Table of Contents
Why Was the COVID-19 Response Flawed and What Is the Real ‘Big One’ Looming Ahead?
Get essential insights from The Big One by Michael T. Osterholm & Mark Olshaker. Understand the critical science of aerosol transmission, why “hygiene theater” failed, and the urgent strategy shifts required to protect your family from future airborne threats.
Equip yourself with the knowledge to stay safe—read the full summary below to understand the real science behind pandemic survival and how to prepare for the future.
Genres
Science, Health, Nutrition, Technology and the Future, Society, Culture
Discover why pandemics spread – and defenses repeatedly fail.
The Big One (2025) challenges your assumptions about pandemics by revealing that the next global health crisis will be far worse than COVID-19. Through a gripping, scientifically-grounded scenario, it reveals the critical failures of our past response and the essential, practical steps needed to prepare for the inevitable.
Living through a global crisis like COVID-19 can leave you feeling adrift. You’re bombarded with conflicting headlines, contradictory advice from experts, and a constant, low-level hum of uncertainty about the future. It makes you wish for a clear, honest assessment of what went wrong and, more urgently, a reliable map for the path ahead. Grasping the true nature of these threats – how they start, how they spread, and how they are fought – is the first step toward regaining a sense of control and resilience in a world that feels increasingly unpredictable.
In this summary, you’ll get the big-picture analysis of how a truly catastrophic pandemic unfolds. You’ll move past the day-to-day headlines to grasp the fundamental scientific failures, the flawed political strategies, and the deep-seated communication breakdowns that defined our last response.
As a result, you’ll be empowered to make smarter, more confident decisions for yourself, your family, and your community when the next Big One hits us.
An inevitable beginning
You might picture the next pandemic starting with a dramatic outbreak in some major city, instantly capturing global attention. The reality will probably be far quieter, beginning somewhere you’ve never heard of, challenging everything you think you know about how global crises unfold.
Let’s set the scene with a hypothetical scenario. Take a moment to imagine a small, sun-scorched plot on the edge of a national park in southern Somalia, devastated by more than a decade of severe drought. A local farmer wakes with aching muscles, chills, and a cough he can’t shake. Soon his son falls sick too. Within days, others in his small community show the same symptoms, seeking help from a local health worker, who has little beyond palliative care to offer.
Not far away, another family, desperate for food and water, sets out on a week-long journey on foot, carrying two young children toward the sprawling Hagadera Refugee Camp across the border in Kenya. During the trek, the mother and her one-year-old daughter fall ill with the same hacking cough.
These individual tragedies are sparks, but the refugee camp is kindling. Hagadera is a makeshift city of tents and huts, a hub for hundreds of thousands of displaced people and a key center for livestock trade. Here, local sparks converge and build into fire. The chief health manager at the camp’s hospital, already exhausted, starts seeing clusters of patients with severe respiratory distress which can’t be attributed to COVID-19. The one-year-old girl who traveled on foot dies in her mother’s arms. The virus spreads among patients and staff within the hospital itself.
Now the virus connects with the engine of modern global travel – silently, through multiple people at once. A French aid worker finishes his volunteer stint and heads home. He boards a plane at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for Istanbul, one of the ten busiest airports worldwide. He starts coughing mid-flight but dismisses it as exhaustion. After a three-hour layover, he boards for Paris.
Meanwhile, an Indonesian businessman visits a camel auction in Kenya’s livestock capital before flying home. Feeling perfectly healthy, he spends his Istanbul layover networking with at least ten international travelers before boarding his eleven-hour Jakarta flight. At the same time, an American college student flies from Nairobi to Frankfurt to Atlanta, spending hours in crowded airports before meeting his parents.
By the time we think about closing barn doors, the horse has already circled the globe. The fight begins in our own communities, because the virus has taken flight and landed long before we knew it existed.
The first and costliest mistake
If a virus has already crossed every border before the first alarm sounds, how do you even begin to fight back? The answer depends entirely on grasping how the enemy moves through the world.
Let’s look back now at COVID-19. For months, the official guidance focused on a single, intuitive threat: droplets. You can picture these as microscopic projectiles launched by a cough or sneeze. They’re heavy enough that gravity pulls them to the ground within a few feet. This simple idea gave birth to the six-foot rule and the plexiglass barriers that shot up in every shop and office. It led to a worldwide obsession with handwashing and disinfecting surfaces, a set of rituals that came to be known as hygiene theater.
These well-intentioned measures largely ignored the real danger. The true enemy was in the simple act of exhaling.
The real threat was aerosols: microscopic particles so light they behave less like projectiles and more like smoke. Think of the last time you saw dust motes dancing in a sunbeam, or smelled perfume from across a wide hallway – that’s how aerosols travel. They can linger in the air for hours, accumulate in poorly ventilated rooms, and travel far beyond six feet. You don’t need to be coughed on to get sick; you just need to be in a room sharing the same air with an infected person for long enough.
The plexiglass shield at the checkout counter? Useless against this threat. As the authors would often ask: if someone were smoking on the other side of that partition, would you be able to smell it? Of course you would. And if you can smell their smoke, you can breathe their virus.
This single, colossal misunderstanding rendered much of the early public health response ineffective. So what should have been done? The answer lies in a simple but powerful concept: the Precautionary Principle. When confronting a new and mysterious respiratory threat, you immediately assume the worst-case scenario for transmission until you have conclusive evidence to the contrary. You assume it spreads via aerosols.
This principle dictates a completely different set of actions from day one. The priority becomes clean air and effective respiratory protection. And this means recognizing that the only personal tool that reliably protects you from inhaling aerosols is a high-filtration mask that forms a tight seal around your face, like an N95 respirator.
To recommend anything less for protection against an aerosol-transmitted virus is the equivalent of trying to waterproof a submarine with a screen door. It gives the appearance of safety and provides almost none.
This initial scientific failure was a mistake that cost millions of people their health and their trust, and it set the stage for all the flawed policies that followed.
A strategy built on sand
As public patience around COVID-19 wore thin, and blunt-force mandates proved unsustainable, the world turned its collective hope toward science. The call was for a miracle, a silver bullet that could end the crisis. And in a stunning display of innovation, science delivered one – or so it seemed at first.
The development of mRNA vaccines in under a year was a monumental achievement, built on decades of prior research and accelerated through initiatives like Operation Warp Speed. When initial trials showed 95 percent efficacy in preventing COVID-19 infection, euphoria swept the globe. It felt like a decisive, war-ending weapon had arrived. These vaccines saved an estimated 3.2 million lives in the United States alone and prevented millions more from being hospitalized.
But the miracle had major limitations. The initial euphoria gave way to a more complicated reality. The powerful protection began to wane significantly after just a few months, requiring booster shots to maintain its effect. More critically, the vaccines turned out to be “good, not great” public health tools – they could save lives but couldn’t reliably prevent infection or stop vaccinated people from transmitting the virus to others.
This single fact had staggering consequences. It meant achieving herd immunity was an ever-receding horizon. It fatally undermined the scientific argument for vaccine mandates, which are ethically and legally predicated on stopping community spread, as the measles vaccine does. When breakthrough infections became common, it further eroded public trust and fueled the anti-vaccine movement.
So what we had was a vaccine that was both a life-saving triumph and a flawed public health tool. This paradox points to a deeper, systemic problem with how we prepare our medical arsenal.
The difficult truth is that the market-driven pharmaceutical industry has little financial incentive to build the tools we’ll need for the next pandemic. Developing a universal vaccine – one offering durable protection against all variants – is a high-risk, decade-long enterprise with no guaranteed payoff. It’s far more profitable to develop drugs for chronic conditions or cancer. Major companies are quietly exiting the infectious disease market altogether.
This is where the most critical lesson lies. You don’t wait for war to break out before building an aircraft carrier. You recognize it as a national security asset, and the government funds its development with massive, sustained investment and guaranteed contracts over many years.
Without this fundamental shift in policy, when the next Big One comes we’ll be left hoping for another miracle – and hope is not a strategy.
The imperfect arsenal
Even if you build that aircraft carrier, even if you stock the nation’s arsenal with the most advanced vaccines and antivirals science can produce, those weapons are useless if the public refuses to trust the leadership that deploys them. The ultimate lesson from the last pandemic is that the decisive battle was a war for trust. And public health lost badly.
The damage was largely self-inflicted, stemming from a catastrophic failure in communication. From the very beginning, leaders and health officials spoke with an air of false certainty about a virus that was constantly evolving and poorly understood. They made definitive pronouncements that were soon contradicted by reality – on how the virus spread, on the effectiveness of masks, on the durability of vaccines.
When the science changed, they often doubled down or quietly shifted their guidance rather than openly acknowledging mistakes and explaining the new evidence. This made them appear either incompetent or dishonest, shattering their credibility.
This communication failure created a vacuum, filled by two destructive forces. The first was a massive infodemic – an overwhelming flood of information, rumor, and propaganda that made it nearly impossible for the average person to find reliable guidance. The second, more dangerous force was politicization.
In the absence of a trusted, unified message, public health measures became toxic symbols of political identity. The decision to wear a mask or get a vaccine became a statement about which tribe you belonged to. This partisan divide was directly measurable in mortality rates, as politically conservative areas with high vaccine skepticism suffered far higher rates of preventable deaths.
To prepare for the next Big One, we need to address this crisis of trust head-on. The solution is twofold. First, we need a new ethos of leadership, modeled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” where leaders level with the public with honesty and empathy, fostering a sense of shared purpose through a long and difficult struggle.
The second critical element we need to build is a modern, national disease surveillance system. It should function like the National Weather Service – an apolitical, transparent, and highly sophisticated system that provides reliable, real-time data on disease threats around the country.
Only with such a system can leaders make evidence-based decisions, and only with credible, trusted data can they hope to earn back the public’s confidence. Without that trust, the best science in the world will not be enough to save us.
How to win the war for trust
If the foundation of our next defense must be trust, built on honesty and credible data, what does that future actually look like? It looks like a choice. The painful lessons from the last global health crisis have left us at a crossroads, with one path leading back to the same cycle of surprise, panic, and failure, and another, more difficult path, leading to a future where you are genuinely prepared.
Choosing the right path forward means first accepting a difficult reality. The next Big One will almost certainly be a virus with wings – a respiratory pathogen that travels through the air. We must grasp that this enemy will be global before it is even named.
Our first line of defense needs to be built on the Precautionary Principle. It requires a national stockpile of N95 respirators for every citizen and leaders with the courage to tell us to wear them from day one. It means investing in the science of clean indoor air, making our schools, offices, and public spaces less hospitable to airborne threats. We’ll need to acknowledge the true nature of the threat and prepare accordingly.
We will also need to build the right arsenal. A prepared nation doesn’t rely on reactive, unsustainable policies like long-term lockdowns that shatter the economy and public morale. It proactively invests in the weapons that can win the war.
This requires a fundamental shift in mindset, treating pandemic preparedness with the same urgency and long-term commitment as military defense. We must be willing to fund the development of universal vaccines with the same seriousness as we would an aircraft carrier, through sustained, multi-year public investment free from the whims of the market.
But of course, it bears repeating that none of these preventative measures will help us if we don’t rebuild the foundation of trust upon which any collective action depends. The most advanced vaccine is useless if the public is convinced it’s a poison, and the best-laid plans are worthless if citizens don’t trust the leaders who implement them.
This human factor requires a new pact between leaders and the public – one where officials communicate with humility and radical honesty, admitting what they don’t know and owning their mistakes. And it requires a society that values evidence over ideology and holds purveyors of misinformation accountable for the lives they put at risk.
The pandemic clock is ticking. In our modern world, we can no longer be indifferent to the suffering of others. The microbe that begins its journey in a distant land today can reach you tomorrow, and when that bell tolls, it tolls for everyone.
Conclusion
In this summary to The Big One by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, you’ve learned that a catastrophic pandemic is not only inevitable but that our previous responses have been fatally flawed by a misunderstanding of the science, a failure of leadership, and a collapse of public trust.
The most critical failure in responding to COVID-19 was ignoring airborne aerosol transmission, which led to ineffective strategies like hygiene theater instead of focusing on N95-level protection. Blunt instruments like lockdowns and mandates were misapplied without clear goals, burning through public patience.
While science delivered a vaccine miracle, its limitations revealed that our medical arsenal requires a new model of sustained public investment, akin to a national security program. Ultimately, preparing for the next Big One requires more than just better science; it demands a new pact of honest leadership and a robust disease surveillance system to rebuild the public trust necessary for our collective survival.