The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Modern Epidemics: From the Spanish Flu to COVID-19 by Salvador Macip

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Modern Epidemics: From the Spanish Flu to COVID-19 by Salvador Macip COVID-19 has made us all aware of the fact that we live in a world full of invisible enemies. Normally, we don’t even realize they’re there, but from time to time one of these microscopic creatures becomes powerful enough to turn everything upside down. What are these invisible enemies, and how can we prepare ourselves for the pandemics of the future? A specialist in the cellular biology of diseases, Salvador Macip explains, in a language everyone can understand, what it means to share the planet with millions of microbes – some wonderful allies, others terrible foes. He provides a concise account of epidemics that changed history, and focuses on the great modern plagues that are still causing millions of deaths every year, from influenza, TB and malaria to COVID-19. Macip also examines the methods we have used – from vaccines to improved sanitation and social distancing – to try to control these invisible enemies. This authoritative overview of modern epidemics and the pathogens that cause them will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our world today, a world in which some of the greatest threats to the human species come from the invisible microbes with which we share this planet.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

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follow them as well today as always as always, as every single podcast episode, we have the most brilliant people on the show, the most brilliant people, the most brilliant guests. And now that I've made my new guest sweat, because he's, wow, I've got to be brilliant too, which of course he is. He's actually a doctor. We know he must be brilliant. It takes a lot of work to become a doctor. And he has written his newest book, the U.S. version. This is going to be coming out June 2nd, 2021. He is the author, Dr. Salvador Massa. He wrote the book, Modern Epidemics, From the Spanish Flu to COVID-19. So today's conversation is going to be quite interesting and eye-opening as well.

And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com. And their Micro-iDSD Signature is a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience.

Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. He is a doctor, researcher, and writer. He obtained his PhD and MD degree at the University of Barcelona, Spain in 1998, and then he moved to oncology research at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Since 2008, he is the head of the Mechanisms of Aging and Cancer Lab at the University of Der UK. Correct me on that, Salvador, if you will. Did I name that right?

No, it's Leicester, but nobody from Leicester. University of Leicester. That is clearly not spelled Leicester, but we'll let that slide. Where he also has an associate professor at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. These are big words. I went to public school, clearly. He is also a researcher and professor at the Universitat, wow, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya? Yeah, you got that pretty well, yeah.

Alright, cool. I'm one for two. In Barcelona since 2020, he's published over 30 books. In Catalan, his native language, including fiction, children's stories, and essays. Some of his books have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese,

Korean, Chinese, and received awards for the European Prize for Popular Science in 2013. And he's published a ton of other books in English as well. I'll let you check that out. Welcome to the show, Salvador. My apologies for butchering half of the universities you went to. Thank you. Thanks, Chris.

I clearly need to, I don't know, get a job or something. I don't know, go back to school. But this is the reason that you're a doctor and I'm not. So give us your plug, Salvador, on why people can find you on the interwebs. Salvador, give us your plugs on where people can find you on the interwebs. Sorry, if you look for me on on twitter my name is dr massip and that's basically the main my main activity and also on instagram there you go there you go what motivated you want to write this book

you've written a whole lot of other material what motivated you to write this one i'm always been fascinated by uh microscopic life by microbes and this started this book started actually when I was in Mount Sinai in New York and I was working on cancer but I had a few friends that were working on viruses so one of the things that you go there and say oh what are you working on and I started getting interested in that and we did some collaborations and I thought it's amazing I know I clearly know nothing about microbes So let's do some research and let's learn about this. And all that interest led to realizing that microbes or the microscopic world is quite unknown. The average citizen doesn't know much about viruses, bacteria and so on. So I thought, okay, might as well share some

of that knowledge and try to write a book that explains a bit what are microbes, what is a bacteria, what is a virus, why it's important, why they can be good, they can be bad. And this is how this book started. And this was 10 years ago. And that's when I wrote the first version of the book. And this is the updated version now to include COVID and other stuff. Cool, man. That's awesome. So give us an overarching thing of the book,

what it's about and what it entails in detail. What I wanted to know. How much time do you have? Read the whole damn book. So my main goal was basically to study the relationship between humans and microbes. Because we see bacteria, viruses as our enemies and we are here fighting a war and you can always hear especially now with COVID you everything you

hear is the war against COVID or the war against viruses but actually we coexist we share the same planet there's many more microbes than humans in the planet so and if you put them all together it's they weigh they would weigh more than all the animals in the planet. So we are sharing the same space. And this means that it's not only a war. It's a relationship that has good things and bad things. And actually, life would not be possible without viruses and bacteria, as we know it. And the problem is that some of them, yes, do cause disease. And they are a big issue.

And we are in the middle now of a pandemic. So I don't need to explain to you how bad things can get. But there's also a lot of bacteria that are actually needed. So we are full of bacteria, actually. Our bodies have as many microbes as human cells. You have probably is a mix. The human body is a mix of human cells and a lot of bacteria and viruses that are living with us inside and outside our bodies that actually

help us in our sort of everyday functions in our body. So that's what I wanted to explain in the book. So there's good bacteria, bad bacteria, and bad viruses. And more than trying to fight them, we need to understand them first. And if you understand them, then I think you open the door to a very interesting world, a lot of things that you can learn about them. Yeah, that's really interesting. Wow, I just feel like a polluted junk heap right now, like a little garbage. Why do I bother cleaning my house if half of me is walking bacteria? It seems like...

Indeed. Actually, it's better if you have your bacteria and you keep it healthy for the average adult if you have a 70 kilogram sorry i wouldn't know the u.s equivalent but two out of 70 kilos of a human body it would be two kilos of bacteria and viruses if you put them all together so it's quite a nice chunk quite a chunk of microbes that we have on top of us but and actually over the years we're realizing then the bacteria we have for for instance, in our insides, in our stomach and in our gut, actually, it plays a big role in our health. Depending on the bacteria that you have in your gut, that can influence whether you are thin or you are fat or whether you are healthy or not healthy. And it can even influence your mental health. So things that you would say, how is that happening?

So this is very interesting. So how these small things, these microbes actually influencing things like your brain. So a lot of research here. Yeah. And this is really interesting. So if I'm overweight, it can affect my, it's a dumb question, but I'll ask it anyway. So I, if I'm overweight, my microbes can fuck me up in the brain and stuff. It's a bit more complex than that, but yeah, I think it's a two-way street. What you eat determines what kind of microbes you're going to have in your gut. And these microbes are going to influence also how you process food. And they could eventually have some influence in your brain's good or bad.

So this is a field that is starting now to explode. And there's a lot that we don't know yet. But I think over the years, it's going to become more and more clear that this symbiotic relationship we have with our bacteria is not only something that happens in infections. One of the things we know is that our bacteria help us prevent infections by the bad bacteria. But it goes farther than that. It goes up to other aspects of our health, from mental health to anything else that our body is processing. That's interesting. That's interesting. You talk about in the book, you start with the

Spanish flu and you talk about what that is about and the origins of that. Tell us about what you discuss on that topic and how you take that all the way up to COVID. Yeah, I think actually to start with the Spanish flu, we need to say that it's not the best name because it was not Spanish flu. It's actually probably coming from the US, so it should be perhaps called the American flu. The problem is that Europe was in the middle of a war at the time. And this was 1918, the First World War. And nobody was paying much attention to infections.

And Spain was the first one to say, oh, look, there's a new infection here. There's something happening that is different. And's why it got stuck as a Spanish flu and actually since from then until now there's been this tradition of assigning names to the diseases related to the place where they were discovered that's why they have Ebola and we have other diseases that have names of places now we're trying to change that because that it's not seen night today that's why COVID is not called the Wuhan syndrome or something it's just has this different name basically the Spanish flu is probably the last big pandemic that hit us before COVID and there's definitely a lot more in the book actually I talk about other pandemics before

that and it is since we have records historical records we have notices and stories about infectious diseases epidemics pandemics things that are basically part of our our history and spanish flu i think it's important because it hit the world in a way that was perhaps at that time seen as something that maybe that was uh it could not happen at the time this was the beginning of the 20th century we already started having more knowledge about science and we're still being hit by a new virus in this case a flu virus that caused millions of deaths. And it was thought after that, that that was basically the last big one. So because after that, we started having antibiotics that help with the control, the bacterial diseases, we started having

antivirals to control the viruses, we started having vaccines. And I think we started the 21st century with the idea that this is not going to happen to us again. So pandemics like the Spanish flu or big crisis like that is not going to happen. Obviously, we were quite wrong, as we all know now, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, which I think has been a bit of a wake up call to remind us that we are here again, sharing this planet with a lot of microbes that may have sometimes the idea to just cause a pandemic and this bad still can happen and although we have great tools obviously what's happening this pandemic has been amazing how we managed to develop this vaccine so quickly so this is a an amazing scientific achievement but even there's been there's already more than three

and a half million official million deaths of COVID. So we're still quite vulnerable to new viruses or new bacteria or whatever. So this is a bit what the book is about, how something that historically has been part of our lives, of human history, this interaction with bacteria, now still is a problem

and we need to still be aware of this. And it's not only COVID that is a problem. We have other pandemics that we don't talk about. We have the AIDS pandemic, which is still very much going on in some parts of the world. We have the flu that keeps coming back and there's still danger that we may have another pandemic due to flu. There's tuberculosis. TB is a disease that's forgotten. It's a 19th century disease, but it's actually happening in

parts of the world. You have this antibiotic resistant TB that could be quite an important issue. We have malaria that kills millions of people and is still a very big problem in some parts of the world. So in places like the US and in Europe, we tend to overlook these facts because we are quite okay here because we are not usually hit by these pandemics. And we think, oh, that's not a problem anymore. It is a problem. And not only that, but it can become an even bigger problem if we uh enter

a pandemic like we are uh now where the whole world now becomes part of this issue of this problem and we all need to work together to try to find a way out yeah most definitely my understanding of the reason they call it spanish flu my understanding and so quote unquote was because that no one wanted to talk about or acknowledge it and the spanish press was the first to call it out and be like, hey, man, this is like a thing. And that's how they got stuck with the moniker of the Spanish flu. And it doesn't matter where it comes from.

It's a pandemic, right? Yeah, that's something that I don't think we realize now. Pandemic means a worldwide problem. And we're still thinking, oh, my country's doing fine. We are well vaccinated. This is okay. No, it's a pandemic. Until the whole world is vaccinated, this is not going to end. So the US is doing very well now. The UK is one of the top countries now in Europe with vaccination. Countries in the world that are hitting 70, 80% of the population being vaccinated.

That's great. But that's not the end of the pandemic by a long shot. As long as there's places like India where the virus is running free or brazil or any other places this virus is going to mutate it's going to change and it's going to come back uh and it can give us continue give us uh problems and definitely we cannot move around the planet freely if there is still virus in other places so we need to think about pandemics as global problems that need to be solved globally. And we suck at this. We showed in these past months that we are really bad at coordinating a response

to a global problem. Everybody goes and does their own thing. And there's no way that we together can fight this common problem we have. Yeah, it's really interesting. People are resistant to, especially Republican politicians here, resistant to the WHO,

you know we're seeing government uh worldwide body of outbreaks like this the and i imagine there are other countries and leaders that are as well they don't want to fall under the rule of of these things being called out but we've seen the fall and the damage from it what's interesting is when you talked about and something i thought about i know that the spanish or i don't know this but my understanding of the spanish my understanding of the Spanish flu, one of the reasons we, it was brought back to America and hit us hard was because the returning GIs brought it back. And, but what was interesting is we didn't, we weren't a global

connected, we didn't have flights going everywhere to every country in the world. We weren't connected globally like we were this time. Like this time we like you say we have this real global connection problem where we've got to we've got to fix this thing and attack it legally or not legally but legitimately and and do it very quickly otherwise things can get out of hand and god knows i always tell people i'm like imagine what the next one's going to be like this one was pretty evil exactly actually this is it could have been much worse and i think you should we should see this one as a sort of a dress rehearsal because although it's a bat it's definitely bad it's not half as bad or a tenth as bad as it could be this is a virus that's relatively good if you can call that i mean the coronavirus is pretty stable so it's a

virus that's not changing a lot it does mutate but not a lot if you compare it to the flu every year is different it's completely different from one year changing a lot. It does mutate, but not a lot. If you compare it to the flu, every year is different. It's completely different from one year to the other. So you need to develop new immunity. You need to vaccinate again. It doesn't look like the coronavirus is going that route. If you think about AIDS, the HIV is like the worst virus you can imagine. That virus changes not every year, but every day.

So up to the point that, yeah, we've known the HIV for what, 40 years now? And we haven't been able to develop a vaccine. It's not because we're not good or we're not investing money. It's because it's very difficult. So we got very lucky with coronaviruses, that with this one, with the SARS-CoV-2, within weeks, we had a target and it was a stable target towards which we could build antibodies and do a vaccine.

So we got very lucky there with a stable virus and a vaccine that came up very quickly. And a virus that is very contagious yes but the letality is relatively low the rate of of death by coronavirus it's around two three percent maximum the flu virus has a letality of around 10 percent so it's at least five times bigger so imagine a virus like this but five times the letality that's not it wouldn't be the worst virus either if you think about the Ebola virus has an 80% death rate. So 80%, obviously, that's a different thing. If we ever

get a virus like this, we're screwed. But even a virus with five, six times more lethality, we would have now, what, 20 million deaths. And that's because we didn't react, as you said, properly, quick enough, fast enough, and coordinated enough to actually stop this. These past weeks, there's been this whole report from the WHO saying, trying to analyze what went wrong at the beginning. And they're saying that everybody was very slow at reacting. And in a way, what happened with the Spanish flu, that the Spaniards said, we have a flu, didn't happen fast enough here in China. So the Chinese did communicate that there was a new disease, but a bit late. And then the WHO perhaps took a bit too long to say this was a coming pandemic.

And this delay at the beginning is what's allowed for this sort of big ramp up at the beginning of the pandemic that led to the huge number of infections and a huge number of deaths. And again, this is a relatively benign virus compared to other viruses we know. So with a real aggressive virus, we would have, the death toll would have been completely disastrous. So we should learn from this. We should realize that this, yeah, could be seen as a dress rehearsal. It's a pretty bad disease, but it's not as bad as it can be.

We can be hit by a much worse virus in the future. So let's try to get our act together and find a way, like you were saying, WHO, for instance, it should be sort of an organism that oversees the response to these sort of problems. And now it's seen more as a sort of a consulting body that you may or may not pay attention to. That's not how we can face sort of a global problem like this one. Yeah. We even had an idiot remove us from the who, the United States.

You just can't even measure the dumbness of something like that. But here we are, four years of not measuring a lot of dumbness. It was immeasurable. Here in the US, we're about 50. I think yesterday we announced we're 50% vaccinated, but we still have a whole lot of people that don't want to take the vaccination. We have this virus resistant group. And a lot of it is just political dumbness and people on the right wing fringes. It's interesting. Many of the people who supported the last moron from four years ago and voted for him, you can see that in their states, those are the ones that have the problem. Is there any basis or what would you say to people

that are trying to be vaccine resistant and they don't want to take the vaccine? Here in Utah, we're not even sure that we're going to get to herd immunity levels because so many people are resistant to the vaccine. Do people really have to worry about this? What would you tell people that are like, I'm not sure I should take that virus because I'm the guy on Facebook. The meme says I shouldn't because that's clearly science. It's a big issue. It's a problem. We laugh about it and we mock it because it looks a silly thing, but it's becoming a serious problem for everybody because vaccination, some people

see it as an act, an individual act of freedom. So I vaccinate myself because I want to get vaccinated. But it's not only that. It's a thing that you do for the community. Because if you are vaccinated, the virus is not going to spread through you. If you are not vaccinated, you may be contributing to spread the virus to other people. So it's not only, you cannot just think about this as a personal choice. It is up to a point a personal choice, but it's also

a choice you do for the community, for the global health. And that's, I think, needs to be stressed. Now, what are the issues with vaccines? Are you afraid because they're not safe? That's not true. Vaccines, you have tons of data showing that vaccines are safe. There's no problem about that. None, obviously, there's the rare side effects. Yes, we know about those. And there's been detected. And now we know, we are aware that they may happen,

one in a million or whatever. And if they happen, they can be treated. That's something that needs to go on record. That's true. But apart from that, the amount of lives that the vaccines are saving, that perhaps people that focus on the side effects that the amount of the of lives the vaccines are saving that perhaps people don't that focus on the side effects don't focus on the other side people that get vaccinated are basically now being saved in the uk for instance now we have over 70 percent of the population vaccinated the people that are ending up in the hospitals are dying just has

plummeted that we almost don't see anybody in the hospitals now or very little so we're saving a lot of lives and that's because of the vaccine nothing else vaccines work for sure there's no doubt about it there are vaccines as a whole is one of the safest and more effective drugs we have because they do have tend to have very little side effects and they do tend to save a lot of lives because they just basically protect you against very bad diseases vaccines in general i think are a very good thing this needs to be stressed our life expectancy basically doubled in the past century, thanks in good measure to vaccines. There was other things like antibiotics and there's general health improvements, but vaccines played a very important role in reducing the child mortality to almost nothing. In the beginning of

the 20th century, half of the kids in some countries would die, would not make it to adult life. And that was stopped thanks to vaccines. Now, you translate this into the COVID times. At this moment, the only way we have to control this disease is the vaccine. We don't have a drug. For instance, we're talking about AIDS. So AIDS, we have good drugs to stop the virus. We don't have a vaccine, but at least we can stop the virus. For COVID, we don't have a drug. So there's no way that you can stop this virus from reproducing once you have it inside. You have to wait to see how your immune system fights this virus. So the only way we can help that is just to try to boost the immune system by giving a vaccine so that your immune system can fight this. And that's the only thing we have.

And unless we all reach a certain percentage of vaccination in all the countries in the world, this is not going to go away because this virus we see, it is very infectious. So it just keeps spreading. So as long as there's people that are susceptible, it's going to move around. So that's why it's so important that everybody, everywhere.

So it's not enough to say, oh, my city is vaccinated or my country is well vaccinated. No, because if your neighbors are not, it's going to come back to you. This virus is going to evolve. It's going to keep spreading and circulating. So I guess that's the only thing that you can say to these people that are still doubting. Look for the right sources. You're right. I don't believe the first guy that you see on internet. Internet is great. And again, you were talking about

how this is the first pandemic in a sort of a hyper-connected wall. And this is the first pandemic also in the era of internet so information flows at a rate that's never uh has been seen before and this is good and it's bad because it does allow us to actually know what's going on in real time so if something happens in china now we know it in in one minute but also this disinformation spreads equally fast so that's very dangerous how do you deal with that what's the old what's the old saying a lie spreads around the world in a day and the truth takes weeks or something like that. It's very interesting to me.

Now, this is a new type of vaccine where it's, I think, an MNRA or something like that. Tell us a little about that because I think it holds a great future for vaccines and drugs and how we deal with some of the different things in life. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. That's a very interesting topic indeed, because one of the misconceptions, again, of the vaccines is they have been developed so quickly that they cannot be safe. And that's not really true. They have been developed quickly, but the final stages. So this is not a technology that just appeared out of nowhere in 2019. mRNA vaccines have been researched for the first time that somebody

mentioned this idea of the mRNA vaccines was in 1989. So it's been around for 30 years, the whole concept of how you develop an mRNA vaccine. And they have been developed and studied and all the processes have been studied very carefully. The problem is that none of this had reached yet to the stage of a clinical drug that you could give to people in 2019. There were clinical trials already for vaccines with that technology. But since there was not yet to the stage of a clinical drug that you could give to people in 2019. There were clinical trials already for vaccines with that technology. But since there was not an urgency, it was going on the background. And probably in the next three, four, five years, we would have probably seen the first mRNA vaccine reach the clinic.

But since there was this urgency now, a lot of money and effort and manpower was poured in to finish the development of this drug. And what it does, actually, this kind of vaccine is very interesting because vaccines started as you basically get the virus or whatever microbe that you want to protect against and you inactivate it and then you inject it. So you are basically injecting a weak version of the virus to stimulate the response without making you sick. So that was the classic vaccine. Now, that was good, but it has some problems, like sometimes you can get sick from the vaccine, from these old vaccines. So we improved that, and instead of injecting the whole virus, we started injecting pieces of the virus, the protein cycle. Virus is basically some sort of

different shapes, but it has a sort of a capsule and then some genes inside. So the capsule is made out of proteins normally. So if you get one of these proteins and you inject it, you sometimes get the same response. And that's what the next step of vaccines were. Now we moved even farther to a new level of vaccines, which is we don't inject the protein. We don't inject the virus.

We inject the instructions to make the protein. So we're injecting a piece of gene gene which is just a piece of genetic code that once it's inside ourselves our cells make that protein that's a it's a vital protein and generates that sort of immune response now people say oh these viruses these vaccines are modifying my my dna they're changing my genes that's not how it works that's not the case it may my genes. That's not how it works. That's not the case. It may sound scary, but it's not how it is. It's very similar as being infected by a virus. You're going to get a piece of a genetic code from a virus, which is going to make a protein, and that's going to go away. So that's going to degrade and disappear very quickly. So it's not going to get stuck into

your DNA or change you in any way. So there's no real risk in any of these vaccines, the mRNA vaccines or the other type of vaccines, the vital vector vaccines, which also use similar technology. They're not going to change or modify your DNA because that's not how it happens. And then what we saw is that these vaccines, if you look at the percentage of response in these vaccines, it's amazing. So they give a protection of around 90, 98 percent. That's very unusual for a vaccine. Most of the vaccines we have are not that good. If you think about the flu vaccine, this year there's only like 20, 30% protection, and we consider it's good enough, and we just give it. The malaria vaccine, the first vaccine

against malaria had around 30, 35% protection. We saw it as a huge development because we had nothing to protect people against malaria. Now, here we are talking about a vaccine that would give you 98% protection. That's unheard of, and that's very powerful. And that's mostly or in part due to this new technology that we developed. We need to be appreciative and conscious of how much science went into this, how much knowledge went into this, how much effort from a lot of scientists over the decades to actually get us to this point, that we can generate a vaccine that is very powerful. It gets you a huge response against this virus

and protects you even more than we thought in the initial clinical trials. And all the countries now with good percentage of vaccination, as we said, all the rates of infection and mortality is going down. So I think it looks as good as it can be. That's interesting.

It's really wild. It just gives you a body of blueprint and says, here you go. And that can be really helpful. So what do you see the future? We're getting down on the hour. What do you see in the future for COVID? The way we're going and we're haphazardly,

India is completely out of control. What would be your prediction or what do you see us coming out of this? What do you see, I guess, for the future? I think that the main danger now is to see this as it's almost ending and that's it. And the pandemic is almost over in countries like in the US or in Europe. That's sort of the feeling you're getting because you're seeing how the cases are going down and say, oh, that's it. We're done. And as you say, as long as India or other countries have that much virus running around, that's definitely not the end for anybody.

And actually, we're seeing it now in the UK. So UK had the cases under control, very well under control in the past weeks. And now it's slowly surging again, because we are getting a lot of this Indian version. And that's the danger. So that all the work that you did, all the effort that you did to control the pandemic, it can just go evaporate when you get

a new variant coming in. So that's always a risk. My predictions, I'm guessing we're going to see two or three endings of this pandemic. So the first ending would be for countries like ours that have a good rate of vaccination. Probably before the end of the year, we're going to recover most of our normal life, most, I would say. Not 100%, but we're probably going to be able to get rid of the masks. Probably we're going to have a decent enough level of vaccination and the mortality is going to go down. That's the first end. But it's not the real end of

the pandemic because the pandemic is still going around. The second real ending of the pandemic would be once everybody in the world is vaccinated enough to stop the spread of the virus. And this is going to happen in two or three years. It's not going to happen immediately. Seriously two to three yeah yeah because at least because uh the rate of the rate of vaccination in the in our countries is so quick that it's making actually

vaccines not available for the rest of the world so there's countries that haven't even started so there's a lot of places in africa uh south america they just they have almost nothing to go around so these guys are going to start vaccinating these years, hopefully, but it's going to take another year perhaps to get the full population vaccinated. So we're looking around at least another year or two to get to a good level globally. So that would be perhaps the second real end of the pandemic. But then we're entering the post-pandemic stage. This virus is not going away. This virus is here to stay, like the flu virus, like any other viruses that we have. So we're going to have to learn to live with this virus.

So what does that mean? It means that probably once we are all vaccinated and we have immunity, maybe this virus is going to keep doing like spread a bit. Or here there might be an outbreak in that place or the other one, maybe a new variant coming. We may have to revaccinate part of the population like we do with the flu every year. So we have to see exactly

what's going to happen, how this virus is going to become part of our life. But it's not going away. That's the thing. So we're going to have it under control for sure. But still, we're going to

have to deal with it. So would technically the pandemic not be over for two to three years then? Yeah. If you remember, the pandemic is the worldwide kind of problem uh the wall is not going to get rid of the virus uh this year and we're so interconnected with flights and ships yep that's the thing so as as you do the olympics in tokyo what's going to happen so you're going to spread the virus i mean that's going down that's a given, right? Oh, man. Wow, man, you just blew my freaking mind.

I was thinking this would be over the end of the year, the way I was going. And you're definitely on the big picture. I think I'm American, so we only give a shit about us. Classic asshole American. Anyway, but no, that does make sense. I've been watching the bodies they're burning in India and just just the extraordinary fallout there and it's just heartbreaking but this is where we this is where we go and yeah i've heard that that they may have to update our shots and i've got mine i've got the 5g right here i bill bill gates he's not home right now so i think he's out looking for a new wife so there's that we're rounding up the hour anything you want to touch on in the book to

get people to go out and buy her tees out so get people to go pick that baby up? Yeah, sure. Everybody go out and buy this book. It's full of good stories about viruses and bacteria. I think it's a mix of history lesson, if you want, a bit going through the ages, how bacteria and viruses play a role. And obviously for the American continent, it was a huge difference, a huge impact that when the Europeans came and discovered, if you want to call it like that, America, they brought into America a lot of diseases that the Americans didn't have at that time. And that's how basically the whole conquest of America happened, because all the Native Americans were dead within a year due to the disease, not due to the superiority of the Spanish army, just because they were getting killed by all the bacteria and viruses that we brought to the superiority of the of the spanish army just because they were getting killed by all the bacteria and viruses that we brought to the new continent so this is a part of the book as well as pieces of history that are interesting also a bit of how we got to this point

where we now have antibiotics and vaccines and everything how we develop these tools what are the most important dangers we'll have right now we're facing and we're talking about malaria tb all these things how this may play a role and obviously covet how are we dealing with covet and uh what's going to happen with it so if you are into this sort of stuff i think what i me as a scientist i like reading about science but i think it's important that everybody has a bit of knowledge about science because today we're talking about mrna and most people don't know even what rna is and i think nowadays you cannot afford not to know this i mean because they're going to inject you with rna and you need to know what rna is because it's going to go into your body so i think a bit more knowledge basic knowledge on science i think everybody should not

only this book but everybody should go out and read science books because science books if they are well written they're fun there's a ton of good writers out there that can make it interesting. Yeah, they need to quit reading the books that aren't science. The one thing on this book, if you have relatives or friends that are resistant to getting the vaccine, would this be a good book to give them or at least hit them with? Definitely, I think so. Whack them upside the head. I'm not encouraging violence in any way, shape, or form.

Then you have to buy the hardcover then if you want to use it like that. I mean, that could be assault. So maybe I'll just throw the paper back at him so it bounces off and whatever. But no, this sounds like a great book. And yeah, we need to get more into science and understanding science and quit living like cavemen where we're in some cave going, oh no, there's an outside world that scares me. You're just like, come on, man, people.

Come on. I agree. Science is fun, too. So it's not only necessary, but it's also fun. So if you find the right book and the right writer, and you guys in the U.S. have great popular science writers, so just go out to your bookstore and find a science book and enjoy it. It's lots of fun.

There you go. Give it away to all the anti-vaxxer people. Give the book away. Salvador, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on and spending some time with us, enlightening us. And hopefully we educated some people here and we'll get the world vaccinated even more now. Thank you for coming on, sir. It's a pleasure.

Thanks for inviting me. Thank you very much. Guys, go pre-order the book. It comes out June 2nd in America. I think it's been out for a while across overseas there. Modern Epidemics from the Spanish Flu to COVID-19. There'll be a link on the Chris Voss Show. Go to youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification button. And also go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. Subscribe to us over there. And all the different groups we have on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all fosk subscribe to us over there and all the different groups we have on linkedin facebook twitter uh instagram all those different things see us over there as well we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in stay safe get vaccinated and we'll see you guys next time