Book Review: The Premonition by Michael Lewis

I've been reading Michael Lewis since his biggest claim to fame was being married to Tabitha Soren.

(Immediate side note: Do you know what Tabitha Soren's claim to fame was before being on MTV News? It was being in the Beastie Boys video "Fight For Your Right to Party". She was one of the people in the "PAAAAAAARRRRRRTAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!" scene, and that helped get her job at MTV. Life is amazing.)

Through his earlier finance-based works, up through his internet-based works, then his most famous sideline into sports with Moneyball and The Blind Side, followed now where every book is a completely different topic (my personal favorite phase of his), he always seems to discover that the smartest and most clever people behind world-changing events are the oddballs.

The Premonition is no different. It is divided up into three phases - those who wrote the pandemic plan for George W Bush (crazy note: for those of us - me included - who mocked that W couldn't even read a book, he created a task force to create a pandemic plan after reading a book about the flu outbreak of 1918), those who tried to implement the plan for previous potential outbreaks (H1N1, swine flu, etc.), and those who had to try to implement the plan once we were hit by Covid.

As expected, there were indeed oddballs present at every level. The person who invented the software to model disease transmission did so helping his daughter win a science fair (spoiler: she didn't even win!). W's pandemic plan was primarily written by one erudite doctor and one "redneck epidemiologist" with ADHD. The person primarily responsible for executing the pandemic plan once Covid hit was the second-highest person at the California Department of Health, a woman who had to painfully separate from her ultra-religious community (including the rest of her family) in order to attend medical school.

What else this book includes, as you can imagine, is how all of this fell apart during Covid. There was the CDC, which was so burned by making an alarmist vaccine recommendation in the 70s that blew up in their face that they refused to issue any other directives. There was the Trump administration, which at first refused to see recognize an outbreak, and once it became apparent pushed the problem to the states to solve. And there were the states, with health departments that were powerless to issue any orders. As it turns out, in a health crisis, the most powerful leaders are set up to be county health officials - people who are disorganized, poorly funded, and lucky if they have even out-of-date technology.

That's what distinguishes this book - that despite the incredible efforts of some quirky but brilliant minds, the country wasn't up to the task, and the dam broke anyway.

I can't really call this an entertaining read (especially since we all already know where it ended up), but it was fascinating to learn what people were trying to do to prepare us for the worst. Recommended - nine out of ten hot dogs.