https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-is-bad-but-it-may-not-be-the-big-one/

In 2005, US government health agencies were obsessed with a disease threat that was rolling across the globe: H5N1 avian flu, which had leaped from wild birds into chickens, and from there into humans, and was killing more than half of the people unlucky enough to become infected with it. It was the second international disease emergency of the decade, following SARS in 2003, which had swept out of southern China, sickened people in two dozen countries, and cost the economies of the Pacific Rim approximately $40 billion.

Kicked into action by SARS and alarmed by the potential for bird flu to wreak havoc, the government was on the verge of publishing an ambitious plan, a National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, to anticipate any fast-moving epidemic. But at the Department of Health and Human Services, epidemiologist Michael T. Osterholm—the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who was wrapping up a four-year stint as a special adviser to HHS secretary Tommy G. Thompson—was not convinced that the US, or the world, was doing enough.