The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

The CDC seemed intent on preserving their privileged view of the outbreak. Several times Richard caught the CDC slow-walking data about the illness and deaths caused by this new flu. They had to strain to see what was going on. I see New York City as the chief battleground right now. There’s now potentially as many as 300 chains of infection in the city and it is conceivable that the virus could explode there. On May 17, the week after Richard wrote those words, Mitchell Wiener, a fifty-five-year-old assistant principal in New York City, died of the new swine flu. But it was impossible to actually say what that meant: it was one death. The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, had said he would do what the public-health people told him to do. But one set of experts, inside the White House, thought they should close schools; and the other, at the CDC in Atlanta, thought they shouldn’t. When Obama had asked Carter what he should do, Carter had told him that he ought to close schools until they knew what they were dealing with. Obama had instead listened to the CDC. A few months later, the fog would have lifted and the war would be over. The new flu would turn out to be less lethal than it might have been. The CDC would report that somewhere between forty and eighty million Americans had been infected but only 12,469 had died. Their judgment had been vindicated, and President Obama’s decision had worked out, and everyone would soon move on and forget about the pandemic that wa...

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