A worldwide plague, the American economy shut down schools closed,

masks, social distancing. Now that it all may finally be ending, how did it happen?

The historian Neil Ferguson and his new book Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe, on Uncommon Knowledge Now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A fellow at the Hoover Institution at

Stanford, Neil Ferguson has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, the Stern School of Business,

the London School of Economics, and Harvard. The author of more than a dozen works of economics,

military history, and diplomacy, Professor Ferguson has just published Doom, the politics of

Catastrophe. Now the curious of titles Doom. Well, he's a certain irony in there,

which I think the dust jacket also makes clear. The US edition depicts a golfer sinking apart with

the wildfire raging behind him. Part of the point of this book is to explore our very strange

ambivalent relationship to Doom, which fascinates us, and often leads us to exaggerate the scale

of disaster. I wanted to write the book to put our current or recent disaster into some kind of

historical context. And part of what I do is to show that by historic standards, COVID-19 is not

a really massive disaster. And so in a way Doom is a kind of reassuring comforting, and at times

I find even amusing, reassuring taking the very long view. But you have some very sharp things to

say, particularly about public health officials. And you described the response in this country,

and in Britain, of course, we'll spend most of our time in this country as a straightforward

failure. Doom, on events a year ago this spring, it was all a circus in which journalists and

Trump may believe that it was all about him. In truth, what happened was a disastrous failure of

the public health bureaucracy at the Department of Health and Human Services, and particularly at

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a subject much less discussed in the press, close

quote. So there's a double failure there. One is of the public health bureaucracy, and the others

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