Elementary control theory and epidemic spread models illustrate the deadly impacts delay in recognizing pandemic threat and failure of institutional cognition in facing that threat can have on the institutions of public health. While short delays may cause some oscillation that rapidly dies out, sufficiently large time gaps trigger multiple infection waves of increasing severity, much like the onset of a power network blackout or of uncontrollable vehicle fishtailing. Similar-and synergistic-oscillations are found to be triggered by sufficiently low rates of institutional cognition. This approach begins to lift the cultural constraints inherent to host-pathogen population dynamics models of infectious disease in social systems sculpted by the synergisms of geography, power relations, and path-dependent historical trajectory.