Are we now in a better position to meet the next “big one”?
No. I would have to say that we are in worse shape. We don’t have the opportunity now to use tools like mRNA in a meaningful way. If a pandemic begins to emerge, we will divide up into camps to go at each other. We would right now have major challenges bringing people together, and if there were ever a time when we needed to bring people together against a common enemy—i.e. a virus—it’s during a pandemic.
We need to do that. But we have nothing at this point to support that. We should deal with all of this now, game the situation, and work out what we would do.