The wisdom of plagues : lessons from 25 years of covering pandemics

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Title:

The wisdom of plagues : lessons from 25 years of covering pandemics

Author:

McNeil, Donald G., Jr., author.

ISBN:

9781668001394

9781668001400

Edition:

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

Physical Description:

xii, 368 pages ; 24 cm

Contents:

Part one: Initial reflections on pandemics. Covid as a nervous condition ; How I got here ; What I learned on the way -- Part two: The tangled roots of pandemics. What if we'd handled Covid differently? ; What if we'd handled monkeypox differently? ; Where pandemics came from, and how they changed us ; Why no pandemic will be our last -- Part three: The human factors that spread pandemics. The networks that trigger blame ; The missed opportunities ; The "not me" denialism ; The failures to understand culture ; The cancer of rumors ; The despicable profiteers ; The rare politicians who outwit scientists ; The media's forced errors ; The crises of trust and fetishization of science -- Part four: Some ways to head off future pandemics. We need a pentagon for disease ; We need to fight global poverty ; We need to ban religious exemptions ; We need to improve surveillance ; We need to rationalize "emergencies" ; We need to respect witch doctors ; We need to make medicine cheaper ; Like it or not, we need mandates -- Epilogue.

Subject Term:

Epidemiology.

Pandemics.

Public health surveillance.

Public health -- United States.

COVID-19 (Disease)

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Informational works.

Summary:

"For a certain class of American's, Donald McNeil was a comforting voice when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. He was the regular reporter on the New York Times's popular Daily podcast, and he was telling folks to prepare for the worst. A generation of NYT readers went out and stocked up on food and PPE stuff because of his clear advice. He'd covered public health for the Times for 25 years and understood what he was seeing out of China. THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES is his account of what he learned over a quarter-century of reporting on public health in over 60 countries: part-memoir, part history, and part activism. Many science reporters understand the basics of diseases-how a virus works, for example, or what goes into making a vaccine. But very few understand the psychology of how small outbreaks turn into pandemics: How everyone from hunters to farmers to guano-diggers gets exposed to animal diseases. How diseases spread through networks of similar people and by "mass-gathering" events. How surveillance fails. How countries respond slowly or even cover up outbreaks. Why people refuse to believe they're at risk, or why they reject protective measures like quarantine or vaccines. How wild rumors spring up and scare people away from common sense responses. How greedy makers of false remedies spread confusion. Why public health agencies fumble and let things spiral out of control. The Covid pandemic was the story McNeil had trained his whole life to cover. His experience and deep bench of sources let him make many accurate predictions in 2020 about the course that a deadly new respiratory virus in Wuhan, China, would take and how different countries would respond. By the time McNeil wrote his last Times stories about the Covid-19 pandemic he had not lost his compassion, but he had grown far more stone-hearted about how he thought governments should react. He had witnessed so many failures and read enough history to realize that while every epidemic is different, failure was the one constant. Again and again, containable outbreaks ballooned into catastrophes because weak leaders were mired in denial. Citizens refused to make even minor sacrifices for the common good and were encouraged in that by money-hungry entrepreneurs and power-hungry populists. Science was ignored, obvious truths were denied, and the innocent too often died. THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES is ultimately about what we can do to improve global health and be better prepared for the next pandemic, which is coming"--

Holds:

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	614.4 MCN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	614.4 MCN	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Award-winning New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. reflects on twenty-five years of covering pandemics--how governments react to them, how the media covers them, how they are exploited, and what we can do to prepare for the next one.

For millions of Americans, Donald McNeil was a comforting voice when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. He was a regular reporter on The New York Times 's popular podcast The Daily and told listeners early on to prepare for the worst. He'd covered public health for twenty-five years and quickly realized that an obscure virus in Wuhan, China, was destined to grow into a global pandemic rivaling the 1918 Spanish flu. Because of his clear advice, a generation of Times readers knew the risk was real but that they might be spared by taking the right precautions. Because of his prescient work, The New York Times won the 2021 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

The Wisdom of Plagues is his account of what he learned over a quarter-century of reporting in over sixty countries. Many science reporters understand the basics of diseases--how a virus works, for example, or what goes into making a vaccine. But very few understand the psychology of how small outbreaks turn into pandemics, why people refuse to believe they're at risk, or why they reject protective measures like quarantine or vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic was the story McNeil had trained his whole life to cover. His expertise and breadth of sources let him make many accurate predictions in 2020 about the course that a deadly new virus would take and how different countries would respond.

By the time McNeil wrote his last New York Times stories, he had not lost his compassion--but he had grown far more stone-hearted about how governments should react. He had witnessed enough disasters and read enough history to realize that while every epidemic is different, failure was the one constant. Small case-clusters ballooned into catastrophe because weak leaders became mired in denial. Citizens refused to make even minor sacrifices for the common good. They were encouraged in that by money-hungry entrepreneurs and power-hungry populists. Science was ignored, obvious truths were denied, and the innocent too often died. In The Wisdom of Plagues , McNeil offers tough, prescriptive advice on what we can do to improve global health and be better prepared for the inevitable next pandemic.

Author Notes

Donald G. McNeil, Jr. spent almost his entire career at The New York Times , starting as a copy boy in 1976. For twenty-five years, he was a science correspondent, reporting from sixty countries as he covered global health and infectious diseases, including AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, SARS, Zika, swine flu, and bird flu. His prescient reporting on the coronavirus epidemic and his insightful appearances on The Daily podcast helped The New York Times win the 2021 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. He also won the 2020 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Grand Prize, and awards from GLAAD, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Association of Health Care Journalists. He is the author of Zika: The Emerging Epidemic and The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics .

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

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.

Booklist Review

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.

Part 1 Initial Reflections on Pandemics
Chapter 1 Covid as a Nervous Condition	3
Chapter 2 How I Got Here	17
Chapter 3 What I Learned on the Way	26
Part 2 The Tangled Roots of Pandemics
Chapter 4 What If We'd Handled Covid Differently?	39
Chapter 5 What If We'd Handled Monkeypox Differendy?	50
Chapter 6 Where Pandemics Came From, and How Ihey Changed Us	62
Chapter 7 Why No Pandemic Will Be Our Last	82
Part 3 The Human Factors That Spread Pandemics
Chapter 8 The Networks That Trigger Blame	93
Chapter 9 The Missed Opportunities	107
Chapter 10 The "Not Me" Deniaiism	119
Chapter 11 The Toxic Fatalism	130
Chapter 12 The Failures to Understand Culture	137
Chapter 13 The Cancer of Rumors	148
Chapter 14 The Despicable Profiteers	167
Chapter 15 The Rare Politicians Who Outwit Scientists	185
Chapter 16 The Media's Forced Errors	197
Chapter 17 The Crises of Trust and Fetishization of Science	212
Part 4 Some Ways to Head Off Future Pandemics
Chapter 18 We Need a Pentagon for Disease	227
Chapter 19 We Need to Fight Global Poverty	236
Chapter 20 We Need to Ban Religious Exemptions	250
Chapter 21 We Need to Improve Surveillance	260
Chapter 22 We Need to Rationalize "Emergencies"	268
Chapter 23 We Need to Respect Witch Doctors	272
Chapter 24 We Need to Make Medicine Cheaper	280
Chapter 25 Like It or Not, We Need Mandates	287
Epilogue	296
Acknowledgments	301
Notes	303
Index	351

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

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