Reality vs. Fiction
Osterholm makes it clear in the text that a real pandemic would be nothing like the films:
"Let's get one thing straight about vaccines: It's not like in the disease outbreak thriller novels and movies. A bunch of scientists in a lab don't suddenly find the magic formula, bottle it up, and have a medical flying squad race to the scene and inject it into the arms of the stricken, who miraculously, recover in a matter of seconds or minutes."
Here, he uses the imagery commonly found in films about pandemics, in order to emphasize that this would not happen in real life.
Preparing a vaccine
Osterholm compares the process of making a vaccine to "growing lettuce in a field in California." This is unlike normal drugs, which are produced like "building a Chevrolet on a General Motors assembly line." He uses this imagery to explain how vaccines are "hard to make," and how the process is a lot more unpredictable than when making normal drugs.
The imagery of disease
In this text, Osterholm explores the emotional images we associate with certain diseases. For example, he argues that we think of polio as a more "emotional" disease than malaria. He argues that this is the case because we remember "pitiful images of children in leg braces, wheelchairs, and iron lungs."
