The Pandemic’s Path
How did it happen? And who’s accountable? Seems now a lot of people saw it coming. Stephen King wrote his viral bestseller The Stand 30 years ago; Bill Gates put his warning in a TED talk; our Pentagon had a plan to counter the pandemic. It was the reporter Laurie Garrett, covering viruses before HIV/AIDS in the ’80s, who got inside 30 different epidemics around the world before this one, and put a title on her scrupulous non-fiction: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. That was 26 years ago. This week she’s just out with a first draft of our coronavirus history, with two plausible villains and also two possible sources of critical help, if it’s not too late.