The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind - Hardcover

Nocera, Joe; McLean, Bethany

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593331028 ISBN 13: 9780593331026

Verlag: Portfolio, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From the collaborators behind the modern business classic All the Devils are Here comes a damning indictment of American capitalism—and the leaders that left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic

In 2020, the novel coronavirus pandemic made it painfully clear that the U.S. could not adequately protect its citizens. Millions of Americans suffered—and over a million died—in less than two years, while government officials blundered; prize-winning economists overlooked devastating trade-offs; and elites escaped to isolated retreats, unaffected by and even profiting from the pandemic.

Why and how did America, in a catastrophically enormous failure, become the world leader in COVID deaths? In this page-turning economic, political, and financial history, veteran journalists Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera offer fresh and provocative answers. With laser-sharp analysis and deep sourcing, they investigate both what really happened when governments ran out of PPE due to snarled supply chains and the shock to the financial system when the world's biggest economy stumbled. They zero in on the effectiveness of wildly polarized approaches, with governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Ron DeSantis of Florida taking infamous turns in the spotlight. And they trace why thousands died in hollowed-out hospital systems and nursing homes run by private equity firms to “maximize shareholder value." 

In the tradition of the authors’ previous landmark exposés, The Big Fail is an expansive, insightful account on what the pandemic did to the economy and how American capitalism has jumped the rails—and is essential reading to understand where we’re going next.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bethany McLean is a journalist and contributing editor for Vanity Fair. She has co-authored multiple bestselling books, including The Smartest Guys in the Room with Peter Elkind and All the Devils Are Here with Joe Nocera. She resides in Chicago with her children.

Joe Nocera is a columnist for The Free Press. His business journalism has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. He also wrote and produced the hit podcasts The Shrink Next Door and Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner. His books include All the Devils Are Here and Indentured. He lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

The Scapegoat

The first sighting of COVID-19 in the United States took place on January 19, 2020, when a man in his thirties who had just returned from Wuhan, China, showed up at a clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, with a mild cough and pneumonia-like symptoms. The clinic sent him home. But with a strange new virus already associated with Wuhan, the clinic staff took a nasal swab and notified state health officials.

Just over a week earlier, a virologist at the University of Sydney had tweeted that he, along with a consortium led by the prominent Chinese virologist Zhang Yongzhen, had sequenced this novel coronavirus. They posted its genetic sequence on virological.org, an open-access site. A week later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-the CDC-had a test that could tell whether the sequence was present.

At this early stage of the pandemic, it was almost impossible to get tested for COVID-19. The illness didn't even have a name. The CDC was focused on testing people who had been in Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital, and returned with a fever and respiratory issues. Which meant that if the disease were being transmitted more broadly, there was no way to know. It wasn't clear that the man in Snohomish qualified for a test. Nonetheless, worried state officials shipped his nasal swab to the CDC's Atlanta headquarters and requested that it be tested. It came back positive.

On January 21, Nancy Messonnier, a high-ranking CDC scientist, held a press conference in which she confirmed that the first case of COVID-19 had been recorded in Washington State. "Right now," she said, "testing for this virus must take place at CDC, but in the coming weeks, we anticipate sharing these tests with domestic and international partners." For his part, President Donald Trump was sanguine. "It's going to be just fine," he said. "It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control."

But in Washington State, very little felt under control. Health officials wanted to know if the man had infected others, which would require testing. They even had the means to do so. Dr. Helen Chu, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, had started something called the Seattle Flu Study, which included collecting nasal swabs from residents throughout the region. But she was told she couldn't test those swabs for COVID-19 until the CDC had manufactured its test. Chu's lab was also capable of developing its own test. But two of the government's chief health agencies, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), wouldn't allow that without almost insurmountable red tape. Washington State would have to wait. If you think of the government's many pandemic mistakes as a series of cascading dominoes, here was the first domino. Early testing was the only way to find out if the coronavirus was spreading-and the most important tool if the country was to have any hope of containing it. But officials simply didn't view the new virus with any particular urgency.

One reason for that lack of urgency was that most pathogens in recent years had largely bypassed the United States. For instance, about eleven thousand people had died during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, but only four cases occurred in the United States. The lack of information coming out of China didn't help either. Wuhan was sealed off. The Chinese government was saying next to nothing about the virus. Western scientists didn't know how contagious it was, or how it spread, or what percentage of the population it was likely to kill. The pandemic's true fury wouldn't be felt outside China until it hit Italy in mid-February. That was still weeks away.



The way it’s supposed to work is like this: when a country suspects that a deadly virus is circulating-a virus that might lead to a pandemic-it alerts the World Health Organization (WHO) and major governments so that the rest of the world can begin to take precautions. The process relies on transparency. China didn’t live up to that responsibility.

Alex Azar, who was then Trump's secretary of health and human services, would later say that the first inkling the United States had about the Wuhan outbreak came not from China but from a notification from Taiwan's economic and cultural office in the United States. That was December 30.

That same day, a document began circulating on the internet about an urgent notice issued by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission citing a "pneumonia of unknown cause" and noting that patients had come from the seafood market. A reporter for a Chinese business news website called the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission's hotline and confirmed that the notice was true; just before midnight on December 30, ProMed, a low-tech list manned by part-time employees who try to confirm the truth of chatter like that in Wuhan, sent out a post. These early reports weren't filled with alarm, but some infectious disease specialists were immediately on high alert. "All of us who work in the field worry about the potential jump of a pathogen from an intermediate host to a human, so the live animal market was an obvious concern," says Dr. Kevin Messacar, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Children's Hospital Colorado.

It took another three days-an astonishingly long time given the stakes-for a Chinese health official to contact Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC. Dr. George Fu Gao was his Chinese counterpart; he informed Redfield about the existence of the virus. Redfield then called Azar and said, "I think we have a problem." Azar alerted the National Security Council.

With a presidential election less than a year away, this was not welcome news at the White House. When Azar called Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, he had trouble getting the president to focus, he later complained to aides.

In a follow-up conversation, Gao told Redfield that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But when China shared the initial data on the first twenty-seven human cases, not all of them could be traced back to the market, and some were clustered within families. Redfield would later say he was immediately suspicious, and he was right. According to the Independent Panel, established by the WHO, Wuhan Hospital's chief of respiratory medicine told her superiors in late December that she was concerned about human-to-human transmission. On January 5, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, which was led by Zhang Yongzhen, told authorities that it "should be contagious through respiratory passages," according to internal memos obtained by the Associated Press.

But no one seems to have shared this information with a team of researchers from the WHO, who went to China in mid-January to investigate the outbreak. On January 14 the WHO stated that "preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission"-which the Chinese knew by then was at least highly debatable.

Redfield wasn't the only one who was suspicious. The deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, who had been a reporter in China for The Wall Street Journal in the late 1990s, was sure the situation was worse than China was admitting. "He was convinced a disaster was on the way. His Chinese sources were telling him that 'things were much, much worse in China than they were letting it out to be,'" recalls Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who would become the public face of the pandemic response. Peter Navarro, Trump's irascible economic adviser whose distrust of China had helped spark a trade war, was even more strident. Navarro suggested a travel ban. "The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593331028
• ISBN 13: 9780593331026
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland