From the Editors: A ship has just weathered a storm in Willem van de Velde's painting above, After the Storm. But it's one thing to make it through a storm, and it's another to make repairs to be prepared for the next. What does it look like to make repairs to ourselves, our communities, and our country after the COVID-19 pandemic? That's a question to ask as we read Dr. Mary Talley Bowden's thoughts in this essay.
This essay was written in March 2026 and is published for the first time here.
It’s Spring Break in Texas—a routine pause, more a collective exhale than a true celebration. After months of early alarms, rushed mornings, school runs, sports juggles, and endless demands, most families arrive at this week on the brink of exhaustion. I welcome the break from the school-year grind, yet it’s forever shadowed by March 2020. That Spring Break became our generation’s Pearl Harbor: the moment the world tilted irreversibly.
Spring Break 2020 wasn’t a random accident. History is littered with biological and chemical tools wielded by tyrants—Stalin’s NKVD “Laboratory 12” perfected undetectable poisons for state enemies; ancient and modern China has long explored biological agents in conflict. The 2020 pandemic marked the first successful large-scale deployment on a global scale. The United States, through funding gain-of-function research at home and abroad, became an unwitting—or worse, complicit—partner. Then came the worldwide push to inject a supposed countermeasure into billions.
