Recommendations from our site
“The book is written so well, like an adventure story. It begins with Farrar sitting in an airport on Christmas Eve in 2019, waiting to come home to see his family when he receives a phone call—a covert phone call from a colleague in China, who is aware of what’s happening and wants to tell him. That’s how it begins. And it explains how, in the beginning, there was so much resistance—not just from China, but from the US, because very powerful people did not want to believe this epidemic is real. I think at various points, he genuinely feared for his life, because only a very few people in the world knew that something truly dreadful was happening.” Read more...
The Best Popular Science Books of 2022: The Royal Society Book Prize
“The politics of science is one of those topics that tends to be dealt with in clichés, often self-serving clichés: truth versus lies, reason versus magic, etc. But this is an exceptional account of the politics of science which deals with the messy realities of scientific diplomacy and scientific politics. It’s a very rare, frank account by a scientist about the realities of science-state relations, of science-policy relations.
It’s concerned with Covid, with the World Health Organization, with China, and above all British politics and Covid. One of the things it exposes in relation to the UK is the systemic mediocrity of British government, with very, very rare exceptions which are celebrated. This mediocrity led, according to this book, to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. It is a serious intervention in our understanding of the politics of Covid, as well the epidemiology, the science, the vaccines and so on.”
