Osterholm, who founded CIDRAP in 2001, played a role in helping fight the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 and has spent years working to strengthen America’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure. Public health experts were left “to figure all this out while painting the plane in midair,” as he puts it in The Big One. Though devastating, the 2020-era pandemic had a fatality rate of roughly 1%. The effort has made Osterholm a leader of what can loosely be described as the medical resistance. I sat down with Osterholm recently to discuss his new book, the public health dismantling we are currently witnessing, and what might happen if a pandemic struck now.