March 2025 marks the fifth anniversary of the closure of Colorado by COVID-19. Not surprisingly, five years later, there are now many accounts of this pandemic, mimicking what has happened with publications in the past. I have read some of the numerous pandemic-inspired books, the first being McNeill’s 1976 Plagues and Peoples. In this acclaimed and pioneering book, he explores the nexus of civilization, disease, and epidemics, a topic of many subsequent books, including bestsellers like Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. My favorite book about pandemics has long been John Barry’s The Great Influenza (2004), published almost nine decades after the Spanish Flu, which killed 50 to 100 million persons worldwide. With the lens of a historian, Barry offers a remarkably insightful review of what happened with one of the world’s worst pandemics. An afterword describes one of the most critical lessons from any pandemic—the need for informed leadership. It also drives home how the lessons learned from the past can inform the future—if heeded.  

The COVID-19 pandemic launched its own significant wave of books, both fiction and nonfiction. At the pandemic’s start, I took a completionist approach to pandemic-inspired books, trying to identify and read all of them in the initial wave of publication. The first two, both published in July 2020 were The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again, by Richard Horton, and COVID-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened And How To Stop The Next One, by Debora MacKenzie. The titles speak to the authors’ conceit in offering lessons learned so early in a multi-year pandemic. Subsequently, there has been an uninterrupted flow of books -- some offering accounts of what happened, some offering personal reflections and some offering polemics, misinformation, and disinformation.   

Here, I review five books published after the pandemic’s peak, selected because they offer useful information and informative insights for now, five years after the pandemic arrived in the United States.  The selection is eclectic but complementary and includes books on epidemiology, laboratory leaks of infectious pathogens, vaccines, and measles, plus Dr. Anthony Fauci’s autobiography.  They relate to this moment, as we face a measles outbreak, cancellation of funding for programs that curb infectious diseases globally, and governmental retrenchment on vaccines.   

Power of Prevention

I start with Crisis Averted, written by Caitlin Rivers, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security. The book is about public health -- what it is and what it does. She skillfully uses stories about past pandemics to show that public health has had many successes, i.e., crises averted. The book repeatedly makes the point that much of what public health does is invisible; that is, prevention means that things do not happen. That invisibility of public health may not continue post the COVID-19 pandemic. Efforts to control the pandemic were attacked, discredited with misleading information and politicized. Rivers acknowledges politics but not politicization. Read Crisis Averted for an overview of infectious disease epidemiology; how pandemics occur; and how they end. For those wanting a starting point on epidemiology and infectious diseases, this book is a good choice.   

Laboratory Leaks

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, its origin has been debated and the discussion clouded by seemingly insufficient collection of specimens at its start in Wuhan, China. There are two competing hypotheses on its origin: a spillover event from a coronavirus present in bats in China or a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Plus there are more extreme and paranoid hypotheses, e.g., the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered by the Chinese and, as laid out in the Plandemic films, the pandemic was planned and motivated for profiteering purposes.   

In Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, reporter Alison Young provides a detailed look at leaks from laboratories, ending with the COVID-19 pandemic. Her accounts leave no doubt that leaks from laboratories occur and inevitably result from flawed design and equipment, and mistakes by people. The examples show a lack of accountability, unacceptable arrogance, and willful failure to communicate. Accidents have led to tragedy, even for viruses known to be deadly such as smallpox and SARS-CoV-1. The last smallpox death in 1978 resulted from an avoidable spread of the virus from a laboratory to the anatomy department a floor above. Similarly, Young describes three episodes of laboratory-acquired SARS-CoV-1, which caused the 2003 epidemic in Singapore, Taiwan, and China, each with documented failures of protocols and escape to communities nearby in China.  

Pandora’s Gamble turns to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in the last two chapters. Young recounts the efforts to determine where it came from that began with the release of a draft genome on January 11, 2020. With access to this genome, researchers searched for matches against the genetic sequences of known coronaviruses, looking for close matches. One match was found to a coronavirus (labeled RaTG13) isolated from a bat in a cave where there had been an outbreak of lethal pneumonia among miners in 2013. However, the needed samples from animals, wastes, and workers in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a potential site for the spillover of SARS-CoV-2, were either not collected or never made available.  Consequentially, uncertainty about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic may never be resolved. Quoting Pandora’s Gamble: “We all have a stake in getting this right.”  Perhaps we can’t manage nature, but we should be able to manage laboratory leaks.

Covid Vaccines

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been a vigorous champion of vaccines and a frontline opponent of anti-vaccine advocates. His 2024 book, Tell Me When It’s Over, is a straightforward guide to the COVID-19 vaccine story told in three sections: “Where we were,” Where we are,” and “Where we’re heading.” He offers an understandable account of how mRNA vaccines were developed and how they work. The first section closes with the rogue’s gallery of disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about vaccines, including Robert Kennedy Jr., now head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In the second section, “Where we are,” he probes some current challenges around COVID-19: boosters, therapeutic approaches and long COVID, a difficult-to-diagnose and treat legacy of the pandemic. (A definition has now been offered by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.) In the last section, Offit gives realistic predictions for what may happen in the future around vaccines and practical guidance on what to do, drawing on lessons that have truly been learned. Turn to this book for a lucid description of mRNA vaccines, a technology that we will see again, and for his discussions of what went wrong with COVID-19 vaccination and how to do better.  

Measles Outbreak 

Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health, written by pediatrician Adam Ratner, is the most recently published book on the list and highly relevant to this moment. As I read it, an uncontained measles outbreak was in progress in Texas and New Mexico. It has already caused the first death from measles in the United States since 2015. Ratner explains why we still have outbreaks of measles, a disease that is completely preventable by immunization. Like smallpox, the virus is endemic and without an animal host. Outbreaks take place when a population has become susceptible because of a low prevalence of vaccination and waning immunity, and the virus is introduced by infected individuals. Measles is also highly infectious because its course includes about 10 asymptomatic days of incubation when infected individuals are shedding virus. The average number of people in a susceptible population infected by a person with measles is 14. This figure is among the highest for infectious pathogens and far higher than the estimates for SARS-CoV-2—which is around 2.5.  

Ratner provides an engaging account of measles epidemiology. Peter Panum, a fledgling Danish physician, and a colleague were sent to the Faroe Islands in the remote North Atlantic in 1846 to manage a measles outbreak. Panum’s meticulous documentation of the epidemic established person-to-person transmission, contrary to miasma theory (transmission by bad air). Other notable epidemics are described, reaching to the present and including the 2018-2019 tragic outbreak in Samoa, which occasioned a visit by Robert Kennedy, Jr. to capitalize on the situation for anti-vaccine purposes.  

Because measles was a familiar disease and infected most people without lethality, vaccine development did not receive the urgency attended to polio, but by 1963 a measles vaccine was available. Ratner traces the story of vaccine development and efforts to develop effective vaccination programs. Echoing Offit, the chapter about vaccination efforts is tellingly titled: “Vaccines Don’t Save Lives. Vaccinations Save Lives.” Later chapters, overlapping with Offit’s book, address the now-familiar challenge of vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, juxtaposed with accounts of the outbreaks that resulted, such as the spread from Disneyland in 2015 and in insufficiently unvaccinated populations, such as Somalis in 2016. In these populations, misleading information had fostered resistance to vaccination, leaving them susceptible.   

Ratner is a passionate pediatrician, remembering patients with serious measles who were the victims of their parents’ vaccine hesitancy. Yet, he ends with optimism, calling for the eradication of measles, which could be accomplished with vaccination as done for smallpox. Of the five books, I learned the most from Booster Shots, which provides a very complete picture of measles.   

Lessons From the Frontlines 

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s On Call: A Doctor’s Journey is a lengthy account of his half-century career at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Reading the book reminded me of the parade of emerging infections that occurred across my career, which closely overlaps with Fauci’s. The autobiography is structured across the course of his life, moving from childhood in Brooklyn to his retirement from the NIH at age 82. Much of the book addresses the AIDS epidemic, which shaped his career and his approach to managing epidemics. With so much now settled about HIV/AIDS around its cause, prevention and clinical care, Fauci’s account of the early years is a gripping reminder of the appearance of a mysterious disease that primarily affected the gay community at its start. At that time, we had little to offer those with advanced disease and its infectious complications other than palliation, while AIDS is now a chronic and generally manageable disease. Collaborating with the AIDS community and responding to the urgency of slowing this deadly disease, Fauci accelerated the development of therapeutic agents that lead to effective therapies.  

The book gives telling insights into how policies and programs happen in our government.  Fauci describes interactions with agencies, the Congress, and Presidents. The story of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) resonates particularly now as this 22-year-old life-saving program has been threatened in the first weeks of the new administration. On Call lays out the origins of PEPFAR and the engagement of President George W. Bush in the project. If PEPFAR ends now, lives will be lost—directly for those who will no longer receive the anti-retroviral medications that keep them alive.  

The book’s final section describes Dr. Fauci’s work on the COVID-19 pandemic from its start in 2020 through his retirement in 2022. He details the government’s management of the pandemic and describes his complex relationship with President Trump as it moved from trusting to mixed to hostile on the part of the President. Fauci attempts balance in telling this story, and its end is a pardon by President Biden to protect him from President Trump in his second term. Critical to the present, On Call shows that progress can be made and that infectious diseases can be reined, as in the example of HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, the first weeks of the new administration show how quickly progress can also be undone.   

This article is part of a monthly column, The Jon Samet Report, on the biggest issues facing us today in public health, written by the former dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, Jon Samet, a pulmonary physician and epidemiologist, and Professor of Epidemiology and Occupational and Environmental Health. Dr. Samet is a global health leader, shaping the science and conversation on issues ranging from tobacco control to air pollution to chronic disease prevention and more. Each month he shares expert insights on public health issues from local to global.