RCMTG

·6,471 words ·28 min read

We Can Prevent the Next Pandemic

Table of Contents

  • Intro
  • The Scary Part
  • Defenses in Depth
    • Preventing Pathogen Development
    • Pathogen Detection
    • Blocking Transmission
    • Vaccines = Good
  • Conclusion / What YOU Can Do!

Intro

This is going to be a bit different from my normal articles.

Regular readers will know that I've been searching this year for a meaningful way to do work that I can be proud of outside of Magic. They'll also know that I've written a lot about my experience with chronic pain that began in the first year of the COVID pandemic.

One such regular reader happened to be Aaron Gertler, a (very successful) former professional Magic player who reached out after that piece about searching for what to do after Magic earlier this year. He now works at a place that literally tries to help people with this exact problem, so I was definitely intrigued.

Long story short, through Aaron (and 80K's) recommendations, I've started to become interested in a "problem area" they call Biosecurity. As far as I can tell, this name is helpful for framing the problem in ways that important actors like the US Government will listen to, but the term I've been using to explain to my friends what I've been studying for the past month is Pandemic Preparedness.

Pandemic Preparedness is the kind of thing we assume Very Smart And Reasonable People in places like the US government are already paid a lot to worry about. This is right - there are lots of very smart people who worry about these things and work on preventing them, work we should be extremely grateful for!

But "lots of responsible people care about this" doesn't mean "it's being handled and we shouldn't try to help". In fact, many of these people were trying to loudly warn the rest of society about the urgency of preparing for the next big pandemic long before COVID. So I'm going to ask the obvious question — why weren't we better prepared?

The answer is as boring as it is scary: It turns out that human society is not optimally structured to rationally respond to risks like pandemics. The systems we have created to organize our human potential towards large-scale outcomes like Pandemic Preparedness (mainly, governments and markets) are pretty flawed in important ways!

Events like COVID remind us that we're not living at the end of human history, we're living in the middle of it (at least, hopefully??). As a result, we're not done solving these problems. We haven't worked it all out yet. And importantly, a lot of the parts we've worked out in theory, we've barely started to work out in practice.

To me, the most exciting parts of the course I just finished were about exactly that gap. It turns out there are many things today that we are quite confident will work to efficiently save lives before the next pandemic that are nevertheless not actually happening for the very boring reasons that:

  • Our systems don't naturally incentivize them to happen
  • We haven't yet succeeded at changing the systems to be better at this
  • Some people could work really hard to make them happen, but no one has yet
  • People are trying to make them happen, but it takes time, and they need help!

What follows from this is that a big part of what can help is simply making sure people know about these things! So that's what I'm going to try to do today: share what I learned in this class.

First, I'm going to scare you a bit. Stick with me. The hopeful stuff is on the other side, but I think it's important first to feel the danger, not just allude to it.

The Scary Part

Do you remember the first time you realized you might die from COVID?

I do.

The early days of the pandemic in NYC were extremely scary. In the US's densest city, some bodies had to be buried in mass graves. Seeing on social media that this was happening just a few miles from where I was, despite already "knowing" that the reason everything had shut down was because of a deadly disease, made me really understand:

I might get sick with this. I might die from it.

I vividly remember sitting in bed that night trying to come to terms with that fear, to really understand that this wasn't fake, it was really happening, and even though it was already very bad, it might end up being really, really, really, really bad, and there was no authority figure that could honestly tell us everything was ultimately going to be okay.

At the time, we didn't know COVID affected the elderly far more severely than it affected younger, healthier people like me. We didn't know that we'd miraculously have vaccines ready within a year. We didn't know if the world would ever again look the way it does as I'm writing this. We thought it would, we hoped it would, but there were no guarantees. For a brief window, every outcome was live, even the worst ones.

Even though society as a whole survived COVID, millions died, and millions more were disabled. The fears I was grappling with that night, the fears we were all grappling with, were rational and accurate. But this tragedy also doesn't mean that we get to ignore the fact that, in many ways, "we", humanity as a whole, got lucky.

We did get lucky.

COVID was a very transmissible virus and a moderately severe one. We have already experienced significantly more lethal Coronaviruses (SARS and MERS), as well as more transmissible viruses (Measles). There are also viruses that are significantly harder to detect, harder to vaccinate against, and harder for the body to fight off, like HIV.

In principle, we could face a disease that is far worse than COVID at any time, one that combines many, or even all of these characteristics. To find a worse pandemic, we barely have to look back 100 years. The 1918 Spanish Flu killed (by some estimates) up to 5% of the global population, compared to COVID's 0.5%. It's pretty shocking to me that we spent barely any time on it in school, when it killed as many people as WWII. Much, much worse pandemics are possible. Yes, they're unlikely to happen at any particular point, but that doesn't mean they're unlikely to happen in the long run, and ideally, we want humanity to survive the long run.

Smart readers with a better biology education than mine might interject here and point out that there are good reasons why we shouldn't expect a true "super-disease" to be found in nature. The microbes that cause disease are subject to the same laws of evolution and natural selection that we are. They're not trying to kill us, they're simply replicating themselves to the greatest extent possible, and doing things like killing their host is often a poor strategy for accomplishing this. We don't fully understand all the dynamics at play, but from what we do know, "super-diseases" are probably just possible outcomes of a very chaotic system, not necessarily likely ones.

Granted — but as much as I'd like to end the scary section there, I can't.

If pandemics are like fires, it's good that we're quickly learning the scientific principles behind how they work, and how to respond to them when they occur. But scientific progress doesn't just help us harness the power of fire and manage it safely — it also helped us create nuclear weapons, and the analogy holds here too.

The mere fact that I can break down the characteristics that make a disease dangerous to humanity, and we have some understanding of how those characteristics come to be on a biological level, means we might be well on our way to the biological equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Modern technologies like CRISPR let us directly edit genes. We have mapped the human genome. We are able to create new viruses not found in nature.

Advances like these in science are valuable and can help us fight diseases, but they also give humanity the power to create extremely dangerous diseases - including ones that might never be created organically by nature.

To make things even more scary, recently biologists have begun speculating that it might be possible to create "Mirror Life" pathogens, which are essentially "left-handed" versions of dangerous microbes in a world where all known life is "right-handed", letting them evade virtually all of the human body's built-in defenses.

Bill Gates was one of the people warning about the dangers of naturally occurring pandemics in the years before COVID. Here's what he said about the risks we're now facing in an interview published just this week at the time of writing:

The bioattack — the Gates Foundation, where we fund lots of medical research — the sophistication of coming up with new molecules, that’s really a good thing. But it’s ultimately dual use. Because if you want something that’s, say, worse than smallpox, that it takes even longer to show symptoms before you’re infectious — so you’re infecting a lot of people before it damages your health — it used to be that only nation-states had enough resources and capability to do these things.

Now that power has been passed into the hands of a small group just using the latest A.I. tools.

Humans are a part of nature too, and we've demonstrated a capacity to cause extreme, civilization-threatening harm through our technologies and behaviors. Modern civilization is interconnected enough that any sufficiently dangerous disease is a danger to all of us. We are, right now, learning to use fire, and we still live in a very flammable house.

Now, wherever you are, try to pause for a second.

I want you to sit for a second with the fact that many experts in this field are warning us that we're still in danger, that the next pandemic could be a lot worse.

It's not pleasant to worry about these things, but they're not hypothetical fears. I think the earlier we all have this "gut check" moment I had at the beginning of COVID, the better prepared we are to do what's necessary to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

Okay, that was the scary part. There are rational reasons for fear — but fear is pointless if it doesn't drive you to useful action, and there is a lot of useful action to be taken. Really, I mean it. A lot. There's a reason I titled this piece "We Can Prevent the Next Pandemic"! Based on what I learned in this class, I really believe we can.

I won't be covering every possible intervention here — just the ones I personally found most exciting and promising. But before we get into specifics, let's talk about the general structure of the problem:

How do we protect human society against disease?

The short answer is there is no perfect solution, so our defenses must be many and layered. The best analogy I've encountered for this is "defenses in depth", a concept borrowed from cybersecurity, that rests on the idea of stacking multiple layers of imperfect defenses for strong compounding effects. This is most easily illustrated with the "swiss cheese" metaphor:

Even if each layer of your system is sure to have holes, the system overall can still be extremely protective, such that nothing is likely to get through. So what do these layers look like in pandemic preparedness? Roughly, they are:

  • Preventing dangerous pathogens from existing in the first place
  • Detecting potential pandemics early so that we can respond quickly
  • Having the right resources available to block/prevent transmission
  • Being able to fight them with the appropriate medicine (treatment drugs, vaccines)

The plan here is to step through each of these and tell you guys about my favorite methods from this course for accomplishing safety at each layer. It's important to say before diving in that I'm not an expert, just an interested amateur at this point, and I'm only scratching the surface/highlighting the ideas I found most exciting!

Preventing Pathogen Development

If you talk to people in this space, they're very worried about what AI is going to make possible in biology.

To put it upfront, that's partially because there is a lot of overlap between the people involved in this and the people worried about AI risks in general. I know a good chunk of my audience will be skeptical of the groups of people who spend their time worrying about AI risk, but as someone who agrees that healthy skepticism is appropriate about most claims like these, I want to say that I think the reasons for worry in this area are a lot less speculative and deserve to be taken quite seriously.

The capabilities modern machine learning tools would need to assist a bad actor in developing a "super-disease" that combines the worst properties of known diseases aren't all that speculative. Biology is driven by genetics, and DNA is, at a basic level, the kind of formal system that machine learning tools excel at manipulating.

Yes, the physical processes that this base-level "code" produces are extremely complex, emergent, and hard to predict, but the genomes of microbes that cause pathogens are orders of magnitude smaller than those of humans (~typically 2-20 thousand base pairs vs. 3 billion), which makes the gap between manipulating DNA and the properties someone might want to "engineer" in a virus far shorter than trying to design, say, helpful drugs for people.

Consensus right now (September 2026) is that modern "AI" tools (typically these are things called "bio-tools", BTs, as opposed to LLMs like ChatGPT) are already better than human experts at demonstrating deep and broad biological knowledge of the kind that would be needed to create dangerous pathogens. What's not clear is if they're also more capable at operating in real-world lab environments than human experts. The limited evidence we have seems to say... not yet, as far as we can tell.

But that's not very encouraging, because it means we're already at the stage where even running experiments to confirm or deny that AI capabilities have progressed further is actively dangerous. How do you test whether a tool that knows the theory of how to create a dangerous pathogen can, well, actually physically take the steps to create one? That doesn't sound like a safe experiment to run.

Research with these properties is known in the bio-safety field as Dual-Use Research of Concern, meaning any research that theoretically could be just as useful for "evil" as it is for "good". It's generally accepted that this kind of work should only be done, if at all, in highly secure contexts, and its results should only be shared after careful consideration of their consequences and the potential value of the information to bad actors.

So what can we do to prevent these tools from being used to create "super-diseases"? The answer is that we need extremely good safeguards around their training, capabilities, and use! The "defenses in depth" model works very well here in miniature — we want protections at every stage of the "funnel", from model training to using them in biological applications:

Capabilities:

Making the models unable to assist with harmful bio

  • Filter the data the models train on to exclude dangerous bio knowledge
  • Use "targeted unlearning" to remove the knowledge after training
  • Create specialized models that can only help in specific, safe domains
  • Implant false-but-plausible knowledge

Alignment:

Training the models to refuse or deflect assisting with harmful bio

  • Train models to refuse tasks they identify as dangerous biology work
    • This can be done on preselected, human-labeled, or AI-labeled datasets, or accomplished via "red-teaming"
  • Add additional layers of filtering to censor answers that include dangerous bio information before they reach the user
    • This can be done via intermediary AIs specifically trained to detect such responses, keyword filtering, or monitoring bigger-picture user behaviors and context

Access

Controlling who gets to use frontier models for bio research

  • Stage deployment of frontier models so that trusted human experts are the first to use them and can confirm they are safe
  • Sanctions that prevent users in dangerous countries/locations from using the best models
  • Running background checks/identity verification for potential customers

Application Ecosystem

Controlling who has access to the resources & tools needed to apply harmful knowledge

  • Screen outside customer requests for synthesizing specific DNA sequences in a lab
    • Many companies perform this kind of service today, but there are no universal practices around screening requests
  • Improve industry-wide processes and information-sharing for preventing unknown actors from accessing the labs/tools they would need to create their own dangerous biological materials

All of these processes have flaws. It's impossible to make any of these layers completely secure. You can't keep models helpful with bio research while removing any potential harmful bio knowledge from them. You can't train them to be perfect at detecting attempts to elicit dangerous responses from bad actors. You can't perfectly distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys" with real-world access controls and screening processes.

But as a whole, if we do all these things, we can make it far, far less likely that human-engineered pandemics come to pass in the future. This fight is still actively being fought, so here's what you can do to help:

  • Accept built-in safeguards that will sometimes flag innocuous requests are an important part of keeping commercial AI tools safe
  • Ask politicians to create funding and regulations around AI-assisted bio research that support well-intentioned researchers in their life-saving work, while still making it highly unlikely that someone with bad intentions gets access to the tools they would need to create a deadly pathogen
  • Advocate for safety-over-profit practices at frontier AI companies. Demand that they be extremely sure their models aren't capable of dangerous biology work before they release them, or even better, proactively vote for politicians who will pass laws to hold them accountable if they fail to ensure their models are safe

If you want to read more about this:

Detecting Pandemics Early

This all may still sound quite scary: AI is getting better at biology, and the risks of human-engineered pathogens are rising, so we need to massively increase our safety practices just to "tread water" in terms of mitigating risk. But this layer, in my opinion, is where the advantage flips from offense to defense. Better biotechnology comes with risks, sure, but it also enables us to build incredible systems of defense that were never possible before.

You probably know that we've successfully mapped the human genome (given that it was a pretty big news story back when it happened, and also, I told you about it above). But what you might not know is that we are actually now able to sequence entire samples of DNA relatively quickly, on the order of hours-to-days!

Companies like Illumina have developed "next-generation sequencing" methods that can sequence all the DNA in a biological sample quickly for research & analysis. Today, these methods are mostly used for identifying the causes & cures of diseases and discovering new drugs for treatment of common health conditions.

These are all very good applications! They also rely on getting a very "deep read" of a particular genome, so that researchers can identify extremely small changes and how they affect overall outcomes.

But what if we were only interested in detecting the general presence of a potentially new and dangerous pathogen?

My favorite paper that I read for this class outlines exactly this — if we relax certain requirements that aren't necessary for general-purpose pathogen screening and instead invest in making these "Metagenomic Sequencing" (MGS) tools significantly faster and cheaper, they could be used "in the field" as the pandemic "early detection system" that we never had for COVID.

The current best-practices screening technology we have for detecting the presence of a particular disease is called PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction). How it works is it adds a particular enzyme to a sample that will "multiply" the presence of a particular (known) pathogen exponentially, if it exists in the sample at all. The benefits are that it's fast, accurate, and pretty much agnostic to how much of the target disease exists in the sample — if it's there at all, we'll know about it. This is extremely helpful for figuring out whether someone has a known virus. It's how most lab-based COVID tests are conducted. (most at-home COVID rapid tests are "antigen tests" which try to detect the presence of specific viral proteins, but they are more prone to false negatives because they require a larger porttion of the virus to be present in the sample.)

MGS, on the other hand, allows us to detect pathogens we don't already know about. This is a completely different capability from what PCR allows us to do — we didn't have PCR tests when COVID came, because we didn't know what COVID was, and couldn't have designed the right enzymes for it in advance. If we'd had fast, effective MGS screening tools when COVID started, and had set them up to be used in places like emergency rooms and wastewater processing facilities, we might have been able to "know our enemy" a lot sooner, saving millions of lives in the process. Being early matters a lot in pandemics, because of how diseases spread exponentially.

But there's a problem. Where's the profit?

It's clear to see why companies would invest in research to help cure known diseases or develop drugs they can sell to people who desperately need them. It's a lot less clear how a pandemic early-warning system would be a profitable technology to develop, since at its best, it lets us prevent problems from becoming worldwide threats in the first place.

Technologies already exist that could be developed further towards becoming fast, highly effective pathogen detection tools. Nanopore Sequencing is my favorite that we learned about: You pass a DNA molecule through a microscopic channel (a "nanopore") in a surface that you're running an electric current through. Each base pair in the DNA disrupts the current slightly differently, and this results in a signal you can process with machine learning to reconstruct the DNA sequence. The process of reading these "squiggles" produced by disruptions in the electric current isn't without errors, but we're getting much better at it as machine learning tools become more capable.

Most of these faster-throughput, shallower-read techniques have been set aside or abandoned by industry, because they're imperfect for disease research & drug discovery. The market incentives simply aren't there to the same degree for creating fast, general screening tools for genetic material that would indicate the presence of new dangerous microbes.

What can we do?

  • Make sure to let politicians know that we'd really like these technologies to be developed, and ask them to fund public research towards it!
  • If you or any family members work in the medical field, especially in places where pandemics start to show up early (like ERs), maybe ask them about how they'd use fast, general, pathogen-agnostic screening tools like this if they existed, what the practical barriers to adoption would be, and whether their institutions could demonstrate interest-in-advance for these tools
  • If you have a bioinformatics background, consider trying to work for nonprofit companies like SecureBio who are working on setting up these "early warning" systems through MGS
  • Make sure to advocate loudly for the importance of trusting health authorities in the early days of pandemics, when reliable information is difficult to come by and our public health systems are doing the best they can to keep us informed

If you want to read more about how MGS could be used for pathogen detection:

Pandemic early detection & tracking is a much larger field than this narrow problem I covered here, though. If you're interested in learning more, you should also read about:

  • How we can design better information systems for forecasting how a "live" pandemic is evolving and informing the public in trustworthy ways in realtime
  • Once we know the disease we're fighting, how we can develop good rapid tests, well... rapidly?
  • Watch this video about how Vietnam was very successful in getting public buy-in for government programs that significantly slowed COVID in its early stages.
    • Public buy-in to mitigation efforts is extremely important, and it's a real tragedy that the COVID response has become such a politicized issue

Blocking Transmission

Even before a pandemic starts, we can prepare to defend against it regardless of what it ends up looking like. No matter their biological properties, pathogens first need to enter our bodies to affect us. If we can successfully prepare to block the major ways diseases spread between people, we'll have a robust layer of defense that protects against almost any pandemic.

This is the area I'm personally most energized about. It's where I feel like we have the cheapest wins and the most obvious places we should be investing research & resources into, so I want to cover two valuable interventions. One will be familiar to you, and the other I expect will be new, but is very exciting!

Stockpiling PPE

Despite masking becoming a highly politicized issue in the aftermath of COVID, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is clearly one of our best defenses against airborne pathogens, which are generally the scariest/most transmissible kind of disease.

Everyone probably remembers that N95 masks were scarce in the early days of COVID. Personally, I remember cutting up old T-shirts to use as makeshift masks. Proper masks only became cheaply available once companies had time to scale up manufacturing (a difficult task on its own in the middle of a dangerous pandemic, and one that would be far more difficult in the context of a more deadly disease).

It simply doesn't have to be this way next time!!

Though N95s are pretty good at preventing infections and very cheap, they have some downsides, mainly that they are single-use and don't last as long in storage, so most experts recommend that we invest in stockpiling elastomeric respirators (the ones that look like this):

These masks are reusable with filters that only have to be replaced every 30 days, and can last up to 10 years in storage.

Stockpiling enough EMRs to protect all the essential workers in the US would cost less than 0.03% of the US military budget. That's less than a quarter of a single B-2 bomber, and would mean that we can keep crucial services like water and power running even in a far worse pandemic than COVID.

Keeping the basics of modern society working is extremely important for keeping people's morale up and convincing them that it's worth it to stay home and trust their basic needs will be met. This can prevent a breakdown of the social order that might happen in the case of an extremely dangerous pandemic, making all parts of emergency response orders of magnitude more difficult.

Look, I'm just an average citizen sitting on the sidelines, but this seems like an absolute no-fucking-brainer of an investment.

And yet...

"Current PPE production capacity is roughly 10–100 times less than the predicted need during the first 100 days of a respiratory pandemic that spreads as quickly as the COVID-19 Omicron variant"

Blueprint Biosecurity

Why?

Well, where's the profit? Where's the political incentive?

Now I'm no expert and no politician, but in my humble opinion, this is one of the stupidest things we're failing to do as a society right now. We literally JUST learned how important this is!!! What are we DOING???? We need to invest in PPE stockpiling now. It's so easy, we just need our leaders to have a little bit of common sense (uh oh).

What you can do:

  • Remind people around you that pandemics are scary, and having good protective equipment helps keep us safe
  • Ask your political leaders to invest in this now before we regret it
  • Wear masks when you're sick and have to go out in public, or are interacting with immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk people who need your help to keep their immune systems protected

If you want to read more:

Far-UVC

PPE isn't the only tool we have for preventing transmission though. This class also taught me about a really exciting emerging technology: Far-UVC disinfecting light.

UV light, which has wavelengths between 100-400 nanometers, is the same type of light that causes sunburns. It also kills or otherwise damages the DNA of microorganisms, and has been used since the mid-1900s to help disinfect air in medical facilities like Tuberculosis wards.

However, there are some obvious problems: UV light is dangerous to humans! It causes sunburns and skin cancer, so it has to be used outside of where humans actually are: at the top of rooms where air cycles through and gets cleaned ("upper room UV"), or in places like air vents or water treatment facilities.

However, there is a subtype of UV light that we have some strong evidence is far, far safer for humans to be exposed to, and still has the same germicidal properties, called "Far-UVC". This is specifically light between 200 and 235nm, and there is a growing body of evidence that it could be an extremely effective way to sanitize our indoor spaces in ways that might dramatically reduce airborne disease transmission.

If this sounds like a miracle technology... honestly, it might end up being one! But there's still a long way to go before it can be rolled out on a massive scale.

  • While the early indicators are that it's quite safe, there are still some reasonable concerns that need to be addressed, such as the lack of long-term impact studies.
  • Generally, measuring the amount of air filtration in real-world indoor spaces is hard, and studying how much good filtration prevents infections is even harder, so studies need to be quite well-funded to give us enough data to be confident
  • We're also not completely sure how effective it is against the wide range of potential disease-causing pathogens, and there are some signs that it might work extremely well against some, but less well against others.
  • Finally, it's still pretty expensive to purchase lamps that can safely produce this narrow type of light and cover large areas with it. The best current product on the market costs about $500 and covers about 250 square feet.
    • It's probably possible to bring this cost way down with better R&D, but we need to incentivize this by showing the demand will be there!

What you can do to help:

  • Tell people about it! This is not a very well known technology yet, so just spreading the word helps. That's what I'm trying to do here!
  • If you can easily afford it, consider purchasing a Far-UVC lamp, either an Aerolamp or from somewhere like this (but honestly, they're pretty expensive for personal use)
  • Maybe consider asking a local business with a small indoor space if they'd consider buying a similar lamp to make their air much cleaner!

If you want to read more:

Vaccines

To be honest, the content in the course I found most inspiring and hopeful were the many pathogen-agnostic ways that new technology allows us to invest in to protect ourselves before the next pandemic occurs. But it would still be a dereliction of my duty to write a piece about pandemic preparedness and not mention our single best tool for fighting diseases, vaccines.

If anyone has any doubts about vaccines, please, please feel free to directly reach out to me about them, because I believe it's absolutely essential to recognize that...

  • Vaccines work
  • Vaccines are safe
  • Once we know about a dangerous disease, vaccines are the best way we currently have to protect ourselves and get to a permanent place of safety.

For anyone who doesn't know, vaccines work by putting a small amount of a (typically) disabled disease into your body so that your immune system can learn to recognize and fight it. To develop safe and effective vaccines, we need to do a lot of research and go through extensive clinical trials.

Operation Warp Speed was the US Government's response to COVID, and it was extraordinarily effective, resulting in COVID vaccines reaching the public in less than a year (this was not a guaranteed outcome — again, we got very lucky).

OWS responded to an extreme situation with extreme measures, and got results:

  • The US military was heavily involved in project logistics and the entire structure imitated the command structure of military operations
  • Traditional clinical trials, which occur in 3 consecutive stages, were parallelized, with all three stages running almost at the same time
  • Regulations that normally apply to vaccine manufacturers were largely waived

It's not obvious that we should treat non-emergency vaccine R&D in the same way, but the success of this project does raise the possibility that reducing regulations around vaccine R&D and providing more incentives for companies to do this research might be long-term beneficial. (Contrary to what many think, vaccines are quite low profit drivers for big pharma companies.)

The elephant in the room here is that we're currently dealing with quite an extreme anti-vaccine backlash in our politics. This stems from a decades-old pseudoscientific belief that vaccines cause autism, as well as a general decline in trust of authorities and institutions.

I'm not going to pretend I know how to solve this problem, but I'll say what I think you can do to help:

  • Get freaking vaccinated!! CVS and Walgreens both let you schedule an appointment online today for Flu & COVID vaccines. This doesn't just protect you from getting sick over the winter, it protects anyone around you who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons.
  • If you have family or friends who are vaccine skeptics, try to talk to them about why they feel the way they do. They may have legitimate grievances with our medical system and reasons to distrust authorities. Listen to them, don't get angry, and try to understand their perspective — but firmly tell them how you know that vaccines are far better for human health than they are for corporate profits, and the stories about their dangers have been debunked over and over.

If you want to read more:

Conclusion

Look — I absolutely hate going to the dentist.

From one perspective, it's a complete lose-lose-lose proposition. It takes effort to schedule, the experience is unpleasant, and the only things you can learn from going are bad things, like "you need a root canal".

But going to the dentist is really important.

Just a few months into COVID, as I was flossing in the mirror, a whole entire chunk of my back left tooth just... fell out. I was terrified, partially because I didn't even know if going to see a dentist in the middle of a pandemic was a good idea, despite knowing how serious this might be.

I decided, stupidly, to wait it out and see if anything started to feel off. Within about a week, it started to hurt really bad, so I gave up and scheduled an appointment. Long story short, that tooth ended up needing a filling, then a root canal, then an extraction, and in the meantime, the constant pain it caused me while I was going through these stages very well might have been the catalyst for my chronic pain condition.

I think, as a species, the way we currently treat pandemic preparedness is a lot like my reluctance around going to the dentist in this scenario, even when I had very good reason to believe something was wrong. We do some basic things, but mostly we wait to act until we start to feel the pain. We don't want to think about it until we absolutely have to. Do you remember how early on in COVID, everyone was expecting lockdowns to last for 2 weeks, even though you could easily check what public health experts were saying, and they mostly seemed to know what we were in for?

Individually, there are lots of brilliant, well-meaning people working on public health and getting us ready to fight the next catastrophic disease that affects the entire world. But collectively, humanity is still acting like scared little kids who don't want to do the basic work to keep ourselves safe, because it would require small, but immediate sacrifices that we don't like making, and acknowledging some very scary things are possible.

But just like I learned from my past mistakes in managing my health, we can learn from ours. We can grow up and protect ourselves, and the good news is that if we're willing to eat some very small, very short term costs, the future of humanity could look a whole lot healthier and safer in some very exciting ways.

I'm immensely grateful to BlueDot for their work in providing this course to me and many others for free, and I'd encourage anyone who's considering next steps in their career, no matter what they work in now, to see if they might want to take the course as well. For my part, I'm going to keep working to see how I can help, either in my career or in my personal time! If anyone wants to talk to me about this, I'd love it if they reached out.

We can prevent the next pandemic.

Will we?