Safer

A Playbook—Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community

By: Raj Panjabi MD

"Raj Panjabi is one of the smartest people around on health issues... and one of the best-placed people to guide us through this terrain and keep us safe." —Nicholas Kristof The only playbook you will ever need for planning and dealing with emergency situations, from floods to illness, from the acclaimed disease expert and former head of the White House Pandemic Response Team If you can’t trust authority, who can you trust? At a moment when reliable information—whether from top-down authority or from the noise of social media and AI—feels more difficult to discern, we turn to experts like Dr. Raj Panjabi to share his expertise from decades on the front lines of crisis, both global and closer to home. Here, Dr. Panjabi explains how to be safer in chaotic times by cultivating resilience, self-reliance, and community. Each chapter includes a "play" with takeaways, such as "visualize various outcomes so you can prepare for them" and "take the time to understand your inner, middle, and outer circles of connection and what they can each provide in a time of need." Learn critical information to keep yourself and your family safe, including:

• the people you’re already connected to are necessary to your safety
• a pandemic is as much about conditions as it is about contagion
• how to move past helplessness, fear, and denial and into action
• a step-by-step playbook for getting through any crisis
• the truth about Covid's origins and what we can do better next time

In exploring how we can translate the lessons of recent crises into a safer future, Dr. Panjabi shares what he has learned on the ground, taking us from the rural clinics of Liberia to the working-class cities of Massachusetts, from Alaskan fishing villages to the White House. He writes not only as a doctor navigating life and death decisions, but as a son, a father, and a husband navigating his own family’s fears and vulnerabilities. We can’t avoid viruses or personal emergencies, but if we proactively strengthen our homes and our communities, and develop safety strategies now, we can emerge from the next crisis safer and more connected than we were before. Our safety lies in our ability to move at the speed of trust.