BOOK REVIEW

Spike: The Virus vs The People - Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja B.R. Myers

Potential to be informative for the hyper-interested, but emerges as a logbook of repetitive entries

Another book spontaneously purchased, this after a late night read of an excerpt in The Times, reminds me to be more methodical and meticulous in my selection process. As a slow reader, any choice is often a commitment of hours, and combined with my obdurate insistence on making it to the last page, this necessitates more care than impulsivity bestows.

As it happened I managed to race through Spike, and I mustn’t deny that it did offer novel insight on how the UK government navigated the pandemic and indeed the scientific voices that informed – or rather, attempted to inform – domestic policy decisions. Jeremy Farrar is an expert on infectious diseases, having worked to tackle the bird flu and Ebola outbreaks and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic was a member of the UK government’s little-understood advisory group SAGE. The book is written from his perspective though writer Anjana Ahuja, a Financial Times science columnist, pieces her story together by interviewing colleagues of Farrar’s who contribute their recollections of major inflection points.

The first chapters of the book read as I’d hoped, the text graphically describing the confusion and panic that took hold in government corridors as the cyclone of circumstance expanded. Particularly noteworthy was just how early the scientific community became aware of the virus’ spread and reacted by putting their collective minds towards its analysis. The virus had already been sequenced by January 5, although Beijing prohibited the lead researcher from releasing the sequence, and subsequently closed his Fudan University lab for ‘rectification’ when he did so anyway.

I enjoyed mapping Farrar’s experience to my own remembered chronology: I had first heard of the virus in late December 2019, earlier than most friends but purely by chance due to some obscure tweet catching my eye as I lazed at home. However, it wasn’t until months later that I truly contemplated the origins of the virus, when Trump and mainstream media began to peddle in speculation that it could have been man-made. In fact, a group of scientists assembled by Farrar had already been scrutinizing that very possibility in January, driven by concerns over how the original virus was so effective at binding to human cells and then entering them. Shortly thereafter the group published a paper concluding that it was more than likely the virus came about naturally as opposed to being the creation of a laboratory.

The book then slowly shifts to focus on Farrar’s experience engaging with the government and it’s here that it strays into entries of frustration with political inaction, countlessly repeated to the detriment of the read. There is a notable skip of commentary on a couple of crucial windows, not least the period just after March 23 when Boris Johnson belatedly succumbed to the inevitable and placed the UK under its first lockdown.

Unfortunately, Farrar’s gripes with Number 10 plague the remaining pages and thematically the book’s back half can be summarized as constant forewarnings of rising cases, debate over the appropriate restrictions – including vociferous denial that herd immunity was ever a SAGE recommendation – and exasperation at delayed government intervention. I appreciate it must trigger a special type of discouragement to be consulted as an expert only to have your guidance repeatedly disregarded, but it would have substantially improved the book’s objectivity if Farrar opined on how or why the government behaved as it did, rather than simply lambast the decisions made. In that sense the book’s viewpoint is a little narrow and by close the warnings about future risks have been laid beyond bare. I should credit the text for integrating education on topics such as WHO processes, vaccine funding efforts and how viruses mutate, but these nuggets of learning don’t outweigh what, by close, is a book that has simply run out of steam.

-NP, July 2021