Something was coming: she felt it. She’d obsessed about it since childhood and had learned not to talk about it, because other people thought she was kooky when she did. But as she drove into Sacramento, one subject was at the front of her mind. And not long after she arrived, toward the end of 2018, a journalist asked her about it. “What scares me most and what I think about most,” said Charity, “is our ability to respond to a new pathogen, maybe one we’ve never seen before, or an old pathogen, like influenza that’s just mutated. The H1N1 pandemic of 1918 was over 100 years ago now. The world
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