Opinion: How ‘Lessons From the Covid War’ falls short
As with our pandemic response itself, "Lessons from the Covid War" goes wrong mostly when it encounters the messiness of politics — or fails to do so.
The stream of books about the government response to the pandemic that began with Michael Lewis’ “The Premonition” has just yielded its most important product to date. “Lessons From the Covid War” is public policy analysis at its near-best: lucid, sober, probing, at once analytical and engaging. But the book ultimately comes up a bit short, in ways that interestingly mirror the national response it chronicles and critiques.
The lead writer is Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia, who served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission. But the credited author is the self-appointed, foundation-funded Covid Crisis Group, an assembly of some 34 distinguished figures from public health and public administration, including Zelikow, Ezekiel Emanuel, Peggy Hamburg, and Mark McClellan. Together, they seek to provide the report of which we were deprived when the Congress and White House chose not to name an investigative commission to look at the pandemic response. The result is both the product of some of the nation’s best minds (including many of Lewis’ “Premonition” protagonists — Charity Dean, Richard Hatchett, Carter Mecher) and a book that seems to have been edited by committee, sometimes to a fault.
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