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- Hello, and thanks for joining us.

I'm Mark Baumgarten.

Crosscuts Managing Editor and host of the At-large Series where we discuss the biggest issues with people who know them best.

Tonight we'll be talking about the coronavirus pandemic and how it's changing us with Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a couple of quick notes though before we begin.

There will be an audience Q&A at the end of the event you can submit a question in the chat that you'll see on the right hand side of your screen, right over there.

Also, before we get going I wanted to say thank you to our sponsor BECU.

Who's been providing financial services and support to the community for over 85 years.

I would also like to say thank you to our supporting sponsor Seattle Children's.

So it's been just over a year since normal life in America and many other places around the world came to a screeching halt.

After the spread of the novel Coronavirus was declared a pandemic.

As schools and businesses shut their doors, there was a lot of uncertainty.

The big question was when we would get back to normal but the answer kept shifting, the enormity of the crisis dawned on many of us slowly, would we be back in two weeks, six weeks, by the end of the summer?

Now in the spring of 2021, we're still in the midst of this crisis, but we're also in a very different position.

The peak of a devastating third wave of infections is in the rear view mirror and vaccines are being widely distributed with 20% of the populous now fully vaccinated.

But uncertainty remains variants of the virus along with reopening plans are driving surges in some parts of the country and inspiring talk of renewed restrictions.

And then there's this who exactly will we be when we eventually emerge from this period of sustained weirdness?

How has the pandemic changed our lives as individuals and as a society?

And how has it changed our brains?

These are the kinds of questions that Nicholas Christakis has been trying to answer throughout the pandemic.

Nicholas is a professor at Yale where he is immersed in the fields of network science bio-social science, and behavior genetics.

He is also the director of the Human Nature Lab and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.

In his research and in his book, Apollos Arrow Nicholas is trying to understand how human biology and health can affect the social makeup of humanity and how social interaction shapes human health and in the pandemic and in other situations.

So, yeah, and he's got a lot to work with right now.

So Nicholas, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you so much for having me Mark.

- All right.

I want to start with this question.

There are two types of behavior that we're interested in right now that of the virus and that of human beings responding to the virus.

Tell me, which is more predictable.

- Oh, that's such a good stuff.

First question.

I would say the virus is more predictable.

Well, both are predictable.

We are doing certain things that humans typically do during times of plague, but I would say the virus is a bit more predictable.

- All right.

Well, so let's start on the virus then for a little bit, in your book Apollos Arrow, which we should note came out last fall you entertain the idea that the virus may become less virulent as a possibility, right?

But it looks like with the variants that are taking hold that the opposite has come to pass.

And yet we also have vaccines right now.

And I guess I'm just curious where your thinking is at right now, about what the path of the viruses and how long will we be in its grip?

- Okay, so usually from a sort of a there's an idea which is contested but which I think is probably true that in general terms from a Darwinian point of view the virus doesn't want to kill us.

The virus is better off if it makes us a little bit sick.

So we go out and about and we continue to spread it.

If the virus makes us rapidly sick or too sick and we take to our bed or fells us or kills us then that variant of the virus that is more deadly will become extinct on average.

Whereas the more benign versions of the virus that make us mildly sick will circulate and come to predominate.

And then over long periods of time there's a kind of arms race between hosts and pathogens and they reach a kind of detente where the virus tends not to be as deadly or the pathogen tends not to be as deadly.

So that's the typical pattern, but it's not always the case.

For example, the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The second wave was four times as deadly as the first wave.

And there was a lot of theories about this some of which are relevant as we discussed in more directly the answer to your question, which is that during the 1918 pandemic human behavior modified the natural process of the virus.

So specifically what happened then there were a lot of outbreaks on the front during the first world war.

And then on the front what would happen is if you got very sick you were put into a crowded railway car and transported to a crowded camp to convalesce.

So our human behavior moved more deadly strains of the virus at greater distance and put more deadly strains of the virus into greater contact with other people.

So we did the opposite of what usually the virus does.

And as a result of that, the deadlier strains move further and came into contact with more people.

And as a result of that, the deadlier, the second wave of the pandemic was worse than the first wave in 1918.

That's a theory that I just described.

So the same kind of thing might be happening right now ironically, while what I described as generally true over the long-term the viruses tend to get more benign over the short term they can do anything they want.

And what we are seeing right now is the emergence of new deadlier strains of the virus.

The B117 strain was just reported last week.

Although preliminary results have been available for a few months is probably 30% deadlier and the virus and the strains are getting more infectious meanings that they spread more easily.

And the thing we most are worried about is that the viruses will come to the strange will emerge.

The virus will evolve to evade vaccines that we will have new strains and evade vaccines.

So yes, in general things get, viruses tend to become better.

And I think ultimately what'll happen with this particular pathogen is it'll join the other Corona viruses that just give us the common cold.

There are four other Corona viruses that circulate among us but just give us the sniffles.

And I think over a 50 year horizon, or maybe over a 10 year horizon, this one will become like that.

And we'll just give us the sniffles.

And that'll be the demo, the final demo of this 2019 coronavirus pandemic.

- All right 10 years.

That's still a little ways away.

So we gotta get through a few more years of this and vaccines are gonna help.

- Well, no, I don't mean it's going to last 10 years.

What I mean is I don't mean that the coronavirus is gonna, we're going to be continued to have an epidemic for 10 years.

What I mean is that ultimately this virus will join the other Corona viruses that circulate among us and the disease will become what is known as endemic.

One of the things that it's important to realize is that we happen to be alive at a moment which is rare in our species which is the emergence of a new pathogen into our midst.

And this pathogen is not gonna circulate among us forever.

And it, from the point of view of the pathogen it is having what is known as an ecological release.

It's like an invasive species to us.

Like if we took rats to an isolated Island in the Pacific, the rats would overrun the place.

Our bodies are Island to the rats to the virus, which is just circulating among us in this way.

So ultimately the virus is it's never gonna disappear.

We're not gonna eradicate it.

It's just going to circulate among us but it's epidemic force and its lethality will be attenuated over time and would have anyway, but we'll be especially so because of the vaccines.

- All right, so let's talk about vaccines now, for a little bit, there is quite a bit of vaccine hesitancy still and a lot of that is built on a kind of social contagion of misinformation, right?

And this is something that you studied.

Why are we so susceptible to this contagion right now?

Why is the evidence of the vaccines working not working on everybody who is suspicious of them?

- I mean, I would say that the two ideas that are relevant to the question you just asked, one idea is the fact that during times of plague for thousands of years lies and superstition and denial also come to predominate.

I mean, you might even say that a key feature of serious epidemics is mendacity.

And for thousands of years, during times of plague people have first sought to deny it.

And here we did again.

And in 2019 as the pathogen was bearing down on us, we many of, the president United States, many governors, many people on the street sought to deny what was happening.

Didn't want to believe that we were about to be stricken.

And also all kinds of misinformation circulated this to lies, have been a feature of epidemics for thousands of years.

And as I said, you might think of lies and denial as a key part of what it means to be an epidemic.

The plague is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

You could think of mendacity as it's Squire, followed right behind it.

So if you map human social networks, as my lab does you can trace out the flow of the germ across the social connections, across the network.

And in parallel to that, as you're talking about Mark there's a spread of misinformation and people are influenced your risk of getting infected depends on whether your friends are infected and your risk of getting misinformation or correct information actually depends on whether your friends have misinformation or correct information.

So I guess the first part of my answer to your question would relate to the fact that lies are almost an intrinsic feature of epidemics.

And the second part would relate to a broader set of ideas related to, as you said, social contagion one of the deep ironies of human beings is that when we evolve to be very sensitive to what others around us are doing.

And in fact, if you let human beings do whatever they want they typically choose to do what others are doing which is one of the ironies of our species.

So we are very sensitive to what other people are doing and in all aspects of our life and this also alas applies to things like vaccine hesitancy.

So when your friends are wearing masks it increases your probability of wearing a mask.

If your friends believe that the vaccines, some crazy theory that the microchips are being implanted in you through the vaccines.

Well, then you come to believe that.

Or if your friends believe that a hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for the disease while that affects you too.

And this incidentally is one of the mechanisms we need to employ to counteract misinformation.

And which is one of the reasons when you get vaccinated one of the best things you can do is advertise that to your friends, not only on social media but in your personal interactions, because those among us who have not yet been vaccinated as they come to be surrounded by more and more people who are vaccinated they're more and more likely to see, "Hey, you know pretty much everyone I know "is being vaccinated.

"I should probably get so too."

That is the most powerful way in my view to undo vaccine hesitancy.

And there are other techniques I'll mention one, and then we can go on.

One is you have to meet people who have vaccine hesitancy where they are at it, doesn't help to lecture them.

You need to ask them, well, why, why what are your concerns?

Tell me about your concerns.

And so I understand those concerns.

Like I can see, Oh, you're worried that it's a new vaccine.

You're right, it is new.

So it's a technology we haven't used before or you're worried, you'll regret it if you have a complication, whereas somehow you think it's more natural to get the infection.

If you have a complication of the natural infection or die from the infection you think that's better than if you have an even rare complication from the vaccine.

I can understand why you would think that an action you take that leads to a calamity has different moral freighting than a natural thing that occurs to you.

Anyway, people might have all kinds of reasons and it helps to try to validate what their concerns are or to correct if they say, well, I think the vaccine has chemicals from outer space or something.

No, thank you for telling me that.

But that's not the case, you know?

So I think anyway, that's a narrow though.

So that's a two-part response to the question of vaccine hesitancy.

It relates to your social interactions it responds to your social interactions.

And it also responds to a certain set of tools that we can deploy to meet people where they're at when they're worried about using the vaccine.

- So how do you feel the U.S. government in particular has done in fighting this or just in in messaging in general, around the pandemic and then the vaccines?

I mean, where have they gone wrong and where could, what do you hope we see in the future?

- I think that, I guess as apreamble to answer that question I would like to put another idea on the table which is that this way we've all come to live right now.

It feels very unnatural and alien and strange, doesn't it?

But it's really important to understand that plagues are not new to our species.

They're just new to us.

We think it's crazy that we've had to come to live this way but our ancestors have been confronting plagues for thousands of years.

I mean, they're in the Bible, they're in the Elliot, they're in Shakespeare, in Servon T's, plagues are a part of the human condition.

And I think that an ideal strategy, and from the moment this virus was loose in our species and we had community spread in the United States.

So community spread is important cases are when you have a case and you know where it came from the person who says, Oh, I just came from Wuhan or I just came from Italy.

And so that's a new case that arrived from somewhere else.

Community spread is where you find a person with the disease, and they have no idea where they got it.

That means the virus is loose, from the moment the virus was loose in our society.

And we had community spread.

We were clearly gonna lose a lot of lives a hundred thousand, 200,000 lives but not a half a million to a million.

We're probably in the end.

When I wrote the book back in August I thought we would lose between half a million and a million lives.

We've already exceeded the lower bound of that.

I don't think we'll get to a million before the plague is over but I think we will pass the mid point.

I think we will ultimately lose more than 750,000 American lives.

This is an enormous calamity.

I don't think people fully realize this yet.

And so from the moment the plane was on our shores, the wisest strategy, I think would have been to call the American people to action and implement a variety of things, which we did not do.

I can describe for you some of those ideas but that have had we done it.

We wouldn't have lost as many lives.

We might've lost a hundred thousand or 200,000 lives, but not 500 or 700,000 lives.

And I think our leaders have failed us primarily the previous president and but many governors that it's not just a right wing, left wing kind of thing.

I think the previous president was very limited in many ways and made decisions which I think ultimately resulted in the needless death of many Americans, but many governors on the left hand, on the right also made mistakes.

And some people say, well, other countries also screwed up.

That's true.

But without being jingoistic I have higher hopes for the United States but we're the United States of America.

We're the richest nation on earth.

We have the most fantastic scientists and doctors.

We have an incredible apparatus for free and open communication.

We have the CDC and we flubbed it.

I am ashamed as a nation for how badly we have done.

And I hope we get our act together and do better going forward.

That was a meandering answer.

But these questions of yours are not, they're complicated.

They're just- - (laughs) I apologize.

I'll try to ask them simpler questions.

- No, no, I'm enjoying the conversation.

I'm just saying, I feel like I'm very long winded.

You get these good crisp, intelligent questions and I'm kind of giving this long winded answer but these aren't easy things to talk about.

- Oh, absolutely.

And Nicholas, you're doing great.

I've got some curve balls here for you though.

I hope you can hang with us.

So I think that you touched on herd immunity a little bit earlier.

I think that that is kind of the watch word, right?

That is what everybody is.

As we watch those percentages tick up of the vaccinated in our country, we have an eye on herd immunity, but I think, and I'll just say in the pre-interview for this conversation, you said that we are not at the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning of this pandemic.

And so I wonder what comes after herd immunity, if that is not the end of the pandemic?

- No herd immunity is not the end.

And if I might, before I address your question let me just do a little Epi 101.

So herd immunity is the idea that a population can be immune from an epidemic.

Even if not every individual within the population is immune.

For example, if you vaccinate 96% of the population for measles, and one of the 4% unvaccinated people gets some measles, you don't get an epidemic because they're surrounded by immune people.

There is no one for them to spread it to.

And that percentage, that 96 percentages to herd immunity threshold and you should have the intuition that the more transmissible the disease is the more contagious it is, the higher that threshold is.

And the contagiousness of a disease is quantified by a quantity called R-Naught, or R Sub-Zero or the basic reproduction number.

That's how many new cases do you get for each original case in a non-immune normally interacting host population.

That's an intrinsic property of the virus.

If you release the virus into a naive population how many each case creates how many new cases and that number for SARS-COV-2 is three about three for seasonal influenza, it's about 1.5.

Each case of the flu creates one new case replaces itself plus half a case.

So that's why you get a slower growing epidemic.

Measles, the R-Naught for measles, it's like the most infectious disease known is like 16 or 18.

It just goes like gangbusters.

Each case creates 16 or 18 new cases.

The formula under certain assumptions for calculating the herd immunity threshold is R-Naught minus one divided by R-Naught, so three minus one divided by three is 67% in the original variant of this virus, 67% of the people have to have be immune to the virus before we get the herd immunity threshold.

Now, actually it turns out for certain network science reasons, specifically that people vary in how many connections they have.

Some people have many connections.

Some people have few, that actually that number becomes comes down from 67 to about 50%.

So about 50% of Americans have to be immune before we reached the herd immunity threshold.

Now, when we reach that threshold it doesn't mean that we've eradicated the virus.

The virus is still there.

It's still killing people.

It's still circulating.

It's just that it's epidemic forces gone.

It's no longer it doesn't have the capacity to create epidemic outbreaks.

So that's the concept of herd immunity and a spanner in the works is that some of these new variants have higher R-Naughts.

They're more infectious.

So for example B117 variant it's R-Naught, is not 3.0, but 4.0.

So four minus one divided by four is 75%.

It's a much higher herd immunity threshold.

So these new variants are gonna wreak havoc in our society in a number of ways.

It makes it necessary to immunize even more people.

So with that background, where do we stand?

As you said, we vaccinated let's say 20% of Americans had been vaccinated so far.

That's great, but we now have to manufacturer hundreds of millions of doses distribute the doses of the vaccine, administer the doses.

And most importantly, persuade people to be vaccinated.

And all of that's gonna take time at least until the end of 2021, before we vaccinated least 50% of the population.

And meanwhile, the virus is still spreading, maybe 20 to 25% of Americans have acquired immunity naturally but either way because of artificial immunization, artificial immunity because of vaccines or natural immunity because of the natural spread, we're gonna cross the herd immunity threshold by the end of 2021.

Now, until that time we're gonna be living in a changed world, wearing masks, intermittent school and border closures and business closures, gathering bands, outbreaks in places.

We'll probably have a better summer, but we can come back to that, but we're gonna be living in this kind of still experiencing the acute impact, the acute force of this epidemic washing over us.

But finally, that will end, although, as I said the virus will still be there and this great tsunami that struck us the waters will recede as this wave of virus has finally abated in some sense but then there's gonna be debris, right?

We're going to have to clean up the mess.

We're gonna have to, now that the biological and epidemiological impact of the immediate pandemic period is over.

We will enter an intermediate period in which we have to clean up the psychological and social and economic mess that had been created by the virus and the clinical mess.

Maybe five times as many people's die will be disabled by this virus.

So if a million Americans die we're talking 5 million Americans not with long or short COVID, no you recover from your COVID, but your body is harmed.

You have some neurological deficits some neuropsychiatric problems, renal insufficiency, cardiac insufficiency, pulmonary fibrosis.

You've got some problems in your body for the rest of your life because you were infected.

So those Americans will need attention.

Millions of children will have missed school.

Millions of people will have lost their jobs.

Millions of businesses will have closed.

All of this will take time for us to deal with let's say another couple of years if you look at the centuries of history of pandemics and this gets us to the 2024, and then 2024 I think we're gonna have a bit of a party.

Approximately these are approximate dates.

I think then we're gonna have the roaring twenties of the 21st century, similar to the roaring twenties of the 20th century.

I think people having been cooped up for so long are constrained for so long.

They're gonna relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs and restaurants and bars and sporting events and political rallies and musical concerts.

We might see some sexual licentiousness.

Although my sister Katrina insists that I point out this only applies to unmarried couples not to married couples.

We're gonna see people relentlessly spend money.

There's gonna be a kind of a people right now, the savings rate in the United States is through the roof which is typical of plagues for a variety of reasons but people are gonna now spend their money.

We're gonna see an efflorescence in the arts, and of entrepreneurship.

So I think it'll be a bit like the roaring twenties of the 21st century like the roaring twenties of the 20th century.

And that'll Mark the post pandemic period.

And I'll say one more thing.

And then I'll shut up.

All of this is subject to the understanding that we don't have new emergent variants of concern that put a spanner in the works, right?

That make things much worse for us.

- So I want to focus on pretty much the rest of the conversation on that period after we get past the tsunami and talking about the debris, and I know you've done a lot of looking at the 1918 flu epidemic, also the 1890 influenza epidemic- - They've been a Corona virus, that 1890 epidemic might've been a coronavirus pandemic actually.

But yeah, I'm sorry, go on Mark.

- No, no, that's right.

And so you've pulled a lot of lessons from that and I want to hear what those lessons are, but I also want to hear about what's different about now and in particular there's an aspect of our society right now that didn't exist in 1918 or 1890, and that is the internet.

You've written quite a bit about the impact of online life on human beings.

And I'm wondering, the intersection of those two things what you see as being the impact of us both having the ability to be online instead of in person but also some of the mental health impacts of all of this screen time.

I mean I've been staring at a screen for 10 hours a day, and now I'm staring at it for an 11th hour while I'm talking to you.

And I'm just kind of wondering what is that doing to my brain?

And should we be worried about this?

- So I would say a couple of things in response to that first of all, step back again and frame it as you're right that our time in the crucible facing this ancient threat of plague is distinctive in a number of ways.

First of all, this pathogen serious, though it is is not that serious.

It kills about 1%, 1.2% of the people that it infects.

That's the intrinsic lethality of this pathogen as compared to things like smallpox or color or bubonic plague which are 10 or 30 or 40 times deadlier or Ebola.

So the pathogen is deadly, but not that deadly.

So our time in the crucible with this ancient threat is however distinctive in the ways that you described, which is that there are certain technologies available to us which were not available to our ancestors.

First of all the mRNA Vaccine and adenovirus vaccine technology we are the first generation of humans alive who has been able in real time to invent a specific and effective countermeasure against the enemy, the virus and implement it in a fashion that might change the course of the epidemic.

So during bubonic plague, they thought that if you took a snake and minced the snake and took onions and mince the onions and made a paste of snake and onions and smeared your body with this it would ward off the plague.

Of course, that didn't work but we can invent stuff that actually does work and it's miraculous.

And so yes, our time facing this ancient threat is different because we can actually invent a specific countermeasure and we do have modern medicine.

So if you get seriously ill even though you well might die, you're not sure to die.

We have ICU care and doctors who know how to care for these conditions.

And as you pointed out then we also have the internet and this type of technology which allows not all workers, of course, many business many workers have to do their work face to face.

If you're a trucker or a waitress or a home builder, you can't work at home, but many jobs both blue and white collar jobs can be done from home and using this type of technology.

And this has been, as you suggest a tremendous boon and as I think has softened the impact of the that would otherwise have occurred due to the epidemic.

We also have a system of distribution of goods, for example with trucks that can deliver to home deliveries and in some places, drone delivery technology.

So we have other technologies that have allowed our economy not to suffer quite as much as it would have.

I think if this type of an epidemic had stricken us it's something analogous a hundred years ago.

Did I answer your question?

I'm not sure I addressed your question.

- No, I think that you answered it in part and I kind of double-barreled that one on you.

So I apologize, but I do want to draw on a question from one of our audience members to maybe re emphasize the second part of that question, and there's a lot of concern around the impact of the pandemic on our mental health, right?

And so our reader, Krista Daniel asks can you talk about the difficulty of connecting to ongoing mental health care following a crisis?

So essentially, and you brought this up a little bit but do we have the capacity as a society to really manage and deal with the mental health crisis that we as, that we're entering into?

- Well, again, one of the things, that's I think is important to understand is that this too is not a new experience.

I mean, plagues as I've discussed elsewhere are a time of grief, right?

I mean, they take our lives they take our livelihoods, they take our way of life, right?

I mean, during a serious pandemic, it's a time of loss.

Everyone is losing right now.

People are losing things.

Some for half a million Americans they lost their lives.

Probably 10 times as many people knew those people intimately 5 million Americans probably knew someone that died in our bereaved, probably a hundred, probably so 500,00, 5 million probably 50 million Americans knew of someone that died.

Maybe that's made them afraid for example, we know millions of Americans have lost their jobs.

College kids are not having a normal college experience.

High school kids can't have a normal dating experience elementary school kids, aren't having normal playground experiences.

People it's intrinsically a time of loss.

And so there's a kind of widespread grief that is typical of plagues that we are also experiencing.

So when framed, so from the mental health point of view, in the broadest sense, our experience of sadness and almost grief I would say is it's pretty typical.

Now in the longterm, we will recover like our ancestors recovered both as individuals and as a society, but I think many people will bear the marks of this, will have been traumatized by this and again, I think the idea that we would somehow re emerge unscathed, I think pretty much everyone alive in the United States will remember the epidemic of 2020 and 2021 and what they were doing and what it was like for them at that time.

And I don't think there's any easy way to escape it.

- I mean, is there a way to minimize the suffering though?

I mean, I guess I'm just, I'm trying to think naturally grief is a big part of what we're going through.

And as you said before, I don't think that we were really set up in a way that allowed us to come to grips with what we're in the middle of early on in the pandemic, or maybe even right now.

I think that there is certainly, we are a country, a civilization that maybe is in a denial over and over again about this pandemic until it's over.

But I do wonder if there is a way to minimize or if we just need to like, grit our teeth and just get through it.

- No, I think both are true.

I don't mean to be realistic about it.

I guess what I was trying to do first is just frame people's expectations.

Like the idea that somehow, we could just whistle as the plague afflicted us and not suffer is not realistic.

I mean, I guess my first point was just to say some of the suffering is unavoidable and it's not realistic to imagine that we could do something that would completely mitigate and eliminate the suffering.

I guess that's my first point, but that doesn't mean there's nothing we can do to mitigate it.

And I think, engaging socially with others I think the sense of, and this is why I was so disappointed in the prior administration.

I think a call to action to the American people that said, look this is what's gonna happen.

We know this is gonna happen.

These are what the experts say is happening.

Certainly by March when Italy observed, certain by February when Italy, Northern Italy collapsed we knew the United States was gonna be afflicted.

There was no way to escape this fate, something that I said to people, this is what's going to happen.

This is what epidemic growth means.

You remember your high school math class that you ignored when your teacher told you about exponential growth the long flat part of the curve and then the steep part, we're on the flat part now.

So it seems like nothing is happening but something is happening and it's gonna get bad.

And, but don't be afraid.

Here's how we're gonna work together as a nation.

So to give people a sense of purpose to give them a sense of meaning, to frame the experience as a kind of shared sacrifice I think actually would have had not only pragmatic benefits in terms of confronting the epidemic but mental health benefits, right?

I think people would have felt like, I'm in this with together with everyone else in my community and in my nation and everyone is doing their part, including me, I'm doing my part.

And that kind of sense of purpose, I think, would have been a factor that could have mitigated some of the mental health consequences.

Other things include, of course, staying connected to your family, trying to stay gainfully employed, making contributions to your community.

These are standard things that people can do to mitigate the mental health consequences.

And of course there are other ordinary things, therapy and medication, but I'm just talking about like the social aspects of it.

- Well, so- - Could I say something- - Go ahead.

- We've talked a little bit about how plagues, this is an ancient threat.

We've talked about how plagues are time of grief.

We've talked about how they're time of fear.

There are time of lies and mendacity, we've highlighted some of these longstanding features of pandemics, which have manifested themselves even now in the 21st century in the United States.

And we've talked a little bit about the stereotypic course of pandemics though, immediate period, the intermediate period of post endemic period.

But I'd like to just say another word about meaning which I just came up in this context that you mentioned because plagues are also a time of meaning.

So typically during times and why?

Well, when death is afoot.

When people are obliged to stay home when their usual occupations have been suspended when they are suddenly thinking about their own mortality it fosters in people, a kind of search for meaning, often this has manifested as heightened religiosity.

So during times of plague, you see more people pray, go to places of worship, have a sense of religious, spirituality.

That's very typical.

And the Gallup Surveys are showing that that's happening in the United States today.

We also see this search for meaning in things like a boom in the applications to medicine and nursing.

So many young people are seeing, I can find meaning in my life by working as a healthcare worker essential workers are finding a sense of meaning or thinking about truckers.

You have a million or 2 million Americans move our goods on our highways.

They're crucial to our society.

They have a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.

Teachers, have a sense of meaning and purpose.

They see the purpose and the meaning of their lives in a different light now during the time of plague.

So all of that's happening.

And I also think incidentally that this search for meaning has played a role in a lot of the protests we have seen in our country both on the left and on the right during the time of plague.

So during, after George Floyd was murdered, by a policeman on video there were all the protests and the eruption and the anger.

And there's no doubt that part of that related to the history of police brutality in our society especially racially tinge police brutality in our society.

So of course that played a role and some people have also said, well an additional thing that played a role was that people were stuck at home because the plague, they were bored, they had nothing else to do.

That's why they were protesting or that the economic anxiety people were unemployed.

And that played a role.

And for sure that played a role too.

But I also think the search for meaning played a role because I think people were at home and they thought what kind of society do I want to live in?

What kind of person am I?

What's important to me?

I think people found justice.

They expressed their concerns as the meaning found is its outlet a concern for justice.

And analogously on the January 6th insurrection in the United States Capital.

I think that was a bit of a right-wing analog to that because one of the things that struck me about that event was that the protestors and the writers, weren't masks, they were making no efforts to conceal their identity for them what they were doing was about patriotism, right?

For them, they thought, okay, this is what's meaningful to me.

So I think the plague that we are in the midst of in a typical fashion has prompted a reflection in the citizenry about what's important to them in their lives as individuals.

And what's important to them about their society and has therefore played a role in these types of other macro social changes we are seeing whether it's the social justice issues on the left or the kind of things we see on the right.

- All right.

So I just want to remind the viewers, that we're gonna be doing Q&A here, in a few minutes.

So get your questions in, and Nicholas I just have one more kind of topic area that I think you set up really well there.

And it's really around what your outlook is for this post pandemic era and looking in the longterm.

It sounds like you view this as an inflection point and I'm curious if you view it as a moment where we're potentially moving towards being better, being a better nation, a better civilization being better human beings.

Is that what you are seeing in our future, or is there something?

- Well, I think one of the things that that plagues do is they function as their stressors on the society and on a human's life living during a time of plague.

And I think they act as accelerators.

For example, they act as relationship accelerators.

I think if you were heading towards a divorce I think the pandemic has accelerated that, if you were heading towards getting married or be more loving to your partner I think the pandemic has accelerated that.

I think that a lot of the technologies that were afoot and some of the political changes in our society have been accelerated by the pandemic.

Zoom technology existed before, but boy has it been boosted, mRNA vaccine technology existed before but boy has it been boosted and so on.

And I think as well that the plague struck us at a particular moment in the history of our nation where we were especially vulnerable.

We have long-term highs in economic inequality.

I think the worst than a hundred years we have although this is contested, depends on how you measure it but approximately it's very high the economic inequality right now we have political polarization.

We as a nation have lost in my judgment a capacity for nuance in difficult social dilemmas.

We think you're with me, or you're against me it's black or it's white.

This is in my opinion, foolish, childish thinking.

I think we need a spirit of compromise, as a spirit of listening to each other a spirit of trying to find common ground.

I don't think it helps us as a nation to demonize each other but in the plague takes advantage of us.

Our enemies take advantage, our geopolitical enemies take advantage of this too, by the way.

But certainly the virus does, the fact that masks for example, became politicized in our nation but not in other nations harmed us.

The fact that wearing a mask which is just a barrier to droplets came to be seen as a political act, harmed us.

There was no reason for that to happen.

It did not happen in other nations.

So all of that's happening in the background but you asked me about goodness and my laboratory and my work.

I have spent a lot of time understanding the deep evolutionary origins of things like love, and friendship, and cooperation, and teaching.

And I have been persuaded that we are an amazing species.

We are miraculous species, actually, full of good qualities and I'm not ignorant of all the awfulness that we're capable of, but there's all this good stuff we could do too.

And I believe the good outweighs the bad.

And in any case, I'm optimistic in my disposition.

So even as you said, during this time of plague I think it is bringing up fantastic qualities in us.

We are banding together late, better late than never as a nation to fight the plague, our capacity to teach each other things and to share knowledge is manifested.

For example, in our ability to invent a vaccine which is miraculous.

And I would like them to read to you a passage which summarizes my way of thinking, which is from Albert Camus, The Plague Camus writes this book.

It's a novel describing events in a set in the 1940s in a North African village.

It based on episodes of the bubonic plague that had stricken the prior centuries, a protagonist in the novel is Dr. Rieux.

And this is Camus writing.

He says, "Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this Chronicle so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence, that there are more things to admire in men than to despise."

And that's exactly how I feel.

And here is this idea expressed by this existential philosopher in the setting of a plague.

- That Nicholas, you are a man of my own heart.

I was fighting the urge to bring up Camus throughout this conversation.

'Cause I thought it would be a little bit too to timeline.

(both laughs) I appreciate that.

So let's get to some questions from our audience.

So Krista MacIntyre says, Fauci said we are in for a century of pandemics.

What's your opinion on that?

- Yes, I think, so a couple of things, first of all, plagues come, respiratory pandemics come every 10 or 20 years.

Everyone listening to this was alive in 2009 when we had the H1N1 pandemic, but nobody remembers it because it just gave you the sniffles.

And most people probably remember the 2003 coronavirus pandemic, but it didn't affect too many people for a variety of reasons.

Anyway, so we get respiratory pandemics every 10 or 20 years and serious ones, every 50 or a hundred years, and many scientists are concerned that the inter pandemic interval for serious pandemics might be shortening.

And it's very hard to be sure because let's say it went from every 50 to a hundred years to every 20 to 50 years.

It might be 30 years before we could really know if we had another one.

Incidentally, pandemics are stochastic.

That means they come at random.

We could have another serious one in five years or 10 years.

And let me just interrupt my answer to go on a slight tangent and then I'll come back.

There's no God-given reason this pathogen isn't more deadly.

Just imagine everything else the same about this pathogen but it's intrinsic lethality is 10 or 30 times higher, like in the movie contagion, the lethality of the pathogen was about 30% of the people who got the disease died.

Whereas with this one about 1% who got the symptomatic COVID die.

Just imagine if that had happened.

Unlike things like bubonic plague, or cholera which are caused by bacteria for which we have antibiotics to treat bacterial illnesses.

We have very few if any drugs that are effective at treating viruses, we would have been facing a bubonic plague type calamity in 21st century, United States, bodies piling up on the streets in an unbelievable way.

And this is why so many people from Bill Gates to Tony Fauci, and everyone else have been warning about this for so long.

It's a national security threat.

And we could have another such plague of much deadlier nature sometime in the next few decades.

And if it happens in five or 10 years, which it could we'll be better prepared, we'll remember.

But if it happens in 30 to 50 years, we'll have forgotten.

And the new people will act just as we are probably.

Now Fauci, his statement, going back now.

There is some evidence that so-called Zoonotic diseases, diseases that leak from wild animals to us have been rising over the last 50 years.

So decade on decade, we get more and more of these new pathogens that are leap viruses and bacteria and parasitic infections.

People heard about Zika, and Hantavirus and Legionella, and various new pathogens that affect us.

There's some evidence Ebola outbreaks that these are rising.

And one of the theories about it connects it to climate change that as the population grows, as the climate changes we are encroaching on the terrain of these wild animals.

And of course, they are also encroaching on our terrain because we are constricting their jungle habitats and so on.

And so we are in for based on everything I've said, we're in for more and more pandemics over the coming century.

I think that that's the consensus view right now.

- All right.

We've got another question here from M-Fate.

And you talked about the healthcare industry a little bit earlier about people entering it, maybe at this time but M-Fate has a question.

How do you think our healthcare community might change as a result of the pandemic?

It could see many dealing directly with COVID quitting and maybe others deciding not to pursue this work.

It seems a thankless job the way so many have disrespected health protocols to try to avoid the virus.

So this is kind of the counter to what you were presenting before, what's the reality?

- It's too early to be sure but I don't think that's, what's ultimately gonna happen.

Yes, many healthcare workers.

First of all, many healthcare workers have died.

Many of those deaths were unnecessary and it enrages me that as a nation, we did not take the measures we should have a year ago to prepare our healthcare workers.

It's one thing to ask healthcare workers to take a risk.

For example, when I was a young doctor we took care of people with HIV and we were very worried about needle stick injuries.

I won't say frequently but I was occasionally splattered with blood.

I never had a needle stick injury.

Thank God.

I was lucky and I was careful, but I was on more than one occasion splattered with body fluids from an HIV positive patient.

And, but we were expected to take these risks.

It's part of the profession if you're healthcare worker, but not without equipment.

I mean, we had equipment, we had we weren't sent into battle naked.

We had gloves, and we had masks, and we had everything we needed to minimize our risk.

And yet when the pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic crushed upon us, we expected our healthcare workers to risk their lives unequipped which is just an unacceptable expectation in my judgment.

Now having mentioned HIV, let me just say that the HIV pandemic has cumulatively been much more deadly than coronavirus and will still be more deadly.

I could reach over here and get some precise statistics just to vary it.

Just give me a second to find those that figure.

And I'll just tell you the precise amount.

So for example, in terms of deaths over the course of the, over the whole pandemic HIV is about as deadly as coronavirus will prove to be.

But in terms of years of life lost the HIV pandemic will be about three times worse than Corona virus, because of course, HIV preferentially killed young people.

So we've had a previous pandemic in recent memory, in the form of the HIV pandemic and that did not reduce the interest in medicine or the commitment of healthcare workers to care for patients.

So I don't think the coronavirus pandemic will have this untoward effect that the questioner is asking about.

- All right.

We have room for just one more question.

And we'll hand this one over to Marsha Arthur, who asks are Americans recoiling in fear or reaching out more compassionately to less fortunate people as a result of the pandemic?

Now you talked about the goodness of people in a time like this, but again what's the reality here.

I mean, I feel like we see both sides of this but it's hard to know what the reality on the ground.

- I mean, I think it depends on what indicator you look at whether it's charitable giving or altruistic acts or the emergence of all kinds of collectives to provide for food and healthcare for other people, you have to pick your indicator.

But I would say on balance we have acted fairly well as a nation.

Now are, there are people who have been, I would say, unneighborly, not wearing a mask is an unneighborly thing to do.

You're not brave for not wearing a mask, fearlessly getting the epidemic.

And you're not showing your Liberty by not wearing a mask.

You're being unneighborly.

You're exposing others to potential risk.

You don't know if you have the infection you could have it and be spreading it and not know it.

And it is basic public health precautions to wear mask.

So yes we've had, and if you refuse a vaccine, you are unless you have a health contraindication, you're not bearing your fair part of the burden in confronting the epidemic.

We all have to get vaccinated.

If we want to get back to society as normal if you fail to get a vaccine when offered one you're probably free riding on other people.

And the risk is minuscule compared to the benefit.

You're much more likely to die of coronavirus than you are to die of complications or serious side effects from any vaccine, frankly, that is available now.

So I think that, those are pretty strong statements I've expressed but I do believe these statements from a public health point of view.

So yes, there are some people who are avoiding masking and vaccining and other people.

And there's a big debate in our society about whether we should or shouldn't close schools.

And there was a legitimate debate about that.

I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss these things or deliberate as a nation and come to some consensus we should.

But I think overall, we are concerned as a nation about our neighbors and acting generally well and in any case, as I said, I'm optimistic.

So that's my story.

I'm gonna stick to it.

Oh, one more thing.

A lot of this is easier because the pathogen is not as deadly.

If it were killing one out of three out of us I think we might've seen a bit more of a free for all.

And back in March, that was the highest ever level of purchasing of weapons that our society has ever seen, Americans armed themselves as the plague was coming down upon us.

And in fact, we've had quite a year of murders in the past year, excess spike involved in violence in murderous violence which again is not uncommon in times of plague.

It's of course, much worse when the plagues are much more deadly.

So it's a complicated picture.

I don't want to sugar coat it, but I am going to choose to focus on the positive side, there are more things to admire in men and women than to despise.

- I want to allow you to close on that but that is a good place to end Nicholas.

I appreciate so much you bringing both the facts as well as the humanity to this.

It has been a pleasure speaking with you.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

- Mark, thank you so much for having me and thank you to all the listeners and good luck and Godspeed.

- All right, before we go, a couple of important notes.

I want to remind you that Crosscut is a nonprofit reader supported news site that relies on the support of our community to ensure that our events and journalism remain free for everyone.

Thank you so much to everyone who donated to this event today.

And if you would like to make a donation or become a member visit us at Crosscut.com/Support.

Also, we hope you will join us at the Crosscut Festival coming in may, which features a ton of incredible speakers, like Jane Goodall, Ibram Kendi.

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You can learn more at crosscut.com/Events.

Okay, thanks again to our guests tonight, Nicholas and to all of you for joining us, have a good night.

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