This is what failure looks like. We are looking at it. No one ever said when the concept of public health emerged in the 19th century, “We really need an organization that is committed to serving as the doula for every newly emergent pathogen that pops out of the wild.” The idea that emergent pathogens need to be shepherded into endemicity, this has never been in any public health mission statement.

What we have done is take something that should never have established itself in human communities in the first place and have built a public health consensus around the concept of repeated mass infection.