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Though the truly horrific COVID-19 pandemic, which killed 1.2 million Americans and many millions more worldwide, is barely in the rear-view mirror, public health authorities keep telling us the next pandemic is inevitable. Joe wondered how inevitable, and he asked Mark whether it’s likely to happen in our lifetimes and why pandemics seem to occur with greater frequency these days. Mark and Joe review the historical context of pandemics past and contemplate how the next pandemic’s lethality will be determined not so much by the pathogen’s biology as by the human environment we’ve built for it to move through.