Politicians might have failed us during the pandemic but thankfully journalists didn’t. Failures of State (Mudlark) by Sunday Times reporters Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott catalogues a shocking series of unforced errors by the government—from the failure to lock down quickly enough in March 2020 to dumping elderly patients with Covid into care homes. The authors are damning about Boris Johnson, who dithered when he needed to be decisive and listened to his backbenchers more than he did the scientists.
Things were even worse in the US—and it wasn’t just Donald Trump. As Michael Lewis shows in The Premonition (Allen Lane), the healthcare system failed to work. In the crucial early weeks there was no unified response, even though experts like Charity Dean, a public health officer in California and hero of Lewis’s story, could see what was happening. The most compelling parts of Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year (Allen Lane) show vaccine developers at Moderna tantalisingly close to developing the jab but terrified of making a mistake. In Oxford, researchers were on a similar path—their heroic story is told in Vaxxers (Hodder) by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, the two women who worked on the AstraZeneca vaccine that has saved so many lives.