The Friday Brief

March 15, 2024

The Big Picture

Four Years Ago

When the full impact of COVID hit, I was on my book tour. One day, the world was normal, or at least adjacent to normal. The next I was standing in LAX, everything delayed or cancelled, and flights in chaos. There was talk of shutting down air travel…and the delays made me reserve the only car I could find if I had to drive home to Florida, a Hertz panel van. Thankfully, the flights still ran.

The Year of Living Dangerously was on, and the mounting toll of suffering and death was like nothing since the 1918 flu epidemic.

As in any crisis, people make mistakes, missteps, and don’t see the whole picture. As an amateur historian of infectious diseases and pandemics (I know, I know…my catalog of weird hobbies and reading-matter rabbit holes is deep), COVID was a perfect storm.

If I was to categorize the most pernicious propaganda effort of my lifetime, the anti-vaccine, COVID-is-just-a-cold, Bill-Gates-5G-chips-in-the-vaccine madness is the most consequential.