CNET – “Since the summer of 2019, I’ve been speaking with one of the world’s leading pandemic experts about what a global outbreak could look like. Now, as the world enters a grim new phase, he says we’re in a whole new ball game..Eric Toner has been planning for a pandemic for years. He’s briefed world leaders on outbreaks and how to best prepare entire nations for mass casualties. He’s simulated epidemics in real time and studied the world’s response to major global health emergencies like SARS and the 1918 influenza pandemic….The US response has been extraordinarily disappointing and wrongheaded,” he told me via Zoom, at the end of June. “Whenever there’s been an opportunity to do the right thing, we seem to have done the wrong thing. The US has to recognize that it is competing for first or second position of the worst affected country in the world.”…