HOUSTON — He's been a familiar face on TV for more than a year; a leading voice guiding us all through the dangers of COVID-19, the third coronavirus the world's seen in 17 years.
"This one was so different and so aggressively transmissible," said infectious disease and vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez.
Dr. Hotez watched the death toll climb: more than 600,000 COVID deaths in the U.S. alone. Now he wants to make sure this never happens again.
"The virus is telling us something," Hotez said. "COVID pandemics will be pretty regular. It's not a matter of if but when."
It's why Hotez wrote his new book "Preventing the Next Pandemic."
"Guess what's coming next even after we get through these variants?" said Hotez. "We'll see COVID-26, COVID-32 and we need to build that infrastructure, there's other pathogens as well, we have to up our game."
To prepare for the next one, Hotez believes we have to understand what went wrong this time.
"We knew something like this could come at anytime, but we never mobilized to fight the pandemic," Hotez explained.
Last year, he watched in disbelief as the Center for Disease Control, the world's top public health agency, didn't take the lead as coronavirus starting sweeping through the country. Instead, the public got misleading messaging from the top. That, he says, led to unnecessary deaths.
"It was enabled by defiance -- defiance over masks and social distancing and now defiance over vaccines," said Hotez.
Hotez now says preventing the next pandemic comes down to key factors like more vaccines.
"This is a high-stakes game, we have to do better," he warned.
More investment in pandemic preparation is key.
"We have to stop thinking of disease purely as public health, it goes beyond that," said Hotez. "It destabilized governments, collapses economies and now everybody gets it. They've seen the horrible impact on the global economy."
But perhaps most importantly he says we have to fight anti-science.
"The anti-vaccine, anti-science movement is a killer," said Hotez. "They dominate the Internet."
Fifty-eight-million followers and counting. That's according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate's 2020 report on the anti-vax industry. They spread bizarre conspiracy theories like vaccines come with microchips to track the population.
Hotez says lies like that cannot be allowed to continue to spread unchecked and unchallenged. That will make containing the next virus that much harder.
"It's just the beginning," Hotez said. "It's not getting better and we haven't taken steps to diffuse that."
Houston's own world-renowned vaccine expert hopes his book serves as a warning about the damage disease can do.
"With each epidemic we do get a little better," said Hotez. "But this is the motherload of all of them. This is something we're going to have put in some game-changing things in terms of infrastructure."
More than 4 million deaths worldwide. Lives upended. Ways of life changed. All caused by something so small we can't even see it.
"This will haunt us for years to come," Hotez said.