Stepping Forward

IN LATE DECEMBER 2019, Dr. Alex Garza was on a ski trip with his wife and kids in Colorado when a news item caught his eye: A weird flu was circulating in China. He made a mental note. Over the next couple weeks, more stories popped up. “Early January [2020] is when I started thinking, ‘This could be the pandemic we’ve all been afraid of.’”

The fear had haunted him for years. As assistant secretary and chief medical officer to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013, Garza had kept a close, when, as dean of Saint Louis University’s College for Public Health and Social Justice, he wondered aloud: “We saw the spread of H1N1 throughout the world in a matter of months—what if it had been a deadlier virus?”