Science Friday - COVID Questions, Introvert Origin. March 19, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Rise In Anti-Asian Violence Is At The Intersection Of Racism And Disease Earlier this week, eight people were killed at three Atlanta-area massage parlors. Six of the victims were Asian-American women. In 2020, reported attacks on Asian-Americans increased by 150% over those reported the previous year in some of the country’s most populous cities, according to data compiled by California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism that was provided to the Voice of America. The attacks came in the midst of a pandemic that has been falsely blamed on China by some politicians, including former President Trump.This isn’t the first time that the Asian-American community has been the victim of racist scapegoating connected to a disease, however. Maggie Koerth, senior science reporter for FiveThirtyEight, joins Ira to discuss some of the other instances, from SARS in 2003 back to the bubonic plague in 1899. They also discuss other coronavirus news, including an update on a debate over the safety of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine that is now taking place in the European Union, and talk about non-COVID news of the week, including the development of an artificial mouse uterus and research into water on Mars. This Infectious Disease Specialist Is Answering Your COVID-19 Questions On Instagram Last week marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. As the people all over the world struggled to wrap their head around terms like “flatten the curve,” many took their questions to scientists via their social media accounts. Laurel Bristow is one of those scientists. Although you may know her better by her Instagram handle @kinggutterbaby, Bristow is an infectious disease specialist who started making informal videos  last March, explaining the science around the pandemic. One year later, she’s unwittingly fostered a fandom of over 360,000 followers hungry for simple, straightforward scientific information about COVID-19.  Bristow joins Ira to answer listener questions about vaccine schedules, social distancing, and the slow return to normal life, sharing what it’s been like to be a “science influencer” on social media. The False Personality Binary Do you prefer one-on-one conversations, like to read books, and quake at the idea of a party? You probably call yourself an introvert. On the other hand, if you thrive in crowds and thrive in social settings, you may check the ‘extrovert’ box on personality tests. But the idea of introversion, coined by self-described introvert and Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, started with a different definition—one centered on where you get your energy. Does it come from your own thoughts and inwardness? The term introvert comes from the Latin intro, or “inward,” and vertere, meaning “to turn.” Conversely, the word extrovert (“outward turning”) describes being energized by things happening outside of yourself. Jung’s idea took off, and many of us eagerly categorize ourselves into personality “types.” But in recent decades, psychologists have developed an even more nuanced understanding of introversion—one that may make the terms “introvert” and “extrovert” irrelevant. Introvert is the last word in this mind-focused season of the podcast Science Diction. Radio producer Christie Taylor talks to Science Diction producer and host Johanna Mayer about the origin of the term, and how our understanding of personality has matured in the 100 years since Jung’s inward-turning revelation. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, your COVID questions answered, and a look at the origin of the word introvert. But first, earlier this week, eight people were murdered at three Atlanta area massage parlors. Six of the victims were Asian-American women. The attacks came in the midst of a pandemic that has been falsely blamed on China by some politicians, including former President Trump, and those inflammatory remarks have a serious effect. In 2020, reported attacks on Asian Americans increased by 150% over those reported the previous year in some of the country's most populous cities, according to data compiled by California State University's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism that was provided to the Voice of America.

This isn't the first time that the Asian American community has been the target of racist scapegoating connected to a disease. Here with more on that is Maggie Kerth, Senior science reporter for 538. She's based in Minneapolis. Always good to talk with you, Maggie. Thanks for having me back. Okay. Give us the connection here between the pandemic and these horrible attacks. Well, before these specific attacks happened, there had been this knowledge that attacks against Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. was on the rise. And my colleague Alex Samuels at 538 had actually written a story just last week that addressed some of this. She was looking at this long history of scapegoating and racism playing in a role in how this country responds to crises, including disease outbreaks. And there's all these examples that just go back for years and years and years, you know, during the original SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, Asian neighborhoods in the U.S. lost huge amounts of revenue.

And that's despite there being not a single SARS death in this country at all. If you go even further back in history, you have Asian neighborhoods that have been buried. and even burned when the people who lived there were blamed by white authorities for spreading disease. So there's good evidence to make this connection. There absolutely is. And I think that one of the really interesting things in this story is the point that Alex makes about how disease is political. You know, the virus itself doesn't have politics, but it exists in this world where racism and bigotry spreads as easily as any pandemic. And so you get a narrative that blames a disease on a the particular racial group and it works its way through society. And if we haven't actively

fought against it, it ends up getting normalized into the way that people are thinking. It becomes kind of part of, just kind of part of that background below. Let's talk about other COVID-related news this week. There's been a lot of attention in Europe about AstraZeneca's vaccine causing blood clots. Anthony Fauci was asked about that on Thursday. Give us an idea of what's going on here. Yeah, so this has been a really confusing week for the status of the AstraZeneca vaccine. It's not yet approved for use in the U.S., but it has been widely used across Europe and really the rest of the globe. I think India is another really big user. And this week you had more than 20 European countries that temporarily stopped using it because of these side effect concerns. So this is really

complicated. And the story that I found most enlightening was one at science that was from Gretchen Vogel and Kai Cooper Schmidt. And they framed it essentially as a clash between the priorities of public health experts and the priorities of vaccine safety experts. So what are these safety concerns? Well, it boils down to this. There have been at least 13 patients in continental Europe who have developed what is honestly a really distressing set of symptoms. You know, it was originally reported as blood clots which if it were just run-of-the-mill blood clots, 13 out of tens of millions of doses wouldn't be something you'd be concerned about, right? Like, that's actually less frequent than what you'd expect to find in just a random sample

of unvaccinated people. But these weren't ordinary blood clots. Vogel and Cooper-Schmidt are writing about how what we're talking about is this widespread, full-body blood clotting, internal bleeding, and low-platal it counts. And seven of those 13 people have actually died. So basically you have the vaccine safety people looking at this and going, this is not normal. We should be a little bit concerned about what's going on here. We don't know what the situation is yet.

And then you have the public health people looking at the same data and going, okay, but this is still a really super small number out of tens of millions of vaccinated people. And it's also not consistently happening everywhere that AstraZeneca vaccine is being used. So you have some countries like the UK that have used lots of AstraZeneca but not had a single case of this syndrome. So, you know, they're looking at this and thinking that, you know, COVID is still a lot more dangerous than 13 out of tens of millions of a syndrome that may or may not be linked to the vaccine. The EU, though, some countries have started shutting down or closing up a little bit now, haven't they? Well, some of those countries have put a temporary pause on using AstraZeneca vaccine. And the EU regulator, though, the vaccine regulator there, actually came out yesterday.

And effectively, they sided with the public health people. So they came out and said, you know, we have looked at this. And we have found that the Astrosanica vaccine is not causing general run-of-the-mill blood clots. We can't rule out this really rare thing, but the risks of COVID are higher. So they're basically saying, go ahead and go back to using this. But it'll be interesting to see what the countries actually do with that. And it's not been okayed for use here in the U.S. Has it? It has not yet. No, it's not gone through that emergency use authorization process yet.

All right. Let's move on to some other interesting science news this week, specifically a story about an artificial uterus. Right. So this is super interesting. Yeah. And I think like this is kind of fulfilling the promise of pop culture, right? Because test tube babies are not really test tube babies. They're, fertilized in the lab, but it's a long way from a test tube to a baby. And these researchers in Israel, though, they've just made that path a little shorter. So they've managed to not just fertilize mouse eggs, but grow embryos all the way through the halfway point of gestation without any mouse mothers being involved. They have this artificial womb they've put together. It's basically glass jars. They almost look like spice canisters. And they're filled with this special nutrient fluid. And they're loaded into this little spinning disc and an incubator. And the incubators keep the vials warm and they

maintain proper levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The spinny disc spins slowly. It's kind of keeping the embryos from adhering to the sides of the jars. And the result is an embryo that is basically indistinguishable from what you'd find inside of a living mouse. Wow. Wow. You know, this is, reminds me of turning points in biology when you talk about ethics and things like that. This sort of opens up a lot of different cans of worms here. Yes, it does. Yeah, we are definitely shopping at the worm store. There are lots of legitimate, useful research that this kind of technique could serve.

You know, we have no real way right now to watch animals that are like us grow from cells to babies. and being able to observe that process in real time could have huge impacts for our understanding of biology, for helping scientists prevent miscarriages and birth defects. And then there's also the whole like, where do we stop issue? You know, like right now these artificial wombs can't sustain embryos past that halfway point. So that's where those mouse embryos start to need blood for nourishment and that nutrient goo can't just can't cut it. but the technological limit's not going to exist forever. And so we're now kind of in this place where we have to start asking,

is it okay to grow an animal entirely outside of a body? Is it okay to grow a human entirely outside of a body? You know, we actually have these questions that we now have to start grappling with in our law, in our, you know, regulations. Yeah, you know, technology changes. Ethics have to be talked about and perhaps change also. Finally, we've all been watching the latest Mars mission and even heard some driving sounds this week, but there's new research into the question of where the water went on Mars.

This is always a problem that I've always wondered about. Do we have something new here? Yeah. So, you know, for years, like the lack of liquid on Mars has been blamed on its atmosphere. So there's all this evidence that Mars once had lots of water. It does not now. And it's always kind of been pinned on this idea that at some point the Martian atmosphere got thinner because it's now much thinner than our own. It's less than 1% of the volume of Earth's atmosphere.

So this idea was that like, well, at some point the atmosphere thinned and all of the water that had been there drifted off into space because there was nothing to trap it on the planet. But this new computer modeling that has been done suggests that a large portion of the water might have actually gotten trapped in the ground. bound into like the crystalline structure of minerals. That's something that can happen on Earth. It's something that if it is happening on Mars, the computer modeling is suggesting that anywhere between 30 and 99% of all of the water that was once on that planet could just be there in that chemical geological prison. What?

Yeah. To 99%? Which is a heck of a spread. But that's a lot still. That's a good thing, right? It is. Yeah. I mean, like it's basically saying a lot of, there's a lot of water probably down there bound

into the soil. And, you know, that could be really good for humans if we end up traveling to the red planet. It means there's a hope of having usable water that we can extract from the planet somewhere other than the icy Martian poles. Before we go, I want to take a listen to some of the sounds of the Mars Perseverance rover driving on the surface of Mars. It sounds a little bit like your squeaky old car. Have a listen.

Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited about this. Oh, my gosh. They took the Oldsmobile I drove in high school up there. I can't hear the sound that I know that click and clack always identified as the brakes failing, so we're probably fine. Yeah. I'm not sure NASA knows what all the sounds are. They were saying they knew what most of them are, but not all of them.

That sounds about right. And, you know, we are click and clack that would be great if they were still around to talk about this car on Mars. We're thinking of them today. Thank you, Maggie. Yeah, thank you. Maggie Kerth, senior science reporter for 538. He's based in Minneapolis. Always a pleasure to have, Maggie.

We're going to take a break. and want me to come back one year into a global pandemic, and Science Friday is still here to answer your questions about COVID-19. Our guest, Infectious Disease Specialist, Laurel Bristow, joins us with answers right after this. Hi, everybody. Ira here. I can't believe it, but it's been one year since Science Friday and much of the country started working remotely. It's been hard, right? We miss seeing everyone. I miss the studio. And mostly, I miss being able to talk directly. with all of you, our fans. It's also been difficult to fundraise. So if you have a minute and a dollar,

please consider making a gift to support our program. Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash give. Hopefully, we'll be all together again soon. Until then, stay safe and thank you. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Remember when no one had ever heard of the term flatten the curve? Last week, marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the

coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, and since then, we've been asking scientists to answer your questions about the pandemic. My next guest has been answering countless numbers of questions, explaining terms like flattened the curve to her family and friends, and now to her many, many followers on Instagram. Joining us to answer even more questions is Laurel Bristow, and in infectious disease specialist and science communicator. For the last year, she's been sharing COVID-19 information on her Instagram, King Gutter Baby. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. I've got to ask you first about the handle you use King Gutter Baby. That handle has become very popular with my followers. It's just kind of a really good example of how I did not anticipate

being the position that I have put myself in with this pandemic and being a source of information. because it's just my personal Instagram. The name is based off of a joke from a Bob's Berger's episode. And I didn't think too much of it until it started becoming my de facto professional account. I love the Bob's Burger Show. So it's okay with me. Let's get right to the first question. First up is James from Denver.

Hey, Seifry. I look forward to getting my first vaccine. But I wanted to know if taking more than one type of vaccine, would improve my immunity even more than just taking one vaccine. All right. Laurel, how do you answer that? That's a really good question. It's a common question. So right now, in terms of the MRNA vaccines, their efficacy is extremely high. You would not get any benefit from taking an additional vaccine.

For things like Johnson and Johnson, which also has a high efficacy, we don't really have reason to believe that taking anything would be more beneficial because it's just about how it elicits your immune response. There are studies happening right now looking at a potential mix and match protocol to stretch vaccines or allow people to get booster doses with something that they didn't get the prime dose with. But I would not recommend taking any vaccine that's not recommended in your schedule until we have more information about that.

Let's go to next to Tom from California. Our county is distributing second doses of COVID vaccine. quite late? What are the implications of receiving a COVID vaccine second dose two or three weeks beyond the recommended date? Well, I think a lot of people are wondering that. Yeah, I think that that's a pretty common question as well. There is certainly a window period for second doses. It doesn't have to be exactly on the date that they tell you. Most places tested using a one-week window on either side. I'd say don't worry too much if your second dose is delayed. We're actually getting increasing evidence,

especially in terms of things like the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, that it is okay to delay those doses for quite a while, that you still have strong protective immunity. If we're talking about the MRNA vaccines, you get really strong protective immunity from just one dose as well. So I really wouldn't panic if your second dose is delayed by a couple of weeks. Beyond that, you know, we really want to test to make sure what the best efficacy would be for how long you can stretch those doses before we make that a recommendation. Yeah, we really don't know

how long the immunity lasts either, do we? We're sort of in an experiment on that. Yeah, so people get really scared or confused when we say three months because they think that that's as far as it goes. That's kind of the minimum. We're sure that there are three months of protective immunity. There are a lot of parts of your immune system that we actually can't measure easily or test for easily, like your T-cell immunity. So we do believe that. there is going to be long-lasting immunity beyond three months. But right now, as we're gathering more data and more information, we're kind of existing in this abundance of caution realm, which is why we say three months. But I do anticipate it being longer than that. And speaking of second doses,

David from Anchorage, Alaska wants to know why we need a second shot of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine. Why are these vaccines designed that way, Laurel? Yeah, so most vaccines that we have in our regular vaccine schedule are a prime and a boost vaccine. Some have multiple boosters over years. It's just based off of what we know about how our immune system works and, you know, the most effective way to distribute vaccines or the most effective way to elicit an immune response. So with a lot of vaccines in the clinical trials, because we were working under pressure, decisions were made based off of best estimates based off of what we historically know about vaccines. So, for example, the MRNA vaccines were tested with a two,

two-shot schedule, but Johnson and Johnson was tested as a single dose. Now Johnson and Johnson is being tested to see what happens if we do give a booster dose a few weeks later. And there has been a push to look into the efficacy of mRNA vaccines if we only give one dose. So as time goes on, we're going to really refine those things. But for right now, the FDA has given emergency use authorization for these vaccines based on the way the large base three clinical trials were performed. So we really just stick to those schedules until we know more about how we can kind of tweak the vaccine dosing schedule. We have people asking about whether the vaccine could potentially mutate in a person who is not fully vaccinated. Here's that question from Shalom in Santa Cruz, California.

If we have vaccines which require two doses and some weeks after the second dose to achieve maximum effectiveness, won't we have a pool of tens of millions of people who've received their first dose and will be partially protected and might the vaccine mutate in that population to be more resistant to the vaccine? Good question, Laurel. How would you answer that? I would say the first dose of the vaccine gives very high levels of protection. So the goal really is to vaccinate as many people as we can to limit the bodies that the virus is able to inhabit.

Currently, none of the COVID vaccines are 100% efficacious at preventing disease, at preventing infection. So we don't worry about that with other vaccines that we have that also don't prevent infection 100%. I would say it's important for people to keep in mind that the variants that we talk about all the time now arose before vaccines were available because the virus was so widespread, was circulating so much. And so if we don't get the virus under control, we are absolutely in a position to

see more variance. Whereas with the vaccines, it's a theoretical risk that's probably not that large, but we're not going to get the virus under control currently without vaccines. So really, the benefits of vaccines at this point far, far outweigh any theoretical risk. And we also know that variants happen when you don't vaccinate a population. And now that the first group of eligible people have received their second shot, people are asking us, what are they allowed to do now that they're fully vaccinated. Michael from El Cerrito, California has something to ask about that. I have received my second Moderna vaccination and soon will be the required 14 days beyond that. At that time, how can I change my activities safely? Can I have another person inside my house

without increased risk? Can I dine inside without increased risk? I know when I am, am away from my home, I should still wear a mask, at least for modeling proper behavior. Are there other reasons as well? Yes. So this is a really good question. It's one that comes up a lot as well. The current CDC recommendations for people who have been vaccinated is that two weeks after your last shot of whatever vaccine you get, so in the case of the MRNA vaccines,

that's two weeks after your second dose. In the case of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, that's two weeks after your single dose of that vaccine, you're considered fully vaccinated. And in these situations, they're making kind of realistic recommendations for how people can relax their mitigation strategies, while also trying to limit the amount of spread that's happening. So for people who are considered fully vaccinated, they are allowed to have small gatherings indoors with, ideally, other people who are fully vaccinated, or they can also have small indoor gatherings with people from a single household who might be unvaccinated but are low risk.

And in this case, low risk means under 65 and without comorbidities. And the reason that they want to do this and limit this to a single household rather than, you know, multiple low risk households is just about limiting the risk and the spread and kind of slowing it, right? If you are with a group of people and someone from one unvaccinated household as a carrier, you would be at lower risk because you're fully vaccinated, but someone from a different household who is also unvaccinated would be at greater risk of bringing that back to their home. So that's why we're trying to keep groups small.

All right. Let's go back to our questions. Claudia from Cadamette, Massachusetts. I'm wondering about why public health experts are saying that you could potentially carry the coronavirus in your nose after you're vaccinated and then give it to unvaccinated people. Why do they think that? And what will they need to find out in order to. verify if that's true or not. Good question. That is a good question. So I think the idea or the

question of, you know, asymptomatic carrier ship or transmission when you're fully vaccinated is one that is really interesting because it was born out of the fact that these clinical trials, the large phase three clinical trials, their primary unpoints were looking at things like severe disease, hospitalization, and death. We have a priority of the things that we need to make sure the vaccine. seen to do, which is reduce morbidity and mortality. So from that, we said, you know, we don't know about its impact on transmission for people who may not have any symptoms. So we need to still be cautious. And people interpreted that as, you know, there's no impact on transmission when really it was, we're not willing to say what it is yet. More and more studies are coming out now that we

are learning more about Johnson and Johnson had antibody testing in blood worked in. their regular follow-ups and we're finding that that vaccine absolutely reduces the prevalence of asymptomatic or undetected cases. There has been evidence from hospital systems in Israel that the Pfizer-MRNA vaccine absolutely impacts transmission and people's chances of being an asymptomatic carrier. There's also information on this on Oxford AstraZeneca. So we do know that they have an impact. We just don't know the exact extent of it because it wasn't worked in to those initial trials. But, you know, again, falling under that umbrella of an abundance of caution, we said, we're not sure yet. So treat yourself as if you're still a risk to others until we get a

better idea. Okay. Let's move on to Myra from Boston. Let's hear what her question is. What I don't understand is how the COVID-19 vaccines could ever get us herd immunity if we don't know that they prevent the spreading of the virus. My understanding is that herd immunity develops, when enough of a population is immune, usually through vaccination, so that a sick person can't transmit the virus to anybody who's going to be a host where the virus would multiply. But if they're going to continue to multiply and spread, how do we get to herd immunity? I think there's two important takeaways from her question. First, you know, she said that the herd immunity is mostly achieved through vaccination. It's only ever been achieved through

vaccination. I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind. There's never been, you know, an infectious disease for which natural immunity and a population has led to herd immunity. And the other thing is she asked, you know, how can we get to hurt immunity if we don't know the impact on transmission? But, you know, the more people who are vaccinated, the fewer bodies that this has available to infect, it starts to run into walls when it's trying to find new people to infect. And so I tell people there's a lot of infectious diseases out there that, you know, are endemic that still exists, that still pop up. But we don't spend all of our time thinking about them, the way we think about COVID, and that's the goal. That's what we want to get to.

And even if we had a vaccine, you know, that maybe say was not capable of achieving her immunity, and this is completely theoretical, if we had one that, you know, still transmitted, keeping people out of the hospital and keeping people alive, if we can reduce it to a point where it's like a common cold, that's so much better than what we're dealing with right now. Just a quick reminder, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. President Biden has come out and said, everyone will be eligible to be vaccinated by May 1st, and that's going to require a lot of vaccine to be produced. And Rebecca from Portland, Oregon, is wondering if other drug companies can help out with that. I'm curious why if so many companies

have tried and somewhat failed to create their own COVID vaccines, why Pfizer and Moderna can't contract those companies under NDA to mass produce the successful vaccines to help get vaccines out to the public faster? Yeah, so they are. Sanofi has had, you know, a couple of delays in their vaccine clinical trials schedules due to a few errors on their part. And in the meantime, they have contracted to help produce Pfizer-Bioentech's MRNA vaccine. They're also now helping to produce the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Merck just gave up their vaccine bid, decided to focus on treatments instead, and they are now going to help produce the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. So there are companies that are stepping

up to the plate for cooperation so that we can make sure that we get enough vaccines not only locally, but also globally, because really it's not, this pandemic is not something that's going to end until we take care of lower resource countries as well who also need access to these vaccines. We've covered the so-called Longholler Group on the show before. People who have COVID-related symptoms for months after they're technically virus-free. Amanda from Missouri wants to know if the vaccines will work any differently for these people. I started the Facebook group COVID-19 Long-Hollers discussion group.

Our 11,000 members want to know how the vaccines might affect long-haulers. Will it help us? Will it hurt us? Yeah. So this is a very interesting topic and something that is going to be looked at really closely in the future. Long-haul COVID has just been given the acronym of PASC. I think it's post-acute sequelae of COVID infections.

And the anecdotal data that we've seen so far is that for a portion of long-haul sufferers, about maybe 30 to 40 percent, that the vaccine, just by their own accounts, has improved their symptoms to a degree. There's a couple of theories that have been proposed for why a vaccine might help improve people's symptoms. And it's certainly something that's going to be looked into, but there has not been any data so far or recorded evidence that it exacerbates long COVID symptoms, only that it could potentially be helpful for some people. I suspect that many families are wondering about when they will ever get to return to, quote, normal life if their children remain unvaccinated. Will they still be at risk if their kids return to school or go to the playground or have friends come over? Annie from Madison, Wisconsin wants to know about a potential clinical trial for kids.

I'm wondering what makes vaccines potentially behave differently in children, and why are they not included in the initial trials that are done? Yeah, I would say that, you know, in a pandemic in an emergency situation, a lot of it has to do with dealing with prioritization of needs. Data around children is very hotly debated right now, but so far it is pretty clear that kids who are without underlying medical conditions are at fairly low risk for severe COVID, and their role in transmission is not as clear.

But obviously the priority was adults, people with comorbidities and the elderly, in terms of protecting them from severe disease. So that's why kids weren't initially included in any clinical trials, And of course, you know, you want to try stuff on adults before you move on to children. There are multiple studies that are happening right now for children for vaccinations. I know Moderna has just started enrolling for theirs. I think Johnson and Johnson might be enrolling for theirs currently. So we will get answers to vaccinations for children fairly quickly.

But I do think, you know, there is a possibility that we could still get back to normal without mass vaccination and children if we can have at-risk adults be vaccinated as well. We have to take a break. but when we come back more from Laurel Bristow on communicating science through social media, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Iraflato. In case you're just joining us this hour, we're answering your COVID-19 questions

with help from our guest Laura Bristow, an infectious disease specialist and science communicator. You may be familiar with her via her popular Instagram account, King Gutter Baby. Let's talk a little bit about your career on Instagram. Instagram and what turned you to making videos about COVID and then everyone following you. Why did you make your first Instagram video about this? Back in March of 2020, I was working on respiratory research before in hospitalized populations. All those studies got paused when we realized that COVID was in the hospitals and we needed to make a new plan for how we were going to approach things.

And there was about a four-day period between those studies getting paused and us starting up, full force hit the ground running doing COVID treatment research that I didn't have a lot to do. And so I offered to my private friends and family only 600 Instagram followers. If anyone wanted me to make a video explaining what flatten the curve meant, explaining what COVID was, why it wasn't just the bad flu. And a few people said yes that they would like that. So I made my first informational video kind of giving a broad overview of what we knew. and people started asking if I could make my private profile public so that they could tell people to watch the story or share it.

And I did that. And then by the end of the weekend, I got 2,000 followers and it just never stopped. People started sending me their questions. They started sending me, you know, news stories that they had seen that had scared them. And so it's really just grown from there into this wonderful community of people who really want to learn. They want to do their part to help out with others. and they just want to feel really informed and empowered to make choices in their life and also talk to their family members who might be more hesitant or confused to try to get the pandemic under control while looking out for each other. And right now you have what, hundreds of thousands of followers?

Yeah, I think we're somewhere in the 360,000 range in about a year. Now, do you consider that great success the topic or are your really good skill at being a communicator? I think it's both. I think, you know, my proximity to the information is obviously helpful and draws people to me. But also, you know, I really, I do enjoy teaching people. I think it's really fun to come up with creative ways to make sure that people understand really complex topics so that they can feel really empowered in their life. You know, I am so close to this pandemic.

The only people in the hospital who I see are very sick with COVID. And so I interact with them. And even that proximity, I am not afraid of the pandemic, the way I think a lot of people who only get exposed to it through headlines are. And so I want people to feel the way that I feel and feel like they can make good choices that might not be the most fun. And it's obviously not enjoyable the last year of this social distancing and isolation, but that they can feel confident that they're doing what's best for them and also what's best to minimize their impact on others. You ended up working on the Moderna clinical trial and ended up having a very close connection

to some of the COVID information people had questions about. Did you find you needed to filter the information you were sharing because of this? No, not particularly. I think I'd been lucky in a couple regards. One, in that mostly people are asking me to explain stuff that's public information, right? It's headlines based off of papers or conspiracy theories that are out there. And so there's never been kind of a conflict about what I can share. And also the fact in this pandemic, you know, preprint servers that host papers that have not yet been reviewed have been really overwhelmed with an immediate access to data. So there's not really a lot of stuff that stays under locking key. I actually can't really think of anything that I've worked on where I have learned any data that hasn't, you know, been published within the next few days. And then once it's out there, I feel completely confident sharing it with other people. So I think I think the free sharing of information in this pandemic,

has made it super easy to not even have to worry about, you know, giving away any information that was, you know, under lock and key for whatever reason. And of course, you've got a very positive take on the news, whereas the media elsewhere, people might say, not so cheerful. Was that something you intentionally put into your messages? I don't know about intentionally. I mean, I think getting people hooked on fear is a very powerful way to keep them coming back. So I like to be the balance to that just by default. And there is a lot of positive news that comes out of this.

And also just my natural disposition has been that this is going to end. It's going to end one way or another. I would just prefer it end in the way that doesn't involve mass casualties. So here's what we can do to prevent that. And here's the things to look forward to. And here's the evidence that, you know, we might be coming out of the tunnel. So I think it's been pretty easy and also important for me to kind of be a guiding light to hold people together and have people hold on because it is exhausting and it's draining. And I, you know, I do take time to acknowledge that. But I think that people are capable of really incredible things. And so they just need someone to remind them of that. Okay. I have to ask you the question that everybody asks a very successful person. And that is, would you do anything differently? If I had to do it all over again, I definitely would. I think I might. respond to the difficult aspects of it a little bit differently. You know, it was such a quick change. And of course, with this kind of notoriety comes people from the conspiracy side of the spectrum who, you know, post my information and then my DMs are full of their trolls. And I think if I would do it again, I would know better than to give my time and my energy to those people because it's just not worth it.

I think in the beginning, it was a lot easier to pick a fight with me than it would be now. Let's talk about post-pandemic, and we all hope there's going to be a post-pandemic. Do you plan to continue being a science communicator on what you do or on another topic? Yeah, I think I would definitely like to continue in some capacity. I think this year has certainly shown me that I really do enjoy teaching. Well, we have to leave it there, Laurel. This has been very educational and certainly helpful to all our listeners. Thank you so much.

I'm so happy that I could be here. Laurel Bristow is an infectious disease specialist and science communicator, and you can find her sharing important science information, answering questions about COVID-19, on her Instagram account, King Gutter Baby. There's no doubt that the pandemic changed the way we socialized. One day, a year ago, in March, we just weren't going places to meet our friends. One group of people, though, that may have mixed feelings about that big change, introverts. Earlier this week, two of us. of Science Friday's many self-identified introverts, radio producer Christy Taylor, Science Diction host Johanna Mayer, had a conversation about this misunderstood personality trait. It's the subject of our latest episode of Science Diction. Hey, Johanna. Hey, Christy.

So this is really weird, but I don't think that you and I have talked one-on-one with our actual voices in something like six months. How did that happen? Well, Christy, if you haven't heard, there's been a global pandemic. And also I feel like it's because we don't overlap so much on our teams at Science Friday. So when we do see each other in meetings, it's in like a 20-person Zoom call. And I am physically unable to speak in those calls. It's so weird because you know all those memes that came out at the beginning of the lockdown measures last year about quarantine and introverts.

The ones that we're basically like, welcome to our world of staying home all the time, extroverts. Let us introverts show you the way. We have the compendium of knowledge that you need to get through this. Yeah. I mean, it's true that I would struggle to go to parties before lockdown, but I can't actually say that it's been easy in lockdown. I'm lonely. I'm frustrated.

I used to do a lot of things out in the world, even as an introvert. And, you know, Zoom, it turns out, is the worst way to spend close one-on-one time with people, even though I love it. I never want to be on another Zoom call in my entire life. I mean, we have video off. I should note right now even. Yes, thank God, an introvert stream. It's almost like introversion is more complicated than pop culture memes could ever understand. So, Johanna, I know you've been looking at brain things over at Science Diction this season.

And your latest episode is actually all about introverts. So can you help us out here in bringing some nuance to this memeable personality trait? I can. And shout out to Chris Agusa, who researched and wrote this episode. But we took a look at where the word introvert comes from and why introversion just doesn't really work the way that most of us think. Most of us think. The classic introvert is quiet. They're a bookworm.

Maybe awkward at large gatherings. Probably prefers one-on-one interaction to big parties. The opposite of essentially like a boisterous, friendly extrovert. So these archetypes obviously came from somewhere. It's not like we all just innately understand when we're born that there are two different. kinds of people in the world. Yeah, it's really interesting. It actually goes back like a hundred years to when these two famous psychologists had a falling out in their friendship. Parle Young and Sigmund Freud, they had this like really intense personal and professional relationship. Cracks

began to surface and they eventually had this big falling out. Freud essentially told Young, like, I never want to talk to you again. And Young was like completely. bereft and was just trying to figure out how two people could look at a situation and come to like completely different conclusions about what went wrong. And that's what led him into his investigation into personality types. And he actually wrote a book called psychological types. And that's where he popularized the terms introvert and extrovert. What do the words mean themselves? How do you translate them? Well, you can kind of break it down. So intro means inward or to the inside and vertere means to turn so together they mean to turn inward and the opposite of course

is extrovert which is to turn outward young thought that it was really a matter of energy like where it's directed and where it comes from so the inward facing introvert gets their energy from like thoughts ideas and introspection whereas the outward facing extrovert gets more of their energy from like people and the world around them. If you want to break those down into stereotypes, the introverts would be considered aloof and dull, and the extroverts would be considered superficial and insincere. All right. And so a hundred years later, we're still using introvert and extrovert to describe ourselves. But what do scientists see in the way that we're sorting ourselves into personality types? Is there something there? Oh, man. We love to categorize ourselves. It is like,

So satisfying and so fun to take personality quizzes online. Really what psychologists are saying is that it's much more accurate to think about personality in terms of traits rather than types. We talked to Dan McAdams. He's a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Here's what he had to say about that. Personality doesn't come in type. So let's think of height as a trait.

Some people are taller than others. but types basically are like saying, okay, we got two kinds of people out there, tall people and short people. And that's it. Okay. So we have a spectrum of height. So does that mean we have a spectrum of introversion? Yes, absolutely. So most personality tests are basically junk science, but there is one personality test that has that more nuanced view of a spectrum and that is kind of backed by research. And it says that there's actually something to introversion and extroversion specifically. So it has to do with something called the lexical hypothesis. And basically, if a personality trait is important enough, we're eventually going to

come up with the word to describe it. So psychologists literally combed through the dictionary, and they came up with this initial list of 18,000 words that could be used to describe personality. And so over the decades, they keep condensing it and condensing it. The list gets whittled down and confirmed across several cultures and languages. And in the 1980s, they landed on five broad personality traits, and they were called the Big Five. And one of those traits that made it onto that list was introversion. And the thing about the Big Five personality test is that when you take it, it doesn't categorize you into a type. It gives you a score of where you fall on the spectrum of a certain trait.

This is Science Friday. I'm Christy Taylor. All right. The label isn't necessarily as helpful because I could be 75% introvert as opposed to like a introvert. Is there anything real at all going on here? Totally. So yeah, it's probably more accurate to refer to yourself as someone who falls more towards the introverted end of the introversion extroverted spectrum. But to answer your question, yes, there are real differences in what's going on in the brains of introverted end of the introverted end of the introversion extroverted spectrum. But to answer your question, yes, there are real differences in what's going on in the brains of. introverts and extroverts. And it really comes down to dopamine. It's commonly called the chemical of pleasure. More accurately, it could be described as the chemical of desire. Dopamine motivates us to pursue rewards, things like, you know, food or sex or praise. Here's Dan McAdams again. It turns out to be mainly that extroversion is about reward seeking. The activity of dopamine in the brain seems to go into overdrive for extroverts when they are pursuing something that they really want. So the idea is that when we anticipate these rewards, dopamine just floods our brains

and makes us more motivated to take risks, more alert, more talkative, more basically extroverted. And I mean, that's true for both introverts and extroverts, but it's especially true for extroverts. So there's a chemistry component that we can measure in people's brains. That's amazing. Does this mean there's also like if people aren't seeking rewards because they're introverted, they're not getting rewards so they're not as happy? That's a really interesting question because research shows that extroverts do tend to be happier. But as always, it's a little more nuanced than that because it's not that introverts are sad or moping around all the time. It's just that introverts emotions tend to be more muted.

If an extrovert is feeling elated over something, an introvert might just feel satisfied. You can think of dopamine as sort of like a car engine. So in extroverts, it's like revving all the time. And in introverts, it's more just kind of like a slow and steady hum, idling. And what's really wild is that there was this study from 2019 that found that when introverts forced themselves to act more. more extroverted, the introverts reported feeling happier too. Although another very similar study from the same year found that the introverts actually felt worse overall in the long term. So the jury's still out on that one. But, you know, personality traits can change

quite a bit over people's lives. But the thing about introversion and extroversion said it's pretty much the most stable one. I don't know that I want to be revving like a car engine all the time anyway. I like being satisfied. I'm happy with my hum. Yeah, I'm very happy with my home. Thank you so much, Johanna, for coming by to explain this. This has been really helpful. I feel like I at least understand who I am a little bit better. Yeah, thank you, Christy. And if you want to learn more, you can check out the full introvert episode of Science Diction, which was written and produced by Chris Agusa, along with a ton of other science stories behind our words. You can just subscribe to Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts.

Johanna Mayer is producer and host of the science diction podcast and full transparency. Two introverts having a conversation didn't sound quite as smooth as this Intel editing. Burr-Ber-Ber-B-B-Bap-Bah. I was back with the credits. Now I'm obsessing over how to say, hey, Johanna, normally. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis, senior producer Alexa Lim, contributing producer, John Dan Koski. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music.

And one more thing. On the Science Friday Vox Pop app, this week we want to hear from COVID-19 long haulers, people who have had COVID symptoms over a long period of time. What questions do you have about your experience? That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. I'm Iraflato.