Europe said it was pandemic-ready, pride was its downfall

Professor Chris Whitty, Britain’s chief medical adviser, stood before an auditorium in a London museum two years ago cataloguing deadly epidemics. From the Black Death of the 14th century to cholera in war-torn Yemen, it was a baleful history. But Whitty, who had spent most of his career fighting infectious diseases in Africa, was reassuring. Britain, he said, had a special protection. “Being rich,” he explained. Wealth “massively hardens a society against epidemics,” he argued, and quality of life — food, housing, water and health care — was more effective than any medicine at stopping the diseases that ravaged the developing world. Whitty’s confidence was hardly unique. As recently as...