It looked like infectious diseases were conquered

Writing in the heady days of new antibiotics and immunizations, esteemed microbiologists Macfarlane Burnet and David White predicted in 1972 that “the most likely forecast about the future of infectious diseases is that it will be very dull.”¹ They acknowledged that there was always a risk of “some wholly unexpected emergence of a new and dangerous infectious disease, but nothing of the sort has marked the last fifty years.” Epidemics, it seemed, were of interest only to historians.

David S. Jones, History in a Crisis—Lessons for Covid-19, New Eng. J. Med. (April 30, 2020) (quoting Macfarlane Burnet & David O. White, Natural History of Infectious Disease, 4th ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972)