The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

The root of the CDC’s behavior was simple: fear. They didn’t want to take any action for which they might later be blamed. “The message they send is, We’re better than you and smarter than you, but we’re letting you stick your neck out to take the risk,” said Charity. “They would argue with me about how kids behave in fraternities and sororities. And I had been president of Kappa Delta!” In the middle of the crisis, Charity figured out what it would take to appease the nation’s highest authority on infectious disease. “It was when they said, ‘If any of this works, you won’t know which one worked,’ ” she recalled. “They said, ‘You need to do these things one at a time and gather evidence.’ They wanted to learn from this meningitis outbreak, and I wanted to stop it. My goal was to stop it, and that was not their goal. They wanted to observe it as if it were a science experiment on how meningitis moves through a college campus. And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me: a kid just lost his feet.’ ” Charity never would know which of the measures she took had controlled the disease; she knew only that all of them together had. To her, all that really mattered was that the disease had been contained. The job of the public-health officer—or at least her job as the public-health officer—was a series of intense firefights. There was no standard operating procedure for many of the situations in which she found herself: usually, they were sufficiently different from anything that had ever ...

Action Over Analysis: Fighting Disease Amid Bureaucratic Fear