Drawing on surveys, official reports, and news stories from 2019 to the first months of 2022, Stephan sketches a picture of a confused, rapidly politicized response to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. Notwithstanding some dramatic language and frequent quotes from experts and victims, the narrative makes dry reading. It seems mostly to be a catalog of failures, as the author records then-President Donald Trump’s skeptical early statements, points to racial and political divides in vaccination rates, lists the impact of diverted attention and funds from other pressing social and medical issues, and questions how beneficial school closures were. On the plus side, she does highlight the speed with which vaccines were developed (if not distributed, particularly to people in low-income countries) and successful efforts to reach the unvaccinated. She also ends with a reference to the soaring recent enrollment of Black and Latino students in Brown University’s public health program. Considering that Covid is still very much with us and that many of its effects are going to be of the long-term sort, this overview is almost certainly premature. Still, students will find it a sobering record of the United States’ lack of preparedness to cope with a (long-predicted) public health crisis.