In 2018, I published an article with public health expert Vin
Gupta sounding the alarm about the failure to prepare adequately
for emerging infectious diseases. We were hardly the only ones. Our
article, "The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving
Shortly," joined many national security and public health
experts in using the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Spanish flu
pandemic, which killed 50 million people, to focus attention on the
national security imperative that is pandemic disease. From my
perspective as the former homeland security and counterterrorism
adviser to President Obama, the role through which I helped lead
the successful response to Ebola in 2014, I believed it was
necessary to highlight the need to treat pandemic disease with the
same urgency that the United States applies to other transnational
threats.
