Diary of a Flying Scotsman

Week ending January 4, 2025

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of the first news I heard of “a new outbreak of pneumonia that’s bad” in Wuhan. It came at the end of a lengthy email from my dear friend, Professor Justin Stebbing, one of the world’s leading oncologists.

I recall the shudder of historical recognition with which I read those words. So many pandemics in history have begun with just such a brief reference to a “new outbreak” of a respiratory disease in an Asian city.

It was the first week of January 2020, and I was about to fly to Hong Kong, followed by Taipei and Singapore, for a series of lectures and talks. I’ve written in Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe about the experience of flying towards what became the Covid-19 pandemic and then flying back, only to have the utmost dif

ficulty persuading people in Davos, Washington and Stanford that a global plague was beginning. I shall never know for sure if I was a superspreader of the virus, but I certainly did my best to spread the news.