The Premonition Quotes

“You can keep mistakes from happening if you can identify the almost mistakes. This kind of changes how I view everything.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“It shouldn’t be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That’s what they do well.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” actually isn’t usually true for human beings. It is for bacteria, however.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Courage is a muscle memory. The tallest oak in the forest was once just a little nut that held its ground.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The model he’d built with his daughter showed that there was no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network: in each case, a person lost the ability to infect others. Yet all the expert talk was about how to speed the production and distribution of vaccines. No one seemed to be exploring the most efficient and least disruptive ways to remove people from social networks. “I had this sudden fear,” said Bob. “No one is going to realize what you could do.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“the people who already saw themselves as experts in the field would be least capable of original thought.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“He’d been born in Poland and moved to the United States as a child. He had memories of Poland as a communist regime, and of the total breakdown of the government’s ability to be useful to its citizens. What he saw in the local U.S. public-health offices remined him of public services in Poland, but before the collapse of communism.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The Mexicans, interestingly, had taken the new pandemic strategy of the United States and run with it. They’d closed schools, and socially distanced the population in other ways that, studies would later show, shut down disease transmission. The CDC, by contrast, sent the message that each American school should make its own decision, which was a bit like telling a bunch of sixth graders that the homework was optional. A few schools closed, but the vast majority did not. The local public-health officials with the power to close the schools had no political cover to do what needed doing. In that moment it was clear to Richard and Carter that there’d be no cohesive national strategy.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The entire United States government had been drifting that way for some time—management jobs once done by career civil servants being turned into roles performed by people appointed by the president. One of the problems this created was management inexperience: the average tenure of the appointees fluctuated between eighteen months and two years, depending on the administration. Another was the kind of person the job now selected for. There would be exceptions, of course, but the odds favored the pleaser. The person who did not present risks to the White House’s political operation.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“people don’t learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need. For people to learn, they need to want to learn.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“scale. The American institutions built to manage risk and respond to a virus had been engaged in a weird simulation of crisis response that did not involve actually trying to stop the virus. “The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“In the end he plotted both the deaths and the restrictions imposed to prevent them, and saw that the earlier the restrictions imposed in any given outbreak, the fewer the deaths. In the case of Philadelphia, he wrote, “the closing of schools and churches, banning of public meetings, and banning of large public gatherings occurred relatively late into the epidemic”—nearly one month after the outbreak began and just a week before its peak.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,” he later recalled. “Not the usual owner’s manual, but an owner’s manual that pointed out all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of how we”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Our players aren’t our problem. But we are what our record says we are.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“it became clear that Trump’s approach to government management was only a part of the story, and maybe not even the bigger part. As one of my characters put it, “Trump was a comorbidity.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“He showed them a survey that Lisa Koonin commissioned, of parents with children who used it: just one in seven, or 2.8 million, said they’d have trouble feeding their children if schools could not. If schools were closed, Carter concluded, the problem was not 30 million kids but fewer than 3 million; they could be fed with supplemental food stamps.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Whatever was happening in the White House was happening without the benefit of the people Bossert felt qualified to advise the president.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Communicable meant a person could give it to another person. You could get Lyme disease, for instance, but you couldn’t give it to somebody else. Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Charity had heard that the Trump administration might be using new arrivals from Mexico as weapons in a public relations war. When space in the migrant shelters ran out, ICE workers would drive these people into cities in the dead of night and just leave them there. “I’d heard that Trump was trying to create a crisis,” said Charity. “Trying to turn people against immigrants. It was just a rumor. But when I get there I find this is all true. They’re just dumping families on street corners at two in the morning. They were trying to create a disaster.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee. Since the agency’s inception back in 1946, no one had paid much attention to the party politics of the CDC director. (“No one ever asked me,” said Foege.) Henceforth the CDC director would not bubble up from inside the CDC, lifted by the approval of his peers, but would be plucked from the supporters of whichever politician happened to occupy the White House.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Companies that manufactured aspirin petitioned the White House. “The White House called and told us to cease and desist,” recalled Foege. “Do a new study.” The aspirin makers had been able to force the CDC to scrap its findings and slow down science. Foege had resigned after that. “The fact that they would risk the lives of children—it just bothered me so much,” he said.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Here is the frightening aspect of the global supply chain,” said Joe. “When there is a surge in demand, inventory goes to zero. Just-in-time manufacturing. Great concept! Horrible in a pandemic.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story