Talking Politics

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