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pointing out how unprepared the world was and laying out what we needed to do to get ready. I adapted the warning for a TED talk called "The Next Epidemic? We're Not Ready," complete with an animation showing 30 million people dying from a flu as infectious as the 1918 one. Pointing out that there would be trillions of dollars of economic losses and massive disruption, I wanted to be alarming to make sure the world got ready. The talk was viewed xx times after the pandemic started but only yy times before. jThe Gates Foundation, in partnership with the governments of Germany, Japan, Norway, and Wellcome, , created an organization called CEPI--the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations--to accelerate work on vaccines against new infectious diseases and help those vaccines reach people in the poorest countries. I also funded a local study in Seattle to learn more about how the flu and other respiratory diseases move through a community. Although CEPI and the Seattle Flu Study were good investments that helped when COVID came, not much else was done. Six years after I gave my TED talk and published that NEJM paper, as COVID-19 was spreading around the world, reporters and friends would ask me if I wished I had done more back in 2015. I am not sure how I could have gotten more attention on the need for better tools and practice scaling them up rapidly. Maybe I should have written this book in 2015, but I am not sure how many people would have read it. CEPI is now raising money to scale up the great work it did, and I hope it gets a strong response. ***