Front Burner - Lawrence Wright takes on The Plague Year

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Today, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright joins us to talk about The Plague Year, his new account of the biggest failures and successes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It was about the beginning of September in the year 1664 when the news first reached us that the plague had returned to Holland, had it arrived in England? The first confirmation came at the beginning of December.

In 1665, the Great Plague of London completely decimated the city, leaving 100,000 people dead over 18 brutal months. It was the last major bubonic plague outbreak in Britain. More than 50 years later, a journal of the plague year was published by Daniel Defoe. It's a defining record of the outbreak. In it, he describes the grisly progression of the catastrophe, starting with how the plague began ripping through specific neighborhoods. Then we learned that there had been a large increase in burials.

Suddenly, the number of burials increased dramatically. The infection was spreading across the city. Well, thanks to Lawrence Wright, we don't have to wait five decades for an all-encompassing recount of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer is best known for writing unflinching books about Al-Qaeda and Scientology. And the last time he was here, he spoke about his prophetic medical thriller, The End of October, a fictional story about the global wreckage of a new viral disease. Of course, for his latest project, Lawrence didn't have to imagine anything. His new book, The Plague Year, tells the painfully true story of our pandemic,

from the utter failure to contain the virus to the extraordinary circumstances that led to the development of life-saving vaccines. Lawrence Wright joins me now to share his thoughts on how the pandemic has revealed and reshaped society. Hi Lawrence, it's great to have you back. Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you again. So as I mentioned in the introduction, a journal of the plague year was written more than 50 years after the Great Plague of London. What was it like trying to get perspective on a pandemic that in many ways is still raging across the world? Well, I was asked to write an article for The New Yorker, and I thought about how many aspects of our society this contagion has touched. It left nothing untouched, really. There was politics you know, politics, the economy, race,

health, science, the whole spectrum of our society had been changed. And I tried to figure out how could I write about all of that. And what I decided was to look at representative institutions, you know, the White House, Congress, Wall Street, hospitals, all of those different things and find people inside those institutions who could represent the total catastrophe that we've been facing. Your book delves into the critical missteps that led to the pandemic spiraling out of control, starting in China. Can you tell me more about the failures in Wuhan and what specific ways did the Chinese government prevent the international community from getting ahead of the pandemic, you think? Well, number one, from an American point of view, the Chinese refused to let American health

authorities go into the country and investigate what was going on. This was a huge setback. I'm sure that the American scientists could have figured out very quickly what they were up against. At the time, the Chinese authorities were saying this was not transmissible between people. Another thing that American authorities would have found that this was a disease, unlike most diseases, that could be spread asymptomatically. In other words, people could get the disease and have no symptoms at all. And yet they were carriers and they were spreading it to other people. This was something that was recognized early on in the public health constituency in China,

but it was kept quiet. And finally, I would say that up until this day, I don't think the Chinese have ever permitted American authorities to have a sample of the original virus. So that slowed down the development of a test. One thing I wanted to ask you about, recently there's been renewed interest in the claim that COVID came from a lab leak in Wuhan. It was previously sort of dismissed as a conspiracy theory, right? But now President Joe Biden has ordered U.S. intelligence to actually investigate this. The president expects a conclusive report within 90 days.

Getting to the bottom of the origin of this pandemic will help us understand how to prepare for the next pandemic and the next one. to prepare for the next pandemic and the next one. The World Health Organization is preparing further studies into its origin, having previously said it was highly improbable to have come from a lab. I know that you've dug into this question, and I wonder what you make of this right now. Well, there are two ideas about where this virus came from. One, it came from nature. It came directly from bats,

or it came through bats into an intermediate animal like a civet cat or something like that. And that's what happened with SARS, the original one in 2003. It came directly from bats into people. And that may have happened with COVID-19. On the other hand, with SARS, you know, there was evidence of how the virus adapted to the human host. It got a foothold, and then it changed, and there's a whole series of evolution of that original SARS virus, whereas with COVID-19, it was almost perfectly adapted to humans from the get-go. So that was odd. And then the other thing, the Chinese behavior around the lab is very suspicious. Whether or not it was a lab accident, one has to acknowledge that lab accidents happen far more frequently than you would believe.

I mean, it happened in CDC. It's happened with SARS. There were, in Beijing, four instances where SARS escaped from a lab. Smallpox has escaped from labs. I mean, these are highly dangerous diseases, and yet there have been lab escapes in the past. The lab in China that we're talking about the wuhan institute of virology is a bsl4 lab that means biosafety level four which is the highest level that there is in this kind of experimentation so theoretically it should be perfectly safe but now we've learned that these experiments on coronaviruses inside that lab didn't actually take place at the highest level. Some of them took place at BSL-2, which is about as safe as a dentist's office. There was a carelessness at work in that lab that is very unsettling.

lab that is very unsettling. And some scientists who pooh-poohed the idea that this might have come out of a lab, a BSL-4 lab, have now changed their minds, saying that that was ridiculous, that they were behaving, you know, that they were experimenting at such a low level of safety. It sounds like you're saying that this theory, it could very much be true. that this theory, it could very much be true. Well, we've learned recently that there have been staff members at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill enough to go to the hospital in November about when this disease is first thought to have broken through in Wuhan. And so had the Chinese been transparent about this, one might say, well, that, you know, that could be an indicator or not. But to hide that information adds suspicion to the behavior. And it makes you wonder if there's a reason that the Chinese authorities don't want a closer inspection of what happened in that lab. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So we've talked about the missed opportunities here from China, basically how they move to suppress information and not share information with the world. They allowed people to travel. Your book gets into this as well. But it does really zoom in on the missed opportunities and failures of the U.S. government in containing the pandemic. And you follow a few key characters from the Trump administration I'm hoping we can talk about today, most notably a young national security advisor named Matthew Pottinger. I was able to call doctors on the ground in China in late January, and they were already telling me, look, this thing spreads asymptomatically. Half of the cases or more are asymptomatic.

Who actually reads like a character from your last book. He's sort of straight out of central casting to me. Tell me about him. Why was he so well-suited to advise the president on this issue? Well, Matt Pottinger is a fascinating character. He actually speaks fluent Mandarin. He had been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in China during the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003. Then he joined the Marines and,

you know, he had an interesting career path. And he was brought into the National Security Council as an expert on Asia. And he lasted through five national security advisors. So he was like the whole memory of that organization. He was the one who persisted. Yeah, it's shocking to think of the turnover rate. And, you know, he was a name little known in the United States. But in January, he began to hear reports from China that worried him. So he began making telephone calls, you know, just behaving as a reporter. So I dusted off some of my old contacts and talked to Chinese doctors who had firsthand information about this pandemic,

and they were very open. They said, yeah, this thing is not going to be like SARS-2003. It's going to be like the 1918 flu pandemic. This is while the U.S. intelligence circle had essentially nothing to say about this virus. It didn't rise on their radar. And so Matt became a solo voice on this. And he started a kind of task force inside the White House, which eventually evolved into the coronavirus task force. the White House, which eventually evolved into the Coronavirus Task Force. And in that task force, there were elements of the public health community, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield, who was the head of the CDC, the head of the FDA, you know, representatives from various agencies. There were economists, a wide range of government leaders were involved in this task force. A wide range of government leaders were involved in this task force.

And over the course of the existence of this task force, it was Pottinger who kept bringing up key elements such as stopping travel between China and the United States. Thousands of people were coming every single day from China. And this was at a time when China had stopped circulation in its own country, but people were allowed to fly to the United States. And so the question Pottinger put was, why don't we stop flights from China? It might slow the progress of the disease. And there was resistance even from the public health people. One of the verities that has been challenged by this experience is that travel bans are no help because by the time you impose them, the virus has already jumped over the borders.

And it also impedes the transport of personal protective equipment and doctors that need to freely move. But finally, they were persuaded by his arguments, and they got the president to agree to ban travel from China and later from Europe. So that was all potager. And then in talking to one of his doctor sources in China, he was asking about what measures had worked. And he was told, you know, hand sanitizer, social distancing, they're fine. But if you really want to put the brakes on this, masks are the only thing. And once again, this was contrary to public health orthodoxy. In fact, it was seen as being maybe even a transmitter of the disease.

You know, if you don't wear the mask correctly, you'll fiddle with it and you'll carry germs to your face and so on. So they discouraged the wearing of masks. And Pottinger was the first person to go to the White House and wear a mask. He said he felt like he was wearing a clown nose. People gawked at him. The president asked if he was sick. And he said, no, I just don't want to be the first person in history to knock off a president with an infectious disease. And he finally was able to persuade the coronavirus task force that mask wearing was essential.

And they got the president to make an announcement at a briefing. make an announcement at a briefing. And of course, what Trump did was say, I've been advised that mask wearing works and they think it's going to be good for you. Maybe it will be good. I'm not going to do it. So it's voluntary. You don't have to do it. They suggested for a period of time. But this is voluntary. I don't think I'm going to be doing it. And he pretty much destroyed the whole, undermined the whole effort. And then at the coronavirus task force meeting that followed that, they applauded Pottinger and said that he was right all along. Nobody else in the coronavirus task force was wearing a mask. And then when Pottinger got back to his office, there was an announcement of

the time when they would have the next meeting. And there was an addendum saying no masks will be worn. So that was the end of Matt Pottinger's effort inside the task force. It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available. It was the one effective, widely available tool that we had in the arsenal to deal with this. It was a grave misstep. That's such an interesting window into what was happening in that White House. The other thing that I found really interesting about Matt Pottinger, You know, you mentioned that he reported on SARS in China in 2003. But also his wife is like a virus specialist and his brother is a doctor too. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? His brother is, you know, an epidemiologist in Washington State, where the disease first arrived. And, you know, and his wife had created one of the standard tests for AIDS at CDC. So

they're both highly respected, accomplished scientists. And so Matt not only had his Chinese language skills and his experience as a reporter to call upon, but the expert counsel of his brother and his wife. changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo.

50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. You know, despite this one character in the White House, it does become very clear throughout your book that he was sort of more often ignored, right? And can you tell me in what other crucial ways did the U.S. government fail to contain the pandemic in those sort of early weeks and months? The worst example is the test that the CDC labored to put together.

In many respects, it was done at blinding speed, although the Germans accomplished a test sooner than that. although the Germans accomplished the test sooner than that. It's, to me, still confounding to realize that the CDC, the people that created the test, discovered before they released it that it was flawed, that 30% of the tests were inaccurate and creating false positives for the most part. And yet they sent it out to public health agencies with this endorsement. And really quickly, public health people began to realize

this test was flawed. They would have to test it against things like sterilized water. And then the water would show that it would have a positive response saying that there was coronavirus in it. the water would show that it would have a positive response saying that there was coronavirus in it. And clearly there wasn't. They couldn't figure out what was wrong. And so finally, the CDC, after three weeks, sent a very experienced investigator to Atlanta to find out what was wrong. And he arrived on Saturday afternoon. And he wasn't admitted to the CDC. They said that no one was there to receive him, and then Sunday, he had made some calls, and he was allowed inside the building, but he wasn't allowed inside the labs. It was still the weekend, and so finally on Monday, he was able to examine the labs, and this is what he found. There is a room, one of several rooms where they were making the test.

They were also processing viral samples from people who were ill in different states around the country. So a virus like this is very persistent. It gets stuck on surfaces. It floats in the air. So it was pretty clear to the FDA investigator that the virus test had been contaminated by the virus. In a way, the test hadn't failed. It had properly detected the coronavirus. It was just that the coronavirus was in the test and not necessarily in the person who had been tested. This is such a mind-blowing story. Just the fact that this happened in the richest country in the world. What does that say to you?

Well, we have learned a lot about our country because of this pandemic. I think of the pandemic as being like an x-ray that allows you to see into your society and all the broken places and before before covet 19 the cdc was considered the gold standard of public health all over the world and to see this proud agency so humbled It's really heartbreaking. In addition to these institutions, the immense wealth of the United States, the political and brainpower that existed there, you know, you also write about how the Obama administration literally left a pandemic playbook outlining a detailed national strategy. But of course, the U.S. became one of the worst managed countries in the world. About 600,000 people have died, a death rate that far exceeds even some developing nations.

And after all your research, I wonder how squarely do you place the blame on political leadership at the top? Well, a lot of responsibility falls on the Trump administration. I'm not going to single it out as being the only thing. But leadership was absent. Not only absent, in many ways, the president sabotaged the effort. One example that really struck me is that there was a call to governors, the 50 governors and also tribal and territorial authorities every week with the White House. And in one of those meetings, the president said, you know, we're behind you. We're supporting your efforts. But then he began to explain what that meant in terms of getting personal protective equipment and ventilators and all the equipment that was required.

He said, ventilators, all of equipment that was required. He said, Ventilators, all of the equipment, try getting it yourself. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourself. We're behind you, but better that you get it yourselves. And Jay Inslee, who's the governor of Washington State, told me, he said that, Mr. President, that's like in 1941, the president telling Connecticut, good luck building your battleships. You know, we're all in this together.

We need, you know, we need your assistance and authority. But Trump later responded that he was not a shipping clerk. And what this led to is that, you that, like Gretchen Whitmer, who's the governor of Michigan, told me that in that call, she realized that Michigan didn't have enough personal protective equipment for the next shift. She was out. And, you know, she was counting on the federal government to send supplies out of the national storehouse. There is such a thing, but it was pretty much emptied out. And, you know, Gina Raimondo, who was governor of Rhode Island, she had been pressing for a shipment of masks and gowns and

ventilators. And, you know, she was promised all this. And finally, there's a truck arrives, She was promised all this, and finally a truck arrives, and they're so excited, and it was empty. It was an empty truck that they sent to Rhode Island, which I think embodies such a striking example of the level of incompetence and carelessness that typified that administration. You know, I will give them credit for speeding along the vaccine. That, you know, that is essential. But when it came down to actually vaccinating people, they anticipated that they would vaccinate 40 million Americans by the end of 2020. And by the end of 2020, they had vaccinated 2 million. So I think by their own metrics, that's a fair judgment of what the Trump administration accomplished.

In looking at previous outbreaks, one of the biggest takeaways from your book is how pandemics can bring about mass social change. For instance, you point out how the Black Plague marked the end of the Middle Ages and made way for the Renaissance. And this pandemic has done much to reveal the racism and economic injustice that exists in North America. We've seen the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement internationally in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the indisputable statistics about how people of color and other marginalized groups faced a much more deadly pandemic than many others. And you write that society is at this inflection point to make radical adjustment for good or ill. And how much

hope do you have that this pandemic will inspire concrete change for good? that this pandemic will inspire concrete change for good? Well, I am hopeful, but I'm sure not certain. I spoke to a medical historian, Gianna Pomata, who lives in Bologna, Italy. She compared the pandemic that we experienced to the Black Plague, but in terms of leading to social change. And what she said is it opened people's minds. It allowed fresh thinking, and that's what led to the change. And what she said is it opened people's minds. It allowed fresh thinking. And that's what led to the Renaissance. I think the brokenness of our society became very clear

during the pandemic. We were humbled by it. But if we are able to rise to the challenges that the pandemic has presented us, I think we'll be a better country. But if we fail, we'll know that we're in decline. All right. Lawrence before we go today, yesterday police in London, Ontario, alleged that a driver that struck a family of five hit them intentionally and that he did it because of their Islamic faith. There is evidence that this was a planned premeditated act motivated by hate.

It is believed that these victims were targeted because they were Muslim. Police say the family was out for a walk Sunday evening when the driver, a 20-year-old man, struck them. Four family members died. The only survivor is a nine-year-old boy who is in hospital with serious injuries. The driver has been charged with four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. We're going to bring you more on this story tomorrow. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you soon. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.