"Sheds light on the US government's response to epidemics through history-with larger conclusions about COVID-19 and reforms needed before the next plague"--

" From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities...

"Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic takes readers on an extraordinary journey from the medical science of viruses and vaccines, to conspiracy theories, through the history of knowledge, to the precipice--where we are now--of uncertainty about the future. This is not a book for those who think they already know how the story ends, but one that asks the tough questions in terse, hard-hitting paragraphs...

Smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, polio... now largely just unhappy history. Yet from our confrontations with these past plagues come lessons. As we struggle to understand and remedy problems like HIV/AIDS, coronary heart disease, and Ebola infection, Gehlbach shows how encounters with epidemics in the past will aid our present understanding of health and disease.