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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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The Big One summary
Michael T. Osterholm & Mark Olshaker
How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics
20 mins
Brief summary
The Big One examines the impending threat of a global pandemic. The authors explore vulnerabilities in public health systems and offer insights on improving preparedness and response strategies to mitigate potential catastrophic impacts.
Table of Contents
The Big One
Summary of 5 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 5
An inevitable beginning
You might picture the next pandemic starting with a dramatic outbreak in some major city, instantly capturing global attention. The reality will probably be far quieter, beginning somewhere you’ve never heard of, challenging everything you think you know about how global crises unfold.
Let’s set the scene with a hypothetical scenario. Take a moment to imagine a small, sun-scorched plot on the edge of a national park in southern Somalia, devastated by more than a decade of severe drought. A local farmer wakes with aching muscles, chills, and a cough he can’t shake. Soon his son falls sick too. Within days, others in his small community show the same symptoms, seeking help from a local health worker, who has little beyond palliative care to offer.
Not far away, another family, desperate for food and water, sets out on a week-long journey on foot, carrying two young children toward the sprawling Hagadera Refugee Camp across the border in Kenya. During the trek, the mother and her one-year-old daughter fall ill with the same hacking cough.
These individual tragedies are sparks, but the refugee camp is kindling. Hagadera is a makeshift city of tents and huts, a hub for hundreds of thousands of displaced people and a key center for livestock trade. Here, local sparks converge and build into fire. The chief health manager at the camp’s hospital, already exhausted, starts seeing clusters of patients with severe respiratory distress which can’t be attributed to COVID-19. The one-year-old girl who traveled on foot dies in her mother’s arms. The virus spreads among patients and staff within the hospital itself.
Now the virus connects with the engine of modern global travel – silently, through multiple people at once. A French aid worker finishes his volunteer stint and heads home. He boards a plane at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for Istanbul, one of the ten busiest airports worldwide. He starts coughing mid-flight but dismisses it as exhaustion. After a three-hour layover, he boards for Paris.
Meanwhile, an Indonesian businessman visits a camel auction in Kenya’s livestock capital before flying home. Feeling perfectly healthy, he spends his Istanbul layover networking with at least ten international travelers before boarding his eleven-hour Jakarta flight. At the same time, an American college student flies from Nairobi to Frankfurt to Atlanta, spending hours in crowded airports before meeting his parents.
By the time we think about closing barn doors, the horse has already circled the globe. The fight begins in our own communities, because the virus has taken flight and landed long before we knew it existed.
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What is The Big One about?
The Big One (2025) challenges your assumptions about pandemics by revealing that the next global health crisis will be far worse than COVID-19. Through a gripping, scientifically-grounded scenario, it reveals the critical failures of our past response and the essential, practical steps needed to prepare for the inevitable.
Who should read The Big One?
- Policymakers and public health officials looking for future-proof strategies
- Anyone who wants to understand our past pandemic response failures
- Curious minds who enjoy science-driven narratives about major global challenges
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