The Chris Voss Show The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic by Nina Burleigh
Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic by Nina Burleigh
The only close analysis of our pandemic year revealing how the confluence of key government missteps, behind-the-scenes deal brokering, staggering dismissal of decades of scientific progress, conspiracy theories, and further malfeasance were behind hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
“A fast-paced narrative that captures the spirit of our dystopian times.”—Craig Unger, author of American Kompromat
A few months before the virus slammed the world, global public health experts declared the United States the most prepared for a possible pandemic. Instead, we watched as the disease killed half a million Americans. A stunned nation has been too busy grieving and doing damage control to ask why, or to comprehend just how much of the blundering and chaos of the pandemic response was either deliberate or entirely predictable. 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. Here readers will learn:
• How the Trump administration packed public health agencies with right wing Christians and their political allies who cared more about gender norms and policing morality than a possible pandemic.
• How another branch of the Trump administration, the anti-government ideologues, were so enamored of extreme free market principles that they treated the pandemic as a business opportunity.
• How America’s anti-expertise culture, long nurtured by right wing media and conservative politicians, and now at its apogee, has left countless millions of Americans doubting the efficacy and safety of vaccines.
• How the phenomenal success of childhood vaccines on extending average lifespan since the early 20th century has left many Americans so ignorant about how much vaccines have already improved their lives that they’re willing to reject them.
• How our metastasizing national security state and the “bad science” of the Cold War from the A-bomb to bioweapons and beyond explains the credulity of vast numbers of Americans who subscribe to wild conspiracy theories about Covid.
• How a growing number of mainstream scientists now actually accept the “lab leak hypothesis” about the origins of the virus.
About Nina Burleigh
Nina Burleigh is a New York Times best-selling author of seven lively, acclaimed works of creative nonfiction. Her latest book, VIRUS, five essays on the pandemic, will be published in May 2021. She has written hundreds of works of journalism, essays and book reviews, on a wide array of topics including culture, politics, gender issues, science, and the environment.
Her books share a theme of examining the tension between belief and science, religion and rationality in post-Enlightenment life, including 1830s American politics, among post-revolutionary French scientists in Egypt, Cold War era CIA conspiracy theories, fake Biblical archaeology in Jerusalem today, and the role of faith versus science in an Italian courtroom. Two books explore the relationship between art, nature, history, and science. In Mirage, she told the story of the scientists and artists behind the first great study of modern Islam and ancient Egypt, Description de l’Egypte, a landmark work of art and publishing produced by the scientists who went to Egypt with Napoleon in 1800. Her book Unholy Business is a Maltese Falcon style crime caper about a gang of forgers accused of applying new technology to alter and sell archaeological relics.
A fellow of the Explorers Club, she has covered stories on six continents. She has published works about the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Amazon, where she wrote an essay about women, nature, and the human culture along the Amazon River in Peru and ayahuasca culture in Iquitos, posh Lagos, racism and rhino poaching in South Africa. She has written cover stories for Newsweek on Trump and Women, Trump as a tool of the New York billionaires, Trump and Evangelicals, Trump and the Law, Facebook and political big data mining, the #metoo movement, the melting of Antarctica, sea level rise in Florida, asteroid defense schemes and other current events.
She has judged the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for nonfiction, and won several awards for her journalism and books. She was writer in residence at the Siena Art Institute in 2013 attached to the Above/Below Ground project with Mark Dion and Amy Yoes, including a symposium on the Art and Science of The Expedition. She was a Dora Maar Fellow in the arts in Menerbes, France, in 2014, where she worked on a novel. Mirage was selected by The New York Times as an editors’ choice and won the Society of Women Educators’ Award.
Her writing can be found in numerous publications including Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Time, New York, The New York Times, Slate and Bustle. She has appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, The Today Show, 48 Hours, MSNBC, CNN and C-Span, on NPR and numerous radio programs.
Nina was born and educated in the Midwest, has been based in Washington, D.C., New York, and Paris, and has traveled and reported extensively in the Middle East and lived in Italy and France. She has been an adjunct professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and has lectured around the United States, in Italy, and in Mexico.
Her latest book, Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women, has been covered in The New York Times, New York Post, Entertainment Tonight, BBC, MSNBC, Yahoo and many other media outlets.