Virus

New York Times bestselling author Nina Burleigh weaves together the key narrative strands to create an uncompromising and highly informed expose about our shared global pandemic experience and what it means for our future


Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic takes readers on an extraordinary journey from the medical science of viruses and vaccines, to conspiracy theories, through the history of knowledge, to the precipice-where we are now-of uncertainty about the future. This is not a book for those who think they already know how the story ends, but one that asks the tough questions in terse, hard-hitting paragraphs and chapters. Virus walks a tightrope wire, in the same way that nearly all Americans are already doing, and does not presume our lives will be saved by any one approach or answer, or that any side has ownership of the truth, but puts us on a path towards a better understanding of what just happened to us and where we're likely to be headed when, not if, the next virus appears.
Here is:
• The true story behind the triumph of science in an era of unprecedented science denialism;
• The other true story of government malfeasance that brought the U.S. to its knees and saw more Americans die from the pandemic than in any other nation;
• An eye-opening series of interviews with researchers and creators of the mRNA vaccine, its test subjects, and other key figures;
• The history behind one of the great medical milestones: the astonishingly fast development and clinical deployment of the first mRNA vaccine, and how it will change the way medicine is practiced in the future;
• The alternate reality of bizarre conspiracy theories that undergird pandemic denialism and vaccine hesitancy;
• The return of eugenics and how shock doctrine capitalism, crony corruption and extreme free ideology killed people of color, the poor, and the frail;
• An assessment of the lessons learned and opportunities lost and what this will mean for the future of our democracy and our people.
Virus includes original research and interviews with many key figures and experts including MIT engineer ("The Edison of Medicine") and Moderna founder Robert Langer, Stanford microbiologist David Relman, first mRNA clinical trial (Seattle) participant Missy Pena, medical anthropologist Martha Louis Lincoln, among many others, and a deep reading of publicly available documents and reporting.