Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
vincent raqueniello professor of
microbiology and immunology at columbia
vincent is one of the best educators in
biology and in general that i've ever
had the pleasure of speaking with
i highly recommend you check out his
this week in virology podcast and watch
his introductory lectures on youtube in
particular the playlist i recommend is
called virology lectures 2021
to support this podcast please check out
the sponsors in the description
as a side note please allow me to say a
few words about the coveted vaccines
some people are scared of a virus
hurting or killing somebody they love
some are scared of their government
betraying them
their leaders blinded by power and greed
i have both of these fears
and two i'm afraid as fdr said a fear
itself
fear manifests as anger and anger leads
to division in the hands of charismatic
leaders who then manufacture truth in
quotes that maximize controversy and a
sense of imminent crisis that only they
can save us from
and though i'm sometimes mocked for this
i still believe that love compassion
empathy is the way out from this vicious
downward spiral of division
i personally took the vaccine based on
my understanding of the data deciding
that for me the risk of negative effects
from covid
short-term and long-term are far worse
than the negative effects from the mrna
vaccine
i read
i thought i decided
for me
but i never have
and never will talk down to people who
don't take the vaccine
i'm humble enough to know just how
little i know
how wrong i have been
and will be on many of my beliefs and
ideas
i think dogmatic certainty and division
is more destructive in the long term
than any virus
the solution for me personally like i
said is to choose empathy and compassion
towards all fellow human beings no
matter who they voted for
i hope you do the same
read
think
and try to imagine
that what you currently think is the
truth may be totally wrong
this mindset is one that opens you to
discovery innovation and wisdom
i hope my conversation with vincent
raqueniello is a useful resource for
just this kind of exploration he doesn't
talk down to people and he's the most
knowledgeable virologist i've ever
spoken to he has no political agenda no
desire to mock those who disagree with
him
he just loves biology and explaining the
fundamental mechanisms of how biological
systems work
that's a great person to listen to and
learn from with an open mind
i hope you join me in doing so and no
matter what try to put more love out
there in the world
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation with vincent
raqueniello
you mentioned in one of your lectures on
virology that there are more viruses in
a liter of coastal seawater than people
on earth
in the
nature article titled microbiology by
numbers it says there are 10 to the 31
viruses on earth
also it says that the rate of viral
infection in the ocean stands at
10 to the 23 infections per second
and these infections remove 20 to 40
percent
of all bacterial cells each day there's
a war going on
do you uh what do you make of these
numbers
why are there so many viruses so the
the numbers you're quoting they're in my
first
virology lecture right because
people don't know these numbers and they
get whoa they get wowed by them so i
love to give them
so the way they decide to interrupt
as i was saying offline you have one of
the best introductory lectures on
virology
that i've ever seen introductory
lectures period so i highly recommend
people
find you on youtube and watch it if
you're curious at all about viruses it
it um
yeah there's a lot of times throughout
watching it
i felt like whoa
yeah that's my goal is to and that's
what my students tell me one student
once said i every day after every
lecture i could go home and tell my
roommate something she didn't know
yeah and and blew her away so the number
of viruses is really an amazing number
so that number 10 to the 31 is actually
just the bacterial viruses in the ocean
so there are viruses that infect
everything on the planet including
bacteria there's a lot of bacteria in
the ocean and so 10 to the 31 is from
basically particle counts of seawater
all over the world so they're more
viruses than 10 to the 31 but just in
the ocean
and that number is so big
first of all the mass exceeds
that of elephants on the planet by a
thousand fold
and if you lined up those viruses end to
end they would go
200 million light years
into space it's so big a number
it's amazing and then yes 10 to the 20
some
infections per second of these viruses
killing bacteria and releasing all this
organic matter and that's part of this
what we call the biogeochemical pump
cycling of material in the ocean
the bacteria die
they start to sink and then they get
metabolized and converted to compounds
that that are needed a lot of it gets
released as carbon dioxide and so forth
so these are actually really important
cycles that are catalyzed by the virus
it's so wild that nature has developed a
mechanism for mass murder
about bacteria that's one way to look at
it but it's just what happened right
it's interesting i mean
i wonder what the evolutionary advantage
of like such fast cycling of life
is
is it just an accident of evolution that
viruses are so numerous
or is it um
is it is it a feature not a bug
so the the fast is
it rain it does not all fast not all
viruses are fast some are 20 minutes per
cycle some take
weeks per cycle
um
but that's just per second there's so
many viruses in the ocean that that's
what you get per second no matter how
fast the cycle is but
i look at it this way viruses were
probably the first
organic entities to evolve on the planet
long ago billions billion years ago
just as the earth cooled and organic
molecules began to form
i think these self
we call them self replicators
they're just short things that today
would look like rna which is the basis
of
many viruses right they evolved and they
were able to replicate of course they
were just naked
molecules they had no protection and it
was just rna-based
and that that's tough because rna is
pretty fragile in the in the world and
um
it probably didn't get very big as a
consequence
but then
proteins evolved and i'm skipping like
hundreds of millions of years of
evolution proteins evolved maybe without
a cell
maybe with a cell
but then
to make a cell there probably were some
rna-based cells early on but they were
pretty simple but the cells that we know
of today even bacteria and single celled
eukaryotes
they have very long dna genomes and you
need a lot of dna to make a complicated
cell and so we think at some point
the rna became dna
and probably one of the earliest enzymes
that arose
is the enzyme that could copy that rna
into dna which we now know today as
reverse transcriptase which my former
boss david baltimore and howard tement
co-discovered
and
that that enzyme arose and copied rna to
dna and then you could build big cells
with because dna can be millions and
millions of bases in length and rna the
the longest rna we know of is
40 000 bases not much bigger than the
sarsko v2 what would you say is the
magic moment along that line i saw it
was uh
one or two billion billion maybe three
billion
years it took
to go from bacteria to
to like complex organism
like it seems like earth had a very long
time
like not a very long time without life
and in a very long time with very
primitive life
um maybe i'm discriminating calling
bacteria affirmative life yeah but
people would object to you yeah doing
that for sure but it seems like complex
organ when you start becoming something
like um
i don't know what's a good uh not animal
like but
more complexity than just like a single
cell
um what what do you think is the magic
there what's the hardest thing if you're
trying to engineer earth and build a
life
and build the simulations obviously
we're living in a video game what this
is so if you're trying to build this
vehicle what's the hardest part about
long-term evolution so bacteria
are mostly single cells they do make
colonies they get together in biofilms
which are really important
but
they're all single bacteria in that and
the key is
making an organism where
cells do different things you know we
have skin cells and eye cells and brain
cells and bacteria never do that and the
reason is probably energy
bacteria don't can't make enough energy
to do that
and so
there was another cell
existing at the time the archaea
and the idea is that a bacteria went
into
an archaea and became the modern day
mitochondria
the energy factory of the cell and that
now let that cell
develop into more and more complicated
organisms like we have today it was all
about energy so the mitochondria the
energy uh the mitochondria is the magic
thing i think so it's actually not my
idea it's nick jones have you heard of
nick jones he's an evolutionary
biologist in the uk
and he's he's done experimental work on
this and it's his idea that the defining
point was
the ability to make a lot of energy
which a mitochondria can do it's
basically a whole bacteria inside of a
bigger cell and that becomes what we now
call eukaryotes and uh
that they can get more and more
complicated so let me bring you back to
the viruses i want to finish that story
yeah which points the viruses come along
so remember we have these pre-cellular
they're called pre-cellular replicons
right
and
so we have a pre-cellular stage where we
have these
self-replicating molecules and cells
arise
and then
the self-replicating molecules invade
the cells
why because it's a hospitable
environment and i mean they didn't know
that they just went in and it turned out
it was beneficial for them so it stuck
and they replicate inside the cell now
where they have pools of everything they
need they get more and more complicated
and then they steal
proteins from the cell to build a
protective shell
and then they can be released as virus
particles they're now protected they can
move from host to host
and
because they're at the earliest stages
of cellular evolution
they can diversify to infect anything
that arises and that is why i think
there's so many of them and everything
on the planet is infected because the
ancestor of everything was infected many
years ago so it's easier to steal than
to build from scratch
so like it's easier to sort of break
into somebody else's thing and steal
their proteins yes
my colleague dixon de pombiere calls
viruses safe crackers safe crackers so
it's just
uh from an evolutionary perspective it's
yeah it's it's easier to steal because
you can select but then you have to
figure out mechanisms for stealing for
breaking into from crack in the states
well you don't have to figure out it
just happens right
because molecules are so diverse that a
molecule gets into a cell and if there's
a protein that sticks to it it's going
to stick
and that gives an advantage
there's no you know there's no planning
there's no thinking about it right it
just happens
oh we'll return to that
what uh but these numbers are crazy so
what as these more complex organisms
evolved
let's take us humans as an example
uh should we be afraid of these high
numbers should we be worried that
there's so many viruses in the world
but to a certain extent i mean they have
it's twofold they're good and bad right
viruses are no there's no question they
can be bad we know that because they've
infected and caused disease throughout
history but we're also you and i are
full of viruses that don't hurt us at
all and probably help us and every
organism is the same so they are
clearly beneficial as a consequence so i
think
so every living thing on the planet has
multiple viruses infecting everything
you can see
and
most of them i think we don't worry
about
because they can't infect us they're
unable in fact
now you could actually you can actually
take your feces and send them to a
company and they will sequence your
viruses in your feces for you your fecal
firearm right
and the most
common
virus in human feces is a plant virus
that infects peppers
it's called pepper model mosaic virus
and that's because people eat a lot of
peppers and it just passes right through
you cabbage is full of viruses from the
insects that walk on the cabbage in the
fields we eat them
they just pass us so i think most of the
viruses we don't need to worry about
except when we're talking about species
that are closest to us mammals
of course
i and i think the most numerous ones are
the most concerning they're viruses like
bats bats are 20 of mammals and rodents
are 40
of mammals and we humans
live nearby right yeah and we know
throughout history many viruses have
come from bats and from rodents to
people no question about it there's a
proximity in terms of just living
together in a proximity genetically to
so it's more likely that a virus will
jump from a bat in the road and birds
too birds can give us their viruses
that's happened you know influenza
viruses come from birds mainly so i
think those are the three
species
not species it's higher than species
obviously but those are the three i
would worry about in terms of getting
their viruses and we don't really know
what's out there right we have very
little clue about what viruses and i've
for years wanted to capture wild mice in
my backyard and see what viruses they
have because no one knows
wait and it's you can't ask them so you
mean map uh like is there a way to ask
them yeah no i have to would have to
sacrifice them and take tissue and then
bring it in the lab and do genome
sequences so you can do a
thorough sequencing to determine which
viruses is there a sufficiently good
categorization of viruses where you'd be
that's a very good question so whenever
you do sequence right you get some
environmental sample and you extract
nucleic acid and you sequence it what
you do is you run it past the database
with the gold standard is the genbank
database which is maintained here in the
u.s and you see if you get any hits
and then you can say ah look this this
sequence is similar to this virus and
you can classify all the viruses you see
the problem is
of your sequence is dark matter it
doesn't hit with anything it's
probably a lot of it is unknown viruses
and that's going to be hard to figure
out because someone's going to have to
go after it and sort it through so yes
you can find a lot of viruses and the
numbers you get are astounding you can
find thousands of new viruses just by
looking in
various life forms but
there are many more that we don't pick
up because they're not in the database
maybe this is a good time to take a
quick tangent what do you think about
alpha fold too i don't know if you've
been paying attention to that
well the them uh deep mind solving the
protein folding problem
and then also releasing
first of all
open sourcing the code which is for me
as a software person that i love and
then second of all also making
like 300 000 predictions or something
like that for different protein
structures and releasing that data
yeah
so on the side of because you make
you're saying there's dark matter right
is there something
um what first what are your general
thoughts level of excitement about their
uh their work and second how can that be
applied to
viruses do you think we'll be able to
explore the dark matter of
virology using machine learning
absolutely because in all this dark
sequence you can
translate it and make a protein you can
see what a protein looks like it has
what we call an open reading frame right
a start and a stop and right now it's
just a bunch of amino acids but if we
could
fold it maybe the fold would recognize
like something we already know some
protein fold which gives you
a lot of clues right because there are
only so many protein folds in biology
and that dark matter is probably one of
them
so i think that's very exciting because
for years i followed structural
biologists
for years and
you know
in the beginning we couldn't even solve
structures of viruses they're too big we
could do small molecules like myoglobin
and that was the first one done took
years to do that and then
as computational power increased then
they could start to do viruses but it
took a long time
x-ray crystallography
it depended on getting crystals of the
virus right and now we can do
cryo-electron microscopy which is much
faster
you could solve the spike of sars cov2
was solved in two months by by jason
mcclelland here in austin actually at
the beginning of the pandemic
but you're limited you can't do
huge proteins you can only do moderately
sized ones so or
actually you can do viruses but you
can't do small proteins so that's
speeded it up but it's still too fast to
solve you get a new protein you want to
solve its structure so if we could
predict it and i know from talking to
structural biologists this has been
their holy grail from day one they want
to be able to take a sequence of a
protein put it in a computer and have
the structure put out without having to
do all the experiment so that's why this
is very exciting that yeah you can
predict it i mean it's not
finished obviously and there's more to
do but i think it will be a day where
you could take any amino acid sequence
and predict what it's going to look like
see but yeah like aren't structural
biology is going to get greedy so once
you have that don't you want to go more
complicated then don't you want to go
because that's that's just the first
step right to go from amino acid to the
structure then there's like multiple
protein interactions
like how do you get to the virus
well so that's what the ultimate goal of
getting a structure is that then you can
do experiments and figure out what the
structure means right so many
in the old days structural biology was a
career in itself you worked with people
who had a system and you solved proteins
for them and then you moved on to
another one you didn't really do any
experiments the other people got to do
all the interesting experiments right
now
young structural biologists are
multifaceted they solve the structure
and then they say what happens if we
change this amino acid oh look it it
blocks binding to the receptor this must
be the receptor binding interface so
that's the exciting stuff absolutely is
doing the experiment i wonder if you can
do some kinds of like
simulations of like
you know different proteins or
multi-protein systems going to war
against each other
like to try to figure out
you know
reinforcement learning is used in alpha
zero for example to learn chess and go
and that's using the self-play mechanism
where the thing plays against itself
sure and learns better and better yeah
whether you can i wonder if you can
simulate almost evolution in that way
for us for primitive biological systems
have them in stimulation
fight each other and then see what comes
out like a super dangerous virus comes
out or super
like chuck norris type of thing that
defends against the super dangerous
virus and it's all in simulation so an
example would be
we have all these variants of sars cov2
arising right
which which
look to be selected by
immune responses
but we now we know what amino acids are
changing in the spike
and how they block antibody bonding you
could simulate that you could say
what what is the antibody looking at you
these are where antibodies bind on
proteins are called epitopes right you
could map them all and change them in a
simulation one by one and and go back
and forth between the antibody and the
virus so all these
evolution is is what we call an arms
race right the virus changes
and then it evades the host and then the
host can change the host takes longer to
change though unfortunately it takes
geological time but it can and then the
virus can change and it can go back and
forth and we can see evidence of this
in genome sequences of both viruses and
their hosts
and so
you can take a protein
in a host that is a receptor for
multiple viruses and you can see all the
impacts of virus pressure on it and you
could simulate that for sure and that's
just one thing that you could do you
could simulate
changes in say a an enzyme that makes it
resistant to a drug and predict all the
drug resistance
but but the problem is
people like me the experimental
virologist don't know how to do any of
that so we need to collaborate with
people i guess oh with other humans
we do that we do that okay but with
people from a field that we're not used
to like i suppose people who
would it be ai i suppose yeah machine
learning people machine learning people
and you would say look
this is the biological problem is there
a way we can use your tools to attack it
the problem is those people
are
anti-social introverts
that
have a place like this and try to hide
from other people in the world very
difficult to find in the wild
um okay
so outside of doing amazing brilliant
lectures online
you
host
and produce
five i would say related podcasts
including
my favorite this week in virology also
this weekend parasitism this week in
microbiology and so on so you're a good
person to ask
what are the categories of small things
small biological things in this world
that can kill you
kill us humans
let's let's look you said like most
viruses are friendly or at least not
unfriendly right but let's look at the
unfriendly ones and viruses and bacteria
and those kinds of things when you look
at the full spectrum of things that can
kill you
can you kind of paint a brief picture
yeah i think
the the big picture is that
the things that can kill your minority
of everything that's out there and we're
talking about
molecules so we have in us
proteins that can kill us yeah prions
that are just
it's a protein in us and if it misfolds
it makes all of its other
copies misfold and then you you die of a
neurological disease yeah that's pretty
rare
um so there are proteins there are
viruses
and as i said only certain ones
can kill us
but even though if we get those from
animals it's not straightforward if you
look at sarsko v2 right this is probably
a once in a hundred year pandemic i
would say
equivalent to 1918
in its devastation and in between there
have been smaller pandemics of other
other viruses but it doesn't happen all
that often so we have a lot of viruses
we have a lot of bacteria
of various sorts that can cause
infections in us and there's this it's a
limited number right your streptococci
and staphylococci and clostridium we
could go on and on but
we know how to handle those as long as
we have antimicrobials it's just that we
abuse them and we get resistance so that
can be a problem then we have fungi
not mushrooms but much smaller fungi
that
multiply submicroscopic or just at the
microscopic level they can
you know in dry climates of the u.s you
can inhale their spores and they can
grow in your lung if you're
immunosuppressed and so forth so those
are
the tiny guys and then we have parasites
which we we do this week in parasitism
where
single cells even worms of various sorts
can invade you and cause all sorts of
problems
how um i was like kind of terrified to
listen to that podcast what uh what's it
like
i mean what you learn is that
you can you travel somewhere and you can
get infected and bring it back home yes
here in the us we do have
certain kinds of parasites but
because of our lifestyle we more or less
have avoided them for example there is a
parasite called toxoplasma
which
has is infected most of the world
actually because a lot of people like to
eat raw meat and you would get it from
from raw meat and
we're not as fond of that here in the
u.s
we like to cook our meat but that could
be a consequence of
eating raw meat is that what leads to
what is it called taxoplasmosis
yeah so toxoplasmosis
it's mainly
a big issue is if you're pregnant and
you get toxo then your fetus is going to
be
very badly malformed it's going to have
brain defects and so forth
and
animals can get it as well
so there are a lot of parasites of that
nature which you often acquire by food
eating food of different sorts and it
usually happens elsewhere we just on
this week in parasitism we do
a case so daniel griffin is a resident
physician he's a doctor a real doctor
right and he every month he comes up
with a case okay this is a person i saw
and last month this young lady had
traveled somewhere
and
she ate
raw fish
she was just somewhere southeast asia or
something and she ended up with
with with red bumps all over her skin it
turned out was a parasite from the fish
that moved around in her and and they're
very easy to cure
we have you have to write doctors and
the right drugs you can cure all these
what about diagnose like connect the red
spots to the fact that it's a parasite
it's very easy to if you have the right
diagnostics now daniel often goes to
parts of the world where they don't have
diagnostics and he has to
use other mechanisms he may have to take
a bit and look at it under a microscope
and then he may not be able to get the
drug depending on where he is
but if these but often he sees patients
who come back to the us and they get
diarrhea or they have a fever and he
said where have you been and he can put
two and two together and so we let our
listeners do that and they all send in
guesses and it's wonderful to hear them
go through this so there are a lot of
parasites puzzle and solvent that can
get you you have to be careful about
eating when you go overseas and water
too water as well and you know in parts
of africa there are parasites in the
lakes that if you go swimming they can
invade you and in fact it can go into
your hair follicles and burrow in and
get into your bloodstream that's
exciting so um daniel is interesting
because he's very adventurous he doesn't
he's not afraid of any of this
so there's a famous lake in africa lake
malawi
where which harbors a lot of these
parasites and he said oh yeah yeah i
just make sure i towel off vigorously
when i get out
and get yours get rid of them and that
was the name of an an episode but you
know food
vigorously you know sushi you can uh you
can get worms from sushi yeah and the
solution is to freeze it
and many sushi restaurants now have
liquid nitrogen they snap freeze their
sushi and that kills all the parasites
and a study was actually done
in japan showing that freezing does not
alter the taste of sushi because oh wow
except you see a big industry yeah
that's brilliant
yeah um i i was thinking about
you know i'm so boring and bland
that especially when i am now in texas
here and i've been eating quite a bit of
barbecue i realized i really haven't
explored
the culinary world
and i've been curious to travel and
taste different foods is there something
you can say by way of
advice uh you know channeling daniel i
guess if you were to travel in the world
if eating is the thing that gets you the
parasites
what's good advice for eating
in uh strange parts of the world
mongolia india china
is there something you could say by way
of advice i think daniel would say make
sure your food is cooked
right but that's so boring yeah it's
unfortunate and he would agree with you
because you know many vegetables are
delicious salads even are delicious not
cooked but they can have parasites in
them meats fish people like to have
uncooked fish
so if you want to be really safe and
boring just make sure everything is
cooked now we have a case this week on
twip
of a young man who went
i forgot where he went but he stayed in
a hotel i think he oh oaxaca mexico
stayed in a hotel
and he said to dan he came back with
diarrhea and fever
and he said i don't know where i stayed
in the hotel i just ate hotel food lots
of vegetables and fruits and
probably they weren't washed with clean
water you know he got something from
that
the bottom line is most of these
infections with parasites can be
diagnosed and you can be treated and
you'll be fine
so if you really want to
experience the cuisine i don't think you
should worry about it that's what daniel
would say let's return to the basics
we're gonna jump around all over the
place
what are the basic principles of
virology maybe a good place to start is
what is a virus that's great i mean i
talk in my first lecture for 20 minutes
before i get to that
but and i wonder if i should put it up
front but it's kind of a boring
definition so if you do that first
people will turn off so first you tell
them about all the millions and billions
of viruses around so a virus we have a
very specific definition
because it's different from everything
else on the planet
um because first of all it's a parasite
it takes a parasite means you take
something from someone else you know we
have human parasites who take money from
others right but in biological terms
a parasite takes something from the host
that the host would otherwise use energy
or some building block or something
there's never really a symbiotic
relationship between a virus and a host
well there there can be so that's the
dichotomy i think is that we define them
as parasites yet i just told you 20
minutes ago that many viruses are
probably beneficial
so i think
what it means is we at some point we're
going to have to change our definition
right because
after all definitions we make are just
constructs that make it easier for us to
study that not necessarily represent
what's right yeah right like uh like
pluto was a planet at first and now it's
not a planet anymore and a lot of people
are very upset but it's only according
to us there may be another race living
somewhere else who thinks it's a planet
right well maybe that's why viruses are
attacking humans they're very angry they
weren't uh calling them parasites so
right now our definition includes
parasite
because a virus cannot do anything
without a cell
if i if this mug were full of viruses it
would not do anything
for years it would eventually probably
lose its infectivity but it's not going
to reproduce here it needs cells
and you know to the first people who
discovered viruses that was astounding
that they didn't just reproduce divide
on their own like bacteria so a virus
needs to get inside of a cell
inside the cell it can't just hang
around on the surface it needs to get in
in order to make more of itself and so
we call it an obligate intracellular
parasite because it needs to get in a
cell and then it takes things
from the cell in the form of all kinds
of molecules and processes and energy
and so forth to make new viruses
obligate means it's obligated to be
inside the cell absolutely it will not
reproduce outside of the cell so this
mug of viruses is can in no way be
living in my opinion however once it
gets inside of a cell now the cell is a
virus infected cell it's alive so a
virus in my view has two phases right
it's this non-living particulate phase
that everyone is used to
yeah i'll send you you need a virus for
your table i'll send you a nice model i
think it would look good here yes you
have to go with all this other stuff
yeah well these are all mechanical
there's no biology here so you wouldn't
want a virus here no i'd want to buy of
course i'll send you one and look at
that you can look at it because now that
we have the three-dimensional structures
solved by structural biologists we take
the coordinates so we put it in a 3d
printer and you can make amazing models
right
of any virus and so there's a huge
variety of viruses huge that we know of
yeah which is only a fraction of what's
out there what's the categories so
there's rna there's dna viruses what
what are those what's dna and rna two
two
broad categorizations rna and these are
genetic material it can be two different
chemicals
so rna
everything else on the planet besides
viruses is all dna based you and i are
dna based everything on the planet today
is dna based except some viruses are rna
based and that's because
as i mentioned earlier the first
life that arose on the planet was
rna-based yeah so these are like
old-school viruses they're old-school
these are we call relics yeah they're
relics and this has got a name it's
called the rna world which i think is
great is it big still or they are the
relics dying out oh no the relics in my
opinion are the most successful viruses
the rna viruses and the source cov2 is
an rna virus we can talk about why
they're so successful but you have
broadly speaking viruses with rna
genetic information which are relics
of course they're contemporary they have
adapted to the modern world
and the modern organisms living in it
and then we have dna based viruses which
are extremely conservative
and slow they're very successful you
know everyone has a herpes virus
infection but
they
they don't get the news like the rna
viruses do the hivs and the influenza
viruses and the um sars coronaviruses
they get all the press and they're
rna-based because rna lets you change
more so than dna so they they've evolved
much faster rna viruses much faster and
in fact when i i have an electron
evolution i don't know if you've
listened to that one you should it's
really i think it's really interesting
rna viruses exist
at
their error threshold
which means they can't make any more
mutations when they reproduce otherwise
they're dead
they don't extinct they're evolving at
their error threshold
dna viruses are hundreds of times lower
than their error thresholds
and we know this we can do an experiment
to find that out now why that is is a
good question
but uh
that's that's the reason why rna viruses
are far more successful they infect many
more hosts and they're very i would say
slippery they can change hosts really
quickly because in any animal harboring
an rna virus
like let's say a bat in some cave
somewhere it's not just one genome it's
it's millions of different genomes of
all
kinds with all within the framework of
say coronavirus but they're all
different and one genome in there might
just be right for infecting a person if
it ever encountered that person i mean
that's the thing that well there could
be a large number this is a tiny
fraction but a large number of uh of
them and they're all operating at the at
the threshold of
error that's right that's fascinating
it's like a little like uh it's like
startups little entrepreneurs like a
startup world yes and many of them fail
yeah many of the changes and then
there's the dna of ours that are like
the ibm and exactly exactly big
corporations it's very good conservative
with the bureaucracies and all that kind
of stuff so there's a lot of baggage
yeah yeah it's expensive for them to
reproduce yeah and they don't move
quickly yes the rna viruses are the
fast-moving
members so that's what a virus is we
call them
obligated intracellular parasites and
then i told you there's dna in rna but
then let's go further
the the nucleic acid is not naked
because naked nucleic acid in the world
isn't good i mean it it existed in the
in the pre-cellular world but there
probably weren't a lot of threats to it
then
naked nucleic acid doesn't last long in
the environment so they're they're
covered the nucleic acid is covered it
can be covered with a protein shell a
pure protein shell
or it can have a membrane around it
which would be uh lipids from the host
cell
so
lipids so it's a fatty membrane fatty
membrane yeah so our cells are
coated with fatty membranes right our
cells the outer plasma membrane right
that's the same viruses can be too so
they're kind of like cells but without
the ability to do the mitochondria stuff
some some are some they don't have
nuclei they don't have mitochondria yeah
but they do have a nucleic acid they
have a membrane and then of course there
are spikes in the membrane
that allow them to attach to cells
and so that completes our two different
kinds so they have they all have like
attachment mechanisms like ways to
like keys into the into the city they
all have to get into cells there are
there are a couple of exceptions though
uh there are viruses of fungi
uh and uh plants
so let's do the fungi fungi would be
like yeast
the virus yeast cell wall is pretty hard
to get through so viruses typically
don't attach to a yeast and get inside
rather they just live in the yeast
forever yeah and they multiply as mostly
nucleic acids and as the yeast divide
they go into the daughter cells and
that's how they exist plant viruses also
the plant cell wall
would be very hard to get across with a
by binding a protein
so plant viruses get into plants either
by
pests that inject them in
they're sucking sap out and they inject
virus at the same time or farmers they
have contaminated farm equipment and
they roll over the plants and introduces
viruses so those fungi and plant viruses
they don't have this specific receptor
binding to get them into the cell but
everything else yeah the virus binds to
something on the surface very specific
it's taken into the cell because that's
what cells do
when things bind their exterior
they take it in because in most cases
it's good it's something they need
and so the virus slips in i guess you'd
call that a trojan horse right frozen
horse it's so hard to not
anthropomorphize this whole thing it is
hard so obviously they don't know any of
this
it's not an actual trojan horse
so that they
they're not getting actually tricked in
the way humans trick each other
no it's all passive and it's just
through so many years of evolution it's
you select something that works
and
it continues and what survives then goes
on with the
uh perhaps a slightly different approach
i love this idea of past of course
according to sam harris uh so from a
sufficiently intelligent alien
civilization observing humans our
behavior might seem passive too because
they understand fully exactly what we're
doing and then there's no free will and
we're all just operating in the same way
it could be a cell does which is a much
higher level of complexity
yeah so i love the distinction between
active and passive i mean the point is i
think anthropomorphizing to a certain
extent is fine because it helps people
understand
but when you start to say i think the
virus is doing that because then you're
putting a human
lens on it and you may be wrong
yeah because you don't know why things
happen
for a virus
so right now we have variants emerging
and people say well i think it's because
the antibodies are selecting for
variants
that's a good idea but it may not be the
only thing that's going on you start
imagining them coming to the table
negotiating
yeah
you get into trouble with that that's
right that's why i tell my students be
careful about the anthropomorphizing
because
you're going to apply your values to a
virus and you have different value
you're human and you have
what you think is the reason for this
outcome may not be right that's all just
be open-minded yeah about it in both
directions i actually one of the things
that push back
on is in in the space of robotics people
most people in robotics try to not
anthropomorphize for example they don't
give a gender or a name to robots they
really try to see it as a machine and to
me that makes sense in one in one way
but it totally doesn't make sense in
another if that robot is to interact
operate in the human world and interact
with humans
we have to we have to anthropomorphize
it
in order to understand
as an engineering problem
how should it operate in a human world
now the difference with viruses the
scale of operation
it doesn't make sense to treat them as
human-like because the scale of
operations is much smaller but with
robots you're on the same sure time
scale the same spatial scale of course
in the movies they always give them
names and personalities yeah well yeah
that's the move but that's my argument
is we should do the same when you're
trying to solve the engineering problem
of robotics too it's not just for the
movies well let me ask you this because
you've said
controversially not really that uh
viruses are not living
um
defend yourself
so are viruses alive or not so i've seen
many people say oh they have to be they
they have nucleic acids they evolve they
mutate
that's all true but they don't do it on
their own the particles in my mug are
just not doing any of that unless they
get into a cell
so a virus infected cell is alive i
totally agree with that because in fact
when a virus gets in a cell it converts
it into a virus making
factory if you will it's no longer a
cell it's a some people call it a viral
cell i don't really like that but it's
fine
so that's what i'm talking about the
particle is not alive you can have your
virus infected cell as as alive but the
particle it just would not do anything
forever without getting inside of a cell
well once it's in the cells
it it is alive then but it's no longer a
particle it's taken apart and nucleic
acid is moving around the cell it's
making proteins eventually it makes new
particles and then those particles
released from the cell they're not
living anymore so
it's kind of i think it's kind of like a
spore a spore of a
or a seed
although the seed just doesn't work
because the seeds the cells in the seed
have the ability to make their own
energy and so forth
but a bacterial spore and it's the same
thing doesn't do anything unless you add
water and nutrients and then it starts
to divide but it doesn't need to get
into a cell it's very different from a
virus so that's why the particle
and when people think of virus
they're always thinking of the particle
and that's why i say it can't be alive
because the particle can't do anything
on its own but if you think of a virus
as an organism with a particle phase and
a part in a cell then it makes sense to
be alive
and by the way when you say particle
you're referring to that structure that
you've been mentioning so right membrane
and not that that's that's been called
what is a viron particle or something
so what you should have here i'll send
you one and then you can refer to what's
the sexiest one to have like what what
in terms of particles to have on the
table well unfortunately the ones that
you can 3d print
oh they're not going to be so they're
they're only they're the ones that we
know the structures of right so someone
sent me
last year a 3d model of source cov2 and
it's beautiful it's actually cracked
open so you can see the rna and the
spikes are sticking out and they even
put some antibodies sticking onto the
spikes and that's i mean when i show
this on a live stream people love this
thing oh my god that's beautiful it is
it's absolutely gorgeous i have that i
have my virus that i worked on most of
my career polio virus i have a 3d model
of that which i actually just had made
it's gorgeous and you can have it made
in any color you want right what would
you say
is the most fascinating
terrifying surprising beautiful virus to
you so
of all the viruses you looked at
sometimes when you just sit late at
night with a glass of wine looking over
the sunset which virus do you think
about
so
fulfilling all of those adjectives is
hard
right fascinating
exciting terrifying well the terrifying
is an optional one i think because
maybe that puts a lot of pressure i see
terrifying
to me
i'm not terrified because i think we can
handle
as most viruses as you see with this
brand new one that emerged a year ago
where we can handle it
from a virology perspective yeah i mean
the human perspective is a different
story right that's always an issue but
um
so i i think
there are a couple of different
categories of virus so we could do the
the terrifying and i think rabies is a
terrifying virus because unless you're
vaccinated
certainty you're going to die
so you get bitten by a rabid raccoon or
bat or dog whatever
and you know and there's still 70 000
deaths a year of rabies throughout the
world because there are a lot of feral
dogs running around that are infected
unless you're vaccinated you're going to
die there's nothing we can do but we do
have a vaccine which we can actually
give you
even after you've been bitten which is
the only
vaccine that works that way
it's a therapeutic right it will treat
your illness because the disease takes
so long to develop
you know eventually you get all kinds of
neurological issues and
paralysis and so forth but it takes time
and you can be vaccinated it will
prevent that in the meanwhile so people
always say what's the most lethal virus
is it ebola i said no it's actually
rabies unless you're vaccinated it will
kill you
maybe it's good to linger because we'll
talk about vaccines a few times today
it's good to linger
on cases where vaccines have clearly
undoubtedly helped human civilization
and it seems like uh rabies is a good
example oh rapist is great because
everyone knows what happens when
somebody gets rabies right
you have fear of water
hydrophobia
your body becomes and stiff and
jerks around and
you lose consciousness you can't
no no more not a fun ride to death it's
horrible it's a horrible way to die
so i think most people know that it's
been popularized enough in in media
right so that nobody would probably
object to getting
oh i was just bit by this raccoon and it
ran off
okay well we should assume it's rabid we
should immunize you and most people are
okay with that yeah because they know
the consequences and it's also pretty
rare
right it's not like something that
you're trying to get into the arms of
you know
three 250 300 million americans that's
hard but yeah the the the few thousand
every year is easy so the
transmissibility is difficult right it
has to
oh it's not it's not airborne so now
you're bored it just has to be you have
to be bitten although some some people
claim you could
walk into a cave
and the bats you know breathing out
rabies virus could infect you but i
don't really think that's well that's
well substantiated yeah i think it's a
bike how would you do a study on that
yeah it's very hard to do you'd have to
collect the vapors in the cave and show
that they're infectious which
and by the way someone emailed me the
other day you'll like this they say why
can't we just immunize all the bats in
the world
against these viruses and i said well
how would you do that there's caves
everywhere right yeah
he said well maybe you could just go and
aerosolize that
yeah it's pretty dangerous and then and
then all the bats should have vaccine
passports to make sure that they're yeah
so you have to get their consent before
you do it
but
you we do
immunize wildlife against rabies
we have rabies vaccines for wild animals
there are a whole bunch of them that get
rabies
and we put it we put it in bait and drop
it from helicopters in the woods and it
drops down the incidence of rabies and
people wow you know people hiking get
bitten and so forth it drops the
incident so we can do that i didn't know
that i always wondered how much medical
care are we doing for animals in the
wild because
i've recently become more and more aware
that animals are living in extreme
poverty
right like you don't know you think like
natural it's great
um you know like uh like when animals
are living on a farm it's terrible but
then you also have to compare to like
what life is like and or like the zoo
you have to compare what life is like in
in the wild
life in the wild is very tough i think i
mean most animals have to well the
carnivores anyway they have to catch
their food every day yeah right and then
there's the viruses there and viruses as
well so the rabies immunization is the
only
one i'm aware of for wild animals um
we do immunize lots of other
animals we immunize
chickens and pigs and cows
even fish farmed fish we
pick each fish up and give it an
injection you know when it's a small
fish
but that's mostly
so that the farmers get a good yield we
don't really care about the animals
right we want a good yield for
market and then there's some examples
where we
immunize animals to prevent
spillovers into
people so there's a disease called
hendra in australia
which
was
discovered in the 90s it turns out that
there are bats fruit bats that have this
virus and the bats are fine
but sometimes they flying into horse
stalls
and the horses get infected these are in
australia it was initially race horses
which are very expensive right
the horses got infected and they died
and the humans who would take care of
them would die also so now they immunize
the horses
to prevent the well to save the horses
probably that's the motivation because
these horses are hundreds of thousands
of dollars right and then the people
don't get sick because the horses don't
get sick you don't want to immunize all
the people because it's too rare but
that approach is called one world health
approach which means everything's
connected on the planet
and we have to think of everything in
the grander scheme not just us
yeah so you can immunize some things
along the trajectory that a virus would
take exactly so something some living
beings
in the arabian peninsula they have a
mers coronavirus issue every month there
are a couple of cases where a camel
will infect the human and the human can
get very sick
it's respiratory disease very very much
like covid
and so
camels are very common there they're
used they're raced they're used as pets
they're eaten
so there's a lot of human camel contact
but the number of cases are rare two to
a month so you don't want to immunize
all the humans so the idea would be to
immunize the camels
so i like it so okay so you put rabies
but ebola
uh also is a famously deadly one right
what is it it kills like i don't know 50
60 percent of it could be 50 to 90 but
that's in africa where the health care
isn't great what you saw when they when
cases of ebola came to the u.s
we were we could take care of it we knew
how to take care of we had fancy
hospitals and so forth and now we have a
vaccine so
we can and the vaccine is really good
but there are many governments in africa
who that are suspicious of of us and
they don't want to use our vaccines so
that they so there's a vaccine for ebola
there is yeah and uh
the effectiveness and safety of it to
how much is understood so
this is difficult because there's not a
lot of ebola right
it's not a continuous ongoing thing
there are sporadic outbreaks here and
there of a few thousand people at most
at most usually a few hundred and
the biggest ever
in fact this is why we didn't for years
have an ebola vaccine the us military
together with canada developed an ebola
vaccine for service people right they
wanted to say well we're sending people
into these ebola areas we want a vaccine
for them so they had developed it
through
all the pre-clinical which means before
it goes into people
and that stopped because there was no
money to do a phase one and a phase two
and a phase three in fact for phase two
and three you need to have infections
going on because you're looking at how
well the vaccine prevents infections
right so then there was a west african
outbreak in 2015
2013 2015. the most cases ever 25 000 so
they got to test the vaccine
but
they only put it in a few thousand
people it's not like it's been in
hundreds of thousands of people like the
covid vaccines has been so
it's it looks like it's it has high
efficacy
um but we'd like to have more data
side effects may be are not so great
there are a couple of different
available vaccines some have been tested
more than others
i would say
this would probably not be widely
accepted in the u.s
but then
neither would be
something over 50
uh deadliness of a virus no i think if
you are in fact many physicians work in
countries that have ebola so they get
vaccinated because they understand the
choice yeah right it's always about the
choice um so
so then one more thing to answer the
interesting
what are some of the viruses you really
are fascinated by
there are
a number of viruses that
have clearly been shown to alter host
behavior and that's how they spread
i think those are fascinating for
example
there are some viruses of plants
that are spread by aphids
and the aphid bites the plant the virus
reproduces in the plant and it somehow
engineers the plant to give off volatile
organics
to attract more aphids which will spread
the virus
isn't that amazing
yeah so that's altering the behavior
altering because somehow the virus
infecting the plant cells gives off
these organics and it contracts aphids
and furthermore
somehow the when the aphid bites it
tastes horrible so they immediately
leave with the virus they've just picked
up and go to another plant to spread it
so they're attracted and then repulsed
at the same time and obviously you don't
want to anthropomorphize this like a
strategy they're taking on somehow this
worked out it worked out this way it
just evolved and you know evolution is
sometimes hard to trace right
like
darwin famously said he could never
figure out how an eye evolved from a
single cell right but
it did
the more complicated complex the the
holistic organism is that the virus
invades
the less able it is to control that
organism right so i wonder if there's
viruses that can control human behavior
um
you know to
induce
more spread of the virus
well i don't see why not there's not
enough humans i supposed to like evolve
through well we can't do the experiment
to test it right we have to observe and
that's always hard when you're observing
because there's so many things that can
confound
what you're looking at change human
behavior yeah i mean there's so many
things that impinge on our behavior but
um yeah it's i think it's possible um i
think it's highly possible if it does it
in a plant why not change some other
organisms behavior i think it's fine
anyway those fascinate me there are lots
of examples of those
that are fascinating and how they work
people are trying to figure out but
there's not a lot of money to work on
you know insect and plant viruses unless
you're going to the usda so they don't
get a lot of
uh work moving forward well is there if
you understand some of those viruses is
that transferable to human viruses that
understanding i think some of it could
be sure i think the general principles
for example how the
how does the virus cause volatile
organics to be made it must be turning
on some genes
and you could learn principles from that
how the virus might do that sure i think
everything is broadly applicable so to
say
it's not useful to study
viruses of insects and plants is just
wrong because in science you probably
know this maybe in your field it's the
same
if you're curious you're going to run
into interesting things that you never
planned on right that's why people like
you can criticize uh why do we want to
go on mars why do we colonize mars
well it's like why do you want to go to
the moon
the the reality is when you do really
difficult things
yeah engineering things like all these
inventions along the way are created
it's kind of fascinating how basically
just
pick a
pick a thing that everyone can agree
it's kind of cool and it's really hard
and do that and then you'll have like
thousands of inventions that have
nothing to do with the thing that's
right i think you should let
curious scientists just follow what
they're interested in to a certain
extent you can't
you know in science we say we have
translational research where we say okay
here's some money go cure cancer or
diabetes or heart disease whatever right
and that's fine but that often doesn't
work out very well what works better is
to say here you're you have a good lab
you have a good track record here's some
money
or something and that's where pcr
crisper recombinant dna all that stuff
which has made the field explode that's
all it came from not from people saying
i want to cure genetic diseases by gene
editing but by saying what are these
repeated things in this bacterium doing
yep
can ask you a big philosophical question
so there's these deadly viruses they're
not very transmissible
ebola rabies and then there's these less
deadly viruses that are very
transmissible
um
like uh like covid is i guess kind of
borderline
but
uh why isn't there
super transmissible super deadly viruses
i think if you compare stars one and two
you get
somewhat of an answer right sars one was
more deadly
in fact
over half of the time
when people were infected
they ended up in the hospital because
they were that sick
and then
the peak of virus shedding from them
happened long after they went in the
hospital so it's easy to contain
uh the infection when you're in a
hospital right
there was not much
pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic
shedding with sars1 and shedding means
you you're in you become infectious so
in a respiratory virus you're you inhale
the droplets with virus and they they
reproduce in your upper respiratory
tract what we call the nasopharynx right
the nose and going back to that little
cavity just above your mouth
so the virus reproduces really well and
then as you talk and sneeze and cough
you expel droplets and then those are
inhaled by other people and then they
reproduce and
for sars 2 we now know there's a lot of
reproduction just before you feel
anything if at all so there's a lot of
shedding and transmission before you get
symptomatic and many people don't ever
get symptomatic right so they spread
really easily
so that explains why some viruses can
transmit a lot better than others and if
one happens to knock you out
then you're never going to transmit
because you're in the hospital like sar
as one but why can't you have both why
can't you just wait a while before he
knocks you out but when it knocks you
out it really kills you that's that is a
philosophical question right because
we could talk about why we haven't
observed it i mean one one issue is that
if you uh
if you're killed too quickly by a highly
lethal virus
you're not going to transmit it very
well right so ebola can kill you quite
rapidly
and most of the transmission occurs
when people are being cared for at home
or in hospitals the doctors and nurses
get virus but people walking around
you're not walking around when you have
ebola you're too sick
you know you have black bloody diarrhea
you're vomiting you're
you're bleeding from your skin and
mucous membranes you're not walking
around not going to parties so
i think that's part of it that if if the
infection is too lethal you're simply
not a good transmitter and i think
transmission is probably one of the most
powerful selection
forces for viruses because of ours
always has to have find a new host if it
doesn't
it's a startup that fails right if it
doesn't find a new host it's gone and so
anything that makes the virus transmit
better
is going to help it and if killing you
being less lethal is part of that that
works too so there's a strong selection
pressure against being lethal i think
there's a strong selection of
pressure against being lethal and
being more transmissible
those two
seem to work in opposite ways and now we
don't have a lot of data to support this
this is kind of a
thought
experiment but there is one
experiment done in australia
many years ago i don't know if you know
this but
in the 1800s the hunters in australia
imported a rabbit from europe so they
could hunt it
because the native rabbit in australia
was too fast for them they couldn't
shoot them so they brought in this
european rabbit
and they they reproduced out of control
within a couple of years they were
everywhere millions of rabbits and all
the watering holes
and now they had a problem so they
decided to use a virus to get rid of
these excess rabbits
and they used a virus a pox virus called
mixoma virus which is a natural virus of
a different kind of rabbit but for these
european rabbits it was quite lethal and
it's spread by mosquitoes so they said
okay let's let's uh release this virus
and the first year
99.2 of the rabbits were killed
but that point eight percent that were
left
had some form of resistance they were
variants you know every organism not
just viruses makes mutants and there
were some variants of the rabbits that
could survive infection and then in
subsequent years the virus became less
lethal and then
the mosquitoes had a better shot of
transmitting it from one rabbit to
another if the rabbit lived longer
that's the selection probably and so in
the end the rabbits lived on the virus
was there it evolved to be more
transmissible and less
uh
lethal so that is amazing that's the
only data that's amazing it is it is if
you take the time to
look at it and see what's happened it is
amazing it's also humbling that it just
makes you realize humans are just a
small part of the picture of course
and we're wrecking it aren't we
well i mean that's that
we're not really
i mean viruses are wrecking it some way
it's part of this we're not really
wrecking anything it's all part of it
but you know when
the ways that human exists encourages
viruses to infect us right when we were
hunter-gatherers living in bands of 100
people very few viruses because it was
hard for the virus to go from one band
to another and perhaps a hunter would
one of these humans would get an animal
and bring a virus at the camp and some
people would die but it would never
spread
to another and then when we started to
congregate in cities we figured out
agriculture and so forth and how to
harvest animals then we could get bigger
and bigger populations and the viruses
went crazy and they went from animals to
us so measles went from cows to humans
when humans learned to domesticate cows
and and started gathering in big cities
yeah but now that humans are able to
communicate and travel globally
the viruses become more and more
dangerous transmissible
thereby if you look at earth as an
organism thereby pushing humans to be
more innovative
create alpha fold two and three and four
and five create better systems and
eventually there's rockets that keep
flying from earth and eventually
uh the virus is becoming super dangerous
and threatening all of human
civilization will force it to become a
multi-planetary species and this
organism starts expanding so i think
it's a feature not a bug i don't know
um well i think that we have
our early probably the most of the when
we're studying viruses since 1900 right
most of that time was because of
diseases they caused the first viruses
discovered yellow fever
virus smallpox
poliovirus
influenza virus
those were all because people got sick
and they said oh look this is a virus
that's associated with it and so we got
good at learning how to take care of
these infections making vaccines and so
forth over the years and it's only in
the last 20 years that we recognize that
there are more viruses out there that
are far more interesting perhaps but
we've learned how to deal with the bad
ones for sure so we talked about what is
a virus
we talked about some of the most
dangerous and deadly viruses can we zoom
in and talk about
covin-19 virus sure i don't know what
your preferred name is but well
right the virus is cov2 which is hard
it's long right and then covet 19 is the
disease so you could say the virus of
covet 19 that's fine it's a virus of
cova-19 but for the purpose of this
conversation we'll every once in a while
i'll just say kovid it's fine no problem
what is this virus from uh
i don't know how many ways we can talk
about it i think from a basic structural
like the the varian
structure
biological structure perspective what is
it what are its variants
can you describe the basics the
important characteristics of the virus
so viruses are classified by humans just
to make it easier to keep track of them
right so this is a corona virus which is
because
when they were first
discovered
i think the first ones were animal
coronaviruses
they looked at them in the electron
microscope and it looked like the solar
corona and that's all there is to it and
i have to say that
early in the outbreak the the
place with the highest cereal positivity
in the u.s for a while 68
was a working-class neighborhood in new
york city called corona
can you can you beat that right that's
crazy yeah so coronaviruses they have
membranes right we talked about
membranes they have spiked proteins in
the membrane so they can attach to cells
and inside they have rna
and they are the viruses with the
longest rna that we know of no none
other comes close
for some reason
they're able to maintain thirty thousand
so sars cov2 rnas thirty thousand bases
of rna and some of the other coronas are
even longer 40 000. this is a
coronas our family of viruses that
included
the
what the the one you mentioned before
version one cesares kovi one yeah kobe
one and i guess other ones so the first
we first learned of them in animals a
lot of animals pigs and
uh
cows and horses have coronaviruses and
then
uh in their 60s we discovered a couple
of human coronaviruses that just caused
colds very mild colds that you wouldn't
even think twice about right
and then suddenly
in 20
2003 there's this outbreak of
severe respiratory disease in in china
and you know they it started in november
and they didn't tell the world until
february
and
that was really bad because it was
already spreading by the time they
told people about it but
this
went to many 29 different countries only
8 000 people were infected and then it
stopped
and that was the first time we saw
an epidemic coronavirus and it what they
did afterwards is they said okay
it looks like it came from the meat
markets they have live meat markets in
guangzhou in the south of china
where you can go and pick out an animal
and the guy will
slaughter it for you and give it to you
and then of course there's blood
everywhere and that's how they got
infected and they figured out that
there's this animal called a palm civet
that was the source of virus the palm
civets are shipped in from the
countryside and they the palm civ
somehow in the countryside got it from a
bat so they went looking in caves in the
countryside and they found in one cave
all the viruses that could make up
saurus one
and that was 2000 and well i would say
took about five eight years after that
outbreak so that was the
first
hint that bats have coronaviruses that
can infect people and cause problems
right
and after that we should have been ready
so didn't they already start developing
vaccines yes so some people started
making vaccines they tested them in in
mice
but they never got into people
and some people started working on
anti-viral drugs
nothing ever came of them
you know industry there's no there's no
disease it's gone why should we make
vaccines and drugs and nih in the u.s
you submit a grant and they say it's too
risky there's no none of this virus
around so people were really
short-sighted because i always say we
could have had
antivirals for this absolutely yeah for
sure no question in fact one the one
antiviral that's in phase three it's
called
molnu pyravir
it's the only one that you can take
orally it's a pill it looks really good
that was developed five years ago but
never taken into humans it could have
been ready
so we dropped the ball
and then the next decade 2012 mers
coronavirus comes
comes up in the arabian peninsula this
comes from
camels and infects people but probably
the camels got it from bats originally
some time ago
but that never transmits
from person to person very rarely
every new little outbreak is a new
infection from a camel
so that was 2012 and now here we are
2019 a new outbreak of respiratory
disease in china
and this one really
goes all over the world
where sars one could not it's a
coronavirus you know it's different
enough from sars one that it has very
different properties but it still has a
membrane still has a very long
rna in the middle and then it still has
the spike proteins that's right what are
the things that are what are the little
unique things
that make it
that much more effective
to make it cause a pandemic of millions
of people as opposed to sars one yeah
well the genome
is
20 different from source one say and in
those bases there's some there are
things that uh make it different from
soros one it binds the same receptor
ace2 on the cell surface so that's
remarkable
it has a lot of the same proteins
they look similar like if you look at
the structure of the spikes they look
similar but there's enough amino acid
differences to to make the biology and
what it is we don't know because
how do you figure that out you need to
study animals because you can't infect
people and the the animal models aren't
great you know for for so the way you
figure that out is you figure out how
those differences
what functional like how the difference
in the amino acids lead to functional
difference of the virus like how it
attaches how it breaks the cell wall
exactly and how the hell do you figure
that out like i guess there's models
of interaction you need uh first you
need an animal of some kind to infect
right you can use mice people have used
ferrets
guinea pigs
non-human primates
all of the above and non-human primes
are very expensive so not many people do
that
um and then you can put the virus in the
respiratory tract but in fact
none of them get sick like people do you
know
many people with with kovid get a mild
disease but 20 percent get a very severe
longer-lasting disease and they can die
from it right no animal does that yet so
we have no insight into what's
controlling that but if you just want to
look at the very first part of infection
and the shedding and the transmission
you can do it in any one of several
animal models ferrets are really good
for transmission they tend they have
nasal structures like humans and they
you can put them in cages next to each
other and they'll transmit the virus
really nicely so you can study that
but the other thing that's important
that we should mention
is how do you manipulate these viruses
so these are rna viruses
you can't manipulate rna we don't know
how to do it
but we dna
because of the recombinant dna
revolution that
occurred in the 70s we can change
dna any way we want we could change a
single base we can cut out bases we can
put other things in really easily
and
if i may
give it a personal aspect when i went to
mit as a postdoc in 1979
david baltimore said here's what i want
you to do
the the moratorium on recombinant dna
experiments on viruses has just been
lifted i want you to make a dna copy of
polio
and see if you put that in a cell
whether it will start an infection
it's okay
so
i made a dna copy of poliovirus it's
only 7500 bases it's much smaller than
corona
and i took that dna and i put it in a
piece of dna from a bacteria called a
plasmid
and you can grow plasmids and many many
bacteria make lots of them and purify
the dna really easily and i took that
dna
and i i sequenced it because we wanted
we didn't know the genome sequence of
polio at the time
and that took me a year by the way
because the techniques we had were
really archaic and nowadays you could do
it in 15 minutes right it's amazing
and i took the dna i put it into cells
and out came polio
so that's the start now since then
everybody has taken that technique and
used it for their virus you can now do
it with source cov2 you make a dna copy
of any rna virus you can modify it
and you put it back into cells and
you'll get your modified virus out so
that's an important part of
understanding the properties of the
virus as say in an animal by changing
the virus you're changing a dna copy
you're making the virus then and putting
it into the end
can you clarify so even in the rna virus
you can take and turn it into
dna yes and then that allows you to
modify it yes
what's that what's that uh mapping well
no no what's the process of going from
rna to dna
reverse transcription that's reverse
transcription right oh so you actually
go through the the process of reverse
transcription to do this yes oh remember
david baltimore and howard yes had
discovered this enzyme in the 70s they
got the nobel prize for that and when i
went to david's lab at mit
he had the enzyme in the freezer he said
here take this and make a dna copy of
paul yeah i didn't make the connection
that you can use that kind of thing for
an rna virus
and so that's and then modify it see any
dna virus already exists as dna so you
can modify it
but for rna viruses it was difficult and
so then from that point on for influenza
every other rna virus and coronaviruses
people made dna copies and that's what
they use to modify and and ask questions
about what things are doing right what's
this gene doing what if we take it out
what happened can you do the same thing
with uh kovid uh is it takes rna and
then of course and in fact in january
2020 as soon as the genome sequence was
released
from china the
labs all over we're synthesizing this 30
000 base dna
and
getting what can you figure out
without infecting anything just uh
turning into
with the reverse transcription turning
into dna modifying stuff and then
putting it into a cell what can you
figure out
from that oh well you could let's say
you can cut out a gene you see some
genes in the sequence i don't know what
these genes do let's cut them out
and then you could
cut them out of the dna you put the dna
in cells and maybe you get
virus out and you go oh
clearly that gene's not needed
for the virus to reproduce at least in
cells right or maybe you take the g now
and you never get any virus so it's
lethal is there a nice systematic ways
of doing this do people kind of automate
it
absolutely and we
i mean the problem with sars
the covid virus is it's thirty thousand
basis a lot of stuff there yeah and
what makes it more difficult is that
you have to it's been classified as a
bsl3
agent
biosafety level three
and so not everyone has a lab that's
capable of doing that so it limits the
number of people who can do experiments
you know some we were lucky to have a
few in new york city but not every place
has them so you cannot work
with the virus just out on the bench
like we do with many other viruses you
have to wear a suit and a have to have
special procedures and containment and
so forth so it makes it difficult to do
basic experiments on the virus but well
it's a pandemic there's a lot of money
there's a lot of incentive to work on it
harder and also you don't need to work
on the virus you can take bits of it and
work you could take say just the spike
right and say can we make a vaccine with
just the spike because that doesn't
require bsl3 so yes so if uh like
building a vaccine requires you to
figure out how or antiviral drugs
how to attack various structural parts
of the virus and the functional parts of
the virus right you have to decide on a
target
yeah like i'm going to make an antiviral
what am i going to target in the virus
and
there are a few things that make more
sense than others
usually we like to target enzymes
i don't know if you remember any your
biochemistry but you know enzymes are
catalytic you don't need a lot of them
to do a lot of things so they're
typically in low concentrations in in a
virus-infected cell so it's easier to
inhibit them with a drug and the coronas
have couple of enzymes that we can
target
so it's you have to figure that out
ahead of time and decide what to go
after and then you can look for drugs
that inhibit what what you're interested
in it's not that hard to do
there's just something beautiful about
biology
about the mechanisms of biology and i
kind of regret
falling in love with computer science so
much that i
um
left that biology textbook on the show
and left it behind but hopefully we'll
return to it now because
i think one of the things you learn even
in computer science that studying
biology and certainly neurobiology
uh you you get inspired
here's a mechanism of incredible
complexity that works really well is
very robust it's very effective
efficient
it inspires you to come up with
techniques that you can engineer in the
machine so that's that's the what drives
a field forward when people
improvise
and come up with new technologies that
really make a difference we have we have
a bunch of those now
what's the difference between the
coronavirus family and the
uh the other popular family influenza
virus family
is um
i mean if i were because you mentioned
we should have done a lot more in terms
of vaccine development that kind of
thing for coronaviruses but if i were
back then
from my understanding the thing we
should all be afraid of is influenza
like some
strong variants coming out from that
family that seems like the one that will
destroy human
civilization or uh or hurt us really
badly i don't know if you agree with
this sense but maybe
maybe you can also just clarify what to
use the is the difference between the
families so it's an interesting
difference they both
they both have membranes right
so then they have spike proteins
embedded in them for
and they're different spikes
in fact
for influenza there are two main ones
they're called the h a and the n a
but what's inside
is rna but it's very different rna
and here we have to explain that so
viruses with rna can have three
different kinds of rna
they can have what we call plus rna
they can have minus
rna or they could have plus minus
actually two strands
hybridized together
the plus rna simply means
that
if you put that plus rna in a cell you
know your cell has ribosomes in it that
make the proteins that you need the
ribosomes will immediately latch on to
the plus rna and begin to make proteins
a minus rna is not the right strand to
make proteins
so it has to be copied first and then
the plus minus is both together so the
sars
coronaviruses all the coronaviruses have
plus rna
so as soon as that rna gets in the cell
boom it starts an infectious cycle same
thing with poliovirus by the way which i
worked on influenza viruses are negative
stranded
so they cannot be translated when they
get in the cell so that that's tough for
the virus because
the cell actually cannot
make plus
rna
from minus rna it doesn't have the
enzyme to do it so the virus has to
carry it in
inside the virus particle and then when
the minus rna is in the cell the virus
enzyme makes plus rnas and those get
translated
it's a big difference and then
in the influenza viruses not only is it
minus rna but it's in pieces it's in
eight pieces
we call that segmented whereas the
corona is in one long piece of rna
so what is it is that they're like
floating separately yeah so the genes
are on separate pieces they're all
packaged inside that virus particle of
influenza virus but they're in pieces
and why that's important
is because if two different influenza
viruses
infect the same cell
the pieces as they reproduce can mix and
out can come
a virus with a new assortment of pieces
and that allows influenza virus to
undergo
extremely high frequency evolution
that's why we get pandemics when we have
a new flu pandemics is because somewhere
in some animal
two viruses have reassorted and made a
new virus that we hadn't seen before
so so you're you're you're talking about
kind of
biological characteristics but what am i
incorrect in my intuition that
or from the things i've heard that the
influence of family viruses is more
dangerous
like what what makes it more dangerous
to humans
well it depends on the there are many
flavors or vintages of influenza virus
some are dangerous and some are not
right it depends on which one some like
the 1918 apparently was was very lethal
killed a lot of people
but more contemporary viruses we had a
pandemic in 2009
of influenza and that wasn't such a
lethal
virus
we don't know exactly why but it didn't
kill that many people it transmitted
pretty well is that the bird flu one
they're all they're all deriving that
one was called swine influenza swine it
seemed to it
started in a pig but it had bird it had
rnas from bird influenza viruses these
viruses are all reassortance of
different viruses from pigs and birds
and humans
um
but influenza can cause pneumonia and
can kill you as does
sorrows covey too so it depends on the
the virus so there is another influenza
virus that's currently circulating so
right now we have
the 2009 pandemic virus that's still
around and then the 1968
pandemic virus which was the one before
2009 that one is still around too and
that's more lethal
and depending on the season some seasons
the 2009 virus predominates some seasons
the 1968 and when the 68 is around you
get more lethality so we're living with
the influenza family we haven't
exterminated them
right we never will never exterminate
them why well because every shore bird
in the world is infected with them you
know gulls and turns and ducks and all
sorts of things
why can't we develop
strong vaccines that defend against oh
we could do that sure
um but that would not eliminate them
right from humans even if you had the
best vaccine you would never get rid of
it in people because there would always
be someone who's not vaccinated or in
which the vaccine didn't work you know
no but no vaccine is a hundred percent
right so well you just contradict
yourself you had the he said the perfect
vaccine so
but you then you said
like even if you had the professor yeah
some people wouldn't get vaccinated but
i understand what you mean so but i
actually was asking how difficult is it
to make vaccines like that for
it seems like it's very difficult to do
that for the influenza virus
so it's really easy to make an
old-school vaccine
so the the way
the first influenza vaccines were made
was actually jonas salk worked on them
in the 40s you just grow lots of virus
and you grow it in eggs by the way
chicken eggs nice
literally wait wait yeah chicken
embryonated so they get fertilized and
there's a 10 or 12 day embryo in it and
you put virus in it it grows up and then
you harvest it you get about 10 ml of
fluid
and then you take that you treat it with
formaldehyde or formalin and it
inactivates the virus so it's no longer
infectious
and you just inject that into people and
that was the first flu vaccine it was
made for the the us army actually and
then it got moved over to people we
still use that old school tech today
so you're you're taking
can you help me out here okay so this is
a good time to talk about vaccines
okay so you're talking about
you're taking the actual virus right you
put it in an egg you let it grow up
it's very funny that you put in an egg
it's very um it's very poetic
and then uh how do you make it not
um
infection uh not effective or whatever
not infectious not infectious is that
the right term here yeah so how do you
make it not infectious you can
treat it with any number of chemicals
that'll
disrupt the particles so it no longer
so that that step of disrupting the
particle
is that very specific to any a
particular variant particle no the same
collection of chemicals you can use for
all kinds of action and which have been
used for sars cov2 vaccines also same
technology okay so what are
there's several things to ask so you
called it old school in a way that's uh
slightly dismissive like people talk
about windows 98 or something uh
so there
so is there risks involved with it or is
it just difficult to produce large
amounts no it's a lot of eggs it's very
easy i mean you could do it in cells and
culture but eggs were convenient and
in the 1940s we didn't have cells in
culture we didn't know how to do that so
we had to use something else
it's easy to do
but the process of inactivating
the virus with a chemical
makes it not not the best vaccine you
can make the flu vaccines that we have
today which are mostly based on this
inactivation this is called inactivated
virus vaccines oh so like the kind of uh
thing it presents to the immune system
to train on
not right it's not it's not
it's not close to the actual virus yes
that's what we think so that's why
probably the flu vaccines are just not
very good you know
efficiency at the best right which is
not really good what does it mean what
is the measure of efficiency for a
vaccine well
it's how it does in the general
population at preventing influenza at
preventing
illness not infection we usually don't
measure
infection
when we're testing a vaccine we just
measure sickness that's really easy to
score right
you do a trial and you say if you feel
sick give us a call we'll tell you
so uh yeah i mean what's what's sickness
sickness is the presence of symptoms
so this is good time to say what a
symptom is okay a symptom is what you
only can feel
only you can feel an upset stomach or a
sore throat or that sort of the lived
experience okay so the sign is something
that someone could measure and tell that
you're infected like
a virus in your nasopharynx or
something else right signs and symptoms
and so in a vaccine trial they tell you
if you have any of these symptoms they
give you a paper with the exact symptoms
listed to make sure you're picking them
up right so for flu it'd probably be
fever sore throat cough
you call them and then they will do a
pcr make sure you you've got flu and not
some other virus that makes similar
symptoms
and then
they would say are you a vaccine or
non-vaccine arm and count up all the
infections and see how the vaccine did
basically that's so fascinating because
um
the reporting so symptom is what you
feel yes and certainly the mind
has a ability to conjure up feelings oh
yes absolutely and so like culturally
you know maybe there was a time in our
culture where
it was uh looked down upon to
to feel sick or something like that like
toughen up kind of thing yes and so then
you probably have
very few symptoms being reported
absolutely and then absolutely and now
is like much more
um i don't
know perhaps you're much more likely to
report symptoms now it's fascinating
because then it changes oh it is
definitely a perception because for you
know your symptom may be nothing to me
or vice versa right so when you're doing
this it's a little bit of a
imprecise
science because in in and even it's a
cultural thing in some countries
something that would make us feel
horrible they wouldn't even bother
reporting no i didn't have any symptoms
so it's a little bit imprecise and it
clouds the results so if you can measure
things it's always better but you start
out with a symptom
and if you say if someone tells you this
virus 20 of the people
are
asymptomatic they don't report symptoms
that number is probably not as a
constant it depends where you did the
study
it could be different in china versus
south america europe et cetera yeah i
mean i was trying to figure so i took
two shots of the fisa vaccine i had zero
symptoms wow
so and i was wondering well see but
that's my feelings right this is not
because i i felt fine i was waiting did
you have pain at the injection site
uh no it was kind of pleasant
yeah you felt nothing the next day no
nothing okay no no no tightness no
exhaustion no
um but see like i have an insane
sleeping schedule i already put myself
through crazy stuff that said
maybe i was expecting something really
bad like i was way
and therefore didn't feel it then but i
also got um
allergy shots
and
those i was out all next day like
exhausted for some reason so that that
gave me like
a sense like okay
at least sometimes i can feel shitty
that's good to know
sure and then then
with the vaccine it didn't but the the
question is like how much does my mind
come into play there
are the expectations of symptoms uh
the expectations of
not feeling well how does that affect
the sort of the self-reporting the
symptoms i think it's definitely
a variable there but um there's
certainly many people that don't feel
anything after the vaccines and there's
some that have a whole range of
things like soreness and fever etc yeah
so okay you were talking about the
old-school development inside the egg
right
what's uh what's what's better than that
what's what so then the next generation
of vaccines which arose in the 50s were
what we call
replication competent where the virus
you're taking it's actually reproducing
in you
yeah that sounds safe
and
it can be somewhat problematic yes as
you might imagine because you know once
you put that virus in you you have no
more control right it's not like you
have a kill switch in it which actually
would be a great idea to put in
like
like nano nano bots what composition no
you could just put something in there if
you added a drug you would do it shut it
off right and people are thinking about
that because now we're engineering
viruses to treat
cancers and other diseases and we may
want to put kill switches in them just
to make sure they don't run away oh
interesting so you can like deploy a
drug that binds to the
this this virus that would shut it off
in the body something like that
something like that yeah that would be
the idea you'd have to engineer it in
anyway these were the first one was
yellow fever vaccine that was made
because that was a big problem and this
virus and the way you do this
back in the old day was empirical
so max tyler who did the yellow fever
vaccine he took the virus which is a
human
virus right
and he infected
i think he used chick embryos
and he went from one embryo to another
and just kept passing it did that
hundreds of times
and every 10 passages he would take the
virus and put it in a a mouse or a
monkey whatever his model was and then
eventually he got a virus that didn't
cause any disease after 200 and some
passages and then that was tested in
people
and it became the yellow fever vaccine
that we use today
he selected for mutations that
made the virus not cause disease but
still
make an immune response wow so those are
called replication competent we now have
the polio vaccine which was developed in
the 50s after the yellow fever then we
had measles mumps rubella those are all
replication competent vaccines
and you mentioned is that's that's a
good idea
they are all
safe vaccines the only one
that has had an issue is the polio
replication competent vaccine it was
called sabin vaccine or
oral polio virus vaccine
because
you take it orally it's a wonderful
because you don't have to inject it this
is the perfect delivery
you know either intranasal for a
respiratory virus or orally for polio
goes into your intestines it reproduces
and it gives you wonderful protection
against polio
however you do
shed virus out
and
that virus is no longer a vaccine it's
reverted genetically in your intestine
so you can infect others with poor take
that virus and put it into an animal and
give it polio and in fact
the parents of some kids
in the 60s and 70s who were immunized
got got polio from the vaccine the rate
was about one and one and a half million
cases of polio so it's called
vaccine-associated polio and i always
argue that
we may not have picked the right vaccine
there was a big
fight in the
u.s and other countries between the
inactivated polio and the and the
infectious polio vaccines which ones we
should be using because we found out
that the infectious vaccine actually
caused polio and 8 to 10 kids a year in
the u.s alone got polio from the vaccine
which looking back is really
not acceptable in my view although the
public health community said it was to
get rid of polio so now we are
we're close to eradicating polio
globally
but this vaccine derived polio is a
problem so now we have to go back to the
an activated vaccine which is tough
because it's injected
so okay so the the basic high level
you know how vaccines work
principle is uh
you want to deploy something in the body
that's as close to the actual virus as
possible but doesn't do nearly as much
harm that's right and there's like a
million that's right not a million but
there's a bunch of ways you could
possibly do so those are two ways and
now of course we have modern ways we can
make
mrna vaccines right what's what are the
modern ways i did you want to look uh
mrna vaccine that's so that's one of the
that's the most modern but even before
mrna vaccines we learned that we could
use
viruses to deliver
proteins from a virus that you want to
prevent
and so the ebola vaccine
we took the spike gene of ebola virus
and put it in a different virus and we
deliver that to people and that's called
a vectored vaccine and some of the covid
vaccines are vectors of different kinds
of most famous or adenovirus vectors
carrying the spike gene
into the cell can you explain how the
vector vaccine works again so we have we
take a
a virus that will infect humans
but will not make you sick
in the case of adenovirus the years and
years of people studying it has told us
what genes you could cut out
and allow the virus to infect the cell
but not cause any disease so instead of
doing selection on it
you uh you you actually genetically
modify it yes you modify the vector yeah
so you'll be much more precise about it
very precise and then you splice in the
gene for the spike
and then you use that to deliver the
gene and it becomes produced as protein
then you make an immune response and
vector is the term for this modifying
right
so we're now using viruses
at our
bidding we're using them as vectors not
just for vaccines we can cure monogenic
diseases that is if you have if you're
born with a genetic disease you have a
deletion or a mutation in a gene a
single gene
we can give you the
the regular gene back using a virus
vector
so but cancers too we can cure cancers
with vectors
wow
really
interesting yeah i think in 10 to 15
years most cancers will be treatable
with viruses yeah
wow and not only can we put
things in the vector to kill the tumor
we can
target
the vector to the tumor specifically in
a number of ways and that makes it less
toxic right it doesn't affect all your
other cells
but it takes time to develop a vector
for a particular thing because it
requires a deep understanding
yeah in fact we have about a dozen
different virus vectors that have been
studied for 20 years
and those are the set of vaccine vectors
that we're using so it includes
adenovirus
vesicular stomatitis virus which is a
cousin of rabies but doesn't make people
sick
influenza viruses being used as a vector
and many even measles virus so
we're familiar with how to modify those
to be vectors and those are being used
for for covid vaccines and then of
course we have the the
new the new is just the nucleic acid
vaccines so
years ago
people said why can't we just inject dna
into people
take the spike and put it in a dna and
inject it
so people tried many many different
vaccines and in fact there's there are
no human licensed vaccines that are dna
vaccines although there is a
there is a west nile vaccine for horses
that's a dna-based
vaccine
so if you have a horse you can give it
this vaccine but no human can you
clarify
uh does a dna vaccine only work for dna
viruses no it can work for dna or rna
because remember for an rna virus we can
make a dna copy of it right and it will
still when you put that dna in a cell
it goes into the nucleus okay right
so it's you just essentially you get you
get proteins
vaccines yeah you're giving okay i got
it so those didn't work for human
vaccines and there were many hiv aids
vaccine trials that used dna vaccines
didn't work
and then
a number of years ago people started
thinking how about rna
rna vaccines and i first heard this i
thought what i've worked with rna my
whole career it's so fragile
if you look at it the wrong way it
breaks
i mean that's that's being facetious
right but
you have to be very careful because
your hands are full of enzymes that will
degrade rna
so i thought how could this possibly
work injecting it into someone's it's an
example of i was skeptical and i was
wrong
it turns out that if you modify the rna
properly and protect it in a lipid
capsule
it actually works as a vaccine and
people were working on this years before
covid came around they're doing
experimental mrna vaccines and there are
a couple of companies that were working
on it and
so at the beginning of
2020 they said let's try it and
i was skeptical frankly because i just
thought rna would be too labile but i
was wrong
so this is uh as we're saying offline
one of the great things about you is
you're able to say when you're
wrong about intuitions you've had in the
past which is a beautiful thing for
scientists
uh but you know i still think it's very
surprising that something like that
works right yeah i am surprised so
you're just
you're just launching rna in a
protective membrane yeah and then
now
one thing is surprising that the rna
sort of lasts long enough
right for the uh in its structure but
then
um the the other
thing is why does it work that that
that's a good training ground for um
for the immune system
is that is that obvious
i don't think i don't think it's obvious
to most people and it's worth going into
because it's really interesting i mean
first of all they
they wrap the rna in
in fats in lipid membranes right and the
particular formulation they test for
years to make sure it's stable you know
it lasts a long time after it's injected
and the two companies that
make the current covet vaccines right
moderna and physio they have different
lipid formulations to get to the same so
that's a real part of it and it's not
simple there are quite a few different
lipids that they put into this coding
and they test to see how long
they protect the rna after it's injected
say into a mouse how long does it last
and the way it works is
these apparently
these lipid nanoparticles they get
injected into your muscle they bump into
cells and they get taken up so lipid
fat is sticky
it's greasy
we like to say
and so your mem your cells are covered
with the greasy membrane also so when
these
lipid nanoparticles bump into them they
stick and they eventually get taken up
and they
they figured this out right at the
beginning if we put rna in a lipid
nanoparticle will it get taken up into a
cell and the answer was yes it was just
let's try it and it worked so basically
experiment it's not like some deep
understanding of biology it's
experimentally speaking it just seems to
work yeah well they had some idea that
lipids would target this to a cell
membrane
and remember there's no
there's no receptor involved like the
virus has a specific protein that
attaches to a receptor right
it's not efficient enough to just bump
around and get into a cell
that's what these things are doing and
they probably optimize the lipids to to
get more efficient uptake
but it's not as efficient as a virus
would be to get into a cell you have no
specific i mean which is why
it's surprising that uh you can crack
into the safe
with with a
hammer or
with some fat i mean that's a
that's kind of surprising it's kind of
amazing
um that that it works but so
maybe let's try to um
talk about this so one of the
hesitancies around vaccines
or basically around any new technology
is the fact that mrna is a new idea
and it's an idea that was
shrouded in some skepticism as you said
but it's the scientific community
because it's like it's a it's a
cool new technology
surprising that it works
what's your intuition
i think one nice way to approach this is
um
try to play devil's advocate and say
both sides one side is why your
intuition says that it's safe for humans
and what arguments can you see
if you could steal man and argument why
it's unsafe for humans
or
not unsafe for humans but
the hesitancy to take an mrna vaccine is
justified
so many people
are afraid because it's new technology
and they feel it hasn't been
tested
i mean in theory what could go wrong
this is the nice thing about
mrna
is that it doesn't last forever
as opposed to dna which doesn't last
forever but it can last a lot longer
and it could even go into your dna right
so mrna has a
shorter lifetime maybe days after it's
injected into your arm then it's gone
so that's a good thing because it's not
going to be around forever
so that would say okay so
it's sticking around for your lifetime
is not happening but what else could
happen
well
the let's see the protein that's made
could that be an issue
and again proteins
don't last forever they have a finite
longevity in the body
and this one also
lasts perhaps at the best a few weeks
now this is a protein that's made after
the
the rna gets into the cell yeah so the
lipid nanoparticles taken up into a cell
and the mrna is translated and you get
protein made and there's also a question
i'm sorry to interrupt where
where in the body so because it's not
well targeted
or
i don't i don't know if it's supposed to
be targeted but it can go throughout the
body that's one right so it's injected
deep into your deltoid muscle right your
shoulder
and
the idea is not to put it in a blood
vessel otherwise it would then for sure
circulate everywhere so
they go deep in a blood vessel and it's
it's locally injected and they did
before this even went into people they
did experiments in mice where they gave
them
a thousand times higher concentrations
than they would ever give to people and
then when you do that it can go
everywhere basically you can find this
these nanoparticles in every tissue of
the mouse
but that's at a thousand-fold higher
concentration right so
i think
at the levels that we're using in people
most of it's staying in the muscle but
sure small small amounts go elsewhere
could there be a lot of harm caused if
it goes elsewhere in like let's say
ridiculously high quantities i'm trying
to understand what is the damage that
could be done
from an rna just floating about
so the rna itself is not going to be a
problem it's the protein that is a
protein encoded in it right this is a
viral rna which
has no sequence in us so there's nothing
that it could do it's the protein that i
would say
you you could ask what is that going to
do
and
the one property we know about
the spike
is that it can cause fusion
of cells
right that's how the virus gets in in
the beginning the spike attaches to the
cell by this h2 receptor and it
causes the virus
and the cell to fuse
and that's how the rna gets out of the
particle but so wait uh i'm a bit
confused so with this mrna vaccine with
the lipids and the rna there's no spike
right
the the mrna codes for the spike oh the
mrna codes so it creates the spike it
creates a spike so that spike could
cause fusion of cells yes except
they modified the spike so it wouldn't
got it they made two amino acid changes
in the spike so it would not fuse so
they understand enough which amino acids
are responsible for the fusion that's
right interesting this is so they could
modify it so now it's not going to cause
fusion so that's not an issue it's
called the pre-fusion stabilized spike
um
the spike when it binds ace2
that that top falls off and the spike
and the part of the spike that causes
fusion is now exposed and that doesn't
happen in this
mrna vaccine so
those are the things that could have
happened but i think they're
ruled out by what we've just said but
there's no better test than putting it
into people right right and doing phase
one phase two and phase three in
increasing numbers of people and asking
what do we see do we do we have any
concerns and so now it's been in
many millions of people
and we don't see
most of the effects you see in a vaccine
you see in the first couple of months
things like the myocarditis with some of
the vaccines the clotting issues with
the astrazeneca vaccine guillain-barre
you see those
relatively quickly um
and we've seen small numbers of those
occur
but um
other things we haven't seen and
you know you you never say never right
right so i mean this is fascinating
right
it's like uh
i i drink
uh i put splenda in my coffee
and has
supposedly uh no calories
but it tastes really good and i this
despite what like rumors and blogs and
so on i have not seen good medical
evidence
that is harmful to you
but it's like it tastes too good
so i'm thinking like there's got to be
long-term consequences but it's very
difficult to understand what the
long-term consequences are
uh like that
and there's this kind of
like distant fear or anxiety about it
like this thing tastes too good it's too
good to be true
there's got to be there's no free launch
in this world
this is the kind of feeling that people
have about the long-term effects of the
vaccine
that
you mentioned that there's some
intuition about near-term effects that
you want to uh
uh remove like the diffusion of cells
and all those kinds of things but they
think okay this travels to other cells
in the body it travels to
uh neurons or that kind of stuff and
then what kind of effect does that have
long term that's yet to be discovered
what do you make i mean for this vaccine
but in general in science about
making statements about long-term
uh negative effects is that something
that weighs heavy on you is that
something we can kind of escape through
just large-scale experimentation
with human with animals and humans well
if you're really
if you're concerned about long-term then
you have to do a long-term experiment
right
and
maybe you don't see something for 50 60
years so
if someone says to you there are no
long-term effects of the covid vaccines
they can't say that because they haven't
done the long experiment right right is
always the possibility but you have to
weigh it it's always
there's no free lunch right
there's always a risk benefit
calculation you have to make you can
have the study that goes for 50 years
and and then decide but i guess what
you're doing is you
just like we said um
i forget with which one with polio with
rabies i forget but you're weighing
the side effects yeah
the vaccine versus
the effects of the virus
and like both of them you don't know
long-term effects
but you're building up intuition as you
study which what are the long-term
effects like there there's a huge number
of
people
like
um
that have like i don't want to say
experts because i don't like the word
but people have studied it long enough
to where they build up intuition they
don't know for sure there's basic
science being done in this basic studies
we start to build up an intuition
of
what
might be a problem down the line and
what is not biologically speaking and so
given that map you then considering the
virus
there seems to be a lot of evidence for
covid having
negative effects
on
all aspects of the body not just even
respiratory which is kind of interesting
right so the cognitive stuff that's
terrifying all kinds of systems of
autism yes
and then you look at the same thing with
the vaccine
and there seems to be less of that
but of course you don't know
if it's some kind of dormant thing
that's just going to you won't know it's
you have to
make a judgment and for a lot of people
they can't right because they don't have
the tools to make the judgment i totally
understand that
and we have
we have let people down a few times
in medicine right
and i know two very
specific examples the first polio
vaccine ever made the salk vaccine was
released in 1955.
and immediately within months
few hundred cases of paralysis and kids
who got it because it was not properly
inactivated
now you have to understand parents were
dying for a polio vaccine because kids
were getting paralyzed every summer 30
000 kids a year
and so they went and took it they took
the word of the medical establishment
that it was safe and it wasn't
big letdown never going to forget
something although i think a lot of
people today don't don't aren't aware of
that
i think that was a big problem that's
everlasting then
the
attenuated vaccine that we talked about
the infectious
causing polio
yet parents continued to bring their
kids
to be vaccinated because they were said
this is the right thing to do and i have
to say i was involved in several
lawsuits where
parents of a kid who got paralyzed from
the polio vaccine decided to sue the
manufacturer
and get some some money for their for
their kid and so
they got mad
and and i think
you could not
the first
issue could have been prevented
could have been prevented by and
activating it properly i think the
company just did the wrong thing
the second we had evidence for and we
should probably have not used that
vaccine any longer but i think that
destroys public confidence but those
aren't they're not long minority of
cases this minority this is a very rare
event yeah but nevertheless science is
an institution
uh didn't
make corrections in that case no they
didn't so what do you
make of
that i mean it's very unfortunate that
those few things can destroy trust
but i don't think that lasts till today
i think today is a different era right
yeah and most people don't know about
those stories i tell them to you because
that's what could happen i think it
could happen today
if you look at the history of
the the polio vaccine
the u.s public health service wanted
kids to be vaccinated so they did things
that probably weren't correct to get the
vaccine back online right but they they
did it and they pushed it through
um so where
the question is what do we do today
so
i can look at
as we just said i can look at what might
happen
and
i can
make reasonable
decisions about the likelihood of them
happening and i can also say
i don't want to get covet of any kind
because i've seen how nasty it can be
and i decide
i'm taking the risk whatever small of a
long-term effect i'm going to take the
risk my family took the risk and many
other people did of a vaccine of getting
vaccinated
because i think it's very small but i
understand where people can't make that
decision and that begs the question what
would they need
to make a decision so if you're
concerned about
an effect in 40 years
we're not going to know for 40 years
yeah so i think if i were to speak
because i suppose as i talked to like i
mentioned offline to joe rogan and his
podcast yesterday i talked to him all
the time about this
i think the concern
is less about
the uh
long-term effects
like on paper it's more about the
the ins like um
people like anthony fauci and
people at the top are simply
misrepresenting the data or like are are
not accurately being transparent not
collecting the data properly not
reporting on the data properly not being
transparent not representing the
uncertainties
not
us
openly saying they were wrong two months
ago like in a way that's not like
dramatic but uh revealing the basic
process of science when you have to do
your best under uncertainty just also
just being inauthentic there's a there's
a sense
especially with like a younger
generation now there's a certain way on
the internet like the internet can smell
much better than previous generations
could
and so they they see there's a kind of
um
inauthenticity that comes with being
uh
like representing authority like i am a
scientist i'm an expert i have a phd i
have four decades of work therefore
everyone should listen to me got it and
somehow that maps to
this feeling
of well what are they hiding if they're
speaking from authority like this if
everyone is in agreement like this that
means they all have emails between each
other they said we're going to tell this
this is the message we're going to tell
the public
then what is the truth
the actual truth maybe there's a much
bigger uncertainty maybe there's dead
people in the basement that they're
hiding from from bad mrna vaccine
experiments maybe they're and then and
then the conspiracy theories start to
grow
uh naturally when there's this kind of
mistrust of the that so it's less about
kind of
like a deep concern about long-term
effects
it's a concern about
long-term effects
if we find out that there's some secret
stuff that we're not being told it all
runs on that so what what the heck i
mean i so i put the blame not on the
data but basically on the leaders and
the community communicators of the
science at the top
well to that i would say
all the data
as far as i know are made public
so you can dive into it and i know a lot
of people ask me questions and i just
say it's right here
in the data and i know a lot of people
can't do that they can't dive into it
but that's one solution for people who
are able it's now you could argue well
maybe they've left data out well then
not even i can help because then they're
hiding it from me too and i think that's
highly unlikely i think for the most
part the fda requires the release of all
the clinical trial data right so okay
what so this clinical trial data that's
one thing so that's the data that we
should be focusing on right is it so
there's there's a lot of different
data sets here so there's preclinical
data which is
everything that was done in the lab
before this vaccine ever went into a
human arm it's all the cell culture work
that we talked about a little
experiments in animals
all of that is publicly accessible most
of it gets published and then there's
the initial drug filing which is huge
the books of dot you can get that and
look at it right this is me sort of
asking sort of difficult questions here
right okay
uh so there is a there's a lot of money
to be made by makers of the vaccine
so
for
these company obviously there's a
distrust of those folks too they've done
a lot of really good things in this
world but they've
there's the incentives are such that you
want to sweep stuff under the rug
if if you're not 100
pure in your ethics
and
how hard is it for for that data to be
fabricated
uh manipulated
like what's your intuition for the the
pre-trial stuff i think when you when
you start
fabricating then you get inconsistencies
which are
pretty easy to pick up when you talk
about some large-scale things of this
nature
because then you can look through the
data very you're gonna i mean we require
looking very carefully but you will see
inconsistencies from one trial to
another
and uh that might ring a bell that
something's been done
yeah
it's like it's like the moon landing
thing i think sometimes like going to
the moon is easier than faking it
right
in the sense it might be it might be
easier to do a large-scale trial and get
an effective vaccine versus faking it
but you know when you brought up the
for-profit issue i i think that is
always been
an issue i've always felt that
having your health depend on for-profit
industry may not be the best solution
and i don't know how else to do it
people tell me i'm a dreamer that
thinking that
you know all medicines could be
non-profit but i also think that the
world should have one health system that
takes care of everyone right because
there are some countries that can't and
other countries have an excess like us
so
i wish we could do that well the
argument is
the speed of which the vaccines for
covet were produced
would never happen in a non-profit
system would never happen in a
non-capitalist system oh i could set up
a vaccine production
institute in the u.s that would get the
vaccines done because you just need to
put money into it that's what made these
vaccines get done money they poured
billions of dollars and they got it done
quickly
but if i set up a non-profit institutes
of vaccines throughout the u.s staffed
with really talented people pay them
well keep them motivated you'll get your
vaccine no but
that's the thing with capitalism is that
uh the selection of who to hire like
good when you say good people yeah the
capitalist has a machine
that still fires people who are not good
and selects people are good
coming from the soviet union the dream
of communism is is similar to what
you're saying
broadly defined it certainly doesn't
work in the broad the question whether
it works in the healthcare
uh
space
you know
there is some aspect to the machine of
capitalism being the most effective way
to select for good people and to
effectively produce the thing and but
then of course
a lot of people would argue the current
even the current healthcare is not
with like regulations there's some weird
mix where there's a lot of opportunities
for inefficiencies there's a lot of
opportunities for bureaucracy so you
have like the worst of
all the world can't there be some
intermediate that works because
i mean the other issue that we haven't
mentioned is that politics gets thrown
into this and
that really messes up and it should
never be mixed with health care but it's
it is because a lot of funding comes
from the government so that's another
confounding factor but
i i really think i could make
a vaccine institute that
if someone didn't do well i'd fire them
no you're not going to stay if you can't
do your job and do it well you don't
give them incentives but it doesn't have
to be the two extremes i think it has
there has to be a solution that people
don't
have this mistrust for a company making
huge profits off of a drug but you know
what it's funny
it seems that vaccines and antivirals
bear the brunt of this criticism yet
there are many other pharmaceuticals
that people
rely on yeah of all sorts they don't
seem to question and have issues with
those and they have far more side
effects than vaccines it's very strange
how we're
picking that way but i should also say
that when you know if you have one big
vaccine institute one of the other
like
sets of uh
vaccine conspiracies
i mean i would say they're
a little farther out into the into the
wild set of ideas but it's you know
that's one way to con control the
populace
is by injecting
substances into them right people i mean
part of that
funny enough is probably has to do with
needles versus uh something you put in
your mouth yeah but there's something
about the government especially when
it's governor mandated injection of a
substance into you i don't it doesn't i
don't care what the science says if it's
100 effective 100 safe
there's a natural distrust of what like
even if this is effective
and safe
giving the government power to do this
yeah aren't they going to start getting
ideas down the line for you know uh
i i think that they can barely govern i
don't think they're gonna do that but
you don't have to take
unless you're a federal employee you
don't have to take a covet vaccine right
yeah but that's that largely has to do
not largely but
there is an individualistic
uh
spirit
you know to them to the american people
there's this like you're not going to
take my gun away from me sure you're not
going and i think that
you know
that's that's
that's something that
makes america what it is just coming
from the soviet union there's a power to
sort of resisting the overreach of
government that's quite interesting
because i'm a believer
i i hope
that it's possible to have
to strive towards a a government that
works extremely well i think at its best
a government represents the people and
functions in the similar way that you're
you're mentioning but that like pushback
even if it turns into conspiracy
theories sometimes i think is actually
healthy in the long arc of history it
can be frustrating sometimes but that
mechanism of pushing back against power
against authority can be healthy i i
agree i think it's fine to question the
vaccines what i have issue with is that
many people
put out
incorrect information and i'm not sure
what their motivations are and it's very
hard to fight that because then it's my
word versus theirs and i'm happy to talk
with people about any of their concerns
but if you start getting into the stuff
that just isn't true then we have a
problem the thing i struggle with is
conspiracy theories
whatever language you want to use but
sort of
ideas that challenge the mainstream
quote unquote narrative
given our current social media and
internet like the way it operates they
can become
viral much easier there's something much
more compelling about them sure like i
have a secret
that about the way things really work
that becomes viral and that's very
frustrating because then you're not
having a conversation on level ground
the
you know when you're trying to present
scientific ideas and then there's
conspiracy theories the conspiracy
theories become much viral much faster
and then you're not just having a
discussion on level ground it's
um
that that's the frustrating part that
it's not an even discussion
can i just say one more thing so i mean
the internet is here to stay so we're
gonna have to figure out how to deal
with it right but from my perspective i
was skeptical that these mrna vaccine
that any coveted vaccine would be
ready within a year yeah that's amazing
me too plus
these
the way i look at the mrna vaccine as a
scientist it's g whiz to me it's amazing
that it worked and i think the data are
great so i want it
well as a scientist i wanted one of the
really sad things again with me too as a
scientist or as a admirer of science is
i don't know if it's politics but one of
the sad things to me about the previous
year
is that
i i wasn't free to celebrate the
incredible accomplishment of science
with the vaccines i was very skeptical
as possible to develop a vaccine
so quickly
so
it's unfortunate that we can't celebrate
how amazing humans are to to come up
with this vaccine now this vaccine might
have long-term effects
that doesn't mean this is not incredible
why why um
why couldn't you celebrate
um
because i would love to inspire the
world with the amazing things science
can do
and you know when you say something
about the vaccines they're not listening
to the science a lot of people are not
listening to the science what they hear
is
oh you're um
you're a republican or you're a democrat
and you're social signaling of doing
some kind of signaling no i think that
the vaccine you're talking about
injecting something into you and maybe
you're right
that the rhetoric is like you better
take this or you're or you're dumb
you know it's not the right approach
i've seen actually it's kind of
interesting i think both sides kind of
imply that
so the
the people who are against the vaccine
are dumb for not trusting science
and the people who are for the vaccine
are called dumb
for trusting science the scientific
nobody wins yeah
and they both kind of have a point
like because because you can always it's
like a glass half full or half empty
because you can always look at um
like science from a perspective of
certain individuals that don't represent
uh perhaps not greatest leaders
uh almost like political leaders there's
a lot of you know i've
yesterday went on a whole rant um
against i said a lot of positive things
about anthony fauci before i went on a
rant i guess
uh because ultimately
you know i think he failed as a leader
and i know it's very difficult to be a
leader but i still wanted to hold him
accountable for that
as a great communicator of science and
as a great leader what what do you think
he didn't do right i'm curious
so
the core of the problem
is
the
several characteristics of the way he
was communicating to the public so one
is the general inauthenticity
uh
two is a thing that
it's very hard to put into words but
there are certain ways of speaking to
people
that sounds like you're hiding something
from them
that sounds like you're full of
that's the authenticity piece like it
sounds like you're not
really speaking to the full truth
of what you know and that you did some
shady in your past
you're
trying to hide so that's a way of
communicating that i think the internet
and people in general are becoming much
better at detecting it's like you said
they're good bs detectives yeah good bs
detectors uh then
but contributing to that is speaking
from authority
speaking um with with uh with authority
and confidence where
neither is deserved
so
first of all nobody's an authority on on
this new virus right we're facing a
deadly pandemic and threatens especially
in
the early stages it was unclear how
deadly it would be
it was unclear probably still unclear
fully how it's transmitted the full
dynamics of the virus
the full
the full understanding of which
solutions work and not
how well masks of different kinds work
how easy or difficult it is to create
tests how many months or years is going
to take to create a vaccine
how well in history or currently do
quarantine methods or lockdown methods
work how you know what are the different
data mechanisms
that are
data collection mechanisms that are
being implemented what are the clear
plans they need to
uh happen what the epidemiology that's
happening what is the uncertainty around
that
um
then then there's the geopolitical stuff
with with china you know like what uh
uh i you know personally believe there
should have been much more openness
about the the origins of the virus
whether a leak from a lab or not i think
communicating that you're open to these
ideas
is actually the way
to get people to trust you that you're
legitimately open to ideas that are very
unpleasant that go against the
mainstream
showing that openness is going to get
people to trust you when you finally
decrease the variance in your
uncertainty like decrease uncertainty
and have we still have a lot of
uncertainty but this is the best course
of action vaccines still have a lot of
uncertainty around them mrna is a new
technology but we have increasing
amounts of data and here's the data
sources and like laying them out in a
very clear way
of this is the best course of action
that we have now we don't know if it's
the perfect course of action but it's by
far the best course of action and that
would that would come from a leader that
has earned the capital of of trust from
people i mean i think
in recent history the worst pandemic is
1918 flew right but that's mainly
because we didn't know what to do we
didn't have many tools at our disposal
and that was tied up with world war one
that's right that's right so the the
leadership there i mean but i don't know
what what is a lot of deaths right and
any one person is someone's family so to
them it's a lot right
but that logic we don't apply that logic
generally
because there's a lot of people
suffering and dying throughout the world
and we turn
turn the other way all the time and
that's the story of history so saying
saying you all of a sudden what bothers
me though i mean personally i don't like
anyone dying anywhere but and especially
considering what
technology we're able to muster yet we
still kill each other it's just a
dichotomy to me
yeah but i mean this is the what is the
paul farmer uh
there's these great stories i mean
that's that's the
that's the um
that's the burden of
being in health care being a doctor
is
you have
to help you can't help but help a person
in front of you who's hurting sure
but you also are burdened by the
knowledge that you helping them you
spending money and effort and time on
them
means you're not going to help others
and you cannot possibly allocate that
amount of time to everybody so you're
choosing which person lives and which
person dies
sure and you're doing so the reason
you're helping the person in front of
you because is because they're in front
of you and so the reason right now we
care a lot about kovid is because the
the eye of the world has turned to covet
but we're not seeing all the all the
other atrocities going on in the world
they're not necessarily related to
deaths they're related to suffering
human suffering which you could argue is
worse than death
prolonged suffering of course so there's
all there's all these questions and and
the the fundamental question
here is are we overreacting to kovid in
our policies so the the this is the
when we turn our eye and care about this
particular thing and not other things
are we dismissing the pain that business
owners who've lost their businesses are
going to feel and then the long
talking about long covid the long-term
effects economic effects on the millions
of people that will suffer that suffer
financially but also suffer from their
dreams
being completely collapsed so a lot of
people seek
gain meaning from work and if you take
away that work
there's anger that can be born there's
pain and so what does that lead to that
can lead to the
rising up of charismatic leaders that
channel that anger towards destructive
things that's been done throughout
history it's like you have to balance
that with the policies that you have and
covid and then
i mean uh very much my main opposition
to uh
fauci is not on the details but the
final result which is i just observe
that there's a significant decrease in
trust in science
as a
not the institution but the various sort
of mechanisms of science i think
sciences is both beautiful and powerful
and the reason why we have so many
amazing things and such a high quality
of life
and
distrust in that that the thing we need
now to get out of all the troubles we're
in
continue getting out of the troubles
we're in is science the scientific
process broadly defined like innovation
technological innovation scientific
innovation all of that
distrust in that is is uh is totally the
wrong thing we need and so anybody who
gets in
who uh causes a distrust in science to
me
um
you know um
carries the responsibility of that
and uh should be in because the response
means should be fired should be should
be
or at least uh
openly have to carry the burden of that
of having caused of that kind of level
of mistrust now it may be unfair to
place it on any one individual but you
have to uh i think in your pocket the
the buck stops at the top like
the leaders dude no no there's there's a
clear leader here yes absolutely so even
if it's not directly his fault
you know he has to carry uh uh carry the
price of that
do you think we should
at this point say okay we have vaccines
you can decide whether you take them or
not let's move forward
maybe you can help me understand this
because it seems like
why is that not the right solution
completely open society the vaccines at
least in the in the united states as i
understand
are
widely available
so
this is the american way you have the
decision to make if you have
uh conditions that make you worried to
get coveted and go to the hospital then
you should get vaccinated because here's
the data that shows that it's much less
likely for you to die
uh right if if you get vaccinated if you
don't want to get vaccinated because
you're worried about a long-term effects
of vaccine that you don't have to but
then you suffered the consequences of
that
and that's it
so i here's what i think is driving
the i think it's all about kids
right
because they're going to go back to
school in the fool and many of them
can't be vaccinated right so
if they get infected they do have less
frequency of disease but it's not zero
they do get sick and they can have
long-term
consequences and
at that age it would be
a shame right and not even their choice
they can't decide
to get vaccinated or not because they
can't have access to it so i think that
would that's what would drive my
efforts to try and get more people at
least in schools vaccinated but i might
be wrong it may not be that so can you
kind of dig into that a little bit so
there's um
see you're saying that there should be
an effort for increased vaccinations
of of kids going to school just not for
societal benefit but for the benefit of
each individual kid right so right now
kids under
12 right you're not yet vaccinated is
that correct yeah i think so
and it's going to be it's not gonna
be in time for school opening that they
get vaccinated
um
and then
i mean i suppose the teachers are all
gonna be vaccinated it makes sense for
them to do that but i'm just worried the
kids are gonna be transmitting it
amongst them and many states don't allow
mass mandate in school so
i think that's what's driving the larger
narrative
in the u.s to protect kids
it's kind of what i hear from daniel
griffin
because increasing numbers of kids are
being admitted to hospitals now because
they're the mid they're becoming the
major unvaccinated
population they're hanging out over the
summer and that's just going to get
worse in the fall
and so you could have a lot of kids with
long covered and disabled their entire
lives right so
and of course
hearing from people who are vaccine
hesitant i hear exactly the kids
statement but they're saying
they don't want the long
vaccine
the long-term effects of the vaccine to
affect the kids that's the of the co of
this new vegetable which i would say is
as i said before you can't say
never but
we do know that long
covid exists we don't know for how long
because we've only looked out six or
eight months we know that exists and the
frequency is increasing it certainly
exists in young kids and we have no idea
about long vaccine effects so i think
they have to make their decision
based on that
but yeah but your question is why don't
we just open up
society say here we have these vaccines
if you want to protect yourself i think
it's mainly the school that's driving
the whole narrative that's my opinion in
which direction not to open up or no to
open up but to try and get
you know their efforts at the federal
level to get people vaccinated right but
see how high are the risk for kids i
mean as my understanding was it's i mean
yes it's non-zero but it's very low
for
but what is the numbers now 70 000
hospitalizations so far in kids as of
last week so yes it's low but
i i
polio was low polio was 20 30 000 kids a
year paralyzed
and
well many people have actually argued
that that vaccine wasn't necessary you
know
that wasn't a substantial enough health
problem but paralyzed is different than
hospital so what does hospitalized mean
but this is the long covered question i
mean this is the open question it was
long covered in kids what is that so
well
a lot of the same issues cognitive
issues
motor issues
respiratory
gi dysfunction how long
we don't know
i mean it could end in a year
as you know there are other post acute
infectious sequelae that we know about
you know chronic fatigue mecfs
is thought to be a post-infectious
sequelae which has gone for many decades
now and many millions of people this
could be another another one of those so
i'm just saying it
might be worth airing on the side of
not letting the kids get infected yeah
but well i'm trying to keep an open mind
here and i appreciate you doing you're
doing the same of course i
uh lean on
definitely not requiring people to get
vaccinated but i do think
getting vaccinated is just um
the wiser choice if looking uh
all the different trajectories before us
getting vaccinated this um
seems like
from the data it seems like the obvious
choice frankly but i'm also trying to
keep an open mind
because some things in the past that
seemed obvious would turn out to be
completely wrong
so i'm trying to keep an open mind here
so for example
one of the things
i'd love to get your thoughts on this is
uh antiviral
ideas so ideas outside of the vaccine
so ivermectin
something that uh brett weinstein and a
few others have been talking about
there's been a few studies some of them
have been shown not to be very good
studies
but nevertheless
there seems to be some promise
and
i wanted to talk to brett
about this particular topic for two
reasons one i was really bothered by
censorship of this that's a whole other
topic
i i just
i'm bothered by sensors there's a gray
area of course
um
but
i it just feels like that should not
have been censored from youtube like
discussions of vibramectin we can we can
set that aside the the other thing i was
bothered by the lack of open-mindedness
mindedness on exploring things like
avermectin
in the early days
especially when at least i thought the
vaccine would take a long time
i mean it's not just ivermectin it's um
really seriously at a large scale
rigorously exploring the effectiveness
of masks
and the big one for me is testing
like the fact that that wasn't explored
aggressively
to lead to mass manufacturing like may
2020 is as absurd
anyway
so i was bothered by these solutions not
being explored and not by now having
really good ivermectin studies so can i
talk about ivory mechanics yeah i would
love that yeah sure so full disclosure
my wife
worked on ivermectin at merck for 20
years
okay
so
they just want people to know but i
didn't
i
don't talk to her all the time about it
anyway she hasn't been at merc for a
long time as you know ivermectin is a
very safe drug used to treat certain
parasitic infections yes right
and
it is approved it's amazing you can take
one dose a year and be protected against
river blindness in africa and certain
parts of africa it's remarkably
effective
and so um it's quite a safe drug at the
doses that are
that are approved
now uh early last year a study was done
i believe in australia which showed in
cells in the lab if you infect with
source cov2 and them and put ivermectin
and it would inhibit the virus
production substantially it was quite
clear right
but the concentrations they were using
were rather high and
could not be achieved by
uh the the approved dosing so you would
need to do a dosing study to make sure
it's safe and the reason is that i have
a mechanic binds to receptors in your
brain and it can have high doses a lot
of some people take high doses
inappropriately and they have
neurological consequences so
if you needed 10 times more ivermectin
you'd have to make sure it would be safe
in people so this is a question of
safety too right
so
my i think it has always been the case
that it should have been properly
studied
but it wasn't there are lots of trials
here and there lots of improperly
controlled trials where someone would
just treat some patients and say hey
they all did fine but have no control
arm and there were some controlled
trials but they were very small
so right now
a four thousand person trial is unroll
enrolling to test in a randomly
controlled trial setting
whether it works or not there's still
plenty of cases that you can do that so
you can ask whether in their whether
there are any side effects i think
that's completely fine and if it says
it works then we should use it in the
meantime i always tell people
if you want to use ivermectin you can do
it off label it's fda approved and if
your physician says i'm going to give
you this off label
i don't have a any objection but i don't
know if it's going to work now i a
friend of ours
last week in new jersey got
covered he went to his local hospital
and their regimen was rem deservier
dexamethasone
ivermectin it's written that's what they
do for every coven patient they just
give it to them automatically and um wow
so he's he recovered so
who's to say it was or were not was not
ivermectin right so i don't have any
strong ideological opposition i just
think it should be tested for what you
want to use it for yeah and that's being
done and i think that's fine is it
strange to you that um
ivermectin or other things like it
weren't tested aggressively in the
beginning like
from a broad
scientific
community
aspect
you know i can be a little bit
conspiratorial and this is what people
talk about with ivamectin yeah is with
the vaccines there's quite a lot of
money to be made
a with then there's not as much money to
be made
is is that too conspiratorial like why
didn't we try more solutions in the
beginning
well um
well all the money was put into vaccines
right very little was put into antivirus
because the mission decision was made at
a very high level probably involving dr
fauci yeah we're going to put 24 billion
into vaccines right yeah
and i think part of the reasoning is
they give you years worth of protection
whereas an antiviral works and you have
to keep dosing and so forth but
vermectin is not trivial and that's i i
agree it should have been tested early
on but we had a really bad experience
with hydroxychloroquine which we can
talk about too um
ivermectin is very hard to synthesize
most
drugs you synthesize chemically you
devise a formulation in a synthesis and
they do it they scale it up and it's
fine hypermectin is really hard and so
what they do instead is they take the
culture of the
bacterium that makes it and they grow it
up and they ferment it and then they
purify it
and merck owns
the bacteria
a number of years ago two employees of
merck stole it and left the company
and tried to market and they were
arrested and they got put in jail so
they protect it very carefully
so
you can't just make it
if you do it's incredibly expensive and
now india it's very cheap apparently
they use it uh quite liberally there and
i don't know how they're they're making
it maybe they've licensed it from merc
and so forth but
that's why it hasn't been tested more
widely i think there's complexities in
terms of getting a lot of it and
manufacturing a lot of it yes okay so
what was the other the hydrocarbon
hydroxychloroquine was also shown
uh early on to inhibit virus in cell
culture
and that's not surprising
hydroxychloroquine of course
is used for malaria
and what it does
when you're when your cell takes up
things from the from the plasma membrane
including viruses it goes through a
pathway called the endocytic pathway
which involves a vesicle moving through
the cell and as it moves through the
cell its ph drops
and that lets a lot of viruses out
actually and hydroxychloroquine blocks
that so it blocks infection with a lot
of viruses
so the problem with those early studies
that were published
is that they were done in kidney cells
in culture
where the only way the virus can get in
is through the endosome
and hydroxychloroquine inhibits that and
that's why it inhibits
in kidney cells and culture but lung
cells
and respiratory cells of humans where
the virus reproduces
can get in two different ways it can get
in from this endocytic pathway
which is inhibited by hydroxychloroquine
or it can get in at the cell surface
which is not inhibited by
hydroxychloroquine so when you treat
patients it has no effect in the lung
because
the virus can just bypass it
and all the
usage initially were based on
uh the the studies done in kidney cells
and culture so that that was just wrong
scientifically incorrect yet it drove a
lot of and today many people still think
they should be taking it but so like the
that not panning out kind of resulted in
a
loss of optimism about other similar
things well that and many other drugs
repurposed drugs were tried right a lot
of hiv antivirals were tried i think the
problem with with hydrox i think
hydroxycork would influence the
ivermectin narrative right people
thought that the data was being hidden
about hydroxychloroquine so they said
well they must be doing the same thing
with hydromaxim but with
hydroxychloroquine it just
scientifically could not work
as an antiviral
the other problem that is more broad
that is important to point out is that
when you
when you have covet and you need an
anti-virulence usually because you can't
breathe and you go in the hospital
because if you're mildly ill you're
never going to go to your doctor and ask
for an antiviral and the problem is when
you can't breathe it's no longer a viral
issue it is now an inflammatory issue
and no antiviral in the world is going
to help you
so if that's why rem deserver doesn't
work very well because it's mainly given
intravenously to people who go in a
hospital
if you get ivermectin in the hospital
it's not going to do anything for for
reducing virus because by that time you
have very little virus to begin with you
have an inflammatory problem that you
need to treat in other ways so
this is why a lot of the antivirals
failed because they're used too late
what you need is a pill you take on that
first positive test when you have a
scratchy throat
you get a pcr in 15 minutes i'm positive
take a pill boom that's going to inhibit
it if you wait till you can't breathe
and that's why the monoclonals even
don't work if if you're in hospital that
well because it's too late and that the
approach now is if you're in a high risk
group if you're over 65
if you are obese or have diabetes or any
other comorbidities your first sign of a
scratchy throat positive you get
monoclonals then they might help you but
if you wait till you go into hospital
it's too late because the viral curve
drops after that first symptom
within three days you're you're no
longer shedding enough virus to transmit
drops really quickly so that's the
reason a lot of these antivirals failed
because they were tested in hospitalized
patients
and we have nothing but rem deserve here
now unfortunately so it was the wrong
approach we should have
been
giving it to people who just tested
positive from the start or just even for
preventative and see you could do that
too yeah but i have to say the other
issue is
this monument is a drug in phase three
now it's an oral antiviral it looks good
if we go ahead with just one
we're going to get resistance within a
few months and it will be useless we
need to have at least two or three drugs
that we can give in combinations and we
know that because that's what took care
of hiv that's what took care of hcv
hepatitis c virus it really reduces the
emergence of resistance
joe rogan got quite a bit of heat
recently about mentioning a paper
and a broader idea
which i didn't i don't think is that
controversial but maybe we can expand on
it
and the idea is that
vaccines
uh create selective pressure
for a virus to mutate
and for variance to form
what um
first of all from a biological
perspective
can you explain this process and
from a
societal perspective what are we
supposed to do about that so let's get
the terminology right so as we talked
about earlier viruses are always
mutating so no vaccine or no drug makes
a virus mutate right that's the wrong
perspective which you look at
what the what the
immune response is is putting pressure
selection pressure on the virus and if
there's a
one particle with the right
mutation that can escape the antibody
that will emerge right
so that's what happens with influenza
virus right we vaccinate every year
and there are not a lot of people that
get infected so they get natural
immunity
and then the virus is incredibly
varied it mutates like crazy and there's
in some person somewhere there's one
variant that escapes the antibody which
has been induced either by infection or
vaccination it can be both
and that drives the emergence of the new
variant so the next year we need to
change the vaccine
so
i would say
both natural infection and vaccination
sure
select for variance absolutely there's
no question because they're inducing
immunity now
what happened last year was
at the beginning of 2020 very few people
in the world were immune as the virus
first started spreading
but you can see in the sequences of
those isolates from the beginning of
2020 you can see
all of the changes that are now present
in the variants of concern at very very
low frequencies they were already there
but there was no selection for them to
emerge until november when we now had
many millions of people who had
mostly been infected but also some
vaccinated then we saw the alpha variant
emerge in england probably because of
immune selection now the the virus
that had the change that evaded the
antibody
had an advantage
and that virus drove through the
population so that's what we're seeing
we're seeing all these variants are
simply antigenic selection so so the the
variance the mutations that are at the
core of these quantum core variants
they were always there all along the
vaccine
or the infections did not create them no
infections don't create they're selected
it's like the vaccine wipe out
a lot of the variants
right
and then
um by being immune by making your body
immune to them and so but some of them
survive yeah exactly and there's another
tree that's built
and it's unclear what that tree leads to
i mean it could make things much worse
or much better don't we don't know well
with flu we see year after year the
virus changes we change the vaccine we
deal with it
we change it again there's an unending
but see that's a very different story if
do you think
do you think covid will be
um
with some likelihood
uh like the flu whereas basically
variants will never be able to um
eradicate it
it will never eradicate it
in any case
ever
well
come up with a vaccine that uh
makes you immune to enough variance to
where there's not enough evolutionary
like
room well if you cut down the number of
infections then you reduce the diversity
sure yes right the problem is if let's
say you're a cynic and you say well
vaccination is just selecting for
variance so let's stop it but then
you're going to have infection and
that's going to select for variance and
they're the more you're more likely to
get very sick because we know the
vaccines are really good at preventing
you from dying so
that's why it still makes sense to use
vaccines because they prevent you from
dying yeah that's the bottom line but
can we ever make
a vaccine that deals
with all variants
absolutely and the reason i say that is
because
people who get
naturally infected with psoriasis they
develop covid they recover
if you give them one vaccine dose
they make an immune response that
handles
all the variants that are around right
now
all of them much better than people
who've gotten two doses of vaccine for
some reason
their immune response is suddenly
broadened after the infection
vaccination
and they can handle all the variants
that we know of so far so that tells me
we can
devise a strategy to do the same thing
with a vaccine that makes a really broad
vaccine that'll handle all the variables
well you actually uh on the virology
blog i don't know if you're the author
of that but i am
yes oh the blog yes but there's a
particular post that's talking about
reporting in a paper
the mix-and-match strategy oh yes that's
one of my co-writers trudy ray yeah yeah
that's a it's an interesting idea that
there's some
early evidence now that
mixing and matching vaccines
like one shot of pfizer and one of like
modern or something
that creates a much better
uh immunity
than uh does two shots of laser i think
that's worth exploring absolutely
and this is relevant what we're doing
with influenza
you know instead of having to vaccinate
people every year why can't we devise a
vaccine which you'd get once in your
lifetime or maybe once every 10 years
okay
so
the the spike of influenza
it's a long
protein kind of like the spike of saurus
cov2 it's stuck in the virus membrane
and the very tip
that's the part that changes
every year that's where the antibodies
bind
but the stem
doesn't change
and if you make antibodies to the stem
they can also prevent infection it's
just that
when people are infected or with the
current vaccines they'll make many
antibodies to that stem part
but we're trying to figure out how to
make those and we think they would be
broadly protective and you'd never be
able to or more rarely be able to
have a variant emerge that that escaped
it and i think we can do the same thing
with with coronavirus too for sure
can i ask you about testing
sure
sure so you mentioned pcr what kind of
tests are there the antigen test
uh what what are your thoughts on each
maybe this is a good place to uh to also
mention like viral load
and um
the history of the virus as it passes
through your body in terms of the
okay what's being tested for and all
those kinds of things
so the the first tests that were
developed
were
pcr polymerase chain reaction they're
basically nucleic acid amplification
tests
and they were very first ones they stuck
the swab all the way up into your brain
almost
you know i had that done a couple of
weeks ago oh my gosh it's really nasty
but now they do an interior nary swab
they get a little
they get a bunch of cells and some mucus
which has virus and
parts of virus stick it in a test tube
and then they run a reaction which by
the way involves reverse transcriptase
because it converts the viral rna to dna
and then you amplify it
and you can
specify what part of the viral rna you
want to amplify and then a machine will
detect it
and it can be done in 15 minutes
you're detecting pieces of rna not
infectious virus so we're measuring
viral rna loads right
and a common
mistake that many people who should know
better you know physicians and
scientists of all kinds they think that
indicates how much virus you have
it doesn't
it it's a diagnostic of whether you have
bits of rna in you and it
probably means you're infected but
you can't use it to shed light on what's
going on and i'll tell you why in a bit
but first we have to explain some other
things
so until you get to about a million
copies
of rna so you can measure the copy
number in this test this pcr test
it's it's it's a number called ct or
cycle threshold the test the way the
machine works it goes through cycles in
every cycle it amplifies
what you put in
and
the more cycles you need to see
something that means there's not a lot
of rna there
so if you see a if you do a test and you
have a cycle threshold of 35
you have very little rna in you
contrary if you have a cycle threshold
of 10 you have a ton of rna it only took
10 cycles to detect it
and you can extrapolate from that number
the number of copies you have per sample
say per swap and if you don't have a
million you're not infectious you're not
going to infect anyone so in the early
days no matter what ct whatever what pcr
result you had they would quarantine you
and that was wrong because you're not
shedding you don't need to be
quarantined but but
wasn't thought through properly right
that's where you had like 14 days or
something like that
which is now we know is too long because
you don't shed
for that long in a normal infection now
it's 10 days should be fine
so what happens is you get infected you
don't know it of course the virus starts
to grow very quickly and within four or
five days
you reach a peak
of
shedding you're making a lot of rna
and you may be asymptomatic you're
shedding it can affect others and then
you may or may not have your symptom
onset
so you shed for a couple of days before
symptoms and then within three days four
days
the viral rna crashes and you're no
longer shedding you're no longer
transmitting so that's the one kind of
test we have it can tell you if you're
infected at the moment
but it won't tell you
if you're going to be infected tomorrow
right because if you're negative today
you could be positive tomorrow you just
might be on in a different part of the
incubation period right
so that's one test
been used the most you can now
get 15-minute versions of them in a
walk-in or whatever fine then there are
antigen tests which look for the
proteins that the virus is making so as
it's reproducing in your nose it's not
only making genomes it's making proteins
and so these you can buy in the
drugstore and
these would have been great if they had
you know michael minna last year had the
idea that if we could make a little
stick a little piece of paper that you
would suck on and it would tell you if
you're infected or not if this could
cost less than a buck
everybody could test which they can cost
less than a buck by the way
yeah but they were never made right
right
uh
they're never mass manufactured so his
idea is to do like daily tests so yeah
daily and then the kid's going to school
he's positive or she's positive
well if it's cheap enough you just take
another test because they have a certain
error frequency if it's positive twice
you stay home and the next day you try
again
and this i think this would have
revolutionized because the pcr tests are
more expensive at the time and they take
longer to do and so forth
but
it never happened but now we do have
twenty dollar binax now and others that
you can buy and people buy them and see
but that can still happen right and this
is a very frustrating thing to me
because
i'm worried about variance but i'm also
worried about future much more deadly
pandemics
like
i know we kind of said yes covey lots of
deaths
but like it could be a lot worse
too and so i'm thinking
what is going to be the right response
for the future
pandemic of its kind and what's the
right response for continued number of
variants and some of the variants might
be deadlier
or more transmissible well we we can the
antigen
tests
will pick up
the variance that's not a question the
pcr may be influenced by changes but you
can quickly adapt the primers that you
use that's what i mean like to me all
these discussions about vaccines and so
on
vaccines we got very lucky that they
took so little time right
and and you have to be aware no matter
what that there's hesitancy with the
vaccines in this country before i mean
yeah if that's a reality you can't just
be like magically saying that
right you're going to overcome that
and i don't think there's any hesitancy
and cheap tests at home
i agree i think if someone so the
question is if someone tested positive
would they stay home that's the question
what if their what if their job depends
on them going in i i mean that's well
you have to look at sort of aggregate
yeah how many people would decide and i
think
um
again a lot of that is in leadership but
i think a lot of them mo i would say
most people stay home
i think that mina had the idea and it
would have changed the whole
situation for sure if it could have been
made when we talked to him last spring i
think or summer
we would have gotten around a lot of the
issues that we're in today because i
think people would have stayed home and
not transmitted and i think it's still
valuable to this day in the fall if we
don't have vaccine uptake we could just
test kids every day yeah and get them
and keep them home when they're infected
it cuts
it's and we don't have it
but i think and i'm not privy to what
was going on but
i don't think a lot of emphasis was put
on testing early on you know the cdc
developed the first one it was flawed
they had to recall the kits i mean
there's a fiasco they should have had
100 companies making the tests initially
right
so for the future
i think what we have learned is we need
to have a rapid antigen test right off
the bat
that's doable
you can't do it in a day like you can
for pcr because
you need to make antibodies to the
protein that you're looking for and you
need to do those and animals but you can
do it in weeks
and we should be ready for that
yeah because
i mean to me that's obvious that's
obviously the best solution uh second to
that if we understood how well masks
work
like
maybe let me ask you this question let's
put masks aside
how will do we understand how covet is
transmitted
there's there's droplets of different
sizes
uh aerosols tiny tiny droplets
it seems like that's a very difficult
thing to understand thoroughly
uh so it seems like it's transmitted
both ways
it's unclear how exactly
so how how how much do we understand
and why is it so difficult to understand
hopefully i think it's clear that it's
transmitted through the air
mostly it's not touching we thought
initially it would be a lot of touch but
very little of that
it's through the air
and when you talk
mainly when you talk you you expel a lot
of
droplets right even the plosives that
your foam thing here is are meant to
pee right that you send out little
sprays and those have viruses in them
and the big drops fall to the ground
and the little ones can go 100 feet or
more right but the little ones also have
less virus in them
so i'm not sure well we certainly do not
know how much virus you need to be
infected right but it's probably at
least several thousand particles if not
more
and it could be that
for most people
the tiny droplets don't have enough
virus to infect someone else but there's
one observation about this virus it's
really interesting and that is that
80 of transmissions are done by 20 of
the people of the infected people
not every infected person transmits
that's been borne out in multiple
studies and in fact there's a study at
university of colorado
where they
quantified the viral rna loads and all
the swabs that had been done of students
for like a six month period
and
most of the infectious fire most of the
rna copies
were found in
15 to 20 percent of the people the rest
had really low and they're probably
that's probably why they don't transmit
so
those are the ones that might get by
enough virus in the tiny droplets to be
able to infect someone at a distance and
i think that's entirely possible
why is it hard to study
you can't do it in real life because you
don't know who's infected and if you do
this there's not a controlled
environment to measure droplets and so
forth you'd have to do it in a
laboratory situation if you use an
animal you just don't know what the
relevance of that is
to people you'd have to use
human and do challenge experiments and
you know we we don't do that at this
point at least not for this virus so
that's why it's hard to know what's
going on so we have to make inferences
from epidemiological
associations where you're studying say
transmission in a household where people
are stuck in the same rooms together and
you can get an idea of
what kind of droplets were involved so
that makes it much harder to if you're
if you're leaning on epidemiological
stuff as opposed to like biophysics or
something like the the mechanic very
hard
so
that makes it but that makes it really
hard to then develop solutions like
masks to ask the question how will the
masks work because then to answer that
question you can lean on epidemiological
stuff again
like looking at populations that wear
masks versus don't wear masks
as opposed to
actually saying
uh
like from an engineering perspective
like what kind of material
and what kind of tightness
by which amount decreases
the viral load that's received on the
other end but
some experiments have been done with
masks and just droplets with no virus in
them right right yes and you can measure
the efficiency of different mask
materials at
keeping those in so if i say that this
mask stops
70 percent of this or larger size
droplet
that leads to this percent decreased
transmission
um and also on both the
the generation and the the the
the receiving end and the giving end
sure so how will the mask protect you
from others how well do you do mass
protect uh others from you
like all of those things
seem like they could be more rigorously
studied there's no doubt about it and
now is the time because once this is
over
nobody's gonna do it nobody's gonna care
no right but it seems like to me so test
is one thing
but masks
like
the
good mask whatever the good means
whatever that means like some level of a
quality of material on your face
if it's shown to actually like
thoroughly shown to work well
that seems like an obvious solution
uh to
reopen society with if you have a good
understanding of how well they work
because if you don't have a good
understanding if there's a lot of
uncertainty that's when you get and you
have people speaking from authority
that's when you start getting the
politicization
of the solutions of course no the data
there are some data
most they're mostly epidemiological
and they show some effect in some
countries right but they could be way
better yeah and
but the fact that they're not perfect
then people take advantage of and say
well look they don't work that well so
i'm not going to wear it i think as you
said people can use it as an excuse but
even if it works so daniel always says
it a mask will cut down transmission by
to 60 percent and then distance will do
another 30 yeah those numbers are made
up though
i mean they're not made up but they're
estimates
absolutely
and many of them are made
based on models right yeah we make this
model and let's say the mask cuts down
this much what's what will be the effect
on i mean yeah they're models and it's
for the same reason i i don't believe
the transmission
uh var of the variants because it's all
based on statistical models as well not
biological experiments done in the lab
so that in that sense vaccine data is
much better than masks
for sure for sure so
my my problem with the mask date which i
always thought was fascinating i stopped
talking about it i was in the paper
about masks i stopped talking about it
because
what what started happening is mass
created on both sides
the people that were like in silicon
valley friends of mine that were wearing
masks the way they look at others who
don't
is like that's that's a whole other
issue right that's yeah but that what
that i understand that's happens when
you don't have solid science understood
they that now start judging you like
you're less a human being you're not
only uh dumb but you're just you're
almost like evil you're doing bad for
society by not wearing masks and then
the people looking in the other way
are seeing you for the that
you're being for judging them
uh unrightfully so they almost want to
say fu by not wearing the mask and
there's this division that's created
that that was heartbreaking to me
because masks like testing is a solution
that was available early on
and if understood well it could be
deployed in a mass scale and it seems
like there's some historical evidence
for other viruses where it does yes very
well that's correct and so like
the fact that this was politicized
um
yeah was a little bit heartbreaking you
can find in the literature studies
mostly of healthcare workers and
influenza where you can actually
because you see the people every day
they can sample them you can actually
see what masking does and some of them
show an effect and others do not then
that's the problem that's like any trial
sometimes if it's not big enough and
then people latch on to that see it
doesn't really work but i think the main
issue is that
in january both cdc and who said masks
don't work don't use them
that was the kiss of death for masks
because when they then changed their
mind
they didn't say we screwed up
they just said wear masks if they had
said we made a mistake we were wrong
i think more people would have worn
masks but they didn't yeah and like you
said
admitting you're wrong is
like
a real big part of it i think almost the
better way is not just saying you're
kind of
saying you're wrong but
in january saying
like revealing the uncertainty under
which we operate like actually
like uh reveal what was done
and with the spanish food at the the
beginning of the previous century
uh
because there's a lot of mass
controversy then too it went back and
forth and that was actually the source
of a lot of distrust there too
so and then uh look at influenza like
how is it effective with that and just
reveal this we don't we don't know but
uh
with like with some probability this is
the best option we got right currently
and then and then in a month or two
adjust it
saying that you know what our like
uncertainty decreased a little bit we
have a better idea
like that was a that was an incorrect
estimate but reveal that you're
struggling it's not like this weird
binary clock that goes one direction or
the other you're struggling in
with uncertainty and like trusting
people maybe criticize me sometimes with
this but i i think most people are
actually intelligent
like trusting the public to be
intelligent uh with if you give them if
you have transparent and give them uh
information in a real authentic way like
don't look like you're hiding something
i think they're intelligent enough to
use that data to make decisions it's the
same thing as with the testing is if if
you put that power in the people's hands
to know if they're sick or not they're
going to make
unmask the right decision i think
it's uh that the masks and the testing
has been a bit heartbreaking
i think it's a good point though that
most people don't seem to have an
objection to testing
that's a good point yes yeah and then
obviously makamina makes that point
brilliantly and still there's very
little
excitement around that
but he said he was going to do it i
don't understand i mean i haven't spoken
to him since then so i don't know why
he's pushing it well i mean but he can't
do it alone he has to get so one of the
one of the resistances fda doesn't like
cheap things
yeah
they don't want to approve it so it
makes the mass manufacturer
like uh with the emergency exceptions
all those kinds of things very difficult
and then there's not much money to be
made on it without that i don't know
i think there's just economic pressures
against it and because so much
investment
was uh placed on the vaccines and
obviously there's an incentive mechanism
there where the companies sure you know
lobbyists and all those because
there's this machine that says
um
arguing for tests is difficult because
the thing that's worked for most severe
viruses in the past is vaccines
now we have vaccines why the hell would
you need tests
at that time
like why the hell do you need tests when
we could be working on vaccines it seems
like the obvious thing to be working is
the vaccines from from their perspective
but it's not obvious at all to me
i think you should have both i think you
have vaccines and good testing and that
covers you
really well because you're always going
to have people who don't get vaccinated
i don't know if you've been paying
attention to this there's a guy named
brett weinstein there's a guy named sam
harris
they have good representations
i would say of uh
of
two sides of a perspective on vaccines
so from sam harris's perspective
it's obvious that everybody should
get vaccinated and
it's irresponsible
to not get vaccinated
i think he represents a lot of people's
belief in that and then uh
brett
is talks a lot about ivermectin
but also talks about the hesitancy
towards the vaccine for
for people who are healthy who are
people who are younger that kind of
thing
and saying we should consider long-term
effects of
the vaccine
in making this calculation
what do you make about this conversation
some of it happens on twitter
some of it happens in the space of
podcasts
um do you pay attention to this kind of
thing
what's your role in this
what do you hope
is the way to resolve this conversation
do you think it's healthy
well a conversation is always healthy
but to make definitive statements is not
because it suggests you have information
that you don't have so
um
you know we talked about long-term
effects i think you need to balance
those versus long-term effects of the
disease and you can make your decision
i don't think
you need to
tell everybody to get vaccinated i think
you need to present the case you say
here we made good vaccines here the
safety profile
here's the risk benefit balance and you
should decide you're a smart person you
should decide
now
companies are going to do differently
right companies may say you have to be
vaccinated to work here my employer
columbia
said we have to be vaccinated to work in
the fallen if you want to be a student
you have to be vaccinated so you decide
whether you want to go or not
but
the the idea that
you should make a decision based on
long-term
effects there is no evidence right so
how can you make a decision when we
don't have evidence whereas we do have
evidence that there are long-term
effects of getting covet so i don't
think that's a fair argument and it just
makes people scared to say that
yeah but on the other hand for someone
to say it's a no-brainer and
to denigrate people for not being
vaccinated that's not the approach
either because
they're going to dig in
and say i'm not doing this because you
tell me too right i think the middle
ground is to say
take a bit of both and say
hear the potential issues and hear the
benefits and
this is what i would do and you have to
just decide on your own i'd leave it to
them i say you decide and if you don't
want to you know it's up to you you
don't have to get vaccinated
and you'll probably get infected at some
point and maybe you'll be okay
but here's the best available data and
it looks like the vaccines are pretty uh
a pretty damn smart solution they seem
to work i think you
tell people what you did
and present both sides calmly and i
think digging in you know as like in a
debate i don't think that's terribly
useful yeah so that's my view i i mean
people come to me all the time and ask
me
i'm worried what should i do and i'd say
what are you worried about let's talk
about it and go through it calmly
and if they want to still take
ivermectin i said it's fine it's your
choice
and i have a problem with that i love
that i love that's the way you think uh
people should definitely listen to this
week in virology
and follow your work is brilliant i've
been really enjoying it lately it's it's
like it's my favorite way to stay in
touch with
the
the happenings of covid obviously you
put in a lot of other stuff in there but
we used to do other viruses before
covert it was quite interesting
and i'm trying to slip other viruses in
because i think they're informative
in many ways and we're going to do more
and more of that but i have to say i
canceled usually i record on tuesday and
friday and i canceled today so i could
be with you
huge honor i appreciate that no no it's
fine um i think a couple of other people
were going to be away anyway so
so i do a lot of different pods they're
all on youtube but i also do a live
stream
on wednesday nights on youtube which you
can find and that's where people can
come and ask questions we don't have an
agenda we just start and by 30 minutes
in there's 700 people with questions
that i can't even get through because
there's so many of them and i'm actually
astounded that so many people are
have really good questions
most of them are reasonable and and they
come back every week so it's a great
it's turning into a great uh forum to
have a nice discussion
and the youtube channel is called what
so you could search for my name which is
vincent dracquiniello it'll turn up or
my handle on youtube is prof vrr
p-r-o-f-e-r-r have you read uh the
plague by kamu by any chance
years ago
years ago i have to read it again that's
really relevant well let me just sort of
ask you a question about it
it describes a town that's overtaken by
a plague and it's blocked off from the
rest of the world
and it kind of reveals the best the
worst of human nature that's like how
people respond to that sort of the
encroaching
that their own mortality their own death
on the horizon i think what are the
messages in the book that
ultimately
like love for others so it's like a lot
of people want to become isolated and
they hide from each other but ultimately
the thing that saves you is
is love which is one of the things i've
just watching this pandemic
you know with the distance with the
masks
that's all fine
but there's a distancing from people
of that that that um the tension the
breaking of the common humanity between
people that's one of the reasons i when
i came to austin
earlier this year just to visit
i fell in love with the city because
even with the masks in the distance
there were still um a camaraderie like a
like a i don't know just a love for each
other just a kindness towards each other
and uh that's what i took away from the
plague
mostly it's told the story of the doctor
who basically
gives in
and uh just gives himself as a service
to others and that that love is the
thing that liberates him from his own
conception of mortality the fact that
he's here he's going to die what do you
think about this
the effect of the virus we talked a lot
about biology but
the effect of the virus and the
the the fabric of the common humanity
that connects us
well that's what a pandemic does it
really
cuts that right because small outbreaks
are local they don't have global effects
but when you have something this big
where
pretty much nobody escapes
and not just
making people sick
it
changes your life right people lose jobs
they change jobs they move somewhere
else
they have all kinds of
disruptions you know kids can't go to
school it really shows you i mean i
always like to say
a tiny virus can bring
earth to its knees
tiny viruses you can't even see them
that most people don't even think about
most of the time
and the real effect is not just sickness
it's what it does to people because
in the end we are animals and most
animals like each other and they
interact they have great social
structures and that makes them
do well
and i guess the exception is people in
a.i right
they could be on their own
well that's why you build robots that
you fall in love with that's right and
so i think when uh when a the real story
is what it does
to society for sure which has
ramifications way beyond the number of
people dying
in the vaccines and the tests and all of
that and this one has really
made a big rupture and you could tell
not now so much i think being out and
about now things look
pretty normal except you know for some
people wearing masks you would now never
know i mean
the airport this morning was completely
jammed people go and they're all on
vacation or wearing shorts right
so they're they're back to normal it's
august
but last year it's really different in
new york where you're
used to lots of people on the street it
was eerie it's just quiet
but you know under it all people are
still
most people help each other when they
have to right
most people are willing to uh
if something happens to someone to reach
out and help them
you know there are always exceptions
where people are mean
and that's
you know that's just the way animals are
we're not the only ones that can be mean
to our own species
yeah but
i think most of the motivation for
everything that was done is to help
other people i mean i i do think that
the vaccine
manufacturers maybe not the leaders but
the people working in the labs really
wanted to get this out
quickly and help people right yeah i
think at every level people who are
contributing really wanted to help other
people and feel proud that they're able
to do that so there's i view it as
you know we're never going to be 100
good
because animals are not
evolution
made us i mean we're lucky we somehow
rose above by having incredible brain
and so forth but a lot of our base
instincts are animals and you know they
chase each other and
and have alpha males and all that stuff
and and we always have a little bit of
that in us but we do have some
humanity that this really ripped up it
really did
and i think for me someone who studied
viruses for over 40 years it's just
amazing that an invisible thing can do
that right
it goes back to the thing you found
fascinating which is a virus affecting
human behavior yes or uh behavior of the
organism
yes so
you know humans can make weapons and do
harm and you can see that but this you
can't even see yeah
you can't and look what it has done and
it'll do it again there'll be more i
just
i wish we would be more prepared because
we know what to do we know we should be
making antivirals vaccines masks testing
masks making test mode modalities that
we can
really quickly redesign
but after sars one all that went out the
door people didn't do anything and
that's why we're in this situation so
i you know people ask me this all the
time are we going to be ready for the
next one
and i always say we should be we have
all the information we need to know what
to do but somehow i think
people forget
uh that said sometimes uh we we really
step up
when the tragedies run in front of us we
do on the catastrophe so i don't know
somehow humans have still survived the
fact that we had nuclear weapons for so
many decades and we're still not blowing
each other up whether by terrorists or
by nation is amazing it's quite
surprising
so always after reading the pentagon
papers it's even more amazing right
so i don't know how we do it i i tend to
believe as there's uh
there's that
you know at the surface you notice the
greed the corruption the the evil but
the core of human nature of the human
spirit is
is uh one in the scientific realm is
curiosity and
more deeply is kindness compassion and
like wanting to do good for the world
like i i believe that desire to do good
out powers all the other stuff
uh by a large amount and that's why we
don't we have not yet destroyed
ourselves we kind of there's a lot of
bickering there's a lot of wars on the
surface but underneath it all there's
there's this ocean of uh
love for each other i mean i think
there's a evolutionary advantage to that
and uh it would be a good explanation
why we still haven't destroyed ourselves
oh we had so many opportunities yeah if
you look at all the wars in history so
many yeah i was just my son was
telling me about the ottoman empire
right
it's just
you know war after war and then other
countries splitting up countries with no
regard to who's living where right
it's just
how can these people do this yeah it's
fascinating human history is fascinating
and we're still young as a species
we have a lot very young yeah more time
to go and a lot
more ways to distort ourselves do you
have advice like you said you have many
decades of research and an incredible
like career in life you have advice for
young people about
career about life people in high school
people in college
of um how to live a life that can be
proud of
so i what i like to do is tell people
don't plan it because i didn't plan
anything everything i did was one step
at a time you don't have to plan
i just
found things that were interesting to me
and so i
my father was a doctor and
he wanted me to be a doctor but i was
not interested in taking care of people
i
learned that
but i couldn't say no to him so
you know i was a biology major in
college and i i graduated and
i didn't have anything to do
so i liked science so i got a job in the
lab
and it was very exciting and
that led
to everything else that i've done one
step at a time and i think
the most important thing you can do well
they're two important things you could
be really curious all the time you
mentioned curiosity i think curiosity is
essential
you have to be curious about everything
and if you are you're never going to be
bored yeah
and so people who say they're bored i
say you are not curious you should just
think about things and say look at
something and say how does that work or
what what is it doing and how do they
get there and you'll never be bored and
the other thing is when you find
something
which may take time
it's fine
you have to be passionate about it you
have to put everything into it
and that's what i did with viruses so
i i think they're amazing and
i tell my classes
i love viruses they're amazing and
people think i'm morbid because
obviously they kill they kill people and
i shouldn't love something that but
that's not the point that's not what i
mean i love them in the way they have
emerged and
how they work and and so forth and all
that we don't know about them so you
need to be curious and passionate and
don't plan too much and just find
something
that you don't call a job
[Music]
because someone said on the live stream
last week i wish i had a job i liked as
much as you i said it's not a job i
never looked at it as a job it's my
vocation it's my passion
if it's a job then you're not going to
like it yeah something that doesn't feel
like a job so you said uh viruses are
kind of um
passive
non-living you could say
uh or even cells are passive and humans
are kind of active we seem to be making
our own decisions
so uh let me ask you the why question
what do you think is the meaning of this
life of ours
oh there's no meaning it just happened
it's an accident
um
i think there's no life elsewhere
because this is just a rare accident
that happened and the right conditions i
mean people all think i'm wrong because
there are billions and billions of stars
out there right so there's a lot of
opportunity
there's no meaning it's just
a
what do they call it a perfect storm of
events that led to molecules being
formed and eventually i mean it took a
long time for
life to evolve right yeah but it's just
driven by
conditions
if something emerged that worked it
would then go on to the next step
there's no meaning other than that the
only difference is that we
and i think many other animals can
probably we we have the ability we're
sentient right we can influence what
happens to us
and we can take medicines right we can
alter what would normally happen to us
so we can remove some of the selection
pressure
but i think everything else on the
planet just goes you know looks for food
and uh give a lot of offspring so you
can perpetuate it's just a natural
biological function yeah they're much
more directly concerned with survival i
think sure humans are able to
contemplate their mortality we can like
see that even if we're okay today we're
eventually going to die and we're we
really don't like that
so we try to come up with ways to uh
push that deadline farther and farther
away well we have really
i mean we used to die in our 30s right
now it's 70s 80s well most of us used to
die
in our
in the first few weeks that's true
yeah infant death
i i
always tell people the only thing that's
100 is death
it's the only thing in in the world
that's a hundred percent you think about
your own mortality yeah i never think
about it i'm just enjoying
day to day and i don't really you you
work on viruses you don't contemplate
your own mortality given the
the deadliness of the virus i i
around i never thought covert would kill
me no i never was afraid of that not at
all i um
i mostly feared for other people getting
sick especially people who could die of
it i didn't want that to happen to them
but i always thought that
it's obviously not a realistic
viewpoint not to be worried
because many people are
but i've been relatively healthy
they should sequence my genome because
it works really well and have a good
immune system maybe you'd be the first
immortal person i don't think that's got
to be at first so i don't think so
i think that uh biologically you just
can't you know the ends of our
chromosomes keep getting shorter and
shorter and that's eventually what kills
us
um so you just can't keep going on
but um that's fine i i don't need to
i understand from the vampires that it's
not good to live forever
i guess make the most of the of the time
you got that's the uh bacteria live a
much shorter time so we got that on
bacteria bacteria are
just
you know little bags of chemicals that
that split so they have no
they have no
stake in the matter at all it doesn't
doesn't bother and i think you have to
go a long ways before you get into some
kind of consciousness but it's weird
that this bag of chemicals
has a stake in the matter like our human
body
is uh consciousness is a weird thing not
just in us but they make half of the
oxygen on the planet 20 of the oxygen
comes from bacteria
um and they made in the beginning of
earth they made enough oxygen to start
oxygenation going life going i mean it's
they have an incredible role it's all an
accident just happened
well vincent like i told you i'm a huge
fan it's a big honor that you were
talking with me today thank you so much
for coming down thank you for spending
so much time with me
um and thank you for everything you do
in terms of educating about viruses
about biology microbiology and
everything else i can't wait everybody
should check out vincent's youtube
watch his lectures listen to the podcast
it's truly incredible thank you so much
for talking davidson my pleasure
thanks for listening to this
conversation with vincent raqueniello to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from isaac asimov
the saddest aspect of life right now is
that science gathers knowledge faster
than society gathers wisdom
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you