JANUARY 25, 2023

Preventing Viruses Doesn’t Have to Be a Game of Whac-a-Mole

By Han Wei, PhD, and Brittany Niccum, PhD

In the Earth’s interconnected ecosystem, humans are interlopers. We’re far outnumbered by viruses alone, not to mention all other animal species. But this fact was largely ignored by most people outside of infectious diseases until 2020, when “coronavirus” became a household word and a microbe killed over 6.5 million people—and counting.1

Nearly every country has experienced how a virus from a different part of the world can