10 Things We Learned From Infectious Disease Expert Michael Osterholm On Joe Rogan Experience

Throughout the interview Osterholm reiterated that we are grossly under-prepared for this kind of pandemic. However, he did try to warn the world about what was on the horizon.

In 2017 he released a book entitled Deadliest Enemy: The War Against Killer Germs and he mentioned that the title of chapter 13 was 'SARS and MERS: A Harbinger of Things to Come'.

For those who don't know, SARS and MERS are both types of Coronavirus that have sprouted up over the years. So, it appears that Osterholm had a feeling that these outbreaks were just a sign of what was coming in the future.

He also wrote a chapter in the book where he described what he thought an Influenza pandemic would look like if it emerged in China and alarmingly the exact same chain of events have unfolded recently. Supply chains have gone down, China is in lockdown, the disease has spread to other countries and people then all started to point fingers.

What is so frustrating is the fact a literal expert on the subject had been flagging up the potential for something of this scale to grip the planet (he wrote a whole bloody book on it!) yet everyone still turned a blind eye to the prospect of this level of biological threat becoming a reality.