The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

There were several points to this story. One was how screwed up the incentives were inside the medical-industrial complex. It was possible to spend $1,000,100 on drugs to prevent you from dying without anyone’s having any idea if any of them would work; at the same time, inside of a few weeks but too late to save you, some ill-paid postdoc was able to find a cheap cure. Another was that even when you might have thought that problem was solved, it wasn’t. Two years after Joe and his postdocs published their findings on Balamuthia, the FDA had yet to approve Nitroxoline, long since cleared by European regulators, as a treatment. The CDC website continued to recommend an old treatment (another one of the 2,177 drugs) that the DeRisi Lab had demonstrated did nothing but create unpleasant side effects. Which is to say that American citizens could and would die of Balamuthia without ever knowing what they had, or that there was a cure. Unless, somehow, they’d heard about the Red Phone.