A book critiquing the French government’s inept and contradictory responses to the Wuhan pandemic gets the dubious doctor thinking in his weekly Takimag column.

The books about the COVID-19 epidemic continue to pour off the presses, faster even than I can buy them, let alone read them. Most of them are discouraging, that is to say disparaging about the various efforts of Western governments to deal with the crisis, pointing out the anomalies, U-turns, inconsistencies, scientific errors, moral cowardice, and so forth of our so-called leaders. Every author is particularly hard on the government of his own country, though the results in many countries are very similar and the difference in the statistics are probably within the margin of error of all such measurement. Besides, there may well be factors outside the immediate control of governments that might account for any real differences.