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Page 194, para 5: this brings to mind the devastating book by Chinua Achebe: "Things Fall Apart", in which he explains that because of high childhood mortality many parents won't name a child until it reaches its 8th birthday, but then will say that "he or she has come to say". Chapter 9 Page 208, para 3: once again, readers may ask, yes, but HOW do we do these things when lack of international cooperation is a roadblock to so many things (e.g., climate change, territorial water rights, trade wars, etc.) Page 209, bottom para: this really touches on the old but very important question of investigatorinitiated v. managed or directed research, and what role these two approaches should play in going forward to prevent pandemics. The book seems to assume that directed research is the way to go (e.g., "let's all try to make a universal coronavirus vaccine"). But this may be short-sighted. In many cases, scientists don't have very good clues about how to proceed, in part because of lack of basic knowledge. For example, we know that influenza can result in fatal viral pneumonia but, shockingly, in a typical influenza infection that might or might not go on to be fatal, we don't know where the virus is, how and where the immune system encounters it, and why that infection, even if it's a severe one, fails to elicit long term protective immunity. Without these clues, how can we hope to make a successful universal vaccine? Moreover, most of the momentous breakthroughs have come NOT from directed research but from serendipity in the hands of scientists curious about arcane stuff: PCR, monoclonal antibodies, CRISPR cas9, mRNA immunogenicity, even the discovery of the "double helix", all came about because unknown scientists were studying obscure things with little or no funding and few expectations of success. So, where in the big picture of pandemic prevention do these two different approaches to science fit? This was a question faced successfully by Basil O'Connor in the 1940s, as he hoped the NFIP could come up with a polio vaccine. It did. Page 210: para 3, sequencing more genotypes is good but not sufficient, because "genotype does not equal phenotype", meaning that looking at a genetic sequence, even if modeled to guess its protein's tertiary structure, tells us very little other than epidemiology of viral circulation. Ideally, sequencing should lead to study of the infectious virus in animals and in some situations, if safe, even in people, including pathogenesis studies and what has been called pejoratively "gain of function" studies. In this era of genomics, we seem to have forgotten the importance of the biology of infection. It is worth repeating that if we had had the entire genome of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 flu virus beforehand, we wouldn't have been able to predict that it had a chance of becoming pandemic. Had we grown it up into live virus and studied it in the lab, we might at least learned that it was highly transmissibly and not prevented by population H1N1 immunity, derived from infection with highly drifted H1N1 viruses. That would have allowed us to surveil for it and identify a pandemic at its earliest stages. Page 211, para 4, re vaccines against viral families, this is a great aspirational goal, but all attempts have failed so far, and few if any have good ideas about how to proceed. Can this goal be made realistic, and how?