Fighting the First Wave

Introduction: One Threat, Many Responses; 1. Science, Politics, and History: Do They Explain the Variety of Approaches to Covid-19?; 2. New Dogs, Old Tricks: Fighting Covid-19 with Ancient Preventive Tactics; 3. The Politics of Prevention: How State and Citizen Interacted, Battling the Virus; 4. What Was Done? Act One of the Pandemic; 5. Why the Preventive Playing Field Was Not Level: Geography, Prosperity, Society; 6. Where and Why Science Mattered: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Herd Immunity, Asymptomatic Carriers, Superspreading, and Masks; 7. From State to Citizen: The Individualization of Public Health; 8. Who is Responsible for Our Health? How Prevention was Enforced; 9. Difficult Decisions in Hard Times: Trade-offs between Being Safe and Solvent; Conclusion: Public Health and Public Goods: The State in a Post-Pandemic World; Acknowledgments; Notes; Index.

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. His previous publications include Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (2005), Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (1999), and The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (2014). His latest book, Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History is forthcoming in the fall of 2021.