The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind

by Joe Nocera, Bethany McLean

From the collaborators behind the modern business classic All the Devils are Here comes a damning indictment of American capitalism—and the leaders that left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic

In 2020, the novel coronavirus pandemic made it painfully clear that the U.S. could not adequately protect its citizens. Millions of Americans suffered—and over a million died—in less than two years, while government officials blundered; prize-winning economists overlooked devastating trade-offs; and elites escaped to isolated retreats, unaffected by and even profiting from the pandemic.

Why and how did America, in a catastrophically enormous failure, become the world leader in COVID deaths? In this page-turning economic, political, and financial history, veteran journalists Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera offer fresh and provocative answers. With laser-sharp analysis and deep sourcing, they investigate both what really happened when governments ran out of PPE due to snarled supply chains and the shock to the financial system when the world's biggest economy stumbled. They zero in on the effectiveness of wildly polarized approaches, with governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Ron DeSantis of Florida taking infamous turns in the spotlight. And they trace why thousands died in hollowed-out hospital systems and nursing homes run by private equity firms to “maximize shareholder value." 

In the tradition of the authors’ previous landmark exposés, The Big Fail is an expansive, insightful account on what the pandemic did to the economy and how American capitalism has jumped the rails—and is essential reading to understand where we’re going next.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Business, Audiobook, American History, Economics

443 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 17, 2023

About the author

Joseph Nocera is an American business journalist and author. He has been a columnist for The New York Times since April 2005. Nocera is also a business commentator for NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon.

Prior to joining The New York Times, Nocera worked at Fortune from 1995 to 2005, in a variety of positions, finally as editorial director. Nocera was the "Profit Motive" columnist at GQ from 1990 to 1995, and also wrote the same column for Esquire from 1988 to 1990.

In the 1980s, Nocera was an editor at Newsweek; an executive editor of New England Monthly; and a senior editor at Texas Monthly. In the late 1970s he was also an editor at The Washington Monthly.

Nocera earned a B.S. in journalism from Boston University in 1974, and now lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Brahm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked up from the library because I loved McLean's Smartest Guys In the Room.

The writing was fine but I didn't love the book because any account of the US response to COVID is going to be fundamentally negative, and maybe I'm not in the mood for that now. While travelling I was kicking myself for not bringing something a bit more positive.

A closer look at the US healthcare system was deeply depressing. The bright spot in the book was the story of "Operation Warp Speed" which was a government/industry partnership to race to develop vaccines.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

With an unflinching lens honed by decades of investigative business reporting, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean expertly detail the surface and underlying issues that informed the successes and failures of America's pandemic response. Regardless of your opinion on how America and Americans navigated the pandemic, The Big Fail – replete with powerful first-hand accounts from diverse stakeholders ranging from policymakers to parents – will validate and challenge your perspective.

[Jim Manning · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally figured out the issue I have with books like this (“books like this” being highly topical blockbusters in the Michael Lewis vein): they are not that well-written. Which is not to say that if you jump in and go with the flow you won’t learn some really interesting things that you didn’t know. But my reading style requires a little more commitment to clarity, organization, sequence, etc. With this book I found myself constantly asking “wait, what? How does this sentence follow from the last one?” Having said that… this book is really valuable in insisting that we seriously face our abjectly terrible management of COVID-19, from our profit-driven health care system to our tribal politics. The authors know whereof they speak, I just wish someone had been able to channel the flood of information, ideas and insights a lot more coherently.

[Ronald Gruner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is first-rate investigative journalism providing insights into most of the issues which affected America's poor Covid outcomes.

Included are in-depth discussions of the lockdowns, the vaccine controversies, the supply-chain issues, and the politics. The supply-chain issues were fascinating, but disappointing. While thousands were dying every day, "joker-brokers" were taking million dollar deposits for PPE equipment that was defective, used, or non-existent. Vietnam was especially dishonest.

Any discussion of Covid inevitably turns political. Here, the authors were objective in their treatment of President Trump, Governor Cuomo, Governor DeSantis, and others. (No American politician came close to a Roosevelt or Churchill, even though many citizens, as in the World War II, died during the pandemic.) That also includes the authors treatment of the Great Barrington Declaration for which they tend to be supportive (upsetting some reviewers), but their reasoning is logical and objective -- even though I might disagree.

The one weakness in the book is that more specific, quantitative information regarding how the various approaches affected the states would have been helpful. California and Florida, for example, had radically different approaches to lockdowns, school closures, masks, and vaccines. How was that reflected in deaths of despair, tests scores, death rates? A state report at the end would have been ideal.

[Kevin August · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice chronicle of the last three years. Shouldn’t be any surprises if you’ve been paying attention, but some of the conclusions will be controversial for people who dug their heels in on views early on.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scathing journalism on the many mistakes made by more than just blue states during especially the first year or so of the pandemic. Also documents the regular hypocrisies, the ignoring of new science and data by maybe everyone as was required, and maybe even more importantly the broader failures of our 21st Century hospitals systems and for-profit nursing homes. Then comes the weird amazing story where crash vaccine development, production, and distribution meets rabid vaccine resistance vs. vaccine mandates and passports. Also covered is an education on the impact of global financial systems and supply chains and criminals and profiteers, and well, idiots of all kinds.

The impact of shutdowns and deciding who (in largely the underclass) were deemed essential workers in food, transportation, and healthcare systems was also sad to read about. And as a recently former teacher, the section in the silliness of policies relation to education and the positions of the unions in late summer 2020 was particularly on-point.

I did love the early story of the heroic Rush University Hospital in Chicago…a maybe singular “have” hospital that took transfer Covid patients from surrounding have-nots…at a massive cost.

It’s so sad how these times were just another chapter in how our institutions continue to train the populace with their policies and communication decisions not to trust them, and how we divide ourselves as a society.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. America is ill prepared for the pandemic.
2. The pandemic was not taken seriously enough at first
3. When it struck, hospitals ran out of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Hospitals who had it did not share as they were scared of the supply. Brokers were scammed massively.
4. Last defence hospitals accepting Medicare patients were overflowing; rich hospitals taking insurance patients refused to share the burden. Staff were sacked amid increased work load. More resignations ensued.
5. Private equity has been buying old folks homes, extracting the value and laden them with debt. So they cut staff. Care suffered.
6. Hospitals that wanted to take care of covid patients suffered financially
7. Lockdowns don’t work and only delays the infections. But CDC insisted on lockdowns and home remote learning. Mothers thus could not go to work. Students’ learning suffered and many dropped out of school.
8. Vaccine production Warpspeed were one thing the Trump administration did well: investing in many companies with different approaches.

I’m just glad Covid is over!

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best nonfiction I’ve read this year. Fair, balanced, and well-researched, it explores how we were failed at every point of the pandemic, from the Trump administration’s failure to act in the beginning to the greed of hospitals run by private equity firms, to how mask mandates and lockdown did not actually stop the pandemic. It calls for a bipartisan, good faith effort to take a look at the pandemic response and what went wrong so that we don’t repeat those failures.

[Astrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really helped me better understand the pandemic; provides a great assessment and critique of all aspects of pandemic mitigation from a community and public health focused lens.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much good information about how the pandemic was handled by politicians, healthcare facilities, teachers unions, etc... it is disturbing to see how many poor choices were made just to be in opposition to political enemies. We should have focused on at risk populations, namely the elderly, and had those groups isolate instead of the entire country. States did not differ significantly in covid deaths when factored for age.
Things that didn't work to prevent Covid spread and caused harm:
-school closures (especially for the most vulnerable populations)
- stay at home mandates
- forced business closures that shuttered small businesses
- shutting down outdoor spaces where spread was low
- mask mandates
- demonizing the Great Barrington Declaration, recommendations written by infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists --- which turned out to be correct
Other serious issues:
- lack of critical supplies produced in US (PPE, saline....)
- nursing burnout
- instituting a policy and then refusing to modify it when data didn't support it
- private equity buying up health care (larger problem aggravated by covid)
- loans for small businesses being used by large business ie the Lakers
- politicians not abiding by their own rules
- blaming the unvaccinated for the spread of covid (it wasn't their fault!)

Things we did well:
-Project Warp Speed to develop the vaccine
-SF had an excellent public health follow-up program in place because of the AIDS epidemic.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great piece of journalism from Bethany McLean (and Joe Nocera).

Goes into the failures of policy decisions like lockdowns and school closures, the nefarious influence of distorted capitalism such as private equity run amok in places like hospitals and nursing homes, and the role of politics and polarization in making everything worse.

Will make you hate Andrew Cuomo if you don’t already, and private equity in healthcare even more.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book. It provides a deep dive into the pandemic and uses data and interviews to support the findings. The authors try to not make this political but it's impossible to research the pandemic and not find yourself questioning both party's decision making. I appreciate the depth of research done.

[Sara Hewko · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was hoping this was going to be objective. This is great foe the mouth droolers who think no response is the best response while ignoring the stats on areas that did participate in health measures vs not. I feel like there are productive conversations that can be had upon this subject but the authors took the mouth drooling libertarian approach.

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I have read in a long time. Everything a non-fiction book should be. Couldn't put it down. Centrist view on a very politicized topic. Anyone who gives less than 5 stars, frankly, doesn't know non-fiction.

[Robert Sparrenberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really interesting. The best part about it was that it was balanced and it I didn’t feel like it was pushing an agenda or ideology. Made me stop and think about some things. The sad part was the country learned nothing from Covid and how to prepare for the next pandemic.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Big Fail by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera talks about how the United States government, along with the other big agencies there, are supposed to be best equipped to deal with a pandemic such as when Covid-19 struck, which generally failed the American public. It is truly fascinating to have experienced and survived my first viral pandemic, but even more fascinating is learning afterward how our government, along with other agencies whose main job is to deal with situations like these, have reacted in this most critical of times. Although I was not completely shocked by the events, I was still horrified to read about how the most prosperous country in the world, with so many modern tools at their disposal, can still seem like they were caught with their pants down in such a critical moment in our history. While there were obviously positive highlights and how things came to be, especially coming from some politicians whom I never expected, the overall feeling after having read through this is that we flunked our report card when it came to our handling of the virus outbreak. What’s also not surprising? It’s coming down to two or three obvious things: money, politics and more money.

What took place, in those early weeks, was as struggle between those who wanted to do everything and those who wanted to do nothing… - Authors

The book gives us a good glimpse of just how bad things get when a country is unprepared to handle a pandemic. So many unforeseen events and consequences reared their ugly heads and forced the public to take a good, hard look at what happens when so many things are left unchecked. The most maddening part is that many of the crises could have been averted if only the right people in government and big companies actually paid any attention. The PPE shortage situation highlighted in the book gives us the biggest glimpse of how globalization is touted as good when big companies are able to save their bottom line, but it left everyone scrambling once the global supply chain shut down.

“The Fed has effectively shifted from lender of last resort for banks to a commercial banker of last resort for the broader economy.” - Michael Feroli – J.P.Morgan’s Chief Economist

Equally important is the topic of how, again, as usual, when things get tough on the country, it is not the wealthy that suffers but the marginalized and citizens who already have nothing. No bigger example highlights this fact than what is happening to private equity companies buying out hospitals to maximize shareholder profits by increasing medical care costs, exploiting loopholes in the system to squeeze even more life out of their assets, and then moving on to the next big purchase.

Even in the middle of the pandemic, most corporations simply could not shed their now-ingrained habit of putting shareholders above employees. - Authors

Finally, the politics. The United States has been so politically divided. It used to be that one was able to stay away from politics as it was just the “stuff” that happens to politicians and something we usually only get a glimpse of in the news and whatnot. Not so anymore in this modern day and age. When the stakes are so high for politicians, it’s near impossible to admit any wrongdoing. One is expected to double-down, regardless of the statistics presented proving otherwise.

During Covid-19, a mask wasn’t just a mask; it was a symbol of one’s politics. - Authors

One of the more entertaining sections to read involves how Operation Warp Speed came to light, along with the process and people involved in creating the vaccines for Covid-19. Another great read involves how some were on the great search for PPE, especially for nitrile gloves and masks, and uncovering so much fraud and exploitation that makes one wonder if our government actually cares or not.

“It was a complete waste of time. FEMA took the masks. We never saw them again. The government never had the slightest interest in helping hospitals get PPE.” - Schessel

The blame game. It has always been and will always be about pointing fingers. If a global pandemic such as Covid-19 can’t force our parties to work together, it’s really hard to say what actually will. Although I don’t classify myself as anti-government, this book highlighted so many important things to make me question: on what side are they really helping? At the moment, it looks a lot more like the people with wealth. At the same time, I believe a government is needed but cannot and should not be abolished completely. So many questions remain. At least COVID-19 showed us this much, if nothing else. But with so many citizens having so many more pressing issues to deal with along with a “shorter-term memory” of past events, it’s likely that nothing will change.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is wide ranging covering many of the issues surrounding the COVID experience. As the title says, the authors’ point of view is how the occasion was not met and systems failed.

There are many examples that show capitalism, as it has evolved, exacerbated the situation. One of the themes of the book is how the rich got richer and the poor got poorer in the COVID era.

They show how hospitals and nursing homes, be they non -profit or commercial, focusing on the bottom line meant that did not have sufficient resources to meet the crisis.. The major issues being:

1. The difference between private insurance and Medicaid re-imbursement had forced the closing of hospitals in poor areas. This wasn't because they provided poor or unneeded services, it was because they were not financially viable.
2. Private equity firms had bought nursing homes primarily through debt that left the nursing homes unable to handle their current patient’s needs, let alone accept new patients.
3. “Just in time” resource management, widely used in industry, left caring institutions without a store of personal protection equipment. The authors describe its ramifications for the pubic as well as institutions.

The “loans” of the Paycheck Protection Act, clearly designed to prevent layoffs, mainly went to major employers leaving small businesses to fend for themselves. There are many examples of how its recipients still laid of large numbers of employees, while raising executive compensation and buying back stock. The authors show the impact of small business closings, and how restaurant owners organized and eventually a "rescue act", was passed that pales in comparison to the PPE Act.

One of the most interesting chapters was on the development of the vaccine. Here science is a focal point not only in its development, but also in its manufacture. I had not seen elsewhere the enormous contribution of the government to the development companies. (Despite the billions that went to Moderna, its CEO proposed quadrupling its cost to the government for buying dosage for its distribution programs.)

There is a lot on the Federal Reserve showing how, not long after bailing out financial institutions in the housing crisis, it bailed out lenders to mitigate mortgage foreclosures caused by COVID shut downs.

Non-economic topic are covered, such as the policies of individual states, the impact the school closures on student achievement and examples of lock down policies in the US, China and Italy.

While assembling all this is a major achievement of the authors, there are two, what I consider, serious drawbacks.
• No Index: In a book so filled with material it is hard to remember names and policies and papers when they are mentioned 100 pages apart.
• The presentation of data: Often one isolated piece of data is used to present a conclusion.
• Sometimes embedded in an argument is an example that doesn’t fit the argument. You wonder if you missed something. In the discussion of how lock downs had no effect on containing the virus is a the example of how once the Chinese lifted its severe lock down, the virus went rampant.

The weaknesses make it a 3 star book, but given the difficulty of the subject matter I’m giving it 4 stars.

I’m not certain whom I recommend this for. Those interested in this topic would want an Index and tables and charts to show the data that demonstrate the authors’ s conclusions.

[Amy W. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was for me, unfortunately, a Big Fail.

I picked it up due to the subtitle "What the pandemic revealed about who America protects and who it leaves behind". Looking through it at the bookstore it seemed to highlight the nursing home industry. I'm interested in that, and I bought the book. Not too far in I noted that the authors seemed to put a great deal of credence in the Great Barrington Declaration. If I had known that before I bought the book I probably would not have. And I might have taken it as a sign that most of the blurb quotes on the back cover were sources for the book. But I wanted to learn so I kept an open mind. But one of the Barrington authors is quoted as saying something so stupid as "Properly staffed nursing homes would have staff living for extended periods with the residents so they didn't bring the virus when they came to work. When other nurses arrived to take a shift (which could last several weeks) they had to test negative before they could enter", they have an uphill battle to be taken seriously.

This would have been a difficult book to write. Each state largely managed its own pandemic response, and in many states individual school districts could decide if they would be open, hybrid, or remote. Since school closures were a point of emphasis, drawing conclusions about the results of the various paths chosen would have been a huge challenge, that the authors did not even try to meet. There were many, many instances where they contradicted themselves within a few paragraphs or pages. There was very little analysis of how states with more restrictions fared against states with less. (I would love to see a four quadrant matrix with per capita deaths plotted against intensity of restrictions.)

Instead, the authors devoted several chapters to politics, specifically to Governors DeSantis, Coumo and Newsom. This was not all that illuminating, and I'd much rather have read more about what the pandemic revealed about America protects and who it leaves behind.

One of my biggest issues with the book was the handwaving use of the term "lockdown". With restrictions varying widely by state, what did the authors mean when the used the term, usually to claim that lockdowns were not effective and that other countries that did not lock down did better than the U.S., completely glossing over the fact that some of the non "locked down" countries had significant restrictiions.

I could go on and on about my problems with the book (an index would have been nice...) but there were some good things in it. A couple chapters covered the federal reserve and monetary policy, which I had known little about and found informative. The writing was fine.

Overall, if you want to know what the pandemic revealed about who America protects and who it leaves behind, the answer is the relentless pursuit of profit and efficiency in every aspect of every industry. Safety nets and buffers are too costly and just in time is the most efficient path. Until it's not. The end.

[JC Guzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this a few days ago and wanted to take some time to think about it before giving my thoughts. This was a decent read. It doesn't lean too much in either direction of the political spectrum too much which was good. It challenged some of my thoughts of our response to the pandemic.

Obviously, as the title states, it goes over all of the failures that occurred throughout the pandemic, so it's a bit of a downer. I understand that the point is to highlight all the things that went wrong, but I do wish it spent at least a bit more time on what went right or, at the very least, talk about the massive effort of public health workers, health department staff, healthcare workers, etc. Reading this book gives off the impression that everything and everyone was a failure, but I don't think that's accurate for the people who were dealing with the pandemic every day in the field, hospitals, and health departments.

A big focus of this book also highlights various financial topics and, at times, feels like it just brushes over the millions of lives lost because of the pandemic. A dollar is just a dollar, but a life is a life, and I wish that was highlighted more often than it actually was.

[April · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book benefits greatly from hindsight, and I think the language is too strong for anyone on either side of the ideological divide to enjoy it.

I did find it interesting to see it advocate so strongly for things like nurses working weeks-long shifts in nursing homes without addressing any of the issues that it was quick to address for lockdowns and school closures. Surely if you cannot have your children at home for weeks, you also cannot afford to be away from them for literal weeks at a time during quite possibly the most stressful event in the 21st century? The mental health effects of this strategy seem just as deleterious(which also doesn’t take into account actual child care), but maybe that’s just me.

The stuff about asset stripping and private equityand how American health care works was interesting to me coming from a system which is not the same. I can’t stress how often I’ve been told this is the best system in the world, but I suppose it might be if you can pay. It certainly seems anything but to me honestly.

I didn’t know some of the vaccine development stuff and the Federal Reserve stuff went right over my head in a lot of places, and this book struck me as one where the authors really wanted to remind me how smart they were all the time.

[Andrew Tollemache · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am huge fan of Bethany MacClean and Joe Nocera's business journalism on topics such as the Enron implosion and the Great Financial Crisis so I was looking pretty forward to their book "The Big Fail" about how the US govt failed to address the COVID pandemic in coherent manner, especially in the early days. However, it pains me to say this but it just does not measure up to their previous work. I think they couldn't decide whether this was a heterodox take on how so many basic assumptions at the start of the pandemic were wrong: masking, closing schools, social distanacing etc. Or did they want to further the basic popular wisdom from those early days: Trump is a dummy, wipe down our packages and the vaccine is years away.
I am very sympathetic to their criticisms of private equity which is way less focused on improving operations than extracting & stripping assets from the companies like hospitals they buy. The problem was so much of their COVID data for PE hospitals is from before 2019. Plus was the problem with PE involvement in the healthcare sector that they made too much money or all went broke? The book frames it as both.

[Chris Lira · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the authors' previous book about the financial crisis(All the Devils are Here) as well as Bethany McLean's book about Enron with Peter Elkind(The Smartest Guys in the Room). Both of those books did a great job of explaining a complex subject in an understandable and interesting way. So I was very interested to read this one about the COVID epidemic. It's a good book, with lots of interesting things to say. I think it could have been a very good-great book with some more thorough editing. Topics like health care and the nursing home industry are valid topics for criticism, but I feel like there and in a few other spots, the authors went beyond what was needed to tell the story of COVID, and instead those areas became general criticisms. Valid criticisms, but in a 400+ page book, there was room to trim some of it out.

[False · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a huge hunk of this book in a reproduced "Vanity Fair" article, mainly addressing the need for speed in developing a vaccine with a virulent plague let loose upon the world, as well as the growing (and still growing) gap between the 1%'ers and the have nots. Who gets treated. Who dies.

Even now that studies are being done in how things were handling (and are still being handled) I don't know what to believe. Does masking prevent exposure to the disease, or are they useless. I know I am one of the few I even see wearing one these days, even though Covid is on the rampage again in the area where I live and many are contracting their third and fourth rounds with it since it began. My household just had another bout with it this past week, and I am certain of the source where it was acquired, this person having made it through the entire pandemic not getting Covid once.

It isn't just the proper amount of medical coverage and being able to afford to seek out medical help without that coverage. Food prices are soaring, yet some people can afford to go out to eat twice a week with equally soaring restaurant costs. If this election goes south, and it could, I dread to think of what happens next. I highly recommend reading this book, but don't expect to come away with any concrete solutions as to who did what and where we dropped the ball--universally.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is impeccably researched and written. I had a lot of flashbacks to all of the little details of the pandemic period that I have shelved in my mind. It is also an interesting reflection on what was done right and analysis of what experimental measures that were (cliche) unprecedented at the time which may not have been the most proven or ultimately successful approaches. The book really leaves no stone unturned in terms of reviewing all the responses in every sector of society.

My one critique is specifically with the audiobook in that there are some strange pronunciations — the one most repeated is “fih-nancial.” I just found it a strange choice that the authors’ own accents went ahead of more universal journalistic pronunciations. The NY governor’s name (Hochul) gets mispronounced, and most surprisingly— the Omicron variant is pronounced “ah-micron?” Other than this, the authors themselves are the narrators and they have a good presence otherwise.

[Scott Raybourn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply thoughtful and often scathing look at the trials and triumphs of American heathcare, government, and the public during the COVID 19 pandemic. Worth a read if you want a generally unbiased look into the policies and practices that influenced everyone’s lives for about 2 years, with aftershocks that affect us still. It is sometimes tedious to get through the statistics, and deeply frustrating to see incompetence and greed of humanity at large. Mamon appears constantly and makes this a jarring but necessary read. Top class journalism with strong sources and differing views all brought to the table. My favorite section was about the excess of the privatization of healthcare and how it deeply impacted pandemic response. I hate HCA.

[Margaret Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book interesting thought provoking. There were a lot of things they got right. For a book that presented itself as rigorously evaluating the evidence, they also made some kind of bizarre assertions that they didn't actually have the facts to back up. Sometimes they even made a point in one chapter that they then contradicted in another. They also seemed to frequently conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence, which are not the same. Not really sure they proved the thesis they stated at the beginning- that it couldn't have been handled any better - but the messiness of the book matches the COVID experience

[Chrisanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, here's the thing.

This book does not have sources on all of it's quotations or statements. I'd say about 4/5 are lacking citations.

That is a lot of floating claims.

Some of them seem familiar to me because I lived through this stuff. But these days it's crucial to cover your tail.

The book is written well---certainly not dry, though somewhat repetitive and the politics may seep through. I'd give it a 4, if those citations/sources were there.

But, people, after reading this book I no longer wonder why my friends believe in conspiracy theories. I only wonder why I don't. Or maybe I do?

[Ryan Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested in reading this book based on its title--what did the pandemic reveal? It was a fairly detailed recap of many of the events and aspects (hospitals, supply chain disruptions, government money) of the COVID-19 pandemic. I found this to be mostly recap of what happened with less discussion and analysis of what was revealed. To be fair, there was certainly some talk, especially in the last third, about the groups that dropped the ball such as private equity, Federal Reserve, and government officials. For me, I was hoping for more of this and less recap.

[Karens Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Big Fail was able to decipher the complexities of America's response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a rare talent for making intricate topics enlightening and engaging. Thank you to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera for this spot-on delivery. Their meticulous research and analysis highlight the breakdown of supply chains, financial shocks, and polarized approaches. Plus a truthful look at the consequences of private equity firms prioritizing profits. Much like their past works, they are able to break this complex crisis down to something accessible and at the same time captivating.

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written in my humble opinion; however it falls too many times into the hindsight bias: the COVID pandemic management showed a typical example of how complex systems are difficult to understand and govern. Everything becomes clear after and you will always find the Cassandra’s that were not heard for, choose, incompetence, greed, ignorance, etc. The take away point from this book, which I fully endorse and should have been better developed (hence the 3*), is how to get the lessons learnt into building a more resilient society, taking into consideration the complexity of the world