The Wisdom of Plagues: Book traces lessons not learned from pandemics

Covid-19 was the saddest pandemic NYT reporter Donald G McNeil ever covered. Now he shows how outbreaks like AIDS and Ebola foreshadowed the next in patterns, responses, and impact

The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons From 25 Years of Covering Pandemics

by Donald G. McNeil Jr.

Published by Simon & Schuster India

382  pages  ₹699

 

The collective wisdom of past plagues reveals much about the state of the world: Its fault lines, its interconnectedness, its vulnerabilities. But as veteran journalist and former New York Times science and health reporter Donald G McNeil Jr observes in The Wisdom of Plagues, while societies today are well-armed to remain on guard against military threats, aided by elaborate detection mechanisms, our disease-alert systems remain far less sophisticated with “inherent flaws”. “In practice, the WHO’s systems have not