The only thing this book has to do with preppers is that the author, a medical doctor, has spent his life on wildlife adventures and has training in that capacity as well. He has written at least one other supposed medical book for preppers and that one is all about what pharmaceutical products to have on hand and that you need to get to a hospital for the most part. Forgey is a very traditional doctor and I never get any feeling of "prepper" from his books at all.

This is a book about what was known about covid last year with a little history on past pandemics. While I'm not a full-on prepper, I am a forager, gardener, canner, herbalist, etc. and I also run a very large foraging group that has a large prepper membership. This is not the sort of book that I see any of those folks wanting and I did not find it useful for myself either.

I really couldn't find anyplace in this book that gave advice from a prepper angle. Forgey is very traditional and very pro-vaccine. He acknowledges they won't work if you are exposed to high enough amounts of the virus or if your immune system is not up to it (and that prior infection will not protect you then either) and also that some will die of adverse reactions, but he highly recommends them and says that the few deaths are for the greater good. He recommends getting to the hospital if you get Covid. There is no mention of how to do self care if you get it, other than half a sentence about rest and hydration. Instead, it's all about how variants develop, what the R factor is, how the virus replicates, etc. He recommends three-layer masks at a minimum and social distancing.

(I am not saying any of this is bad advice -- I am merely saying that none of this has anything to do with what most preppers consider prepping.)

There is absolutely nothing here for the "prep" in prepper -- no talk about storing food, water or medicine, or finding these if supplies are diminished, no survival information, no talk of the herbal medicines that have been used to treat Covid (some already with promising studies showing effectiveness), nothing like that. There is zero prepper info in this or than a small section on how to sew your own masks. I did not learn anything new, although I was already well read on Covid and the various ways vaccines and viruses work.

I'm not sure who the audience for this book is. It merits two stars from me for okay, but it's not one that I'd recommend widely.

I read a digital ARC of this book via Net Galley.

I liked this book. It discusses many aspects of infectious diseases with an emphasis on COVID-19. In terms of being for preppers, I found the book a fairly good summary without an apocalyptic feel. Dr. Forgey offers some good explanations but I did not find them complete enough, thus I feel that a background in biology is necessary to better appreciate the book. The information on aerosols and masks is very good, but I think that fomites had too large a discussion. While I found the writing to be non-technical, I didn’t really find it conversational. This could be because there is a lot packed into a relatively short book. I am also uncertain why the Great Barrington Declaration is there, as it does not reflect any sort of epidemiological consensus, but perhaps it is used as a gateway to discussing the John Snow Memorandum. The other appendices are well worth reading, including the prophetic Event 201 Recommendations, the historic yet somewhat applicable Year 1582 Manual for Social Distancing, and the comprehensive Glossary of Epidemiological Terms that goes beyond the content of the book but that shows that epidemiology is a rigorous science. The book also has some useful tips and some great links. Thank you to Netgalley and Rowman & Littlefield for the advance reader copy.

This is mostly a bunch of cut-and-paste from various sources poorly formatted and loosely organized. It does an okay job of highlighting the importance of vaccines and precautions, but there is nothing in here that would be of interest to preppers other than maybe the bit about how to make your own mask. It is a general book of things people have been hearing all along about the virus mixed with a history of pandemics and viruses in more or less bullet-point form. I lightly suspect that the author may have included the word "prepper's" in the title so that this information would find its way to those who would be reluctant to read it otherwise based on political ideologies. For that it gets two stars instead of one.

This is an excellent resource for a pandemic, not just Covid 19. Lots of statistics and graphs make this subject much easier to grasp. I liked the historical references and hope we can learn from them! This has how to’s such as “make a homemade mask”. And insight into vaccines, herd immunity and so much more. Well broken down and categorized for those of us that aren’t scientists but detailed for those who want more answers! I will purchase this once it’s published.#NetGalley #ThePrepper’sGuideToSurvivingPandemics,Bioterrorism,andInfectiousDisease