Science Friday - Trump Tests Positive For Coronavirus, COVID-19 Fact Check, SciFri Book Club. Oct. 2, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

The news hit us overnight: President Trump, the First Lady, and at least one member of the president’s staff tested positive for COVID-19. Just before 1 a.m. ET, the president tweeted that “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” Sean Conley, the White House physician, confirmed the positive COVID test and said that, “The President and First Lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence.” The president reportedly has mild symptoms of the virus. Joining Ira to talk about the medical ramifications and possibilities presented by the president’s infection with COVID-19 is Angela Rasmussen, an associate research scientist in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, New York. Plus, this week, the U.S. had its first televised presidential debate of the election season. It was interesting, to say the least. During the debate, the President’s COVID-19 response came under question, prompting President Trump to allege the U.S. is just weeks away from a COVID-19 vaccine. This isn’t the first time Trump has claimed something along these lines. In fact, he’s repeatedly said he wants a vaccine before election day. But is rushing out a vaccine possible—or safe? Joining Ira for another round of Fact Check Your Feed—election edition, this time—is Angela Rasmussen, associate professor in the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health in New York, New York. She also explains why New York City has not yet reached herd immunity, and fact checks Trump’s claims that the Obama administration botched its H1N1 response.   And, the Science Friday Book Club is back! Imagine: A planet inhabited by parasitic life forms that turn human settlers into demonic figures. An aging woman who just wants to live in peace in a “dumb house” with no technological upgrades. A woman who starts to experience the presence of otherworldly visitors. A taxi driver who takes tourists from other planets on rides far above the New York City skyline. And, in the case of Darcie Little Badger’s short story “Kelsey and the Burdened Breath,” a young woman helps the last breaths of the dying, literally their souls or “shimmers,” depart for the next adventure. That is, until she is asked to track down one that has committed the unthinkable: murder and cannibalism of other souls. All these are stories in the Nisi Shawl-edited collection, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction By People Of Color, this fall’s Science Friday Book Club pick. Over the next five weeks, we’ll talk about stories from the book, starting with Little Badger’s story about burdens—literal, metaphorical, and metaphysical. SciFri Book Club captain Christie Taylor kicks off the first in of a series of conversations about short stories from New Suns with Aisha Matthews, managing editor of The Journal of Science Fiction, and Darcie Little Badger, a Lipan Apache writer and author of the New Suns story “Kelsey and the Burdened Breath.”    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. Later in the hour, we'll fact-check your COVID news feed, presidential election edition. But first, the news hit us overnight that President Trump, the first lady, and at least one member of his staff tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. Just before 1 a.m., the president tweeted that tonight Flotis and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this, together. Sean Connolly, the White House physician, confirmed the positive COVID test and said that, quote, the President and First Lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence. Joining us to talk about the medical and health ramifications and possibilities presented by the President's infection with COVID-19 is Dr. Angela Rasmussen, Associate Research Scientist in the Columbia University Malman School of Public Health, in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. What do we know about how he may have contracted it? So that's that's the real mystery. There's certainly been speculation that he

contracted it from Hope Hicks, the presidential advisor who was diagnosed with having it on Wednesday when apparently she became symptomatic on Air Force One. It's also entirely possible, however, that he could have gotten it from somebody else, that he and Hope Hicks got it from the same person, or they each could have acquired it independently through their other interactions. This is going to be very complicated and difficult to contact trace, simply because the president has been in contact with so many different people. He attended a fundraiser yesterday in New Jersey. He's surrounded by AIDS, who are also having contacts, presumably with their own households,

their own families, and other people that they're working with. So this is really going to be a very difficult situation to invest. and bottom line is we really need more information about who else might have contracted coronavirus in this particular situation. We heard that he took multiple tests. Is it likely that he's taking the same kinds of tests that we late people are taking? That's a big question that I have. I'm not entirely sure what type of tests they're using. I believe that the staffers in the White House are tested with the Abbott ID Now Rapid Test or another type of rapid test. I believe that rapid testing is the standard testing protocol for people who work at the White House. There are some questions about how frequently Trump himself is tested.

I would assume, though, that because many of the rapid tests are lower in sensitivity than the PCR tests that everybody has heard so much about over the past few months, that they would confirm that test results with a PCR test that would be more sensitive. However, I just, again, don't have enough details to really comment with any specifics about the type of testing protocols that were used. Yes, the White House has not been very transparent about this whole thing. Let's talk about the timeline of a normal COVID case. How long after you're infected, does it take the test positive? How soon into the infection do you begin to show symptoms if you do? So the incubation period for this virus can be potentially very long. It can be up to two weeks.

And that means that you might not test positive within the first few days after you've been exposed. Some of it will really depend on how much of a dose you were exposed to, how much, how quickly that virus infection can ramp up to the levels that would be detectable by a test. So it's thought that though people can be testing positive several days before they become symptomatic if they do become symptomatic. And the New York Times reported this morning that President Trump is symptomatic and has cold-like symptoms. We know that on Wednesday, Hope Hicks was symptomatic on Air Force One. So that would place if they were exposed at the same time, that would place their exposure potentially as early as Sunday or Monday of this week, potentially even further back towards sometime last week or even potentially the weekend before. So there's really, it's very unclear right now without contact tracing to try to figure out where they were exposed, how they were exposed, and when they might have begun to test positive. Now the president is 74 years old and obese. That puts him at a higher risk group, doesn't it?

It does. So certainly President Trump is at risk of developing more severe COVID-19 symptoms. and while we'll have to wait and see what happens, you know, hopefully he will have a mild illness and we'll be able to recover from it. But certainly it is a concern that he is within a risk group. What do we know about this six-foot rule? And I'm asking this because he was on stage with Joe Biden during the debates. We saw that he was further than six feet away. Is the six-foot rule sort of flexible? And the president did a lot of loud talking.

which evidence shows may spread the virus further. Does that put Joe Biden in a higher risk category? So yes. Certainly the six foot rule is a guideline. It's not a hard and fast rule. There is no, you know, invisible force field that springs up at six feet that will prevent the virus from traveling further than that. And we do know that in indoor environments, particularly those that are not well ventilated, aerosol particles containing the virus can build up in the air. and they can certainly travel further than six feet. The real question for me is what was the ventilation like in that room? How long were President Trump and Joe Biden in that room outside of the debate before and after? How many other people in that room might have also been infected? A big question for me, now everybody had to get tested and test negative before attending the debate, but a big question for me is when were those tests done? If they were done the morning of the debate and then, people came to the debate hours later, it's entirely possible for somebody to test negative in the

morning and then test positive later in the day and potentially be contagious. So there's just a lot of really open questions right now, but I think the one thing we can assume is that there's no way to say for sure that Joe Biden is not at risk of having been exposed by attending the debate in person, as is the case for everybody else in that room. How long would it take for us to know? if the president has a serious case? How did these things progress into seriousness? Well, if the president doesn't have a serious case, he will begin recovering within probably about a week to 10 days. And he will get better. His symptoms will start to subside. He'll be back to normal. I think if he doesn't get better, if he continues to get worse, then we have something

to worry about. But I'm also assuming that President Trump will be treated. early as early as possible. And since presumably his case was caught fairly early, that treatment may have more of an effect. I would assume without having any details of the president's treatment plan, that they'll at least probably start him on remdesivir. It's certainly what I would do if I were a physician and my patient was somebody as important as the president of the United States. Might he get antibody treatments also? I've heard that. That has been reported that he may get some of the antibody treatments that are currently in clinical development or in clinical trials, that's a possibility, too. I would imagine that like with many of the COVID patients that we've

seen throughout this pandemic, they may use a kitchen sink approach in terms of treating him, meaning that he will get as many different treatments as possible in the hopes of having the best possible outcome. He's now said to be quarantined. Now, if this was you and me, how long would we be quarantined in our house? And what is the normal, of a quarantine? So this has been a bit of a moving target. And actually, it's technically not quarantine what he's doing. It's technically isolation.

Quarantine is what the people who have been his contacts, the people he's been exposed to, would be doing. Normally, a quarantine for this would last two weeks. That's to be on the safe side to make sure that you go through the entire incubation period with no signs of disease or a positive test. For isolation, right now the guidelines can vary, but it usually suggests that within seven to 10 days of having your symptoms subside, you can stop isolating like that. So it really will be dependent how long he needs to isolate on when his symptoms begin to go away. And it appears that he's entering the convalescent phase of the illness.

Well, since he has tested positive, what about all the staff and the people around him in the White House? Do they need to quarantine? They should. And I don't think it's enough to test your way out of quarantine because, frankly, we don't have good enough tests to do that. And that's not what we're telling the American public to do since they certainly don't have access to daily testing. Whether the people in the White House who have been in contact with President Trump will quarantine for 14 days, I think is probably unlikely. but we will see what the White House is going to tell us about what their plan is for dealing with this, hopefully this afternoon. Trump has regularly made appearances without a mask, even mocking Joe Biden at the debate this week for regularly wearing one.

Do you think this is now more evidence that masks work? I don't think you can say that masks work based on this. We don't have any evidence that Trump would have been protected. by a mask. We don't know how he was exposed or how he got coronavirus or who he got it from. But I'd say that certainly Trump's reluctance to wear masks, his advocating against them does not, it certainly doesn't indicate that masks are harmful. And if it could have protected him or potentially the people around him, such as the first lady, then, you know, hopefully he'll rethink his policy on mask wearing because certainly if more people were wearing masks in general, it's likely that there

would be less transmission and perhaps he would have been able to avoid contracting coronavirus. Last question, what would you like to know? What more do we need to know about the president so that we can feel better informed? Well, I'd like to know how often he is tested, what type of test he's using. I'd like to know more details about that and I'd like to know what plan they have for contact tracing. As I mentioned, the president has been in contact with quite a few people. That means that quite a few people could be at a higher exposure risk. And I'd like to know how they're going to determine who those people are and how they're going to notify them to take the appropriate precautions so that they're not going on and spreading the virus around their

communities. And they can also seek medical care early on and seek testing. I think that one of the things that really has been very unclear is sort of the sequence of events, like at what point, did President Trump feel the need to take a coronavirus test since he's also said that he's not tested every day routinely. So I just really like to know more about this so that people who may have been exposed can be informed and take the proper precautions themselves. Thank you, Angela. Angela Rasmussen is going to stay with us because when we come back, we're going to talk more about fact-checking your coronavirus news feed, election edition. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. As we await further news about the health of President Trump, the first lady, and possible other staff members testing positive for COVID-19, this week's presidential debate had coronavirus as a central issue. During the debate, President Trump said we are just weeks away from a COVID-19 vaccine. This is not the first time Trump has said something along those lines. He's repeatedly said he wants a vaccine out before election day. But is this even possible? We're remaining with us to help us fact-check your coronavirus news feed, election style, is Dr. Angela Rasmussen, an associate research scientist in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York.

Angela, let's start with the question of if we can get a vaccine before the election. How realistic is this? I think it's very unrealistic. I think it's not impossible. and certainly the CEO of Pfizer in particular has made comments to the effect of they believe they may have some efficacy data. The real question for me is whether that efficacy data, if there's any at all, will be really sufficient for the FDA to say, yes, this vaccine is clearly safe and effective

and it works, and it should now be distributed widely to the American public. I think that the trials for these vaccines all started in late. late July, most of these vaccines are a two-shot regimen, meaning they have to get a shot, a second shot of the vaccine three to four weeks after receiving the first shot. In the case of Pfizer, it's three weeks after. And after that, you'll still have to wait for people in those experimental groups and the trials receiving the vaccine to actually be exposed to coronavirus in order to determine whether or not that vaccine works.

It's not impossible again, but it's a real stretch to say that we would have enough data from those trials to be confident that these vaccines do in fact work. And even distribution, which is something we've talked about last time, even if you have a vaccine, getting it out to the public could take a lot longer than people expect. That's absolutely right. Distribution is going to be a huge challenge for a lot of these vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines, such as the Pfizer vaccine. Currently, the Pfizer vaccine has to be kept at an extremely cold temperature to the point where you need to have either vapor phase liquid nitrogen storage for it, or you need to have a

minus 80 degrees Celsius freezer. And most places, most pharmacies, places that you would normally go to to get a vaccine don't necessarily have that kind of cold chain capability. So it is going to be a real challenge to actually manufacture these vaccines at scale and then distribute them to the American public, much less the global public. Let's talk about a move that Secretary of Health and Human Services as Alex Azar made recently, he barred agencies, including the FDA, from signing any new rules about vaccines. What does that mean? It's hard to say, and I will give a disclaimer that I am not a policy expert, but from the folks that I have talked to who are involved more in the policy side of things, it's really hard to say what this means other than it's potentially a sort of attempt to run around

or circumvent the normal regulatory process for approving things. What this essentially means is that Secretary Azar is going to have really the sole authority to decide whether or not a vaccine could be approved. And if the FDA can't make new potentially tougher regulations describing what would, what kind of bar would need to be met in order for a vaccine to get an emergency use authorization. So it's really very concerning. and we won't really know what it means until we see Secretary Azar really put this into practice. But it's very concerning to think that the Secretary of HHS would effectively undermine the agencies within HHS, including the FDA,

and its important role in regulating drugs. So it's basically seen as a political move. Yes. There have been increased reports over the past month or so that there is a lot of political movements within in HHS. There has also been reporting that the CDC's messages and guidelines have really been influenced by folks on the political side with minimal background in science or evidence-based medicine. So overall, it's a very concerning trend, and I think this is really contributing to the fact that the American public is feeling that these agencies within HHS, including

FDA, CDC, and the National Institutes of Health are somehow compromised politically. Let's move on to what vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that she would be hesitant to trust a vaccine pushed out before the election. And other high-profile politicians and experts have said similar things. Is this a valid concern? I think it's a very valid concern. Personally, I would be very skeptical of a vaccine that was approved before the election unless there was really, really clear, strong evidence. recording that decision. And right now, I just don't see, as I mentioned earlier, how it's going to be possible to actually get enough data from these trials within that time frame to be able

to make a decision that's based on evidence. Anytime you are talking about approving a drug or a vaccine for the general public that's really based more on political considerations than evidence, that process is suspect. That's not the process we normally use to regulate drugs and vaccines and make sure that they are safe and effective. So I would share Senator Harris's concerns about that. And I have to say, I'm a huge vaccine enthusiast personally. If the data is there to suggest that this vaccine, whichever vaccine it is, for COVID is safe and effective, I'll be first in line.

But if it's not, if that data is not there, then I would be hesitant to take it as well. This week, more than 60 physicians and experts sent a letter to Pfizer's CEO asking the couple, to go through rigorous safety and efficacy measures for their vaccine. With what they're asking, a vaccine wouldn't be out before the end of November, like you said before. Do you think this is going to make a difference when the president is persistently saying he wants a vaccine as soon as possible? I really hope that pushback from the scientific and medical communities would have an

influence on the vaccine manufacturers. because ultimately the FDA or Secretary Azar, they are not going to be able to approve a vaccine that they haven't gotten an emergency use authorization application for. So if the manufacturers themselves are going to wait to apply for approval until they have a sufficient body of evidence that suggests that the vaccine is safe and effective, then there won't be the opportunity to have this sort of political approval for it. I worry that if the vaccine manufacturers don't, and they are racing to see who can get there first, and there is a strong financial incentive for them to do so, then we will see overall a huge loss

in confidence in vaccines in general from the public, and that will have repercussions for public health far beyond the COVID pandemic. And could that not be one of the purposes of having this constant back and forth and changing guidelines and expectations about the vaccine to actually increase distrust in the vaccine overall? I mean, I hope that that's not the intent by people in the federal government that they are intentionally trying to decrease public confidence in vaccines. But I think that that is certainly a consequence of this. I mean, we've already seen a lot of vaccine hesitancy from people who are normally also proponents of vaccines. I think some of the language around this, the Operation

Warp Speed language, for example, sort of implies that corners are being cut already. And so if there was an added sort of political interference, or at least the perception of that kind of interference, that this wasn't a science-based, evidence-based decision, I think that that will really be catastrophic in terms of the public's overall confidence that vaccines are, in fact, excellent public health measures that definitively prevent disease. Parenthetically speaking about vaccines, are we seeing any spillover into this year's flu vaccination program about whether the public is actively seeking to get one or to avoid getting a shot? Yeah, so I don't have actual numbers on that, but, you know, there's always been a problem with people

taking the flu vaccine. There are a lot of myths about the flu vaccine. There are a lot of myths about the flu vaccine that persists despite the fact that they've been debunked many times, for example, that the vaccine can give you the flu itself. There's also perception that because the flu vaccine isn't always 100% effective or it doesn't provide 100% protection, that it's completely worthless and it's pointless to get it. And then there are concerns that the flu vaccine is associated with all these side effects that there's no evidence that it is. And the flu vaccine has actually been used for decades safely, but people are already hesitant to get the flu vaccine. And I feel like now a combination of pandemic fatigue, already distrust in flu vaccines, coupled with this distrust

in the agencies themselves that regulate vaccines, such as the FDA, and these concerns about the COVID vaccine, that there will be a lot of people who say, you know what, no thanks. Like, I'm just going to hold off on flu vaccines, COVID vaccines, any other vaccines for the foreseeable future. I think that that, again, has really serious repercussions for public health in general. Let's talk about something else that came up in the debate. President Trump said that the Obama administration was a, quote, disaster at handling the H1N1 pandemic. Is this true? Well, I think that, you know, it's hard to say that any administration, with any outbreak of a communicable disease, does a perfect job. I don't think, however, that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response was a disaster.

And in fact, by all accounts, Joe Biden himself was personally very interested in that from the start. He was very aggressive about pushing for a vaccine. And there were mistakes that were made. There were some manufacturing problems also that came up with making the 2009 H1N1 vaccine itself. There were some technical difficulties that delayed production, and there were shortages of that vaccine when it came out. But overall, if you just want to look at the total numbers for the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, 14,000 people in the U.S. died, and that's not a small amount, but that was over the course of about a year. In the case of COVID, you know, 200,000 people have died within nine months or 10 months, effectively, since it's made its way to the U.S. and began

circulating here. So I would say that while the 2009 pandemic response may not have been perfect and there were some mistakes made, it certainly was very different from the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Let's move on to something that happened last week. During a Senate hearing on coronavirus, Senator Rand Paul claimed that New York had reached herd immunity, and that's why cases had gone down there. And surprisingly, Dr. Anthony Fauci pushed back strongly. Something that we had not seen him do before. Has New York reached herd immunity? So no, New York has not reached herd immunity. And let me back up really quick and just kind of give everybody an explanation of what herd immunity actually means. Herd immunity is the concept that

enough people in the population are resistant to the virus that a virus will no longer be able to spread within that population and will eventually die out or be eliminated from that population. So if everybody's totally susceptible, the virus can spread it will. If some people are vaccinated or have acquired immunity through natural infection, then the virus will have a much harder time finding a host. And viruses have to find hosts because they can't reproduce without them. So the idea that we would have herd immunity with only 22%, which is the average zero prevalence, meaning the number of people in New York City who have antibodies to the coronavirus, is really ridiculous,

because that suggests that basically 80% of the people, the majority of the population, are still susceptible. Now, Senator Paul has also brought up the idea that people have T cells, and this might also be contributing to herd immunity. So there have been studies that have shown that some people have T cells, which is another kind of immune cell that is involved in antivowal responses. They don't produce antibodies, but they kill infected cells and they make antibody responses better. They have T cells that cross-react with SARS-Coronavirus 2, and these are T cells that they probably got from other common cold coronavirus infections. So while we do know that there are some people out there who have these T-cells, we don't know anything. about what these T cells do.

And there are not people who have been reported who have cross-reactive antibodies from these common cold coronavirus infections. So we know if 20% of people have antibodies to SARS-Coronavirus 2, maybe another 20% have T-cells that we don't even know what they do, that's still only 40% of the population

that has any kind of protective immunity. So the general accepted threshold, and it varies from virus to virus, for herd immunity is about 60 to 70% of people, it's still well below that, even if you believe without evidence that those T cells are actually doing something and that people who have been infected before and have any antibodies have a complete protection against the virus. So we just really don't know enough to say that, but I will make one more point, and that is that we've never achieved herd immunity through natural infection. There are some viruses that have gone out of

populations such as Zika because there is herd immunity through natural infection, but that doesn't mean the virus is gone, and it doesn't mean it couldn't come back. The only way that we've ever really achieved long-lasting, effective herd immunity is through vaccination, and that's how we're going to do it for this virus, too. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're fact-checking your feed with Dr. Angela Rasmussen, Associate research scientist at Columbia University, who was always here to help us fact-check our feeds. One last thing before we run out of time, a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds public trust in the CDC is dropping fast. This is especially true among Republicans.

Is the CDC still a credible source of COVID-19 guidance? So this is what really kind of breaks my heart about how political. politicized, this response has been partly due to some of Secretary Azar's actions that have been reported in the past few weeks. The CDC for decades has been a reliable place that we could turn to to respond to these epidemics. And the CDC still has tremendous public health experts, excellent scientists working there. The problem is that the policies that have come out of the CDC have been meddled with. And that does overall reduce public. confidence in that agency, including mine. I have no doubt that the people who are working at the

CDC on the ground who are doing the lab work, who are doing the epidemiology work, who are making the recommendations about policy are excellent scientists and public health experts. I think what's happened, though, is that the way the agency has been interacting with the American public has been compromised, and that does reduce public trust. It's a real shame, and honestly, I don't know how we're going to repair this. Well, we hope that we can because as a journalist, we've relied on CDC news releases for decades. Thank you very much, Angela, for taking to have to be with us today.

It's always a pleasure, Ira. Thanks. You're welcome. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, an associate research scientist in the Columbia University Malman School of Public Health in New York. We're going to take a break and when we come back, time to curl up with a good escapist book. With all this news, the Science Friday Book Club takes on speculative fiction, starting with a ghost story about the last breaths of the dying.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. What if New York City tourists were literally from outer space? Or what about this? What if when people and animals died, their life force stuck around? and you could carry your long-dead family dog around in a backpack. Well, all of these realities are possible in our fall Science Friday Book Club pick New Sons, original speculative fiction by people of color. Science Friday producer and our book clubber-in-chief, Christy Taylor, has more. For me, a good science fiction story can be like a thought experiment

that takes you to new places in your understanding of the world we live in now. But in the early decades, science fiction, was dominated overwhelmingly by white men. It was only this year that Octavia Butler, a black writer with sci-fi's highest awards to her name, even made it to the New York Times bestseller list, 14 years after her death. The book in question,

a story about an authoritarian United States called Parable of the Sewer, which she wrote back in 1993. New Sons, which was published in 2019, is named for a quote from Octavia Butler. It's a nod to the extremely talented crop of science fiction and fantasy writers inside, whose stories can take all of us to places never before imagined by Asimov, Heinlein, or Bradbury. So we're going to talk about new sons and some of the stories in it for the next five weeks with help from my guest, Aisha Matthews, who is

managing editor of the Journal of Science Fiction and Director of Literary Programming for the Museum of Science Fiction's Escape Velocity Conference. Hey there, Ayesha. Hey, Christy. Thanks for having me. What kinds of research do academics like yourself publish in a journal of science fiction. Yeah. So for example, my most recent published work was a paper about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the idea of conspiracy. And it was called Conspiracies of the flesh, talking about the ways that the Handmaids Tale in particular, the very patriarchal government kind of hides the conspiracy itself in women's bodies. In women are the only ones who can be

infertile, for instance, in their society. It's never the men. So it's that kind of argument of trying to both prove that point, but also tease out what the larger, kind of what we can take away from how we deal with our bodies in that vein. So going to our book club pick for this month, New Sons. The title itself is this reference to a quote by the late science fiction author, Octavia Butler, where she says, there's nothing new under the Sons, but there are new sons. Aisha, how do you interpret this quote, especially in the context of a book that is specifically sharing the stories of writers of color?

I mean, I think in a very literal sense, looking at spacefaring and futurism, there are new sons, there are new places out there. But also in reading kind of some of the intro and outro to the book, it sounds like these new sons are meant to be beacons of light in ethnic spaces, doing these ethnic futurisms, kind of reminding us that while we may think everything in science fiction has been done before, there are people of color with different perspectives that haven't been. been put into the mainstream. So as you're turning an academic eye to the wealth of writing out there, what kinds of themes or nuances are you seeing in work by black and brown writers that people might miss if they're only reading Robert Heinlein, et cetera? Yeah, so I think authors of color in particular have a different experience of embodiment in the world than people who are not considered people of color. So those examinations of the body, what it feels like to occupy brown bodies in a space that is still predominantly Eurocentric, I think is one of the bigger themes of

really contextualizing different cultural experiences. And the whole point of cultural futurism is really to show that we can imagine a technologically advanced future, a socially advanced future that hasn't been sanitized of all that ethnicity. Cultures that have in the past been considered primitive are no longer seen as incompatible with science and technology. Okay. So we're We're going to look at one specific story today. Perfect for Fall. I think we've got a kind of ghost story by Lipin Apache writer Darcy Little Badger called Kelsey and the Burdened Breath. Our protagonist, Kelsey, is trying to solve the mystery of a murderous soul, which we call a burdened breath in this story with the help of her long dead family dog, pal. Aisha, what did you think about this story? So I absolutely loved it. I read a lot of futurisms of color, my specialties in Afrofuturism. So I'm very familiar with the kind of haunting narrative.

And one of the things I found most interesting was that Darcy created this world where people kind of universally accept and can witness the soul through the shimmer. And yet we still don't know what happens to that soul after it leaves. So it's interesting to have a soul you can see and still deal with that kind of unresolved tension of what happens to it in the future. Yeah, I really love too, that it's a story too that's about, Kelsey's emotional history at the end of the day. You know, the real burden. It's that Kelsey can't let go of the loss of her parents. And so she's been living in their house since they died. It's really interesting to just see this sort of metaphor of burden being played out in that way. Absolutely. And to some extent, I, and I'd love to get Darcy's opinion on this. It felt like haunting kind of worked as an allegory for a lot of post-colonial trauma, kind of this idea that Kelsey in the end didn't realize her complicity in holding on to that spirit, even though it is her job to literally look for and

send spirits on knowing that it's not good for them to stay. But she doesn't necessarily see how she's still perpetuating that. So Aisha, this seems like the perfect time to bring in Darcy Little Badger herself to answer that question. Darcy is a storyteller, author of Kelsey and The Bird in Breath. She's also a doctor of oceanography. Welcome, Darcy. Hello. Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, it's so great to have you. I think Iisha just pose the perfect first question for you, which is what is Kelsey's sort of emotional burden saying about her relationship to colonization and the perpetuation of that damage? So I was thinking about a lot when I wrote this story. Like on one level, I just really wanted to

write this weird horror. And it's kind of me exploring this belief that life initiates when this one enters through your first breath. And then it is extinguished when that breath that you carry with you, you know, is breathed out. These burden breaths, they are not ghosts necessarily, but they're ghost-like in that they do kind of represent the person that they'd been carried around in. A lot of the things, though, like the ability for them to become heavy, if they cannibalize other shimmers, you know, that's my fancy invention. Just me being a fantasy writer and thinking, you know, what if this happened? At its core, this story is about how Kelsey, growing up, she was taught you need to let go. You cannot hold on to these shimmers. They have a

journey to make. And yet she's holding on to the shimmer of her dog, for one, and also regretting that she couldn't have her parents' shimmers with her through the process of this investigation with this burdened breath. She does kind of have to face her own complicity and perhaps holding, you know, a shimmer hostage for selfish reasons. And the Lip-on, you know, before colonization, death was something that we tried not to talk about. We wouldn't say the names of people who died, especially if they died young or violently. They would be buried in a sacred location, but not one that can be returned to. So that's very different from having graveyards with these tombstones. And yet I do understand that desire to be with the people that you lost.

So it is kind of these two conflicting ways of managing the process of losing somebody you love. I'm glad that that came through a little bit in this very short story. Because I was at first, I was just like, I'm just going to write a cool ghost story with an investigation. There's going to be murder. It's going to be kind of like found footage almost with like recordings. Anyway, it turned out to be a little bit deeper than that without even knowing. Darcy, we asked our online reader community. and mighty networks, what they would want to do in Kelsey's world?

Like, would they want the option to carry six dead family members in a balloon tied to their body? And it was kind of a mixed bag. Most people decided it wasn't that ethical. But as you mentioned, some of them also expressed the desire to be able to hold on until they were ready to let go. Yeah. And one thing it actually made me think about was one of the most kind of poignant parts for me was when she went into the museum and she was looking at the wreck of the St. Mary. and it was particularly the shattered glass,

a thousand pieces from the 600 last breaths that died. And it kind of reminded me of the way that a lot of indigenous people in particular have had their artifacts taken after colonialism and then displayed elsewhere. So I thought it was interesting to kind of meld the idea of holding soul captive while at the same time questioning is the soul actually still in these items that we display

and kind of how, I wonder how the indigenous cultures kind of see that. For the Lip-on people, we have had nameless young warrior. That's the way it was depicted being displayed in Europe. But that is personally painful because this was a young man who was killed far too early through violence. And to then have this him display just for this public consumption is a little bit. It's hurtful. I did kind of think, like, in this museum, these are, you know, artifacts from the bomb. of the ocean, but they reflect a great deal of horrific, you know, misery and pain and just human

loss and to be displayed in this little museum without necessarily maybe the consent of the people those artifacts belong to is a little bit of a gray area there. Obviously that completely changes if there is a sole trap within an artifact because that's like a whole other, you're keeping it there. But even just these like these shards of glass that were just torn, apart by people escaping after their death. You know, that's something to think about. Is this story an example of indigenous futurism, Darcy? One thing that's important about indigenous futurism,

and it's often almost used interchangeably with, you know, sci-fi, but it is its own thing. And one especially important thing about indigenous futurism is not just recognizing the future of our peoples, but also how the present day and our past are influencing the future, how they all influence each other. So in some of my works, I do delve into that. This one not so much. There's still fun to write. I mentioned you're a scientist, Darcy, specifically an oceanographer.

And this story really does have science in it. You mentioned lab studies of mice to investigate whether last breaths can be burdened or not. It feels like a really intentional choice to be giving the, Souls, a Western scientific treatment. Was that a choice that you were making on purpose? Yeah, I could go on a lot longer than this about my experiences trying to be an indigenous person in the Western scientific structure. I assembled transcriptomes. Before that, I studied ocean acidification. I still love knowing about the world and the things that I have learned. I won't get too into it. It is sometimes difficult because a lot of times you'll see a

paper come out that says, oh, we have this great discovery. And then you realize, wait, you know, lip on people knew that like hundreds of years ago. So there is almost this conflict between, well, I'll call like indigenous knowledge and science versus this more Western science. But I don't get too into that in this story. Well, one other kind of, I think there was a lot of both subtle and overt discussion of the difference between animal and human souls. And so I kind of wondered both how in the book and how in an indigenous community like yours, people kind of treat that because I know a lot of people have very different ideas about animals, ownership, rights to ownership of the land than the Western canon often allows. Yeah, and I have to say,

lip-on people are unusual even for other Apache groups in our concepts of the underworld and death and things like that. But one thing that I explore a lot in my way, I even explore this in my book to a greater extent is human ghosts, at least in our stories, in our traditions, are these terrible things, even though, you know, animals also have this ability to have, I guess, what you would call souls. But it's just the humans that are dangerous when they come back. In my stories, I do think of different ways why this might be the case, like, especially in my book. But that is pretty cool that you pick that up because it's something like when I'm a kid and I'm

these things. I'm like, but why? You know? Just a reminder that I'm Christy Taylor and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So I have just one more question, I think, for both of you. And it's actually about the forward to the book by the great LeVar Burton. One of the things he says is that our exploration into the unknown should cause us to examine who we are as sentient beings. And science fiction as a tool for social change makes for a most welcome companion on our journey. I'd love to know how both of you feel about the meaning both of science fiction in the world we exist in now. It's value for social change and especially also, you know, Darcy, the meaning of writing science fiction as someone who is indigenous in a time like now. Writing stories where there are not just, you know, indigenous people, but specifically Lipon Apache people.

my people in contemporary times and in the future, in the case of science fiction is very important because in the mid to late 1800s there was this big extermination campaign and a lot of lip-on people went into hiding. So a lot of our culture was hidden and there were attempts to wipe us out. So it is important to me to show that, no, we are still here and we are thriving and we will continue to thrive in the future. I've heard other native young readers. who have conveyed how much this means to them. And to me, that's the most wonderful thing. But also, I do think that in general,

there is this interest in reading about people who aren't necessarily like them. It builds empathy. And it also builds support. Because for the first time, non-lipp-on people, they know who I am when I say I'm lip-on Apache. They don't go what? They go like, oh, yeah.

And that's just great. Absolutely. I think a lot of the things you use, said also applied to Afrofuturism. While with everything going on with Black Lives Matter at the moment, especially in America, there's particular visibility on Black Lives. But it's oftentimes easy in those outdated history books to forget how much of the history was lost in that middle passage and the transition from Africa, putting people of all different tribes together and forcing them to learn English. And there's also a way in which Afrofuturism is really also

trying to recover that history. I feel like realism was the literature of the 20th century. And for me, I think in the crazy world we live in now, science fiction is the literature of the 21st century. And that it is really one of the few mediums that is capable of helping us think through the problems that we are going to face in a kind of unprecedented way. I love that. Someone who's been reading science fiction since the late 20th century, I feel like everyone's finally joining a party that I've been out for a while. We have run out of time, but thank you so much, both of you, for joining me today. Thank you.

Thank you. Darcy Little Badger is an oceanographer and author of the short story, Kelsey and the Burdened Breath. Her debut novel, Alats Away, is out now, and Aisha Matthews is the managing editor of the Journal of Science Fiction and Director of Literary Programming for the Museum of Science Fiction's Escape Velocity Conference. One last thing, we are still reading New Suns for another month. Join us next week when we discuss the story Dumb House by Andrea Hirston. And for more information, a link to our online community, discussion questions, excerpts from

Nusons, and our newsletter. Check out our website, science friday.com slash book club. For the Science Friday Book Club, I'm Christy Taylor. And like Christy says, check our website, sciencefrily.com slash book club. Plus, on the Science Friday Voxpop app, book club readers, what are you thinking about as you read through Kelsey and the Burdened Breath and other stories in New Sons. Do you have a favorite story yet? That's on Science Friday Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps.

Charles Berkowitz is our director. Producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis, B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music, and of course you can subscribe to our podcasts. Have a great weekend. I'm Iroflato.