Lord acknowledges that wanting to forget about a pandemic is “understandable, but what's happened over the last 35 years or so is that historians and public health experts have realized that it's really dangerous.”

The danger in forgetting is that people lose their willingness to accept vaccination or to support efforts to find new ones. People lose faith in the ability of masks or quarantine or anything else in the public health arsenal to control disease. Even medical science and public health officials can forget, shifting their professional focus to the chronic diseases that, after all, still top the list of leading causes of death in the United States.