"First Shots" and "The Plague Year" are both (entrancing) books about the COVID response, but it's amazing how different their emotional affect is.
This is of course because FS focuses on vaccine development, and TPY on containment and testing. Such starkly different stories!
Conversation
It's also fun to juxtapose "First Shots" with "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", since Operation Warp Speed self-consciously tried to follow the lessons of the Manhattan Project. (Albeit with vastly less centralization and overtly adversarial participants!)
