A veteran journalist explains America’s devastating pandemic
The Plague Year. By Lawrence Wright. Knopf; 336 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £20
IN APRIL 2020 Lawrence Wright published a novel, “The End of October”, about a global pandemic and the political meltdown and mass fatalities it causes in America. Health officials struggle to enforce lockdown rules in the face of conspiracy theorists, feuding rivals, outraged libertarians and a useless president who, washing his hands of the calamity, foists it onto his deputy, a former governor and radio-show host. Then Mr Wright set about writing the true story of America and covid-19. It is not that different.
A veteran journalist at the New Yorker, who wrote a bestselling account of the origins of the 9/11 catastrophe, Mr Wright makes no great claim for his prescience. Plagues, after all, have been common throughout history. And a two-year pandemic of the deadly SARS disease, which emerged in China in late 2002 and spread to several other countries, had raised the threat warning. It was only a matter of time before an even deadlier virus, taking advantage of teeming human populations, ravaged wildlife habitats and opaque government, jumped between species or escaped from a laboratory. According to a study published in 2019 by the Economist Intelligence Unit and others, no country...