I would argue Russian flu Richard Preston made the case 30 years ago that a successful pathogen is one that increases your participation in its vectors without slowing you down. Evolutionarily speaking, a virus that gives you a runny nose and a cough but doesn't make you skip work is a winner. A virus that kills you and all your friends? Yeah, that's a dead end. And yeah. The CDC is now FEMA but worse. All the hand sanitizer. All the clorox wipes. All the bullshit. One of the cook groups was literally giving away four truckloads of hand sanitizer to anyone who would haul it off because of course they were. Imagine what the past 4 years would have been like with an actual pandemic response team in place.First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu.
