The historical account laid out in this book is critical in intent. But it would be foolish to deny that it is entangled with and indeed complicit with its subject matter—the efforts of elites around the world to master the crisis. This is a matter of personal politics, biography, institutional attachment, and social identity. The force of those factors should not be denied by any self-aware writer. In a pandemic, this entanglement takes on a more material quality. How each of us came through the crisis was defined in large part by the events and decisions described in this book.
