Instead of bird flu being a lucky near-miss wake-up call (it spawned Contagion which laid out the issue in an easy to digest movie format!), it became an excuse to hit the snooze button.
That's a bad take: even in the US the CDC built a bunch of knowledge and systems ready to respond to another epidemic like bird flu. Unfortunately it all got thrown away over the last couple of years.
Other countries that were hit by it and by SARS or MERS were ready for it.
