The Plague Year Quotes

“For Fauci, science was a self-correcting compass, always pointed at the truth. For Trump, the truth was Play-doh, and he could twist it to fit the shape of his desire.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“Global Health Security Index,” a sober report of a world largely unprepared to deal with a pandemic.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“And the last one is this hyperimmune response,” said Brooks. Infectious diseases frequently kill by triggering an excessive immune-system response.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“The second surprise was hypercoagulability—a pronounced tendency to develop blood clots.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“There are three things this virus is doing that blow me away,” said Brooks, marveling at the resourcefulness and agility of his adversary. “The first is that it directly infects the endothelial cells that line our blood vessels. I’m not aware of any other respiratory viruses that do this. This causes a lot of havoc.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“The first is that it directly infects the endothelial cells that line our blood vessels. I’m not aware of any other respiratory viruses that do this. This causes a lot of havoc.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“Government alone cannot restore the economy to health. Innovation is a primary driver of economic growth. One way of measuring inventive creativeness is through patent applications. Chetty, along with Alex Bell, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen, studied the childhoods of more than a million patent holders, linking family income with elementary test scores and other key factors. Children at the top of their third-grade math class were the most likely to become inventors—but only if they also came from a high-income family. High-scoring children who were from low-income or minority families were no more likely to become inventors than affluent children with mediocre scores. Successful inventors were also less likely to be women, Black, Latino, or from the Southeast. Chetty called these failed inventors the “lost Einsteins.” “If women, minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top 20%) families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple,” the authors said. The most ominous finding by Chetty and his colleagues was the effect of Covid-19 on educational progress. Using a popular math program called Zearn, the economists plotted the achievement of children from upper-income families versus those from lower incomes. When schools shut down and instruction switched to remote learning, children in the upper-income tier suffered a small drop in the lessons completed, but low-income children fell in a hole—a 60 percent drop in the rate of progress in learning math. The long-term economic prospects for those children are dire. “We’re likely to see further erosion of social mobility the longer this lasts,” Chetty said. The American dream was drifting farther out of reach for another generation.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“That fact was not acknowledged by government officials until nearly a month later; instead, authorities instructed the medical staff not to wear masks or gowns because they might give rise to panic.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“Political divisiveness doesn’t lend itself to having a coordinated, cooperative, collaborative response against a common enemy. There is also this pushback in society against anything authoritative.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“It’s a feeling—I’m going to die anyway, so I might as well risk this virus that I can’t see, to speak about the virus of systemic racism that I can.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“inflection point, when society will make a radical adjustment, for good or ill.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“human tragedy of potentially biblical proportions.” He added: “The challenge we face is how to act with sufficient strength and speed to prevent the recession from morphing into a prolonged depression,”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“There were reasons for the cover-up of SARS, including the fear, typical of repressive systems, of passing bad news up the ranks; a tangled bureaucracy; and the singular priority of economic growth over all other considerations; but the naked fact stood that the Chinese government was willing to sacrifice its own people and place the entire world in jeopardy, risking millions of lives, simply to avoid accountability for the outbreak.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, had been questioning the seriousness of the situation. He couldn’t square the apocalyptic forecasts with the bouyant stock market. “Is all the money dumb?” he wondered. “Everyone’s asleep at the switch? I just have a hard time believing that.”*”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“Howard Markel estimates that the total number of Americans who died of the 1918 pandemic was between 500,000 and 750,000; the”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

“The FBI opened hundreds of investigations. Among the ironies was the fact that more than $850,000 went to five anti-vaccine groups.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid