Book: THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES: LESSONS FROM 25 YEARS OF COVERING PANDEMICS
Author: Donald G. McNeil Jr
Published by: Simon & Schuste
Price: Rs 699
Donald G. McNeil Jr.’s book arrives on the cusp of 2026: a moment defined by techno-feudal monopolies, climate nihilism, and a post-Covid public hooked on misinformation. McNeil, the blunt, battle-scarred science correspondent for The New York Times, sets out to distil a quarter-century of reporting on infectious diseases into a field manual for the future. The result is at once gripping, disquieting, and exasperating.
McNeil’s career reads like an accidental odyssey. A stray foreign-desk posting to South Africa plunged him into the HIV crisis; Zika, Nipah, SARS, MERS, drug-resistant TB and Covid-19 followed in bruising succession. Along the way, he acquired a reputation for interrogating complacent officials and puncturing nationalist hubris — traits that finally cost him his job amid the United States of America’s own paroxysm of ‘cancel culture’ in 2021. The Wisdom of Plagues is his attempt to plug the holes newspaper column-inches could never fill: an archive of anecdotes, policy autopsies, and hard-won axioms.
The canvas is global; yet the analytical heart is a running comparison between America’s flailing Covid response and the nimble containment strategies of several Asian nations. Among others, one of the more difficult questions McNeil raises is the balance, often choice, that must be made between public health interests and privacy and individual rights as he unveils a messy continuum of decision-making. Wrestling with the debates arising from the different responses to the AIDs epidemic in Cuba and the US, he argues against a black-and-white thinking paradigm that pits the “iron fist” and the “latex glove” approaches against one another.
Equally compelling is the book’s mapping of entanglements that link pathogens to trade rules, budget ceilings, media narratives and the bruised egos of presidents. McNeil is at his best when he dissects the chain reactions set off by a single press conference or border closure, showing how microscopic mutations ricochet through ministries and markets with lethal speed. For Indian readers who recall the chaos of migrant workers walking home in 2020, these sections will feel painfully familiar.
Not everything lands though. In rallying readers to action, McNeil leans on the tired lexicon of a war that public health advocates have long questioned. Despite his itinerary, the vantage point carries a whiff of American exceptionalism, undercutting attempts at universality. One wishes he had lingered longer in the Global South rather than treating it as a cautionary exhibit for Western audiences.
Yet the book’s merits are substantial. It functions as a living chronicle of the pre-Trump-2.0 era, a primer on basic epidemiology, and a sardonic meditation on how people talk themselves out of unpleasant truths. Above all, McNeil writes out of duty — an obligation “to speak for the dead” — before the next microbe elbows its way into the headlines.
The Wisdom of Plagues will probably not change the minds of anti-vaxxers or climate deniers. But for readers willing to confront the brutal arithmetic of contagion, it offers a clear-eyed blueprint for surviving the century’s next microbial insurgency and a reminder that science, routinely muzzled, still has a loud enough voice.