An intensely researched, rewarding account of an impressive medical triumph.
Not the first but a thorough, journalistic history of viral vaccines culminating with Covid-19: a spectacular achievement in which entrepreneurs played as great a role as scientists.
Zuckerman, Special Writer at the Wall Street Journal, recounts the lives of brilliant researchers, but he gives equal space to drug companies, both established (Merck, Pfizer) and fairly new (Moderna, Novavax). Not charitable institutions, they give vaccines a low priority because there is little profit in them. It’s more lucrative to sell medicine taken daily for life. Drug companies perk up when governments spend money, so their responses to AIDS, MERS, SARS, and Ebola—all viral epidemics—were swift and large in scale. But nothing matched the response to the devastating Covid-19 pandemic. Zuckerman describes the massive investment, research, and testing that produced effective vaccines that have so far saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented at least 1.25 million additional hospitalizations. The author emphasizes that this was a dazzling advance because the average vaccine took 10 years to produce. The fastest was mumps, which took four; developing Covid vaccines took one. Rewinding the clock to 1979, Zuckerman describes the onset of the AIDS epidemic and the ongoing, still unsuccessful efforts to produce a vaccine for HIV. Moving steadily toward the present, the author delivers interesting capsule biographies of fiercely workaholic scientists and tireless promoters seeking to commercialize their ideas in the battle against subsequent epidemics. Readers will learn a great deal, perhaps more than they want to know, about vaccine science even before Covid makes its appearance more than halfway through the narrative. Thereafter, Zuckerman offers a blow-by-blow account of the cutting-edge technology and maddening politics that led to effective vaccines in record time. He carries his story to summer 2021, when the virus staged a vicious comeback and researchers scrambled for solutions. While not certain, it’s possible that Covid will not be eliminated like smallpox but remain as a seasonal disease like influenza.
An intensely researched, rewarding account of an impressive medical triumph.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-42039-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
A cleareyed, concise look at current and future affairs offering pertinent points to reflect and debate.
Examining issues both obvious and subtler, Zakaria sets out how and why the world has changed forever. The speed with which the Covid-19 virus spread around the world was shocking, and the fallout has been staggering. In fact, writes the author, “it may well turn out that this viral speck will cause the greatest economic, political, and social damage to humankind since World War II.” The U.S., in particular, was exposed as woefully unprepared, as government leadership failed to deliver a clear, practical message, and the nation’s vaunted medical institutions were caught flat-footed: "Before the pandemic…Americans might have taken solace in the country’s great research facilities or the huge amounts of money spent on health care, while forgetting about the waste, complexity and deeply unequal access that mark it as well." While American leaders wasted months denying the seriousness of Covid-19 and ignoring the advice of medical experts, other countries—e.g., South Korea, New Zealand, and Taiwan—acted swiftly and decisively, underscoring one of the author's main themes and second lesson: "What matters is not the quantity of government but the quality.” Discussing how “markets are not enough,” the author astutely shoots down the myth that throwing money at the problem can fix the situation; as such, he predicts a swing toward more socialist-friendly policies. Zakaria also delves into the significance of the digital economy, the resilience of cities (see the success of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei in suppressing the virus), the deepening of economic inequality around the world, how the pandemic has exacerbated the rift between China and the U.S. (and will continue to do so), and why “people should listen to the experts—and experts should listen to the people."
A cleareyed, concise look at current and future affairs offering pertinent points to reflect and debate.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-54213-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.
Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce.
The disastrous war on drugs began under Nixon to control two classes of perceived enemies: anti-war protestors and Black citizens. That cynical effort, writes the author, drives home the point that “societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.” One such drug is opium, for which Pollan daringly offers a recipe for home gardeners to make a tea laced with the stuff, producing “a radical and by no means unpleasant sense of passivity.” You can’t overthrow a government when so chilled out, and the real crisis is the manufacture of synthetic opioids, which the author roundly condemns. Pollan delivers a compelling backstory: This section dates to 1997, but he had to leave portions out of the original publication to keep the Drug Enforcement Administration from his door. Caffeine is legal, but it has stronger effects than opium, as the author learned when he tried to quit: “I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep.” Still, back in the day, the introduction of caffeine to the marketplace tempered the massive amounts of alcohol people were drinking even though a cup of coffee at noon will keep banging on your brain at midnight. As for the cactus species that “is busy transforming sunlight into mescaline right in my front yard”? Anyone can grow it, it seems, but not everyone will enjoy effects that, in one Pollan experiment, “felt like a kind of madness.” To his credit, the author also wrestles with issues of cultural appropriation, since in some places it’s now easier for a suburbanite to grow San Pedro cacti than for a Native American to use it ceremonially.
A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29690-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
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