The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

He had time on his hands again and spent some of it thinking about the next pandemic. “I walked away from that one saying, ‘Next time this isn’t going to be easy,’ ” he said. “The whole thing assumed you would know how bad the pandemic was. And that was a really bad assumption. This fog, this not knowing, is such a big part of it. You almost need t

Her new husband complained to the church elders that his wife was spending all her time working. “He told me I was being disobedient by working so hard,” recalled Charity. “And they agreed with him. They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders

He also set out to learn everything he could about the inner workings of the human mind, and where and why it was prone to err. He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,” he later recalled. “Not the usual owner’s manual, but an owner’s manual th

Richard believed that if the country was suddenly overwhelmed by some strain of flu for which there was no vaccine, there nonetheless existed strategies to prevent illness and death. He also wanted to believe that the benefits of these strategies could exceed their costs. He even thought it might be possible to eradicate a new virus without a vacci

After Marty had finished speaking, the local health people began to voice the usual list of objections. It was then that Carter leaned over to Marty and whispered: “Ask them what they would do.” He’d prepped Marty for just this moment. How many of you have children or grandchildren? asked Marty. Nearly all hands went up. If there’s a pandemic anyth

“When you go into the details of the cases, you see it’s not bad people,” he said. “It’s bad systems. When the systems depend on human vigilance, they will fail.”

On a Red Dawn phone call in early March, she was laying out her ideas about what California and every state in the country should do when a new voice came on the line. “This is Ken,” it said. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these th

But the shift inside the CDC that had begun with the Swine Flu Affair had led it to become a different sort of place. “Now I understood why the CDC was so admired,” said Charity. “It was because of people like him.” But Sencer had also exposed the price of bravery. After Sencer—or after Foege—the CDC’s relationship to disease control had changed in

“They said, ‘You need to do these things one at a time and gather evidence.’ They wanted to learn from this meningitis outbreak, and I wanted to stop it. My goal was to stop it, and that was not their goal. They wanted to observe it as if it were a science experiment on how meningitis moves through a college campus. And I was like, ‘Are you kidding