THE PLAGUE YEAR

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist turns to an enterprise fraught with political implication: the rise and spread of Covid-19.

In 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services conducted an exercise premised on the scenario that “an international group of tourists visiting China” were “infected with a novel influenza, and then spread it across the world.” As Wright delineates, the results were not inspiring. The Trump administration admitted that the response was chaotic, with no clear chain of command and inadequate response. In the end, the influenza was projected to kill 586,000 Americans—not far from the mark of those who died in the U.S. in the pandemic’s first year. That report was buried. In China, where the virus first emerged, the government forbade doctors to wear protective gear, jailed those who tried to alert the public, and underestimated the number of dead in the first wave by tenfold. When Trump came into office, Wright notes, his administration “was handed the keys to the greatest medical-research establishment in the history of science.” Of course, it wasted the resource, politicized federal science, and tried to wish the plague away. In his characteristically rigorous and engrossing style, Wright documents innumerable episodes of ineptitude and malfeasance even as Trump officials such as Peter Navarro privately reckoned that “a full-blown…pandemic could infect as many as 100 million Americans.” The author also argues that Trump, infected with the virus at a rally in which he refused to wear a mask, was much sicker than was revealed and was terrified at the prospect of dying. Still, he consistently failed to develop a national response, so the “pandemic was broken into fifty separate epidemics.” Particularly compelling is Wright’s straight-line connection of the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion and Trump’s failed attempt to maintain power to the destabilizing effects of the plague.

Maddening and sobering—as comprehensive an account of the first year of the pandemic as we’ve yet seen.