The wisdom of plagues Lessons from 25 years of covering pandemics

More than one million American deaths, political polarization, and an increased anti-vaccination movement: the COVID-19 pandemic has left an indelible mark on society and individuals. In his reporting on plagues, McNeil, a longtime global health journalist for the New York Times, chillingly points out, "The first casualty of pandemics is trust" (in science, doctors, and the government). His reflections on COVID-19 are rousing, infused with compassion yet sometimes a bit preachy and tinged with anger, especially at the mishandling of the pandemic. He recalls "the national insanity and the exhausted acceptance that would ultimately descend on us." McNeil reconnoiters the origins of pandemics and the ways they spread. He suggests approaches to warding off future ones. Although his discussion includes outbreaks of other infectious diseases, including AIDS, H1N1 ("swine flu"), SARS, and Zika, COVID-19 occupies center stage. McNeil warns, "When a new disease erupts, it is usually greeted not with alarm but with inertia." He goes on to elucidate how skepticism, denialism, fatalism, rumors, false remedies, and cultural misunderstandings help fuel the spread of pandemics. Hard lessons that should never be forgotten.

A former New York Times reporter surveys the world of pandemics, epidemics, and plagues. "Maybe someday an asteroid or a nuclear exchange will put paid to us as an endless winter did to the dinosaurs, but thus far in our history, only diseases have done damage to rival that," writes McNeil, author of Zika: The Emerging Epidemic. As the experience of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has shown, world-transforming diseases are always with us--sometimes because we're looking for them in the wrong places. When Covid-19 arrived, China had a formidable state apparatus at hand that was able to clamp down on the entire population, ordering people to shelter in place and doing extensive tracing of any contacts victims might have had. The result was that China suffered far fewer deaths than it might have. The U.S., writes McNeil, should have had a proportional death rate, but it did not: The 1.1 million should have been 560,000, but "what cost those 540,000 Americans their lives was poor leadership." McNeil revisits other pandemics, such as Zika and AIDS, and points out numerous instances of poor leadership on display there, too. There's not much actual news in this book, certainly not as compared to the basement-to-ceiling research of David Quammen, but McNeil does a good job of isolating some of the ancillary factors that have fed into mistake-ridden American responses to pandemics. "To my mind," he writes, "the most dangerous profiteers by far are the prominent anti-vaxxers," going on to name Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in particular. Chalk it up to our so-called individualism, perhaps, but, McNeil adds, "every mass murderer and terrorist is a driven nonconformist, a hero in his personal fantasies." A serviceable work of popular science made sharper by its political edge. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.