“It Would Have Been Worse Without These Guys”
This week: a conversation with the author Michael Lewis and the Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch about sharp public health thinking. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.
Michael Lewis — author of The Big Short and Moneyball—has a new book, The Premonition, about the COVID pandemic. It’s the story of public health thinkers who, early on, recognized the pandemic’s perils. The book’s heroes are an idiosyncratic bunch, including the Borges-quoting leader of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) Richard Hatchett, and Carter Mecher, a VA official who became a careful reader of systems.
Years ago, Hatchett and Mecher collaborated with the Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch on a paper about the effectiveness of social distancing, and Lipsitch joins Lewis in conversation for our show this week. In part, we’re talking about the good thinking that was there, if thwarted, in the pandemic response. Lewis says:
The U.S. response has been really bad, but it would have been worse without these guys. It wasn’t that they made no contribution. It’s just it’s a shame we didn’t maximize their contribution. And there’s like a counterfactual here in this particular pandemic that’s just intriguing to me. In the beginning of the Trump administration, Trump, as you know, didn’t want to have anything to do with anything they learned during the Obama administration. And he didn’t want much to do with anybody having to do with Bush. He attracted basically inexperience. Except: he had in the White House in the beginning of his administration a former Bush official named Tom Bossert.
Bossert was the head of Homeland Security. And Bossert had watched Carter Mecher and Richard Hatchett . . . And among the first calls he makes 2017 is to the two of them saying, “I want to badge you into the White House now, because if there’s a pandemic, I want you to come and run it.”
So flash forward to John Bolton coming into the White House, and he fires Tom Bossert and severs the link between what we knew as a society and the agency that’s going to carry out our knowledge. And that was accidental. It didn’t have to happen. If you got Bossert on, he’d say, “I can imagine a scenario where I talked Donald Trump into letting these two guys run it and we would take the blame and it actually could have gone in a different direction.”
Lewis’s book makes a case for who we should have listened to earlier in the pandemic. But what about the rest? On this week’s show, Lewis and Lipsitch discuss the Stanford experts who, across a range of US media, made some wrong assessments (such as projecting 10,000 US deaths even as other projections were already in the hundreds of thousands) that informed challenges to early efforts at social distancing. Lewis says:
I was just amazed at how hard the media found it to find the right people to talk to. And they seemed to make no distinction between an epidemiologist and a virologist, and a virologist and a general doctor and, you know, a researcher at Stanford whose specialty was theory of science and someone who actually knew about communicable disease.
Lipsitch adds, “Stanford epidemiologists do not get everything right all the time. I mean, there was a lot of nonsense coming out of three Stanford public health people, at least. In addition to Scott Atlas.” Nonetheless, Lipsitch has some good things to say about the media coverage:
I think they did a pretty good job considering how complicated a story it was. And how really there are a lot of disciplines which all look alike from any distance. I mean, I don’t know the difference between a tax lawyer and a contracts lawyer. I don’t blame them for getting it wrong, who they called. I mean, six months in, maybe they could have done better. But I think there were a lot of great coverage in the media and there was some lousy coverage.
Watch: The Premonition
In fact, the Premonition movie doesn’t exist yet. But soon (apparently) like other Michael Lewis blockbusters, it will indeed be a film. From Deadline:
Universal Pictures has purchased screen rights to The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, the new book by Michael Lewis about several U.S. heroes who, in the early days of Covid-19, tried to sound the alarm about the dangers of underestimating the deadly seriousness of the killer virus. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller will direct and produce along with Aditya Sood through their Lord Miller banner.
Listen: Cocaine and Rhinestones
In the podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, Tyler Mahan Coe takes an encyclopedic approach to the country music genre, which, as Robert Altman’s Nashville demonstrated, rewards encyclopedic thinking.
From the New York Times:
Tyler Mahan Coe’s enthusiasm for his subject shines through, but never deters him from asking tough questions about country music, which often means asking broader questions about America. One standout early episode tells the story of Loretta Lynn’s 1975 song about birth control, “The Pill,” and exactly why it was banned from the radio, touching on the history of reproductive rights in the U.S. and the moral double standard that exists between men and women in country music.
This week’s ephemeral library
Bernard Avishai on Hamas and Netanyahu. Ryan Grim on new opposition in Congress to Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
See you next week!
