Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick

In 2020, the United States federal government spent over $7 billion on medical protective wear, yet as COVID-19 swept the nation, life-saving equipment like masks, gloves, and ventilators were in impossibly short supply.

In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, award-winning ProPublica investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent the last year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes.

Pandemic, Inc. is the story of the fraudster who signed a million-dollar contract with the government to provide lifesaving PPE, and yet never came up with a single mask. The Navy admiral at the helm of the national hunt for additional medical resources. The Department of Health whistleblower who championed masks early on and was silenced by the government and conservative media. And the politician who callously slashed federal emergency funding and gutted the federal PPE stockpile.

Winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, McSwane connects the dots between backdoor deals and the spoils systems to provide the definitive account of how this pandemic was so catastrophically mishandled. Shocking and revelatory, Pandemic, Inc. exposes a system that is both deeply rigged, and singularly American.