Like Rajeev, Richard thought that the United States government was paying too much attention to the threats posed by people and too little to those posed by nature. Like Rajeev, he believed that some new strain of flu, or some similar respiratory virus, was an accident waiting to happen. And so when he heard Rajeev’s offer to create a pandemic plan for the country, he was all in. His employer, on the other hand, was not. The National Institutes of Health didn’t want to let him go. “It caused some bitterness when I asked for him,” recalls Rajeev. “We had to ask Tony Fauci for permission.”
