Michael Lewis’ The Premonition is a chilling account of Covid mistakes

Peerless researcher and raconteur Michael Lewis has now written the single most illuminating book on COVID-19. It’s a must read.

People dine in plastic tents for social distancing at a restaurant in Manhattan in New York City. Picture: AFP

Michael Lewis is one of a kind. If you haven’t been reading his books over the past thirty odd years, you’ve been missing out. But it’s not too late to start. The peerless researcher and raconteur who gifted us Liar’s Poker (1989), Moneyball (2004), The Big Short (2010), The Undoing Project (2017) and other books, has now written the single most illuminating book on COVID-19. The Premonition is a gem. It’s a must read now book.

Lewis’s trademark is finding people tucked away outside mainstream institutions who think well, have premonitory insights and call things as they see them. The stories they tell him throw the failures of major institutions into high relief. Lewis converts their testimonies into superb books. He doesn’t write polemic. He doesn’t posture. It’s not about him. He writes exquisitely calibrated narratives, in which the canniness and character of his witnesses stands out against the cussedness and corruption of governments, corporations, bureaucrats and social parasites.

Uniquely, for The Big Short, he found Michael Burry, Steve Eisman, Meredith Whitney, Vinny Daniel, Danny Moses and Charlie Ledley. They don’t feature in any of the other post-mortems on the debacle. Through their extraordinary stories, Lewis was able to show us the global financial crisis from underneath. It was brilliantly done. There’s no other book on the financial malfeasance of Wall Street and the bungling of Washington’s economic management bureaucrats that comes close. Yet it is both highly readable and darkly, darkly funny.

It’s to be hoped that a feature film will be made of The Premonition, as with The Big Short. It would deserve a global audience. Picture: AFP

The Premonition isn’t funny; not even darkly so. It’s deeply disturbing. It is, however, highly readable and marvellously illuminating. Once again, Lewis has shown an uncanny knack for finding exactly the right people to reveal what went so terribly wrong in America’s handling of COVID-19 and precisely why. Carter Mecher, Bob and Laura Glass, Charity Dean, Richard Hatchett, Joe DeRisi, David Sencer are the counterparts to the unsung heroes of honesty and insight on which he based The Big Short.

It’s to be hoped that a feature film will be made of The Premonition, as with The Big Short. It would deserve a global audience. It links together what actually happened in 1918 in the Spanish flu, as written up by John Barry in The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2004), the history of American public health planning between 1976 and 2020, the brilliant insights of individuals with initiative and scientific knack, the abysmal politicisation by the White House of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, long before Donald Trump became President; and the failure of the White House and the CDC to address the looming pandemic with even the most rudimentary competence. All in translucent prose.

Paul Monk the Premonition review

Carter Mecher is the Michael Burry of this story – the individual whose idiosyncratic curiosity and independence of bureaucratized machineries generated the insights that would have enabled the United States to prepare for and handle the pandemic. His story, all on its own, is fascinating and inspiring. Charity Dean is like Carrie Matheson in Homeland, a blonde, somewhat manic heroine, labouring within the California public health system to get planning and action going. Around them, Lewis depicts so much comatose bureaucracy and such a chaotic public health system that his cognitive and moral heroes stand out like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in a corrupt LAPD, in the 1970s. He refers to what they encountered as the “malignant obedience” of politically timid functionaries – whether in Washington DC, the CDC in Atlanta, or in California.

The Premonition is full of insight that badly needs to be absorbed by all those who have scrapped in public about COVID-19 and how it was or should have been handled. It throws into high relief the sheer ignorance of almost everyone about biology, statistics, history, bureaucratic politics and epidemiology. It demonstrates lucidly what needed to be understood and done. It shows why there was so much bungling and confusion. It shows that things need to change, not just in the United States, but more generally – and why.

If Michael Lewis has had one common theme or interest throughout his wonderful career, it is that without critical thinking and applied cognitive science, whether in finance or sport, government or public health, we are all in dangerous seas without sound navigation. But conversely that good analysis applied to conventional wisdom can make sound navigation possible. The Premonition shows this as beautifully as Moneyball or The Big Short and with enormous current relevance. It’s a prospectus for political and public health reform.

Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and the
author of 10 books, the most recent being Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018)

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

By Michael Lewis

Allen Lane 304 pp, HB: $37.75