The 2016 push for Brexit was also marked by a kind of anti-intellectual impatience. Brexiteers mocked the overwhelming consensus among trade experts and economists who warned that the divorce from Europe would be far messier and more problematic than what its proponents described. “People in this country have had enough of experts,” Michael Gove, then a prominent “Leave” campaigner and now a member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet, declared at the time. Gove’s performative contempt won the day.

But the global spread of the novel coronavirus poses a unique reality check. A flurry of recent reporting plots how the Trump administration bungled the early weeks of the outbreak, squandering valuable time to manage and prepare for the arrival of a global epidemic that has now reached around 100 countries and infected more than 100,000 people, including more than 500 confirmed cases in the United States.