Not sure. Lewis often tries to mix chapters and stories so that you will get a story in one chapter and then get a continuation 3 chapters later and so on. He does it to keep things fresh. But to me this doesn’t seem like a good idea here. We already needed to wait a long time for any Covid-19 stories and we are yet to read much about what the White House did or even what the outcome was when people started dying. So suddenly going away from the Covid-19 outbreak stuff seems weird. But then again, when the book was written Covid-19 was still a new issue so we just didn't have much more info back then. The lab leak hypothesis for example mainly started to go mainstream after the book was written.
But the chapters all have various stories about different people and this one also has Covid-19 stories here and there.
"ELEVEN Plastic Flowers"
6,5/10
Constantly we see how CDC screws up yet it’s claimed to be Trump’s fault.
"EPILOGUE The Sin of Omission"
5,5/10
More personal stories.
My final opinion on the book
It's the worst Michael Lewis book. That doesn't mean it's terrible. It's still good writing and some stories are great. The CDC California story about the terrible Latina leader hired just for her race is amazing. Besides that the stories are weak sauce and often just about people and not Covid-19. So you hear a lot of narrations about researchers openly bragging. This feels like a miss. Even if you love people bragging you'd expect a different topic in such a book. And surely not everyone is Batman in real life even though they all claim they are in this book.
Then it's mostly about California. So we hear about how the evil Trump made everyone in CDC ignore warning signs even though it's not explained how Trump can make thousands of people not even find evidence. Seems impossible to me. I get hidding things or being biased. But not even understanding basic facts because of Trump? Unlikely. Especially because the story about CDC during Obama was basically the same except for the fact that the Mexico virus was weaker. At any rate it's about how CDC and other regional California organizations acted so it's not really about Trump as such. I feel like one would need to explore more of the country to make any big Trump claims. Lewis often mainly focuses on the coasts in his book which is not really the full America. He is a typical coast Democrat this way overlooking the small towns and GOP voters. Which is a shame because I think you could actually make Trump look bad here if you were more fair about your sources.
During Trump Lewis basically wrote a Orange Man Bad book about mostly the events before Trump even took office. A whole book about Trump that just assumed things would go wrong. A premature book no matter how you look at it. And even so I liked that book more than this one. That one at least didn't use words like "mansplaining" to attack Trump politicians. It felt more fair in the critique. It was based on rumors, but didn't just seem mean for the sake of being mean. Here Lewis tries to prove himself right by showing that Trump actually did screw up. Yet he doesn't even focus on USA overall but just California and then Washington DC work.
I don't think one needs to fix all the bad stuff here to create a good book. Just fix one of the points and it would be enough. It's just too many faults. Even just removing the 5-6 non Covid-19 chapters would save it as then you would at least have a mediocre book on Covid-19 and not just a collection of personal stories about doctors and researchers being heroes.
At the end of the day I don't really feel like I understood Covid-19 any better after having read this book as it's not about Covid-19. But the CDC stuff was really interesting and a critical book about CDC would be super fun! Please Lewis… please stop the Orange Man Bad books and write about other topics. I need it. I need to old clever and more neutral Lewis back.
7,5/10
Very strong intro. I like it. It’s about a girl who has an academic dad who helps her with her research school projects and together they are creating simple pandemic spread models and having fun with it. Frankly, this is how school should be! Unfortunately we don’t have nearly enough of these free group projects where you can deep dive into a topic of your choice.
ONE Dragon
6/10
A woman, Dr. Dean, is responsible for pandemics in a county in Califonia. She newly divorced a rich surgeon and hates men so she just spends the chapter complaining about some men while calling them girly and chicken. Not really relevant to Covid-19. The focus is on her not being taken seriously by men supposedly because she's hot, blonde, very small, motivated and a woman. But that's just her own perception. We never hear anyone else say any of this.
"TWO The Making of a Public-Health Officer"
7,5/10
Dr. Dean here doesn’t come off as a sexist asshole which is an improvement. She’s still power hungry and dictatorial, but frankly giving public workers this extreme power will surely in most cases end this way so it’s not really that unique. It is surprising how much she adores her power and brags about having unrestricted power even as a plain health officer. Most people who abuse their power try to hide it, not her. She visits a clinic and just shuts it down on the spot. She doesn’t do a clear investigation. She seemingly doesn’t fill out papers. She doesn’t ask for advice or follow ups. Just shuts it down on the spot. It's not that she is wrong. It's just that we see a judge, jury and executioner. She just looks around and judges.
In the last part of the chapter we move to another woman doing yet another job. So far we just jump from woman to woman largely bragging about how important their job is. It feels a bit confusing as they are mostly just described as doing their job, but otherwise are the same. Race, looks and other things are rarely mentioned when he describes women. Lewis has shown that he can write good chapters, in Flash Boys he does that. So it's weird that all these women are so badly presented. But I think it's because they are just not as interesting or important as the men in Flash Boys. Here all the women are sorta the prototypical whining academic feminist personality. Just a bit plain and boring. And then the men in his other books are powerful go-gethers as they work in the private industry and create companies. Here the public workers constantly talk about rules, lazy workers, bureaucracy, papers, bad agencies. They are in a system where everyone is fighting to do as little work as possible, but then a few are trying to just gain as much power as possible too so you have this weird conflict between lazies and dictators. All these public workers are trying to abuse their power in different ways and once you understand that you can bully you way through the system you may see the public sector as an easy way to gain an amount of power you would never be close to in the private sector where the quality of your work and your knowledge matters much more. For the left-winger Lewis the government systems largely still work despite all of this. He could have been more critical, but it's not the story he wants to tell.
"THREE The Pandemic Thinker"
6,5/10
This feels like it’s getting closer to the Covid-19 stuff, but unfortunately we are still not there. Now we follow some men, especially one doctor. Unfortunately Lewis is still writing boring characters. The issue is that we are kinda just reading about doctor stuff overall. It’s hospitals, sicknesses and a doctor who works with sick veterans and looks into how to fix doctor errors. It’s fine stuff if you want to read about hospitals, but feels a bit irrelevant in a book on Covid-19. Later this doctor is hired by the White House to write a pandemic plan. George W. Bush has read about pandemics and when he asked about what plans the country had in case of a pandemic the answer was that they didn’t have any plan. So he set up a committee to write a plan, but apparently these committees write boring and pointless plans where you basically can do anything in case of a pandemic. So it feels like a waste of time and money.
"FOUR Stopping the Unstoppable"
6/10
The WHITE HOUSE called some random researcher way before Covid-19 and then… he wrote a report for them. Don’t worry, this is not the only story in this chapter. A female nurse gets a call from THE WHITE HOUSE… OMG… and then she… helps write a report for them. Rinse and repeat with a ton of these people doing the same thing just writing and rewriting the same pandemic response report. In reality some research is interesting. People striving for progress and doing experiments is a really fun topic. But some bureaucrats asking someone to write a summary on a topic is not that exciting. Doesn’t matter that it’s the White House. It’s still just public office papers- the most boring thing in the world. There are zero actual large scale pandemics in the book so far. And now we even have to read about theories about them without seeing anything being used in practise. These public workers write papers and do very small stuff that’s not about towns, cities or countries, but rather about single sick people. I think the book needed to give us just some lines about Covid-19. Just anything.
FIVE Clairvoyance
7,5/10
Obama takes office and the George W. Bush experts who wrote all the reports are either kicked out or shut out as they are not the new “Change you can believe in” group. A guy stays as he can't find a new job, Carter. They rename his agency
Curiously, Obama's White House butches a pandemic response worse than Trump, yet is very lucky that the pandemic is not bad at all. Nothing is shut down. CDC barely reacts. Schools stay open. It reminds me of how WHO kept telling everyone that masks were useless and that borders should stay open. Later following such advice killed millions of people and WHO started to change their Covid-19 guidelines. But not failures are punished.
"SIX The Red Phone"
6/10
It’s not a bad chapter. It just bored me a lot. It’s mainly about studying viruses in snakes. So it’s actually one of the most relevant chapters it just didn’t grab my attention. I didn’t feel like I needed to know about such small non-Covid-19 experiments right now. I want to know about how pandemics spread. But then again, I think most people will find it interesting enough if they don't have a need to read about the pandemic itself.
"SEVEN The Redneck Epidemiologist"
6/10
Covid-19 finally starts in this chapter… finally. Yet the chapter suddenly jumps away from American corona focus to firefighters fighting a fire. Yet again it’s a mix of a ton of personal anecdotes unfortunately. The Covid-19 story by itself would be interesting enough. They find out at the very start that China is messing with the numbers and that the virus is actually spreading much faster than you would expect from the official China numbers.
Curiously it's not Trump making stupid decisions but the various organizations just like during Obama. CDC for example says it's not a pandemic even though it kills thousands of people, because it's not a pandemic in USA yet. But many of the people Lewis interviews are the Bush and Obama people not the Trump people so they are not really part of the active investigation group for the White House. So obviously they are just criticizing things from the outside just being thankful that the old viruses were weak and therefore didn't make the former presidents look bad. It would be interesting to instead see what the current CDC people say. Why did they make the bad decisions? You can blame a lot on Trump here. Just like you can blame Obama for his virus screwups. But many of the old organizations are still lead by the same old people. Only a few Trump people are in power. And Trump doesn't get the best Covid-19 data anyhow as CDC is still as dysfunctional as during Obama. So at the start he couldn't do anything else.
Unfortunately this outside looking in stuff doesn’t quite work for me. Lewis has interviews with a lot of people bragging about themselves and their amazing expertise and will to fight. None of them make any great mistakes. Yet everyone they mention in the government are clueless, lazy, stupid, egotistical and greedy. It may be, but it doesn’t really explain the problem. Why did the CDC not get any good info on China? Why didn’t CDC try to give the White House good info? Why did they mess up? It’s just curious that no one Lewis interviews has any part of the blame. Curious! Of course this doesn't mean they are all lying. Lewis may have asked hundreds of people and then everyone who knew they were at fault just refused to give an interview for the book. That would make a lot of sense too. Also, don’t forget that people who constantly make every virus seem extreme were just luckily right this time around. One of the leading Covid-19 researchers in the UK government constantly predicted that these viruses would kill millions and was always wrong until Covid-19 came along. This is how you can seem like a genius while actually having horrible predictions on average. He later quit because he ignored the Covid-19 guidelines himself while having a sexual relationship with a married woman.
"EIGHT In Mann Gulch"
6/10
When the author is using words like ”mansplaining” to describe what a Trump worker is doing he is not really remaining neutral or trying to be fair. The Trump and “they were all men” claims in this and former chapters make for some bad and maybe even sexist arguments. It just makes it look like he doesn’t have any better stories and claims to dismiss their ideas with. Instead he calls them out for being sexist. Yet you can’t actually know if they were mansplaining or just explaining. These people are experts. No matter if you agree or disagree with them they do have statements and opinions to make that we need to listen to. If the OPINIONS are stupid we need to counter them directly instead of just attacking the messengers.
"NINE The L6"
6/10
Same as chapter 8 pretty much. I do have quite a few fallacies in the book I want to point out as this chapter takes it to an EXTREME.
I have an issue with the typical Lewis thing of making everyone he interviews into a hero. Here it’s often women so the enemies are: men, Trump workers, lazy bureaucrats, mean girls. The term “mean girls” is actually used in this chapter. I get why a woman would want to build herself up like this and why Lewis wants heroes. But this is just lame and often a bit unbelievable. It just seems a bit suspicious that everyone he interviews is basically a mix of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel or a mix between Einstein and an AI if they are men. I don't doubt these few people actually believe they saved USA from Covid-19 all by themselves. I just doubt it's true. But then it’s not completely clear that they are all just bragging. One expert White woman was sought out for a leadership job. Suddenly the Democratic governor in California hired an unqualified Latina instead and the White woman was told that she would never be considered for the job as she wasn’t a minority. Unfortunately the Latina was completely clueless and this made it very hard to even study Covid-19 as she tried to shut down the supposed fear-mongering research. Of course the White woman, who was initially bullied by the Latina, was actually forced to lead. And later the Latina was moved to a basic race issues job by the governor who tried to avoid an investigation.
"TEN The Bug in the System"
6,5/10
Tuberculosis chapter. Why? Not sure. Lewis often tries to mix chapters and stories so that you will get a story in one chapter and then get a continuation 3 chapters later and so on. He does it to keep things fresh. But to me this doesn’t seem like a good idea here. We already needed to wait a long time for any Covid-19 stories and we are yet to read much about what the White House did or even what the outcome was when people started dying. So suddenly going away from the Covid-19 outbreak stuff seems weird. But then again, when the book was written Covid-19 was still a new issue so we just didn't have much more info back then. The lab leak hypothesis for example mainly started to go mainstream after the book was written.
But the chapters all have various stories about different people and this one also has Covid-19 stories here and there.
"ELEVEN Plastic Flowers"
6,5/10
Constantly we see how CDC screws up yet it’s claimed to be Trump’s fault.
"EPILOGUE The Sin of Omission"
5,5/10
More personal stories.
My final opinion on the book
It's the worst Michael Lewis book. That doesn't mean it's terrible. It's still good writing and some stories are great. The CDC California story about the terrible Latina leader hired just for her race is amazing. Besides that the stories are weak sauce and often just about people and not Covid-19. So you hear a lot of narrations about researchers openly bragging. This feels like a miss. Even if you love people bragging you'd expect a different topic in such a book. And surely not everyone is Batman in real life even though they all claim they are in this book.
Then it's mostly about California. So we hear about how the evil Trump made everyone in CDC ignore warning signs even though it's not explained how Trump can make thousands of people not even find evidence. Seems impossible to me. I get hidding things or being biased. But not even understanding basic facts because of Trump? Unlikely. Especially because the story about CDC during Obama was basically the same except for the fact that the Mexico virus was weaker. At any rate it's about how CDC and other regional California organizations acted so it's not really about Trump as such. I feel like one would need to explore more of the country to make any big Trump claims. Lewis often mainly focuses on the coasts in his book which is not really the full America. He is a typical coast Democrat this way overlooking the small towns and GOP voters. Which is a shame because I think you could actually make Trump look bad here if you were more fair about your sources.
During Trump Lewis basically wrote a Orange Man Bad book about mostly the events before Trump even took office. A whole book about Trump that just assumed things would go wrong. A premature book no matter how you look at it. And even so I liked that book more than this one. That one at least didn't use words like "mansplaining" to attack Trump politicians. It felt more fair in the critique. It was based on rumors, but didn't just seem mean for the sake of being mean. Here Lewis tries to prove himself right by showing that Trump actually did screw up. Yet he doesn't even focus on USA overall but just California and then Washington DC work.
I don't think one needs to fix all the bad stuff here to create a good book. Just fix one of the points and it would be enough. It's just too many faults. Even just removing the 5-6 non Covid-19 chapters would save it as then you would at least have a mediocre book on Covid-19 and not just a collection of personal stories about doctors and researchers being heroes.
At the end of the day I don't really feel like I understood Covid-19 any better after having read this book as it's not about Covid-19. But the CDC stuff was really interesting and a critical book about CDC would be super fun! Please Lewis… please stop the Orange Man Bad books and write about other topics. I need it. I need to old clever and more neutral Lewis back.
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