Adapted from Safer — A Playbook: Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community by Raj Panjabi. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2026.

At the time of this writing, there is no consensus about how COVID started.

My colleagues and I tried to harness that uncertainty as a strength. Rather than waiting for certainty to arrive, we began acting in its absence. Not knowing the origins of COVID meant we were forced — as we readied the country and world for future unknown threats — to make ourselves safer from all potential causes: natural spillovers, lab accidents, and biological weapons. Through the fall 2022 and into 2023, we worked with more than 16 federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and State, the USDA, CDC, and HHS, and intelligence agencies to develop and execute the White House’s pandemic prevention plan.

Our plans were designed not just for the last crisis, but for the next one.…