Michael Lewis saw this coming

make you feel bored? We're stupid? Well, it's supposed to add moneyball John Be's on base percentage with four seven, Damon's on base and I'll made this with Add that up and you get divided by three. That's what we're looking for. Three ball players, three ball players. Who's is now? Michael Lewis is taking a crack at our pandemic reality, which is still unfolding. His new book is called The Premonition of Pandemic Story through the lens of three really

remarkable scientists. Michael tries to unravel the government's gross mismanagement of the COVID response that's led to nearly six hundred thousand deaths, which is among the World's Worst Outcomes. You'll get to hear from one of the main characters in the book later in this episode, but for now, let's start with Michael Lewis. So, Michael Lewis, first of all,

so great to have you again on the podcast. And how crazy is it that your last book, The Fifth Risk, was all about, quote, what happens when the people in charge of managing risks have no interest in them and boom the pandemic hits were you basically proves your thesis. You know, I don't want to gloat about this. It's not an attractive it's not an attractive way to go through life, but I did. The point of The Fifth

Risk was you don't know what's gonna happen. Right. We have this instrument called the government that is uniquely suited to deal with certain kinds of problems, and there's no other instrument to deal with them, and pandemic disease is one of them. And the fact that kind of like then the Trump people rolled in and didn't pay much attention to the government and said it was basically the problem and didn't get the transition briefings and all that.

I did have this terror like what's gonna happen? How is it gonna kill me? And and I didn't have I didn't have any specific sense of like what was gonna happen next, But I thought one of these risks is gonna become reality and then you're gonna see what happens when you when you just abdicate the responsibility. So that's what's got me interested in the in writing in the book in the first place was just like, well,

it happened, what happens next? You might be the only writer, author, reporter Michael who doesn't point a finger squarely in Trump's direction. And in fact, one of the people you profile in your book says, basically, Trump is a comorbidity of a larger disease. Can you explain what he meant by that? Yeah.

All of the characters in the book, the three main characters, had been engaged pretty intensely with the question of what happens if a pathogen lands in America and it starts to spread well before Trump, and they had all seen that the tools we had to deal with it were inadequate. They had all seen that, particularly the CDC was not really up to controlling disease. It was more like we're like an academic institution, and that they could all see that we didn't have a system of public health, like

it just didn't exist. What we have is these people who were in this extraordinary role of being local public health officers, and that they they're kind of tasked with battlefield command on the ground, but they aren't real source. They've been starved or resources for a generation. And the focus oddly had not been for a long time on like pandemics, it had been on bio terrorism, if it had been on other things. So these people could see that,

all right, it doesn't matter who's president. We we have a problem, like we have a problem that we don't have the tool to deal with this. So when they would not say that Trump helped, they would say something like, we once had this machine. It worked pretty well. We allowed it to rust and decay and it was still sort of creaking down the highway, and then came a president who took a sledge hander to it. But it was it was the machine was not it was not

in good shape when he was elected. So so that they weren't they they think of him as more symptom than cause it's sort of like the same spirit that elected him led to the corrosion of the machine in the first place. But you also write that George W. Bush actually set things in motion for pandemic preparedness after reading The Great Influenza by John M. Berry, and that was about the nineteen eighteen pandemic. Uh and he read it when he was on vacation, and he decided something

needs to be done about this. So does George W. Bush deserve a little more credit than he is getting in terms of at least seen that this was a potential threat to the country in the world. He deserves huge credit. I mean, I'm a little surprised to find myself saying that, but he deserves huge credit. And he he was freaked out, in a freaked out state of mind when he read it, because not only did he have nine eleven in the rear view mirror, but he had Katrina basically on his desk, and it was like,

what else could go wrong? And he reads this book about nineteen eight and he turns to someone in the White House and he says, what's our pandemic plan? And

the person says, we don't. We don't have one. And it was it was a really interesting case of how fast the government can move when the president's piste off, it was, you know, a couple of weeks from that moment to him using a rapidly sketched out plan by a doctor who was in the White House name region kaya you know, just a few pages to ask for seven billion dollars from Congress, could go about planning for

a pandemic. And you can trace back to that moment not only my main couple of my main characters, but the whole plan to have a vaccine that that was not based on using chicken eggs. I mean that the reason we have vaccines so fast now is stuff they did back then. So that was an example that's sort of a shiny bright spot, like an example of the government taking on a problem figuring out how to deal

with it. The problem is the strategy they cooked up for how to limit death and disease before the vaccine arrives, which is wholly original. All the social distancing that came out of their plan. It was swallowed and understood hook line and sinker bout foreign countries who the CDC explained it to, and we never really got minds around it. We were never prepared to do the things that you

needed to do to contain a virus. Well, if George W. Bush deserves credit, conversely, does Barack Obama deserves some of the blame for letting this apparatus rust, as you said, to a point where it had been corroded so significantly that Trump just had to put a sledgehammer to it

and destroy it. No, it's more complicated than that. So that if you'd ask those guys in the Bush white House, who's one of them stayed on into the Obama White House and brought his fellows back to help deal with the pandemic that didn't happen, the two thousand nine swine flu pandemic, they would say it was a decade long anyway process to implementing this plan, and that they'd say

a couple of things. They'd say, One that Obama made the same mistake every other president made in the very beginning, but then corrected. And the mistake was to kind of shove to one side pandemic risk, meaning it wasn't it wasn't immediately on the National Security Council as a thing that responsibility. Bush has sort of elevated it for I don't know about months. Obama kind of put it to

one side, but then brought it back quickly. And the Obama administration actually did a really good job of trying to institutionalize pandemic response in the White House. The Trump administration got rid of that, and uh, and that that was a problem. The other problem, I think and is it's bigger than Obama. It's generational. It's sort of like if it's a sin, I don't think of it as

a sin. It's like a cinemomission. In the case of that administration, is that there is this argument that the only way we're going to deal with these problems really well is is pretty serious government reform, and it means actually reforming institutions like the CDC. I think the characters in the Bush administration who cooked up our pandemic plan made one big mistake. They overestimated the ability of the CDC to execute it. So they they thought, we embedded

in the CDC and we're done. It's good. The CDC will run this thing like a like a war general. And they overestimated the kind of the willingness, the bravery, the capacities of the CDC, because all along the CDC had been becoming for you know, it's been on a steady drift for decades to becoming this kind of highly politicized academic institution. You know, that was so shocking to me. I mean, the CDC, as you point out in your book, is so dysfunctional, and I guess the downward slide began

in the late seventies. I mean, basically, what happened to the CDC. It lost its independence, as you say, it became politicized, and the White House in essence had too much control over it, and it became less and less and less independent. Is that a fairer yes? Synopsis. Yeah, it's a very curious thing, the relationship between the White

House and the CDC. But you go, what happened was there was a there was a mistake the CDC made back way back in the seven when it took charge of what looked like a dead lea virus coming to America. It looked like there was gonna be a swine flu outbreak. There had been one, a little one in New Jersey in the spring. They advocated rushing to vaccinate all Americans. Some people died, not many, but anful people died from the vaccine. And then they stopped vaccinating people in the

and the pandemic never happened. After that, the CDC director ceases to be a career official who's got the protection of a permanent public servant who the president just can't fire, and who as also who runs the place for like a decade or more and has a very long term view of the institution. It's changed to a presidential appointing to a political appointing, which means that almost implicitly that the guy whoever, whoever is running the place is gonna

be running for eighteen months or two years. They're gonna be on a much shorter leased with the White House. They're gonna be of the political party of the president most likely, they're gonna be and they're view they're gonna

your renter instead of a home right. They're gonna be thinking of like, just avoid whatever the problems catastrophes of the next eighteen months or two years are, rather than build this institution for the moment it's going to be most needed, which is in probably in the distant future. To me, the story was so rich because this isn't just the CDC. This has happened to a lot of

institutions in Washington. We have four thousand and something presidential political appointees who come in and purport to run these places. And it's just impossible. If you're if what you are is an eighteen month visitors some vast institution, how are you going to lead that place? And you really are going to leave that place. You're gonna be better or worse than the person who came before you. But no

company would do this right. You would never say I got to change your CEO every eighteen months, and they've got to be of a particular political affiliation. Were you shocked by that? Were you shocked? I mean, you wouldn't have been shocked but because of the fifth risk. But when it came to the c d C, was that shocking to you? There was a combination of shock and miss read because to me, the CDC had this, you know, golden reputation. It was one of those bright spots in

the government. I would have thought it earned that reputation, but it earned it like a long time ago, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, and then then things start to get murkier. So yes, I was shocked by their behavior

in the pandemic. It's incredible that they're like preventing people from being tested for COVID who come back from wulan because their test doesn't work, or because they don't want to find it because if they find it, they have a problem with Trump because Trump doesn't want to find it. That's that It shocked me that they issued all this guidance that was wrong. All that stuff was shocking, But there was this mystery attached to the shock. How did

it happen? Like, how did this place? It's not filled with evil people, It's filled with probably really good people who were just in a bad system. Like how did it get so systematically wrong? That was the thing that

was the mystery to me and for my characters. You know, Charity Dean, who was the main character of the book, who's this local, this dynamic local public health office who's fighting disease, you know, in hand to hand combat before COVID finds that the CDC so interferes with her ability to stop people from getting sick and dying that she has to ban them from her investigations. I mean, she she knew what was going to happen if they were

when there was a pandemic. It shocked me that it had gotten that bad, that that it had gotten gotten so un incapable of doing the thing it was supposed to do. I'm thinking about the hippocratic oath, you know, first do no harm, And it sounds like they were actually proactively harmy, not just they weren't just inefficient and ineffectual. They were actually hindering science, which is crazy. Well, they're

hindering response right in their minds. Probably rightly, they were doing science like you wait till all the data is in before you allow any decisions to be made. You make sure you have complete certainty so you don't make any mistakes. You focus on like the you know, writing the paper, rather than fighting the disease. And the problem with disease war with with this kind of combat is

its battlefield you're making. You have to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty because by the time you have certainty is too late. By the time you have certainty, you don't have four cases of COVID in America, you have fifty. Up next, one of the real life doctors featured in Michael's book, a member of a secret group of scientists trying to save the country. That's right after this let's talk about the Wolverines. So you find these three incredible

badass scientists. First of all, how did you find them? How did you track them down? And what was your process? Michael um, the three main care This came to me in three different ways. So the fifth risk had a jungle guy named Max Styre who runs something called the Partnership for Public Service, who it's seeking to kind of

fix government. He said to me early on, you got to talk to my uncle, who was the former US Navy secretary, who said to me, if you're going to write anything about this, you need to meet the Wolverines. And I said, who the hell are the Wolverines And he said, basically, they're kind of the secret group of doctors who meet whenever there is like a had a fear of disease, pandemic kind of problems, and they go back and they're kind of the people who are responsible

for the invention of pandemic planning. So I was moving through the world last March, and the Wolverine say, you've got to meet this woman named Charity Dean, who's number two in the Health Department California. If anybody's gonna save if us, it's her and another character I wrote about in the Fifth Risk, who was Obama's chief data scientist named d J. Patel, called me up and said, I've just I'm from trying to help the state of California, and You've got to meet this woman named Charity Dean.

And so I wrote a note finally to the Governor of California. To the government of California, said I want to meet this woman named Charity Dean, and they said, no, you can't. She didn't want to talk to you. So it took me about four weeks to get her private cell number, and she said they're they're lying and and and to figure out that, yeah, she's She kind of unifies the story and she's the character I want to

build the book around. And the wolverine who ends up being the main character from the tribe is Carter Measure, and he is this savant but what was so interesting to me about him is at heart, what he was is a a critical care doctor who, as he said, he has a d h D or a d D or something exampled. I can't focus unless he has a

kind of life or death problem. And he discovered his calling in the I c U, where people were living and dying based on his, you know, decisions, and he had hyper focus in the I c U. And he was just really gifted at at and through kind of a series of accidents, he keeps being pulled up by the society by a string to deal with versions of like crises life or death crisis, but at the institutional level.

First he's asked to run a giant VA hospital that's in a total state of crisis because he's obviously really competent, they think, and he frames it is like, the patient is now my hospital. Then he gets pulled up to run a whole chain of hospitals and the patient is the is this all these hospitals And I've got to prevent them from making the mistakes that end up causing us all this these problems, And kind of by accident, he's pulled into the Bush White House to figure out

how to save the society from a pandemic. And he had this this incredible ability to come at a problem in a really weird way and think about a new kind of solution. And then Joe Ici, who is this biochemist at UCSF who is the most badass virus enter on the planet, and he's serving like in the James Bond movie. He's cute. He creates all the gadgets he

used to go kill the bad guys. I do identify with Q, but I'd like to put it towards infectious disease rather than you know, hiding machine guns and cars. My name is Joseph Desi. I'm a professor in biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, and I'm the co president of the chan Zuckerberg bio Hub. I first met Michael Lewis in two thousand and sixteen. Five years ago, I published a book called flash Boys. I was a big Michael Lewis fan, having read a

number of his books. I think Flashboys is probably one of my favorites. A money manager in San Francisco who liked the book wanted to go to dinner, and I said sure. It turns out the reason he wants to go to dinner is to say I have the character for your next book. His name is Joe Esi. I thought, all right, I'll go have a lunch with JODORESI. I invited him over to the Chance Like Work bio Hub, which is a nonprofit research institute affiliated with UC Staff, Stanford,

and Berkeley. It was like sort of indifferent to whether he was a character in one of my books. He just like that, that's cool, I'll meet this off. Um. He was electrical, I mean electric. I've kind of pitched this idea of of talking about infectious disease work and things like that, and he seemed mildly interested, but you know, not really that. I thought, God, I wish I knew something about science. I wish I didn't get a d in biology myself more year in high school, because someone

should write a book about this. Gaw. I mean, he's unbelievable. He was like doing things like hunting down pandemics and snakes, like find finding a virus that was wiping out parents. He was. He was finding rare bugs that were killing people in mysterious ways. He was, And I just thought, yeah, I want to know more about this, but I didn't. I felt that I didn't have a reason to write

about him until this happened. That was the last I saw of him until you know, the pandemic hit and then suddenly he got a lot more interested in infectious disease easy and then I called him and he was turned out shirt off. He's smack in the middle of it. The Chance Luckerberg biohob as I mentioned, is a nonprofit research institute of five ones. The three affiliate with UCSF Stanford and Berkeley, and we're a research institute that is dedicated to some basic science and the study of infectious

diseases in particular. And so for example, we were working on a system for early detection of emerging pathogens worldwide, especially in low and middle income countries, and we were working on spinning up a number of these pathogen monitoring sites in numerous countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia and Nepal, Pakistan and many other places, with the idea that we needed an early warning radar and early detection network that would help us know when something new is coming our way.

So I was helping Cambodia get set up in January. On my trip back from Cambodia through China, compared to when I came through China into Cambodia only about ten days prior, there was a much heightened level of security, and not the security of you know, um X ray machines looking for you know, things in luggage. It was security around people. So they were big, these big, you know, glass and acrylic boxes that you stood in and it

monitored your fever. It was a temperature sensor with a video monitor, and there was a lot of security personnel and everybody had to go in there and kind of stand one at a time, and it was, you know, a level, a heightened level that just wasn't there ten days earlier. And that different said to me, Okay, something's going on. It's probably a bigger deal than we thought. But did we have much more information than that, No,

we didn't really know. Alls I could tell is that the feeling inside the airport, the security level and the tenseness there, it was just something you could feel. February of the first cases really came in here. And then, you know, the thing that really became apparent to us was in early March, it became completely obvious that are testing capacity in the United States and the commercial providers and big labs were ill suited to carry the load that was coming. There was a tidal wave coming and

nobody had the higher ground. Everybody was going to be flooded, and when tests were being sent out to commercial providers, they weren't coming back for ten or fourteen days, which is unacceptable because the window is, you know, now you need to have an answer in less than twenty four hours. These days, we want an answer in fifteen minutes, not twenty four hours. At that time, I would have been

throwed with twenty four hours. And so you know, at at the chance, like bio Hub, we have this ability to be nimble, to change what we're doing and turn on a dime, and we really felt that it was going to be necessary to get into the game. We're a bunch of molecular biologists were study infectious disease. If we can't participate in this fight, what fight can we fight? In? This goal of setting up a clinical lab as fast as we could, it really took everything that we had.

We begged and borrowed every piece of equipment we could get across the research campus. And luckily here at you CSF, we have a tremendous workforce of incredibly trained pH d s in virology and molecular biology and infectious disease, and so I was able to draw on over a hundred and seventy five volunteers. There were you know that are all PhD level volunteers. To show up and put their

skills to use. Everybody wanted to get into the fight, and so they brought their skills, They brought their re agents, they brought their rope oots, they brought their time. We built a clinical testing lab starting on March twelve, and we had it up and running returned our first clinical result on March twentieth. So it took us eight days to set up the entire lab and get clinical testing for COVID down. And then we just rolled it out

to essentially all the counties in California. And so when we initially did outreach and sort of hey, local counties, we know you're not getting your test back for seven or ten days, we could do it way faster and by the way, we'll do it for free. Uh. And we didn't really get that much of a response, and we didn't really understand why. And I think Priscilla put it really well. Actually, she said, you know, a lot of departments of public health don't know how to ask

for something because they've never been given anything. And it's true. When we worked with our our local county department and health offices, you know, in different counties around the Bay Area, we found owned that there's a great disparity in different public offices. Some had some decent resources, others had almost nothing.

And it's from years of neglect of our public health system. Frankly, and I think the pandemic has taught us that we need to reinforce and rebuild those public health institutions so that this doesn't happen again. Uh and um, I hope that this crisis spurs us to actions so that does occur now. Luckily, we were able to reach out to

our public health directors across the state. Actually, Priscilla Chant actually had a conference call and she invited everybody onto the call from all the different counties and said, hey, what's not to like about free testing? And they got it,

and they finally got it. It sticks some talking to you, and then it took off, and of course we did it, you know more, we did, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of tests until the state was able to bring up its own mass testing sort of systems, and direct Emagine to testing also came online, which also made things much faster and easier. And so once those came online, we're able to sort of ramp down the clinical testing.

But simultaneously, we were always ramping up the sequencing, and of course variance and sequencing only got super popular in round December. But we've been sequencing since April, not just for variance, but for using the data for actionable intervention at the public health level. And the way that works is this, we can sequence the positive samples and we

can understand which genomes are related. Since the virus makes mistakes in itself as it copies itself and transmits from one person to the other, it creates basically a little breadcrumb trail in which you can track back which infections were related to who. When we were working with some of our public health officials and counties, UM I remember um one reporter asking the the official, Hey, if you can have anything today right now, you know what would

it be? A shiny new testing machine? Uh? You know, a mobile van? Wan? What what do we what do you need right now? What could it be? And the Department of Health official said information that's more valuable than anything. Where is the virus coming in? Are there new introductions to my city or is there continuing forward spread among a certain community? Where can I cut the transmission change short?

What is my next action that it's going to save lives, and that's how we can put genomic epidemiology to work. It's been a wild roller coaster ride. It's been very tense and very exciting, but also stressful at the same time. I learned lessons about how how our public health system works. I learned lessons about disease transmission that I didn't fully appreciate, and the potential for pandemic spread in asymptomatic individuals. The basic biology of this virus will be studying for decades

to come. We still don't fundamentally understand the biology of that. It has been wonderful to see the miracle the MR and A vaccines from both Visor Maderna in particular. Those have been incredible innovations that I was initially skeptical of, but it has done really well and I think we can all see the light at the end of the tunnel now. So you know, the other thing that I learned is that in these situations, there's no points for hesitation.

You have to act and act quickly, and sometimes it's not going to be the right move, but the inaction, the waiting for more data, is potentially more damaging over the long run than not doing something. We're going to take a short break, but when we come back. Michael Lewis on how to handle what some experts are calling

the age of pandemics. Talk about the notion, Michael, of premonition, the fact that these folks have this essential trait that enabled them to sense that something catastrophic was was on the horizon and to act on the impulse. I mean, what did these three people have in common? What did you learn from them? Well, all three of them. Once you're living in the world of you know, biochemical events.

Once you're once you're spending a lot of time thinking about how various viruses mutate, might change, and how broken our relationship with nature is so that things are leaping from animals to people more often. When you're really looking at that close. It really isn't a matter of if the wind right that that they they became all of them, And there are different ways and for different reasons became convinced that the risk of pandemic was higher than say,

what I thought it was. But the whole premonition notion is is an interesting one because car a measure was among his gifts was his ability to figure out very very quickly what's happening in the beginning of a pandemic, and so he's January twenty. He has a very accurate read on the lethality and transmissibility of the virus in Wuhan,

and he knows it's coming here. So if he had been in charge, as there's every possibility he would have been in charge, just wasn't um, we would have started acting, you know, two months before we did, and he would tell you, you've got to get it. You've got to have this sort of like clairvoyance because by the time you see the virus, you know in action. By the time you see the first death, you're looking at the

equivalent of starlight. You're looking at something an infection that took place maybe five weeks ago, and in those five weeks that virus has multiplied exponentially. So if you wait till the death, you've got so many cases in your community. You can't you can't manage it. You need to anticipate it. Charity is the one who got a mystical on me about this, and that Charity Dean, she was the only one who's actually stopping disease on the ground, and she found that she had to kind of use that she

had to smell it. I mean it was like it was like jungle instincts with her, and she I'll tell a story that sent a chilled down my spot. It was not not long after I met her. I had been interviewing her something and she mentioned to me, I don't know why that every year she made her New Year's resolutions, but she made them on her birthday, which was December twenty, and she scribbled them down on the back of her grandmother's photograph, her dead grandmother who she adored.

And one day, sometime after we had met, I said, I think to get to know you better, it would really help me if you just let me wander around your house a bit, because there were a lot of like very personal touches in the house. And she went out back with her kids and she left me to wander the house. I get to her bedroom and her grandmother's photograph is beside her bed, and I think she said, I could look at anything, So I pull it off the wall and it's got all her New Year's resolutions,

her birthday resolutions going back for like twelve years. They are all of the sort that I make, like learn Spanish, or or like go to Africa, or they're all resident, they're all kind of like what you're gonna do? Until two thousand and nineteen, and in December two thousand and nineteen, her first resolution is something very personal, and number two it says it has started. And now this is this, This is before anybody would have known that there was a virus in Upan. And this is a woman who's

been waiting her whole life for the pandemic. There's nothing like that on anywhere on this And I call her up I said, I said, like, what is this? And she said, yeah, yeah. I had this vision in my head of this giant tsunami washing over America and I thought, something's coming. Now I don't know what it is. I'm on red alert. And she'd written this down and I thought, you know, I can't explain it. She couldn't explain it.

She didn't make a big deal of it. But it was sort of like you sometimes when you're an expert in something, when you do something so often you don't know why you know what you know. And something had bothered her and it was that instinct. She says she had learned to trust because if she didn't trust it. She didn't have a tool for dealing with disease because you need that instinct that is freaky but maybe not

as freaky but also freaky. Is an interview that you gave to The Guardian in December of two thousand nineteen, Michael, and you say, for people to suddenly start to value what good government does, I think there will have to be something that threatens a lot of people at once. The problem with a wildfire in California or a hurricane in Florida is that for most people it is happening to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it.

Something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from which you could not insulate yourself even if you were rich. I think that might do it. Okay, do doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. That wasn't December of two thousand nineteen. Yeah, but I didn't know anything. So it's it's um. Charity's performance is more impressive than mine, I would say, but I would say this in my I want to like par settlement because here's what I was thinking,

and how different it is from what happened. It wasn't It's not true that you couldn't insulate yourself from this. Rich people have been able to insulate themselves from this. There's been a few exceptions, but the price has fallen vary. The cost has fallen very unevenly on the society, so that my pandemic is very different from the pandemic of a migrant worker in California and or some someone who

can't afford not to work from home. And so the politics of it weren't what I thought it was going to be because enough people could escape and tell a story about how it's a hoax, it's not really that serious, all that stuff. As six hundred thousand Americans die, the biff that it gave to the society wasn't quite as direct as I imagined it would be. However, I do think that is what's happening. I think that the bidens being able to get it, will get away with stuff.

There's more full throated like defense of government going on now than than than ever happened in the Obama administration. And because you I think that there's there's more of a market for the for the idea like, yeah, we screwed up, We screwed up because our government was screwed up enough people would see that that it's it's had some effects. So I was wrong that a pandemic was completely going to completely fix this. A pandemic had a

slightly different effect than I thought. But in that direction, did any of these scientists try to cut through the government bureaucracy and sound the alarm since they're the people you wish were in charge when this all was happening, and what happened to them when they tried, Oh my god, well let's start a car mession. Since he wrote the

pandemic plan, the White House neglected. So at the beginning of the Trump administration, there were some characters you would not have expected to be there because they had associations

with previous administrations. I guess there were so many jobs to feel that some people slipt through, And one of them was Tom Bosster, who had been on the been on the National security in the Bush administration, and he had watched Carter Measure and his partner in crime, Richard Hatchett, cook up this plan and was so in awe of him that when he got there in two thousand and seventeen, one of his first calls was to them and say, I want to badge you into the White House right now,

because if there's a pandemic, you guys are coming to run it now. When John Bolton was brought into the Trump White House, he fired Boston and at that moment the actual link with past knowledge was severed. However, everybody, the people there are people in the know, like Tony Fauci, know who Carter Measure is. And Carter started writing these emails, they called him the Red Dawn emails that had a

bigger and bigger following, and it was read. I mean, you know, it was read by the Surgeon General, it was read by people in the f d A, it was read by people in the CDC. And he knew that. And so he was trying with that, use that bullhorn to get them to do stuff. So but we're crazy doing it. I mean, he couldn't believe. Carter is a hard person to upset. He couldn't believe how long it took for them to acknowledge there was any kind of threat. But so yes, he tried. He got the CDC itself,

even though he lives in Atlanta. Didn't want to see him in the flesh Um the second person charity Deane number two in the state of California. She sees with Carter sees bid January this thing, but she's primed. It has started. Uh that this thing in Wuhan is um. This is serious. You don't well people inside their homes to die if you're if you've got a mild outbreak and um. And she started to try to sound the alarm. Her boss, uh Redder, the riot at, said you're not

allowed to use the word pandemic. You're scaring people. You're not allowed to do that exponential math on the whiteboard showing the twenty million in California are gonna get infected unless we mitigate this thing. She was shut down. She was told go in your box and stay there. You're not welcome at any meetings on the subject uh for two and something months. So she got shut down. Joe Does is in a slightly different position. He's at a nonprofit.

He's running the Chance Zuckerberg bio Hub, which is a couple of enterprise that was funded with Mark Zuckerberg's money. But when his wife's his wife is a pediatrician, it was her interest to try to eliminate disease by the end of the twenty one century. He's got resources. He, to his shock, realizes that, my god, we're not even have a test to do in the in the United States.

He turns the bio hub into it into the fastest, biggest COVID testing lab in this area, maybe in the country at one point, and starts to try to give away free, free COVID testing and finds incredibly that as starved as we are of COVID testing, that the system is not equipped to take free stuff to take his help. So local public health officers say, we don't have test tubes are swabs to administer the test. He provides them with that, we don't have fax machines to receive receive

the results. He provides them with that. I mean that over and over. He's got to resource these public institutions in order to get sort of receive his help. And Joe, who had never heard of the public I mean, he heard of it, but he didn't know anything about the public health system until he starts to try to help it, sees just how ossified, how corroded, how inapt and incapable the system is, even though it's filled with like people he admires, they just don't have the tools. Um, so

each of them. I mean, you just add the question just asked me got to the heart of the story of why. What interested me about the story? I have these extraordinary characters trying to having to do extraordinary things because the system that should have taken care of it was broken, And the way they flounder about and tried to try to operate inside the broken system is sort of a portrait of the system. And it's the system

that is the endgame in the story. It's like, we can't have this, like we we're not gonna survive if our systems look like this, and these people are telling us how how it looks, and so what's the solution? I know, Dr Fauci told me we're living in an age of pandemics, um, And I think you can talk about any existential threat, not just a coronavirus, but anything that the current systems or structure of government is not capable of handling. So do you think there were real

lessons learned from this? Will things change or are you fearful that it will remain as ossified as ever? I act seemed prett hopeful. Uh and I'm pretty hopeful because even though this country has this bizarre movement to declare the whole thing a hoax, enough people's lives have been disrupted and touched, and there's enough evidence from outside of America just how awful it could be. But doesn't it freak you out, Michael, that like Republican men refused to

be vaccinated. I mean, it's so crazy. You know, we're we are, We're a byproduct of a long period of basic prosperity and peace that we're we have the luxury of being idiots that we won't survive if we're that way, And I think that the more more existential the risk, the quicker the society will respond and fix itself. I think we have, Like I guess, I guess I think about the country, it has a bizarre ability to bounce in all kinds of directions and change. It's a very

changeable society. It's a young society in a way, uh, and so as much weirdness as there is now, I could see it bounce in a complete different direction. Yes, we'll have always have some people who won't get vaccinated, but I'm not terrified for our future. I actually think these people you know this is our field. Here's an analogy that that describes how I feel. We had this team that just we had a catastrophic season. We had all these resources and we just stuck it up. We

lost all our games. You asked me to go in and evaluate the situation. Is maybe a person who might be the next coach. If I walked in and I thought, Wow, this team does suck. I don't want to be I don't want to coach this team. There's a reason they lost all these games. You know, I wouldn't take the job. But I walk into this team and I write about the team, and I see such talent. It's like, this is an incredibly talented team. This is like the most

talented team. It's like giving me the Golden State Warriors from three years ago and somehow they used to having to lose all these games. Yeah, I'll take this job. I can fix this because talent that it's hard to you know, you know you got the talent, it just needs to be organized. So the fact that we have these resources, and I don't mean just material resources, these

inner resources, I think it's very hopeful. A huge thank you to Michael Lewis and to Dr Joe Deresi of the University of California's San Francisco and the chan Zuckerberg bio Hub. Michael's new book is called The Premonition of Pandemic Story and it's out now. Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of I Heart Media and Katie Kurk Media. The executive producers are me, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers

Derek Clements, Adrianna Fassio, and Emily Pinto. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter, wake Up Call, go to Katie Couric dot com. You can also find me at Katie Curic, on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.