OH THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: In “Anatomy of a Pandemic,” Christopher Caldwell reviews Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, the “first economic history of the 2020 COVID crisis, Columbia University historian Adam Tooze.”

The system is equipped to fight back. Tooze implies that Pfizer delayed until after the 2020 presidential election the tallying of clinical trials that would have shown its vaccine 95 percent effective. Tooze says this was to avoid being “trapped between Trump and the FDA,” but his writing here is unusually opaque. Its implication is that Pfizer was colluding with the FDA to avoid giving Donald Trump a pre-election boost, requesting on October 29 (the Thursday before the election) that its threshold for reporting be made more difficult, permitting Pfizer to delay testing its samples until Election Day. Tooze calls it a “vindication of due process,” and one can sympathize with the drug companies’ predicament. But if the story is as Tooze relates it, then Trump’s resentful characterization of Pfizer’s conduct is well founded.

It is easy to guess Tooze’s sympathies in American politics. For him the Republicans are a party that has refused to “affirm” the country as it has changed since the 1960s. But why should they affirm it? They are the party that represents those at whose expense the country has changed. The problem is not that the losers of this half-century-long transformation have misdiagnosed anything. It is that the transformation has produced so many losers—probably a majority of the country, if one puts together Trumpists and backers of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

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