The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The lost art of handling a crisis
In 1957, the United States was hit by a pandemic. In three months, they rolled out a vaccine. How?
DOOM by Niall Ferguson 496pp, Allen Lane, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.99
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In 1957, writes Niall Ferguson, the United States was hit by one of the deadliest pandemics in history – Asian Flu. More than a million died worldwide. Yet there was no state of emergency; no lockdowns; no school closures. Hospitals were cleared for the sickest, and the rest were told to stay at home and drink fruit juice. President Eisenhower asked Congress for just $2.5million in aid to public health, a tiny sum compared with the several trillion spent in response to Covid-19. But the most striking thing about the pandemic of 1957 is that no one remembers it, that it left almost no mark on its generation. Why?
Disasters don’t just happen, argues Ferguson in this superb, first-out-of-the-gate historical inquiry into the politics of pandemics: they are often caused, always experienced, so the way they play out tells us much about the human beings involved. Maybe the coronavirus was triggered by bats, but it was spread by us and bungled by us, and our attempts to interpret it expose our contemporary obsessions. The death toll of the past year has been pinned on populists such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson; Ferguson, on the other hand, regards Trump’s poor leadership as symptomatic, not a catalyst. “What happened was in large measure a disastrous failure of the public health bureaucracy”, reflecting a long-term decline in the quality of American governance. Since the middle of the last century, the state has been trying to do more things, with less common sense.
The 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, he points out, was blamed on the Reagan White House – another Rightwing Republican – but had a lot more to do with design flaws and middle management. In a fascinating chapter on Chernobyl, Ferguson dissects the myth that a nuclear power station could only blow up in the
Soviet Union. Communism was a contributing factor, but it was also a perfect storm of bad design, costcutting and human error, albeit one that didn’t take as many lives as Westerners imagine. Of the 237 power station staff and firemen hospitalised, he reveals, only 28 died of acute radiation sickness, and “the three men who heroically entered the basement area to drain the water reservoir beneath the reactor all survived”.
Moreover, Chernobyl did happen elsewhere: in America, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in 1979, and in Ferguson’s view, the American engineers operated as much in the dark as the Soviets did. They were just luckier. In the USSR, “the central government had too much power”, which suppressed potential warnings. In the US, “power is distributed to too many federal, state, and local agencies”, which diluted wisdom. President Carter, watching Three Mile unfold on his TV, observed that “too many people [were] talking” at once, so that the average citizen didn’t know who to believe or what to do, which sounds depressingly familiar.
The spread of Covid-19 has been terrifying, as scenes in India remind us, and the fact that we can lockdown a nation – now having the technology and cash to do it – has, in many minds, made it the ethical choice. But two major differences between 1957 and our response to Covid-19 are, first, that the 1950s generation, shaped by world wars and successive pandemics, were used to disaster and so did not expect society to be shut down in response to it. Second, the US government was smaller and more centralised back then, with power concentrated in the hands of egomaniacs who knew how to get things done. A vaccine was rolled out within three months. The man at the centre of this remarkable operation, Maurice Hillman, “ran his laboratory like a military unit” and kept a row of shrunken heads in his office to represent the people he’d fired. Ferguson, one senses, is an admirer. Indeed, one can imagine Left-wing readers a c c u s i n g
him of allowing his own political obsessions to get the better of the argument. Ferguson is a sublimely good historian, one of our best, but from his first mention of attending Davos (it’s in the opening paragraph) to his recipe for handling China (a Cold War, he declares, is “inevitable and desirable”), Doom comes off as a self-conscious bid to offer a conservative response to current events, to influence policy in a centre-Right direction. In which case, what is to be done?
We cannot recreate the “tight” society of the 1950s, with its Eisenhowers and Hillmans, and nor would we want to if the core ingredient was high mortality. And I’ve no doubt that government was more efficient when it was smaller and better focused – but it has only
Government, since the 1950s, has tried to do more things, with less common sense
grown in size and complexity, like the nuclear industry, because the society it serves is bigger and more complex, too.
Sure, the US Democrats have created a vast, inept bureaucracy, but the attempts of countless Republican administrations to deregulate have yet to pay off, and I remain unconvinced that the private sector is significantly more competent than the public. Just try getting someone to come and fix your boiler. Thank heavens British Gas wasn’t in charge of the vaccine roll-out.
Ultimately, Ferguson comes down on the side of a kind of sunny pessimism: something is bound to go wrong, it always does, but we can’t predict what or how, only that we’re likely to cock things up. This book is history in real time, analysing the mistakes of last week, and its final quarter – that segue into picking a fight with China – feels a little too relevant, as if the intended audience isn’t you or me but some powerful people at a lavish conference in the Swiss Alps. There’s little here that would surprise or offend them.
Disease travels along networks, Ferguson concludes, though he shies away from the obvious medicine, which is to shut them down. Less trade, less travel, less migration? You won’t hear that at Davos.