Michael Osterholm is a senior and very well respected clinician, scientist, and epidemiologist. He’s also very well-connected.
That he would publish this, at this time, and in the NYT, reflects the enormous tension that must exist today within the CDC bureaucracy. No junior scientist/epidemiologist who depends on CDC, or PHS in general for a paycheck could have ever written this.
Not really. He has published scary stories before: http://www.nyu.edu/intercep/lapietra/Osterholm_PreparingforPandemic.pdf
He had me until he said put the UN in charge of the response.