🎧 Michael Lewis on the Pandemic

Episode summary: We talk to Michael Lewis about his new book The Premonition, which tells the story of the people who saw the pandemic coming and asks why they couldn’t get a hearing. It’s a tale of short-term failures and long-term trends in US government and it follows on from his previous book about the risks America has been running in hollowing out the administrative state. A sobering account with glimmers of hope for the future. Talking Points: Old timers at the CDC say that things began to change after the 1976 swine flu outbreak. - The CDC rushed a vaccine program, and some people got sick. Then the swine flu basically vanished. - After that, under Reagan, the head of the CDC became an appointed, political job. This made the CDC overall more political and less independent. - Most people who interacted with the CDC before this pandemic realized that it wasn’t very good at managing disease. Doing a public health job well carries a high risk of getting fired. - The experts in Michael’s story are consistently right about…