This month, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an internationally recognized expert on viral outbreaks and the founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, published The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics, with his coauthor, journalist Mark Olshaker.

Osterholm, who founded CIDRAP in 2001, played a role in helping fight the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 and has spent years working to strengthen America’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure. Then came COVID-19. Public health experts were left “to figure all this out while painting the plane in midair,” as he puts it in The Big One.

The book convincingly argues that COVID-19 was potentially mild compared to what might come next. Though devasta

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