Spike: The Virus vs. The People - the Inside Story

"You may know Jeremy Farrar as the Director of the Wellcome Trust, the biomedical charity. He was also on the Sage committee . Internationally, he is one of the top experts in epidemics. Most of his training has been working overseas in malaria and other tropical diseases, so he has lots of contacts all over the world, and was right at the heart of the epidemic. The book is written so well, like an adventure story. It begins with Farrar sitting in an airport on Christmas Eve in 2019, waiting to come home to see his family, when he receives a phone call—a covert phone call from a colleague in China, who is aware of what’s happening and wants to tell him. That’s how it begins. And it explains how, in the beginning, there was so much resistance—not just from China , but from the US, because very powerful people did not want to believe this epidemic was real. I think at various points, he genuinely feared for his life, because only a very few people in the world knew that something truly dreadful was happening. It develops from there: the frustration of being on the Sage committee, the hornets’ nest of not trusting our own government. Anybody who might feel that they have had enough of reading about Covid should still read this book because it is the inside story, and it reads like a thriller . Farrar really knows what he’s talking about, and it’s no holds barred. I think he feels, having lived through this, he’s going to tell the world what the decision-making was like. And the sad thing is that he concludes that it honestly didn’t need to happen. That’s really sad. He also feels that we’re not preparing for it to happen again. But it’s not a gloomy book. As I said, it’s very dynamic and a great story. It explains the rapid development of vaccinations, but it’s not hugely technical—it’s told much more as part of the adventure, rather than going into lots of detail about how they were made."