evidence: In January last year the CDC and the WHO adopted a sort of fraudulent bedside manner: ‘Don’t fret about Covid, there’s no evidence of human-to-human transmission.’ Remember that? At the time, Dr Dean wasn’t so sure. She watched the YouTube videos of Chinese authorities welding apartment doors shut to keep residents indoors, and thought: ‘This is real.’ [...] At the same sort of time, Charity Dean was acting on her intuition and wrote a battle plan for California that included measures such as social distancing. But her boss, former CDC employee Sonia Angell, responded by simply excluding her from meetings. She told Dr Dean not to use the word ‘pandemic’: ‘You’re scaring people.’ ‘Shit, they should be scared,’ said Dr Dean. She noticed, says Lewis, when the CDC made a curious pivot, from downplaying the virus to behaving as if it could never have been contained. Later, Dr Dean told Lewis: ‘The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible.’