Three warnings have been in the news recently: hantavirus on a cruise ship, Ebola out of Africa and potential exposures to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever at a high-containment laboratory in Montana. Each disease can kill more than one in five infected victims. The world may have moved on from covid-19, but deadly pathogens have not moved on from the most attractive host on the planet in mobility, population density and biology: us.
The next pandemic could come from nature, but it also may come from research the United States or another nation has failed to govern: when a virus studied in a laboratory, and sometimes altered there, escapes. The first route demands preparedness. The second demands governance.