Throughout the history of public health in the United States, there have been a handful of moments where a broad cross-section of scientists and other leaders spotted something happening and thought “This is new. This is bad. This could change everything.”
It happened in the early 1980s, after researchers noted small outbreaks of rare forms of two illnesses — pneumonia and cancer — among the same population of young gay men in New York and California.
It happened in January 2020, when scientists in the World Health Organization spotted a cluster of pneumonia-like cases among people who lived in, or had recently traveled to, China’s Wuhan province.
