Factually! with Adam Conover - How Viruses Have Shaped Our World with Joseph Osmundson

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Viruses are everywhere. But what exactly ARE they, and why have they been able to reshape our world? This week Adam is joined by microbiologist Joseph Osmundson to for a fascinating deep dive into microbiology, the impact of viruses on the LGBT community, and how understanding viruses can help us better understand ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing shit that they know

that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we're going to have so much fun doing it. I want to remind you, if you want to support the show, please head to patreon.com slash adamconover for just five bucks a month. You can join our Patreon Discord. You can get every episode of this show ad-free, and you can join our community book club.

It's such a fun community. I love hanging out with everybody there, and I hope you will come join us at patreon.com slash adamconover. Now, this week on the show, we're talking about viruses. I love viruses so much. Now, I know it's weird to say I love viruses, okay? I don't like it when they infect me and get me sick. I don't like it when they shut down our entire society. I don't like when they kill loved ones of mine or anyone's loved ones. But I do find viruses endlessly fascinating as a form of life because by thinking about viruses, we can get a sense of

what life is at the absolute minimum. When I think about viruses, we can get a sense of what life is at the absolute minimum. When I think about viruses, it makes me realize that life is nothing but a complicated chemical reaction because viruses are just a teeny tiny little sequence of chemical instructions that hack our cells and control how they replicate and cause our cells to replicate the virus instead of themselves. They are alive, as you'll hear me grapple with in the episode, they are alive. Evolution and natural selection do work on them, but they are such an absolutely minimal, simple form of life that it makes me think about how all of us at the end of the day are just a complicated series of chemicals reproducing themselves through the laws of physics and chemistry.

And that is so fucking cool. And not only that, by understanding them, we understand more about ourselves and the world around us. Part of what makes mRNA vaccines so cool is that we are using some of the same mechanisms viruses use, but we're using it to hack our immune system so we can teach our body to fight back against diseases like COVID-19 that it has never encountered before. It's a tiny little hack with massive world historical impact. And that's true of viruses as well. They are so tiny and so simple in so many ways, but they're also a major player in our history, our society, and, of course, our lives. Viruses can cause our entire global

economy to shut down for years on end. They can throw governments out of power. They can kill us in droves. And as we'll discuss today, a virus became a flashpoint moment in the fight for LGBT rights. Viruses are a biological force, but they are a social one as well. They start their work in ourselves, but they end up woven into the fabric of our world. So to dive deep into this topic today, we have an incredible guest. Joseph Osmunson is a scientist and writer. He's a professor of biology at NYU, and most recently, he's the author of Virology, Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between. I was so fascinated by this conversation.

I laughed so much. He's one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking guests we've ever had on the show, and I know you're going to love it. Please welcome Joseph Osmunson. Joseph, thank you so much for being on the show. It is a true pleasure to be here. Oh, it's a true pleasure to have you. So, look, tell us a little bit about yourself.

You have a new book out about viruses. Tell us more about your work generally, though. Yeah, you know, so I have been a scientist my whole life. Imagine that. I've been doing science professionally as long as I've had a job. And I've studied microbes. So small, invisible things that cover the planet. I've studied microbes, so small, invisible things that cover the planet. Viruses and microbes are more numerous than us on this planet by many orders of magnitude.

There are more viruses on planet Earth than there are stars in the sky, and they shape our reality. So, you know, oftentimes when there's something that is so small, so difficult to understand scientifically, but it has such a profound impact on how we live as humans, we can actually attach too much meaning to that thing. It becomes like super saturated with meaning. And I think with COVID-19, my goodness, have we seen the rhetoric spill over and everyone is trying to grapple, make sense of it. It's nonsensical. So in my book, I really argue that you have to understand science to understand viruses, but science alone is insufficient. We have to look at art. We have to look at narratives and stories. We have to look at queer theory and philosophy and what they tell us about how we've always lived alongside viruses.

And through these different sort of methods or ways of looking, we can start to better approximate the nuances of these very complicated, very small objects. I love that you have that perspective because so often, you know, I'm from a liberal arts background. I studied philosophy, as I've said on the show, far too many times. But, you know, I'm from a liberal arts background. I studied philosophy, as I've said on the show, far too many times. But, you know, the liberal arts idea is to sort of take all the different fields in together and have them all in conversation with each other, which is the way that we know more about the world. But science tends to be the one that does that the least, that, you know, you'll have, I don't know, historians and philosophers who learn a lot about science, but the scientists tend to not engage with philosophy a lot. So I love that you come at it from that angle. I'd love to just talk a little bit about viruses themselves.

You said microbes and viruses. I know that viruses are not microbes. Is that correct to say viruses? Viruses are so interesting. What the fuck are they, Joseph? I love thinking about what viruses are because I know there's this whole, are they alive? Are they not alive? Like, they're not themselves able to reproduce. They're not unit. They're not like the where they're not like on the fucking tree of life, really. They're like some sort of little thing that hacks our DNA.

Please, you tell me what how do you describe viruses? thing that hacks our DNA. Please, you tell me how do you describe viruses? And yet you, Adam, sitting here right now, are roughly 10% ancient virus. Your DNA is roughly 8% to 10%, what we call endogenous retrovirus. So these are viruses related to HIV that have infected our ancestors many, many generations ago that have lost the ability to leave our bodies that have become us. They are us, right? Viruses certainly are microbes. Microbes sort of are microscopic organisms and they include everything from bacteria to viruses to yeast and fungi. Yum, yum, yum. You know, as you mentioned to a biologist, a virus is not a living object because it cannot replicate itself, but it gets messy. Dare I say queer because there are viruses are queer microbes. Okay. Keep going. I was, I was going to say all of these distinctions are

get very messy because for example, there are species of bacteria that we consider living, but that are obligate endosymbionts, which means they exist only and can exist only in the gut of a worm, for example. So that bacteria can't replicate on its own, and yet we call it living, whereas for a virus, we say it's not living precisely and only because it cannot replicate on its own. So, you know, evolution, you know, is this driving force of what makes different organisms what they are at every level from the hand that I have to the DNA that is in my genome. And evolution acts on viruses and microorganisms and viruses are weird as fucking shit. You know, I was studying a virus in my PhD that had just, we knew its genome. We knew what genes were in it.

We knew nothing else about it. And like 80% of its genes were not related to anything else that existed that had ever been studied, right? So each virus sort of often finds its own evolutionary niche, its own way of being in the world that no other living thing and maybe no other known virus has evolved that same pathway. So they are fascinating, tricky little things. And they're tricky precisely because you can make an antibiotic for a bunch of bacteria because they all have similar mechanisms of living.

Whereas each viruses do something different, right? So an HIV drug is not going to work against a polio virus or a monkeypox virus or any other virus necessarily. You sort of have to tackle each virus individually in terms of vaccination and also in terms of medicines to stop it from replicating. So, okay, thank you for correcting all the wrong shit that I said. And I love that you point out that viruses are operated on by evolution, by natural selection. And that, if we want to call evolution something that happens to living things, then we would, I suppose, say that viruses are living. But here's what I trip out about um when i think about viruses is that like bacteria okay i understand it's a little you know unicellular organism and it's reproducing and it's having that you know etc it's uh doing its thing um viruses almost

strike me as like it's almost just like a chemical reaction that's happening right it's like it seems like it's very simple in some ways that, hey, I've got a whole bunch of cells, and a self-perpetuating reaction starts happening where this particular little collection of molecules, when it enters my field, oh, it interacts with my molecules in a way that causes it to be reproduced in this way that I find very inimical.

It hurts my life, right? But we talk about them so often as though they're our enemies. COVID-19 is a very smart virus. It's very clever. People describe, well, anthropomorphize it this way. But then on the other hand, it's just like, I don't know, it's something very simple and small happening. I'm talking around in circles. You respond to whatever nonsense I'm saying. You have, you have precisely, well, not precisely, you have roughly 43 trillion cells in your body any given day. Some more or less your, your DNA that makes you up is made of 3.2 billion unique letters of information to it, to a biophist, in a way, you are neither no more nor no less

complicated than a virus, right? Your DNA programs a set of cells to create a bunch of structures that give you the ability to be a human. And, you know, your consciousness is related to your development of your brain and your neurons. And, you know, functionally, everything we experience, see, taste, smell, it's just electricity across a membrane, right? And viruses play on that same level of biology, that same level of information encoded in genetic material then is acted upon based on nothing more than the sequence of the genetic material. I find, you know, first of all, I will say, you know, viruses can make us sick. Of course they can.

And they can even kill us. 99.99999999, et cetera, percent of viruses on this planet will not. Even oftentimes when you are infected with a virus, you are not sick. If you get herpes, if you get a cold sore, you will have herpes for every day that you live until you die. That virus will always be in you and your immune system will essentially always be talking to it and telling it to shut up. And the virus will always be there kind of hanging out. There's a work by this guy named, get this, this guy's literal name is Skip Virgin III.

Amazing, amazing virologist name. I love how after two Skip Virgins, they're like, you know what? Go again. We're going again with Skip Virgin. You gotta, just make sure you skip every third virgin, okay? If you're going down the list of virgins, just, you can go with, you can fuck the first virgin, you can fuck the second virgin, skip the third version. Okay. If you're going down the list of virgins, just, you can, you can go with it. You can,

you can fuck the first version. You can fuck the second version, skip the third version, then go to number four. That's what that makes me think. I really want to know. I really want to know if there's skip version the fourth. I think I'm going to email him later.

We, we did meet a couple of times. I have met skip version. He does this incredible work on how important microbes are for a functioning immune system. A lot of people are taking this out of perspective with COVID like, oh, we've been wearing masks for two years and that's why everyone's getting sick right now. That's bullshit. But because the world is covered in microbes, it is the only human experience to grow up constantly interacting with microbes. And Skip actually showed that having a herpes one infection,

like pretty much everyone does, is actually preventative against certain bacterial and parasitic infections. So you can almost think about herpes one as part of your immune system. It is actually activating your immune system to be ready to fight off other things, right? So, you know, we will always, you know, this notion of virus as being our enemy, I think it's one that I worked very hard in my book to try to reframe because if we view it that way, you know, essentially they're going to win

and we're going to lose. Like they're going to be here long after we're gone. They were here before life evolved, you know? It's sort of like trying to fight the wind, you know? It's just like, it's just not, it's just not happening. Wait, so how do, wait, I want you to go into more detail on that. Why do you say the viruses were here before life evolved? Because to me, I think of what my just, again, dumb, dumb understanding what a virus is, is a virus is something that sort of operates on life,

that it needs to take advantage of an existing organism in order to reproduce itself. So how would a virus exist before life? We think that early life was essentially like a virus. Before there were cells, there were virus-like objects that were able to take things from the environment and use very simple systems to replicate their own genetic material. Essentially, life began as a virus is the idea. That's, and now you've just got me thinking about what life is, which I love to think about, right? Because it, again, brings me back to life

as a chemical reaction, as nothing but a self-perpetuating chemical reaction that becomes more and more complex over time, which is just my favorite thing to just, you know, lie back and just think about that world for a long time. But OK, so I want you to go to more detail on I believe you said endogenous retroviruses. These are viruses that became part of our bodies and are part of us permanently. So how do we think that that happened? And what are some examples of those? So I think they're RTLVs or something like this.

There are all these horrible names that I can never remember. And there's an open evolutionary question about whether retroviruses like HIV evolved from the endogenous ones by gaining the ability to leave cells. evolved from the endogenous ones by gaining the ability to leave cells or if the ones in us evolved from retrovirus from a previous hiv-like infection by losing the ability to leave cells wow they were long thought to be dormant so you know genomes like sets of genes in organisms like humans we can carry a lot of junk around, actually, not metaphorically. You know, there are plants that are like 10% of their genome is what they need to be a plant. Everything else is endogenous. Yeah, a huge amount of our DNA is just not actually used for anything.

And is that where the viruses are? It's like in our DNA. Wow. So it's a part of, you know, what we used to call when I was doing my PhD, we used to call this junk DNA, right? Because it's there and it's not doing anything. But of course, it was doing something. Junk DNA does a lot. We didn't yet have sophisticated enough tools to understand what it was doing.

So actually, endogenous retroviruses, we used to think about them like hanging out, not doing anything. Incorrect. They actually play important roles in early human development. Essentially, they kind of turn on when you're at the one, two, three cell or one, two, four cell embryo level and help regulate your gene expression. I mean, they are fundamental and integral part of what it means to be a human. And so you so you say that there's a bit of a debate about how they actually became part of our genome. So there isn't a clear answer to that. Cause I know there's the story of, I love the story of what is it? The, the, you know, the mitochondria becoming part of

the cell. Am I right about that? Am I remembering this correctly from whatever sort of radio lab I heard five years ago? And so to me, it sounds a little bit like that, but we have a little bit more of that story. But in this case, we're not entirely sure what happened. Yeah. The evolutionary trajectory, to be honest with you, is probably forever lost to time. The other thing that makes these viruses so difficult is they're all quite similar to one another. And so it can be hard to different, it can be hard to retell the story uh whereas when we think about viral evolution that's existed uh in real time so hiv from well hiv actually emerges uh in what was then the

belgian congo around the turn of the 1900s so around the year 1900 uh or covid oh my god we are watching covid evolve in real time right it's like uh omic oh my God, sub variant B dot Q dot X dot Z, you know, and, and, oh my God, it's going to kill us all. We can understand those evolutionary steps by watching them in real time. A lot of these, you know, I've been super fascinated by the studying of the Neanderthal genome. That was actually the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome that was actually the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome won the Nobel Prize this year. And so sort of what, you know, humans and Neanderthals existed at the same time and interbred. And actually a lot of some of our DNA is Neanderthal DNA. And a lot of our DNA that's Neanderthal DNA has to do with infectious diseases.

Probably and potentially sexually transmitted diseases between humans and Neanderthals. I love that humans have always been freak leaks, you know what I mean? It's like a little inner species yum-yum. I know, I love it. And it's like, who doesn't want a little bit of strange, especially when you're living out in the wilderness

and you're just trying to, you know, in the wilderness and, you know, you're just trying to forage for food every day. And then you see, I've never seen a person like that before. I think they must've been really into, like, I have a couple of friends who really like, like, hairy Greek guys. You know, I think that's like, it's like a hair fetish. You know, they just love rubbing their hands

all through the back hair. That's what I'm imagining. That's why Neanderthals like us right i mean who doesn't love tall with a big forehead like sign me up i will climb a neanderthal like a tree i love it and so we actually with there were there were stds passed in this way that then influenced our genome is what you're saying. The majority of our genome that still stems from Neanderthals is around protection against infectious diseases. And in all likelihood, the boing boing diseases. Yeah.

Sexual health care as old as time. You know what I mean? sexual health care as old as time you know what i mean that's incredible i mean with something like covet 19 i mean our virus is continuing to influence our genome i guess is the question i was driving towards um almost certainly although for a virus like covet 19 or even like hiv it's been too soon um but research that just came out gosh a month or two ago uh and this is of course not a, but showed that the plague in Europe created bottlenecks in evolution that still are influencing our genes to this day, hundreds of years later. That was because the population lost during that. That's right. That's right. You know, so that creates different evolutionary scenarios where certain genes of the people who happen to survive the Black Plague are now more common in descendants of those populations.

And we've had a large, I mean, there's been a relatively large reduction in population because of COVID-19. So presumably you'd see some effect from that. I mean, look, you love viruses so much, clearly. It makes me wonder when a new virus arises, because they do pop up like covid19 um or like hiv back when it first arose does this excite you i mean when when the news of covid19 broke or were you slightly like oh this is good i mean it's horrible but also is it kind

of fun it's it's a morbid fascination for sure but it is not. You know, monkeypox this summer, for example. Incredibly not fun. You know, it's there's viruses are awesome in sort of the original sense of the word that they do inspire awe. I mean, HIV has 10,000 letters and you have 3.2 billion. And if you get that virus and you don't take medication, it will kill you. Yeah. That is awesome. There is a power in that. Um, that is incredible. The cool thing about that is that studying, well, first of all, we've been able to develop really good meds. That means that HIV essentially has not as much impact on your health. And studying HIV has taught us really a huge amount of the cell biology that we learned in the 90s and 2000s was through studying how HIV tricks cells into doing all the things that it needs to do. So of course, when you study a virus, you also study the cell that it infects, and you learn a huge amount about these biological tricksters. Yeah, come to think of it, like as a kid growing up in the eighties and early nineties, I mean,

there was a ton of information about HIV. I just remember watching PBS and it was like, Hey, here's a half hour explanation of how HIV works, T cells and all that kind of thing. And come to think of it, I'm like that, that is maybe part of the reason that I have like a relatively good understanding of how viruses work, is because this was, like, a hot topic then. It was, like, something everybody was really interested in learning more about and fighting and

was cutting-edge science at the same time that it was, you know, tragically killing so many people. You know, the story of the scientific response to HIV and the demand from the people who were most impacted by the virus, the demand that their lives mattered enough that this should be a scientific priority, shifted both science and science advocacy for forever. And in ways that are still, you know, I, in my work on COVID and on monkeypox and continuing work on HIV, you know, I've been able to work with some of these, some of these folks, David Barr and Mark Harrington and Greg Gonsalves, who were a huge part of the ACT UP New York

organization that really pushed, pushed to be taken, pushed for the science of HIV to be taken seriously. And without them, the drugs that did come in 1996 would have certainly come much later. Yeah. That interaction with that history, though, is incredibly fascinating. I have a lot more I want to ask you about it, but we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Joseph Osmunson. Okay, we're back with Joseph Osmunson. Right before break, you were talking about the history of HIV,

how that caused a sea change in scientific understanding of viruses, also the way that science has been done because of the demand by those activists for science to take them seriously. And I'm just curious, because it's come up a couple times, like how has queerness influenced your scientific work if it has at all? Yeah. You know, I think it, it impacts what I find interesting. Uh, I always wanted to study viruses and I wanted to study viruses. I'm sure because growing up as a person born in 1983, they were just always on our minds. You know, HIV was such a huge part of my childhood. It connected sex to death in a way that I don't think is healthy for a young person. But that was the reality. I mean, it was, you know, a young person, but that was the reality. I mean, it was, you know,

my first, I was born in 83. So I'm like six to 12 in the early nineties, late eighties. And at that time, HIV was on the news all the time and it was Kaposi's sarcoma and it was people weighing 80 pounds and their friends holding their hands. They died and it was because they had sex and they were, and queer sex more specifically um you know and that i think imprints on you in ways both that you realize and in ways that you don't realize i also read the hot zone in like middle school and i was like reading it on the

bus and like someone vomited like three c you know it's about ebola hemorrhagic fevers right and so it's like i'm reading this scene and it's like in the Congo and someone's like vomiting out blood and their insides are disintegrating. And like Susie, three seats back, literally had too much candy at lunch and like started vomiting on the bus. And then I started vomiting on the bus and I was convinced that I had Ebola. You know, it was just like a whole... In reality, you were just one of 100,000 kids to throw up on the bus that day. Kids just throw up...

To be a bus driver is to constantly be cleaning up kid vomit, right? I was, like, looking for, like, specks of black blood in my vomit. Like every totally fucking normal 12-year-old child. And this brought you to where you are today maybe my parents shouldn't have bought me the hot zone in paperback from the michael crichton novel it was not that was the hot zone was a preston i think richard preston it was it was non-fiction it was one oh oh it was non-fiction it was not the this was not the andronoma strain or that's what i was thinking of yeah yeah yeah this was a non-fiction about

um about ebola viruses and that that family of viruses um and it certainly is sensationalized you know i i have good friends now who work on ebola uh including who have done patient care on ebola and uh ebola doesn't look like that most of the time in real life but that doesn't make for a page turning you know right bestseller in the mid nineties. So yeah, I think, you know, there's always been scientists, believe it or not, are people. And what we find interesting

comes from, you know, things that have happened to us in our lives. And so, yes, certainly my fascination with viruses has come from living in the late 20th century, which is just an age of the reemergence of infectious diseases. If you remember before HIV, people thought infectious diseases were forever gone. Right.

Right. Smallpox, we had wiped out all of these diseases, wiped it out, you know, a polio measles, you know, we essentially, we thought viruses were kaput because of vaccines and bacterial infections were all treatable with antibiotics, infectious diseases. Humanity has one you're done. It's over. This is, you know, cancer is real and diabetes and heart disease are real infectious diseases. Well, you know, HIV showed us that that was a little bit of hubris. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um. You'd said right before we started

rolling that some of your work involves, you know, communicating with queer communities about how to stay safe during COVID-19. Tell me a little bit of that work and how you got involved in it. Well, yeah, you know, I'm just a nerd and also a fag and have some slutty tendencies. And so at the beginning of COVID-19, when all the scientist friends that I knew, infectious disease folks were watching data and we kind of knew that something really nasty was coming our way.

I was doing some outreach to nightlife and sex parties because if you're in a respiratory infection, being at a circuit party with 1500 people or at a sex club in one tiny room with 200 people it's a pretty bad uh situation for the transmission of the virus not because of the dancing or the sex because of the ventilation yeah the ventilation the air uh and so i was just doing outreach you know and just saying hey guys fuck all you want but go to an open field. Like like glory holes are back, baby. They're back.

Literally one of these parties. So I've been working extensively with these parties. One of these parties literally set up and I'm not going to name the name of the name of the park or the spot, but a very infamous park in New York has a very infamous wooded area that's used been used for gay cruising since the 60s and 70s and they brought their party to that park you know they hosted a weekly outdoor cruising party and i'm like fucking sluts are the best and safe safe sluts is what we're we're getting it in and caring for each other and caring for our communities and it's outside. And, you know, it's like people are wearing masks and then taking them down to do a blow job and then putting them back on. You know, it's like it's winning.

It's great. Beautiful. So it's, you know, these types of solutions that, you know, that come from someone who has the gay voice and does the limp wrist. And I'm like the least sex negative person on the face of the planet. So when I talk to people about risk behaviors or this virus or that, they know it's not coming from a place of where a lot of it historically has come of people who just don't like queer sex, don't like queer pleasure, don't like thinking about the fact that people are out there enjoying group sex and use whatever virus it is, be it HIV or monkeypox or COVID as a way to put a stop to

the thing that they already are just deeply inherently uncomfortable with. Well, when you go and talk to that community, that community knows that, that you're not, uh, someone from the eighties saying, you know, Hey, if only you didn't, you're saying, you're saying, Hey, go nuts, but do it safely. Right. And they, and they feel that. Yeah. And you know, and, if only you didn't, you're saying, you're saying, hey, go nuts, but do it safely. Right. And they feel that. Yeah. You know, and there might be times when there's no way to go nuts safely. Right. Like the sex parties in New York this summer voluntarily shut down because of monkeypox, because it just having sex with multiple people in one night without good access to vaccination when there's high levels of a virus in the community, you're not right. You know, they said, we're not we're not doing this. You know, when I go to do outreach at an

event, nightlife or a commercial sex venue, I wear my little necklace that has my little poppers on it. I was at an event last weekend and someone was like, oh, I forgot my poppers. And I was like, oh, you can borrow mine. And I was doing outreach up front and they did a little lap with my poppers and then brought them back to me. You know, it's like there's not a lot of translation, you know, the translation of a community values the community, you know, people just love it. It's like, people are like, it's so cool that y'all are here. We were doing monkeypox vaccines in a van outside. You know, if someone had, I had two doses, I was walking them down to the van. They were coming back to the party. It's like, it's how it should always be.

It should be the rule and not the exception. And that's public health too, to say for that, for those parties to say, Hey, there's a, there's a virus right now it's sweeping through let's take a break for a couple months or however long it takes let's make sure people are vaccinated like that's that's the core of public health and it makes me reflect again on why you know when you look at vaccine rates in america there's so much attention given to anti-vaxxers and there's there's so much little attention given to the fact that how many

communities didn't have and not necessarily the queer community, but communities of color in whatever city you want to list didn't have somebody from their community saying, hey, this is how we keep each other safe. And who has that voice of credibility rather than people who are seen as coming from outside or, you know, not not being representative? Yeah, I think, you know, queer people have incredibly high uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine. And I think this is a part of why we are, it's, it's very normal. We have community experts. We have infectious disease doctors who are big fags, you know, um, I w you know, when I'm, when I'm doing outreach of the thing, some people will be like, Oh, I'm a doctor, you know, or I'm a nurse or whatever. It's like, we are the community. And so we don't have to have anyone. It's not communication with outside

experts. It's, you know, sort of elevating the experts we have within our community because we already have the trust. We already have the knowledge. It's just sort of, and the frustration with monkeypox this summer was that when we were going to, you know, people in the FDA, the CDC saying, you know, my, my dear friend, this is a story from me. My dear friend had monkey pox. He definitely had it. He had gone to Europe and had gone to a bathhouse. So he had a high risk exposure when the rates in Europe were very high. He had come back, he had developed symptoms and he tried to get tested five times over seven days and couldn't get tested. Right. And so that we're then in a meeting with people at the FDA and the people at the FDA are saying, Oh no, testing is great. You know,

we definitely, you know, everyone can get tested. We're nowhere near, uh, you know, not having enough tests. And we just had, we were like, but that is so, that is so untrue. You're just lying to our faces. And we have the community knowledge to show that. So it was very frustrating that we had so many community experts in May, in May and June of 2020 saying, take this seriously and give us the tools. It's not just about messaging. Oh, don't have sex. It's about if you, if you're sick, get tested. If you're having sex, get vaccinated, you know, and, and we didn't have those tools. We didn't have tests and we didn't have vaccines.

So it was a very difficult time. Just getting back to the biology quickly, is there anything particularly interesting about monkeypox as a disease? I'm just curious, as a virus. Well, the most interesting thing about monkeypox as a virus uh it's very similar to the story from hiv i'm actually um working on a book with a dear friend of mine

gofen butuele who's a podcaster and a human rights expert and he's from the congo uh the congo is where both monkeypox and hiv emerge uh And these viruses emerge in a social and political context. And the social and political context of the monkeypox virus is that it emerges in the Congo. In 1970, we identify it in a human. And at that time, we were vaccinating for smallpox because we were trying to eradicate it from planet Earth. Right. So basically everyone in that region where monkeypox is in rodents and sometimes pops into humans, basically everyone was immune from the smallpox vaccine.

But when we eradicate smallpox in 1980, we stopped vaccinating against smallpox that therefore no one born after that time has immunity against monkeypox. So essentially the population immunity against monkeypox is going down, down, down over time. And so the virus is popping up more frequently and it's staying in humans longer. And that leads up to 2010, 2017, between 2017 and now there's been a nonstop monkeypox epidemic in Nigeria. Right. And we somehow imagined this wouldn't affect the rest of the world, right? Because we think Western lives are not connected to West African lives. And that is an social and political realities and assumptions. And so that to me is, I think, where that's both the most depressing and the most hopeful thing that there is depressing because we try to ignore that reality and hopeful because

if we now take the opportunity right now to say that our lives are connected to Nigerian lives and therefore Jinyo's vaccine access to Nigerian people, including but not limited to Nigerian queer people, matters to me materially, you know, and we have that vaccine. We let 20 million doses of it expire in a freezer in Denmark as opposed to giving it to people in Ghana, Nigeria, the Congo who needed it. And these choices, well, we could make them differently in the future if we had the political will. Yeah, if we recognize it. You and I can recognize it right here. It's a bigger job to make everybody else in power recognize it or to make our culture give priority to that overall. It also makes me think about, you say that these viruses are intertwined to their social and political distinctions

or conditions. That's clearly true because whether or not these viruses even arise is related to population density and, you know, proximity to public health and, you know, proximity to concentrations of animals and how many animals are concentrated in a place and all these sorts of things. I mean, we create these conditions ourselves. It's really interesting that you brought up that we eradicated smallpox and these other diseases with, you know, a technological solution with a vaccine that we distributed widely. And then, as you say, had this impression, oh, that's just going to solve everything forever and neglected as a global society to realize,

oh, well, more will arise. And we actually are in control of whether or not they do. They'll arise because of our actions. That's right. Because we're concentrating people, concentrating animals, increasing that level of interaction and not distributing healthcare resources equitably. That's going to be the result. And it's like, you know, we had the medical technology, but not the social technology. That's a theme we keep returning to on this show.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, now that we have the medical technology, it is constantly a choice who will have access to it, which is another way of saying the social technology. Right. Yeah. You know, I think one of the stories that gets lost in work on HIV AIDS is what happened between 1996 and 2006. six, you have the biomedicine arise, be developed, they can save lives, the three drug cocktail that brings people back from the brink of death. Activists then said, well, this pill costs less than a dollar to make, so shouldn't everyone on planet Earth have access? And the pharmaceutical company said, no. They said, no, people in South Africa will not have access to our drug and work really a decade's work worth of work from universities who co-own patents to South African officials that just said we're actually not going to abide by patent law because it is ghoulish and we are not going to do it.

because it is ghoulish and we are not going to do it. Companies in India that began manufacturing the pills and a huge activist push, a global activist push to really humiliate the drug companies for their greed. And it was largely successful. And I really hate to do this. Are you ready for like the worst news ever in the entire history of bad news? Oh, give it to me.

This is what I live for. Tell me about it. Have you heard of PEPFAR? No, I have not. PEPFAR is a U.S. government-funded organization that ensures access to HIV medications to people globally. So in South Africa, in India, in Thailand, wherever you are, if you have HIV, you get no cost HIV meds. People shouldn't die of HIV given that there are meds that can be made. Do you know who funded PEPFAR? No, I do not. George W. Bush. Good job, George. You know, in 2003, George, in 2003, it is one of the most progressive. It is probably the most progressive piece of American public health funding that has ever been made.

George Bush has one or two things on his record like that, where it's like somebody's administration was like, hey, we should do this. And they were just like, yeah, good idea, because they weren't completely fucking insane yet. They had a little bit of occasionally they would see reason apparently someone went to george bush and said people are dying of hiv and they don't need to and that made him really mad i got yeah he literally was like i mean this guy had one compassionate thing in him and and it was that people don't need to die of hiv unnecessarily um but you know we argued in in January of 2021 that we needed a PEPFAR for mRNA vaccines for COVID, right? That it's the same thing that no one should go unvaccinated against a deadly infectious disease just because of where they live on the planet.

We were, we actually had for some time, some traction in the Biden administration on that idea and pharma really shut it down. The manufacturers of the mRNA vaccines weren't, you know, it was the same thing where like, you're not going to lose money. Let's have a factory in South Africa. We're in how to make mRNA vaccines for this one. And they basically said, no, but you can't do it because it's not just about this mRNA vaccine. It's about the next one and the next one and the next one. And we are not going to teach other people how to use this technology. They see it as a slippery slope for them where it's going to reduce their ability to capitalize on any number of future. So other mRNA vaccines using that technology to cure other diseases, is that what they were concerned with having there be?

Wow. cure other diseases is that what they were concerned with having their b wow but but this but mrna vaccines as we've talked about on this show are the greatest you you got your hands up you're like hey it's not me man i mean yeah mrna vaccines are one of the greatest medical technology breakthroughs of the last couple decades they're incredible we did a bunch of episodes on them and how how like once you understand how they work they're like the fucking space race shit. They're incredible. And they are so, there's such a positive move for our ability to fight other diseases. And so the fact that they would stand in the way of that is unconscionable. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was, it was just a very, yet again, a very frustrating activist, you know, three,

four month push where we really thought we might be able to get something really incredible done on mRNA vaccines, you know, that could have prevented Omicron, right? It's like if you get enough people vaccinated that there's less viral replication, you also prevent viral evolution. It's such a win-win. We thought it was such a no-brainer. It wasn't that much money. You know, people around the globe love PEPFAR. I think there's a lot of philanthropy that people

in a lot of countries are resentful about. They don't love it. People fucking love PEPFAR. You go to any country on the world and people are like, yeah, PEPFAR is fucking awesome. You know, and it brings people into primary health care for other things as well. It's just like a really great program. And so, you know, these patterns of emerging diseases where PEPFAR is basically funding for HIV meds. So, you know, then we saw the need for a PEPFAR-like program for COVID. And then we saw the need for a PEPFAR-like program for monkeypox. So I think what infectious disease experts are thinking about is that infectious disease money needs to no longer be siphoned into this is HIV money and this is COVID money

and this is monkeypox money. There's going to be shifting global needs and there is a high global need. As you're saying now, you know, given the planet is warming, people have more and more interactions with wildlife. Animals are concentrated in certain places where people also are. animals are concentrated in certain places where people also are, there's going to be a global need for HIV, monkeypox, COVID, you know, God, polio, malaria, right? So we need money that is able to be accessed by what people need that funding for, for treatment, for testing, for research and development. And I think we're really, you know, pretty much everyone I know in the infectious disease world is no longer fund for this disease and that, fund infectious

diseases and have the flexibility to be able to move and respond to emergencies. Because our, our lives are so global now, we're so connected to everybody else on earth. Like we need this, not just for them, but for ourselves. And you would think that would be the lesson we learned from covid19 but it doesn't sound like we have i mean it's the challenge of the entire century is global collaboration this way on climate change on and everything else but it continues to be the thing that a hundred years from now they're going to be screaming into the past going why the fuck didn't you do this? It was obvious it needed to be done. It's just there's good choices and there's bad ones, and we're not making the good ones.

We have to take another really quick break. We'll be right back with more Joseph Osmunson, and I promise it might be a little bit more positive. Or maybe not. We'll find out. Oh, yes. Let's get hopeful in this one. Let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back. We'll be hopeful with Joseph Osmondson. I'm going to start a podcast called Being Hopeful with Joseph Osmondson.

Oh, that's a wonderful idea. Okay. Each episode will be exactly seven seconds because that's about as much hope as I can muster at any given day. Okay. We're going to include that. We're back now. I want that promise from you on the record. So Joseph, I want to ask about your book because it is really fascinating

when I started looking into it in preparation for this episode. It's really a book of literary essays in addition to being a book about vaccines and viruses and all the other biological things that we might expect. And so tell me about, you know, that part of your work and how you, you know, became,

how you wanted to start doing that sort of writing. Yeah, so, you know, I don't know if anyone's paid attention to the rest of the conversation, but I'm kind of a nerd. I actually, you know, I also come from a lower arts background. And so in, at the very beginning of my education, coming out of like a really uh poor town in the in the rural west i studied french literature and biology side by side um and then i studied biology in france i did a a one-year master's program in grenoble france where i was studying the biophysics of the prion protein, which causes

mad cow disease and Croxodiacob. And I've always had reading and writing as a really essential component of my life. I just, again, as someone who grew up in a really rural town without a lot of access to ideas and to people, you know, to scholars or writers or people doing creative work, I met so many ideas that expanded my life in books. You know, when I read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble about how all gender is performative, when I read Foucault's interview where he said homosexuality is not so much a system of desire but something desirable because of the friendships it lets you make you know i mean that shifted my insights like that that sentence changed my insides because i've i had felt that for a long time i had felt that

um whereas growing up i was scared of being close to other boys. You certainly couldn't touch other boys, you know. I have a life that's full of casual intimacy with friends, men and women and non-binary. And, and I had always been writing and it comes out of writing a scholarly article. I was writing a scholarly article about the genetics of sexuality back in the Lady Gaga days of I was born this way. Remember those days? And I, as a noted bisexual, I was like, I actually have a lot of choice in my sexuality. I actually have a lot of choice around who I sleep with, who I'm romantically and sexually attracted to. And like, I actually have a lot of choice in my sexuality. I actually have a lot of choice around who I sleep with, who I'm romantically and sexually attracted to. And like, just because I could choose to only sleep with women doesn't make my queerness any worse or better than anyone else's.

So I was kind of pushing back on the notion of the sole gay identity was like, I've known since I was five that I've liked boys. And the trouble that comes with a genetic reductive view of human sexuality. And a dear friend of mine who ran a website at the time called the feminist wire, which was kind of public facing scholarships and please write about this for the feminist wire. And I was like,

Oh no, I don't do that. I write, you know, 5,000 words, emails to my friends. We would do book clubs and just like write emails about every chapter back and forth. That sounds like you're a little bit SAS curious if you're writing 5,000 word emails to friends.

They were essays that we were just writing an email. This is my dear friend, Whitney. And she actually, for my birthday one year in the aughts, had bound our emails that we had written to each other hundreds and hundreds of pages of emails about books and art and experiences that we had had yeah um you know so i had always been doing the work privately and the other amazing thing that um starting to do more public writing gave to me was a whole new set of friends and community. Queer writers are just fucking awesome and smart and hardworking and often humble, although not always, and often with good senses of humor, although sometimes not always. And it is through actually this work of public writing and activism that I made so many friends

who are a generation older than me. I had always sort of wanted to have queer elders. And I had this sort of notion that all the queer elders had died of AIDS, which of course is not true. Many people, you know, who are elders for me, I'm 40, so 60 and up, did not die of AIDS. And I have very dear friends now who I've met who are writers or activists. And all of those things have just been such incredible gifts in my life. I really wanted my book to, it is, it's exactly literary essays. It is literary essays about viruses and how our bodies interact with them. And I wanted to bring that craft and that care, that rigor, that curiosity,

that experimentation to the page. My favorite, I honestly, my friends and I were talking last night about doing an event where we all got up and read one-star Goodreads reviews of our books. And I honestly, honestly love the one-star Goodreads review of my books um and i honestly honestly love the one star good read review of my books that are saying i thought this was gonna be a textbook on virology and there was a blow job on gate on page two i got your 1695 literally one just said not about viruses about gay culture yes you read the book correctly that is that's wonderful i mean come on every good reads review

even when you read even when you get the five star ones you're like oh come on this is this is like no good reads review is any good you know know, everybody should go back. Just, just write, write down what you thought about the book in a little journal. You know what I mean? Write your friend a 5,000 word email. There you go. Write an essay about what you thought about the book. Um, well, I love writing like that. Some of my favorite writing is, is, you know, that which someone who understands the science deeply then starts thinking about, hey, what does it mean to us, you know, or how does it affect my life in a non-trivial way? I mean, sometimes it's done trivially, but I think that that's so beautiful. And so let's sort of move in that direction. When you think about what you know about viruses and virology and all of this,

how does that change your notions of, say, sickness or wellness as a, you know, as a human moving through the world? Or how might we think about them differently? Yeah, you know, I write about this in the book, that a human being is sort of in a constant continuum of sick and well, right? You have viruses, you have a herpes virus, and you almost certainly, the example that I like here is Kaposi's sarcoma, which of course is a famous cancer that leads to the purple blotches on AIDS patients. The patient did not, it's this virus called HHS8, or HHV8, herpes simplex virus 8, and it is an infection that that person has had for many years. But because they have a functioning immune system, the virus doesn't do anything.

It chills. It sits there. It's when you have a depressed immune system due to AIDS that you actually, the virus can activate and cause cancer. Right? So do you have HHV8 in you all the time yes are you sick from it no you're only sick when a set of conditions comes about that leads to um you know sort of the expression of that virus's impact you know i think there are writers uh thinking of susan sontag and you abyss here who have you i was thinking of her when you were talking about,

when you're talking about writing in this way. She's such a wonderful essayist about medical and scientific issues. Sorry, please go on. And she writes a lot about wellness as a moral state, right? The American notion that one can purchase wellness, that eating a just salad at lunch and having a personal trainer

and having 2% body fat and only drinking smoothies. And it's sort of a class symbol is what a good person does. And therefore, you know, being fat or being sick is what is by inversion an indication of a not good person. And fundamentally, the problem with this is the only human truth that we all share is that we all will get sick and die. That is that's it.

The only experience all humans share is sickness that we know for sure you experience this. And so have I. And so it sets us all up to inevitably be the not good person that we are trying to consume our way into into being. And, you know, I think there's something deeply tragic about about that. And so I think, you know, writing against that and remembering that we are always in flux, that being being sick sucks. Right.

And I thought about this so much with monkeypox, my dear friends, I have five friends total, not a lot of friends. Two of them had monkeypox at the same time. And they were miserable, not just because they had an infection, but because they were feeling all of the weight of the stigma about having a sexually transmitted infection. Paul Monette is an incredible writer who died of HIV, and he wrote about the shame of dying of an STI. When your mother holds your hand on your deathbed, in a way, she knows you died from fucking, and there's an inherent shame in that. And it's quite bad enough to have AIDS. It's quite bad enough to have monkeypox. One doesn't need the additional illness of the stigma associated with it.

So it inevitably will harm us all. So I think it is hard to undo thinking about being sick as sort of a moral failure or any sort of perceived not way of being healthy, not being... I'm turning 40. My body is changing. I used to have a six pack. I don't anymore. You know, it's just like it just is not possible for me. And that makes me feel a way. And that's not good.

You know, and so it's this constant sort of working toward taking value out of states of sickness and health and wellness and bodies and size it's so true what you're saying i think about when people would do covet 19 posts and they still do of course but you know the i've got covet 19 post um so often they would say i don't know what happened i did everything right i I was good. I was good. And I got it. And you could feel in that that there was a shame about, yet somehow I got it anyway. I also write it.

I mean, I do a joke on stage about this right now that I've been working on about how, you know, when I drink a Diet Coke and people are like, oh, you can't drink that. That's worse than regular Coke. And like, that's not scientific. They're just saying it's a sin. It's a sin to drink it. You shouldn't be drinking. It's worse than regular Coke. And that's not scientific. They're just saying it's a sin. It's a sin to drink it.

You shouldn't be drinking it. It's wrong to drink. It's chemicals. I love when people say it's chemicals. I'm like, bitch, everything is chemicals. Water is a chemical. What is wrong with you? I love nothing more than a barbecued piece of meat.

Yeah. And the thing that makes barbecued meat is that char on it. And that's literally a carcinogen. It causes cancer. I don't I would rather die of cancer than live a life without grilled meats. You know what I mean? I think it's fucking fine. I don't need to live to be 103.

I want to do poppers and eat charred steak and have a glass of wine. And just it's there's there's more to life than just a thirst for like the right thing all the time. Bury me in a coffin of Diet Coke for fuck's sake. Mine would be gin and tonic. Bury me in a gin and tonic, baby. Incredible. That's you know what? I was going to ask you another question,

but I actually want to end right on that note. I think that's the perfect way to go out. Poppers and steak. Thank you, Joseph, for coming on the show. Please tell us the name of the book one more time and where people can get it if you have a favorite bookshop you want to shout out. Yeah, it's Virology, Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between,

and it's wherever books are sold. Yeah, bookshop.org is great. Yeah, and we actually have a special affiliate bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. That takes you to our special affiliate bookshop if you want to support this show and support your local bookstore. Thank you so much, Joseph, for coming on the show. This has been so much fun. I've had a blast.

And I'm less clinically depressed than I was before. Marginally. That is the experience I want people to have on this show. Thank you so much, Joseph. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Joseph Osmunson for coming on the show. If you want to pick up his book, you can get a copy at

factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books, and you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore when you do so. I want to thank our producer, Sam Rodman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level

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I want to thank Clifton Vargas, I want to thank Larry Latouf, I want to thank Chris McKinless, I want to thank Kel Crow, so many of you signed up in the last few weeks, and I really thank you for doing so. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. We'd love to have you join

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Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything.