PLANNING MIRACLES

Finding hope in failures of pandemics past.

In 1955, the long, costly fight against polio ended in victory when Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that would save untold numbers of children. The head of the March of Dimes called the vaccine a “planned miracle,” something that the world hadn’t believed possible a generation earlier. With the eradication of polio setting the scene, science writer Cohen, a correspondent for Science who specializes in biomedicine and infectious diseases, takes on the sweep of our battles against pandemics—past, present, and future. In clear, precise prose buttressed by meticulous research, he lays out what went wrong with Covid-19—from China’s calamitous lack of transparency at the start, to global unpreparedness, to the United States’ failure to mobilize and contain the virus. The author shows no patience for bad actors, or those who help them with conspiracy theories and junk science, or even those who might mean well but display a deep fixation with the “lab leak” theory, which has never been proven. “All too many of the loudest lab leak proponents confuse possibility with probability,” he writes. “They embrace what could have happened, what might be. They pile speculations atop speculations. Like the religious, they believe. They know.” Building on a meticulous recounting of our recent traumatic global history and how it happened, along with far-flung battles against Ebola, bird flus, and other deadly scourges, the work presents comprehensive plans for a better way forward. As the world rebuilds from the wreckage of Covid-19, policymakers would be wise to take Cohen’s work to heart. Pandemics, after all, are an ongoing fact of human life, not an anomaly.

A leading science writer scrutinizes our pandemic failures and offers strategies for correcting them.