The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Alina Chan

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

Dr. Alina Chan is a co-author of the book, VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, and a researcher with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and vector engineering. At the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, Dr. Chan is currently creating next generation vectors for human gene therapy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chan began to investigate problems relevant to finding the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and in parallel spearheaded the development of the COVID-19 CoV Genetics (covidcg.org) browser for scientists worldwide to rapidly track virus lineages and mutations by locations and date ranges of interest.

🎵 This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of New York's world-famous comedy cellar, coming at you on SiriusXM 99, Raw Dog. And on the Laugh Button Podcast Network, this is Dan Natterman calling. I mean, I'm not calling. I've got brain fog. That's apparently one of the symptoms of the Omicron virus which i have according to a binax a home test that i took the other day but i was uh i've been i've been feeling ill since um since in the middle

of the night sunday anyway i'm here with noam dorman and periel ashenbrand and we are doing this all over zoom because nicole our sound person, her boyfriend has COVID and I have COVID. And the comedy cellar has a lot of cases of COVID. Should I say that, Noam, or is that not a good thing to say? So anyway, we're avoiding the place. And you say what? I didn't hear what you said. I said the comedy cellar. There's quite a few comedians that have come down with the vid, apparently. Yeah, yeah you don't say

that i won't say that well i already said it but um but we forge on and it's all systems are going home or what's the what's the situation there's no all systems are going i mean the mayor the mayor doesn't seem to think we should do anything so why should we do anything i mean so um i mean i know i mean, everybody, everybody in America must already know a lot of people who have this and they all seem to be mild. Um, no. Well, look, as long as everybody's aware of the situation, you can come, swim at your own risk, as we like to say at the comedy cellar.

And this is down a bit 15 to 20%, I would say, but it's not down. The way you would think it would be down. I mean, I wouldn't, I'm not looking for, but I'm older, you know, I'm not looking forward to go out. I mean, I'll still go to strip clubs, but I'm not going to a comedy. As I understand it, no, I'm the rules have slightly changed. There's no more drink minimum, or is that just for new years? That's what I heard.

For new years, although new years, we actually never really used to enforce the drink minimum, but we never had, we've never had a drink minimum. We always had a two item minimum, but the people don't want to take their masks off. I think all along we've not been enforced that if the reason they don't want to make the minimum is because they don't want to take their masks off. Well, you mentioned everybody seems to be mild. Yeah, I've been mild. I was, you know, I was literally on my way to Aruba.

I was I was escaping the hot zone and I was like this close to getting the hell out of town. And then all of a sudden I wake up with a scratchy throat with, with light congestion. And then I go on Google. And at first I thought, well, it's just a cold, but given the times I went on Google, I expected Google to say, don't worry about it. If you got, if you, if you, and I was sneezing, I said, I expected Google to say, oh, sneezing. That means you got a cold. Don't worry about it. But Google didn't say that. Google said, matter of fact, uh, sneezing is one of the symptoms of this omicron thing i go outside and i try to find a home test kit to verify that i don't have covid so i can go to a room and they're all sold out of home kits so i'm like what do i do do i take a chance so i i elected to uh to to not go

um and then a couple days later i finally got my hands on a home test because i didn't feel like waiting online for an hour at city md with a bunch of people with covid uh i could have given you a test i have a bunch of them well what would you have do mailed it to me i would have dropped it off downtown for you okay just because you can't imagine yourself doing these kind of things for friends doesn't mean... I found one at Eisler Chemist on Lexington Avenue. They're probably sold out by now.

But in any case, it has been a mild affair. And hopefully it'll stay that way. And then he sent me a picture of it. And he said, does this look positive to you yeah because it was a very and the binax test if you have two pink lines it's positive but my my bottom pink line was very faint and um so i asked for a second opinion she said you're ugly too

of course so i i had it go ahead this so you you you said no even if it's faint uh that means it's and and it makes sense what else would it be i i had a cold a month ago so it's like who probably not another cold and in any case and i've been hanging out around covet people so i want to tell you the story my story and and and the i'm gonna tell you the end of the story is what you should conclude from this story is that people like George Soros and whoever these people are that made millions and billions of dollars on the stock market, don't think that they're so smart. Because there's a tremendous amount of luck that goes into it. So back in August, I took the third Moderna shot and I took a full dose. I didn't take a booster. I took a full dose, a full hundred micrograms, milligrams, whatever it is. And so then it came out two weeks ago that Moderna says that the fourth or the third dose of Moderna helps you. But the but not the booster dose booster dose helps a bit.

But the full dose, that is the one you should take. A hundred. Even though that's not the one the FDA approved, a full hundred dose increases your antibodies by 87 times. And then I took a fourth dose of Moderna four months, based on my four months after my booster. I took it two weeks ago. I mean, five days ago. And came out today, or yesterday, that Israel has now authorized a fourth dose of the booster four months from the time you've taken your third dose, precisely at the time. So I've fallen on my feet in every decision that I've made

here. And there's a certain amount of intelligence that went into it. But there's a tremendous amount of luck. And if you know shorting the market or stocks or whatever it is i'd be a multi-billionaire now it does it's it's just you know you even even the decision to take moderna was half luck or or all luck so but uh so that sunday night sunday after i got the fourth dose i i was meeting some friends and i wanted to cancel my dinner but i said i haven't seen this one guy particularly in a while. I really like him. So I texted him and my other friends said, listen, uh, I'm gonna, I'll, I'll meet for dinner, but I have to, we have to eat in the shed outside the olive tree. I is too many. I don't want to eat indoors. And they started

calling me out of, out of date words that mean that you're kind of effeminate. I can't, I can't say the word anymore because that word is not supposed to be used anymore, but, uh, but among 60 year old guys, it is still sometimes used in the schoolyard sense. And I said, look, that's the way I feel about it. Wouldn't you know that one of the guys I sat with tested positive for COVID this was Saturday night. I'm sorry. One of the guys I tested positive for COVID that Sunday morning. And my wife put me immediately into isolation, but you know, it's four days later now and I don't have it. I tested negative and I think a big part of it had to do, well, it's either was the, it was

either getting the booster or being outdoors or both. But, um, so I had, I had, they had to all apologize to me for calling me that word because I actually prevented like four other people from getting COVID because I insisted on eating outdoors. Well, the question is, is, is are you just putting off the inevitable anyway? And that's one way to look at it, but the, the inevitable, I mean, like if, if you could have put off getting a bubonic plague by a thousand years, your chances of surviving it are way, way better, even if it was inevitable.

And my point being that the more you put it off, the better the medicines are, the technology. So like already we have pills and Regeneron and they know which way to lie in the hospital. So your chances of surviving it and not are much much better the longer you put it off but yes now is a good as good a time well i guess it could be could get even better but now is not a bad time it's not a bad time to get the omicron no especially omicron does seem to be less uh serious at least for people who are vaccinated. It's clearly, I mean, there's data today out of South Africa that said that it's like one-tenth or one-ninth of the people

are hospitalized Omicron versus Delta. I mean, the bad news for me is the timing because like I said, I was a hair's breadth of escaping the hot zone. To be fair, Dan, we told you to take Moderna. I don't know that that would have made the difference. No, but, but based on the data, it should have done is been more careful at the comedy selling.

Cause I was hanging around, hanging around everybody. I figured I was invincible. And then Marina tells me, you know, there's a fucking it's going around here. And, Marina tells me, you know, there's a fucking, it's going around here. But by then it was probably too late. It was not going around the Comedy Cellar. It was going around everywhere. I mean, the Comedy Cellar is part of everywhere.

There's 20,000 or 19,000 cases reported yesterday in New York City alone. This is more than at the peak of the pandemic. It's everywhere. Do you think that we're all going to get it eventually? Or do you think that this is going to like pass? We're in a surge right now and it's crazy and it's going to pass. All is a big word. Many, many, many, many people are going to get it and then it's going to fade away and some people won't. And, you know, if you're if you're extremely careful, the thing about risk is that, you know, if you're, if you're extremely careful, the thing about risk is that, you know, it adds up. So if you, if you're careful where you go

inside, if you wear your mask all the time, if you take the, the, the, the, the vaccine that has the highest likelihood of protecting you, all these things compound, you, you may not get it, but the other, the flip side is that I don't think you should really worry that much about getting it at this point, because we've all known dozens of people already who've been through this Omicron thing and they're fine. And it's, it seems that even though like I had COVID, that doesn't seem to. That's not going to help you. Right. No, that will not help you. And what about going inside with a mat, with, you know, and KN95 mask on? Well, I think you should get rid of the KN95 and get a get a an adult real N95 or an N100 like I got. Okay, but I don't have that right now. So is it I can give you one.

Thank you. That's very nice of you. But in general, I mean, sell you one that I say, give you one. I can sell you one. Um, by the way, I've seen the, you know, the COVID at home test, people are selling for double what they were. They're sold out everywhere. It's crazy. But can I wear my KN95 inside and be okay? I don't know. I mean, the thing about KN95s, you're definitely better than not wearing it. You're probably okay. I mean, a lot, a lot of our staff has just been wearing K-95s, you're definitely better than not wearing it. You're probably okay. I mean, a lot of our staff has just been wearing those K-95s and have not gotten it. And they're at the club every night and they're surrounded by crowds and throngs of people. So clearly it's protective. But I think the easier the mask is to breathe in, presumably the less effective it is.

So, so those ones that really cover your face, like that people it's too hard to breathe in them. First of all, it's not that hard to breathe. I mean, you get used to it, but the reason it's hard to breathe in them is because you're a higher percentage of the air you're taking is being filtered and the filter slows down the air. So people like the KN95, but there's gaps. And, you know, the air comes in through the gaps. I wouldn't be sure that 100% of the air is not coming in through the gap.

By the way, you ever suck on a mint whilst wearing a mask? No, it gets you high? No, well, it doesn't get you high. But what happens is the minty air is funneled through the top of the mask right over your eyeballs. It's like a sting. It's kind of fun. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm so happy I didn't

have it because we have one unvaccinated child in the house. I don't want him to get it. Although the risks are low for children. Who needs that stress? I know, I agree. It's like somebody said to me,

oh, I'm assuming you're like back in your bunker, and I'm like, you're assuming correctly. And they're like, well, you know, you can't hide from the virus. By the way. Well, I can be like super fucking careful, though, and try not to get it. You know, you can't hide from Hitler, don't you? You should just report to the camps.

No, what is the, what is, at what point am I authorized to return to the cellar for spots? After you test negative, whatever, it's like seven days you have to test negative. I don't know. Well, do I have-

Liz knows the rules precisely. Do I have to present negative i don't know well do i have those the rules precisely do i have to present liz with any sort of proof i i don't i i don't think so i mean i can't imagine that you what i'm getting at is that i was supposed to be in aruba over new year's oh you want to work new year's you'll probably there's an opening if somebody there's definitely gonna be an opening um unless we have to unless we have to camp people are going out so i mean what a time it's what a crazy time wait what about this so a comic actually who a seller comic was positive and he told me that his he was he isolated for 10 days and he told me that his doctor told him after 10 days not to take another PCR test because he might still test positive because the virus is still in his system. Yeah, yeah. I've seen that. The PCR test is so sensitive that it can detect traces of the

virus long after you're not infectious anymore. So what does that mean? Like for the kids to go back to school, like if they tested positive, for example, you weren't allowed to send them back until you could present the nurse with a negative test. Like, I thought that was sort of the deal for everything like what Dan is saying. I don't know. I'm not up on it. I know these are, these things get revised, but I, but I think that I've heard this over and over that they, they 10, 10 days after a positive and zero symptoms is, you know,

is, is very reliable. But the thing about having no symptoms is that I don't know if I really believe people when they say they have no symptoms or they don't realize they have symptoms because everybody, even throughout a 24 hour period, has some congestion, coughs, a little mucus, a little phlegm. These are everyday things and you don't think they're symptoms because you have no way of knowing if they're symptoms. Right. I mean, I mean, Dan had a real cold, right? But like a little sort of, a little, oh, I swallowed. That was, I felt a little something when I swallowed.

That's not a symptom, but maybe it was, you know? Oh, so brain fog. I mean, we know people that have had brain fog for years. Well, so I don't mean to scare you, Dan, but the brain fog would worry me. Well, I know you had- Did you, Dan, but the brain fog would worry me. Well, I know you had mentioned-

Did I say it slower? The brain fog. I know you had mentioned, you know, long COVID. Some people have continued brain fog, and you wouldn't even necessarily notice if you only, say, lost one IQ point, assuming that's something that could happen. You might not notice that, right? I have to do sort of puzzles or so I had to take, you know, an SAT or something to know, noticed it. But, but I guess if you don't notice, it's not that big a deal. Whereas, whereas smell and taste is something obvious, you know, you'll know if that's permanently been altered. So I read today that the long COVID is COVID is much less correlated with the vaccines, but you took the J&J. I don't even know if that's a vaccine. I don't know what that is. Well, of course, I mean, it's, what do you mean you don't know if it's a vaccine?

I mean, it was, okay, Harry Anton and I were laughing because at the time, like way back when we, like within a few weeks, we knew that a single shot of Moderna was more protective than the J and J. We knew this way back when, and then, and then the, I told you this at the time and then the data on J and J has gotten less and less impressive to the point now where they're not even recommending it anymore. Can you talk about the Moderna booster with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine? You're not seriously still asking me this question after six months of me telling you yes.

I knew that with Pfizer. I didn't know if that was also- Any, you can take them with anything. There is no, there is no, you can mix the vaccines. As a matter of fact, some people think it's even more protective. Well, all I know is that the people I've spoken with that have Omicron that were given these other vaccines don't seem to be any better off than I am, if that's an indication of the effectiveness of the booster that I got, which was J&J. Yeah, well, you don't know people who've been boosted and you don't know who's I don't know. I feel weird asking, like one person I spoke with said that she was having such high fever that she was hallucinating. And I didn't

ask her, are you boosted? Because I felt like that's such like nowadays to ask that question. It almost feels. Yeah, well, maybe she's having high fever is because she's hallucinating. Alina Chan is here. I'm going to let her in. I really am interested in your prediction, Noam, so that we can look back at this. And I also want to know if you've had Omicron, does that protect you from not getting it again? Getting, not getting Omicron again? Yeah. Yeah, probably.

I mean, if it's like any other virus, yeah, probably. All right, I'm going to let her in. Stand by. Question is, does it protect you from Delta? We don't know that. Oh. Or syphilis. Everybody worried about the coronas.

Coronas virus. Man, coronavirus, whatever the fuck it's called. I'm not worried about that. I'm just worried about cinnamon. It's my favorite stripper. Nobody's worried about the strippersbers man i don't fucking cinnamon is this shit you don't like me do you i see okay there she is have you had her on before alina chan no no alina chan a brief intro elena if i may alina chan is a canadian

molecular biologist we have a lot of canadian guests and they're always wonderful people so welcome specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the broad institute of mit and harvard where she is a postdoctoral fellow. And she's co author of viral the search for the origin of COVID-19. Welcome, Alina Chen. And thank you for her zooming in from your camping trip. Alina, are you in Canada now? That looks like... No, I wish I was in Canada now. but this is yes, from the Rockies. That's from the Rockies. Haiti and Rockies, but you're in Massachusetts right now?

Yes. Harvard? Yeah, the Broad Institute. So you first came on our radar because of the origins of COVID stuff that you're writing, but since we're in the middle of a new historic chapter in COVID, maybe we can ask a few questions and get your take on everything that's going on now.

Sure. Should I leave it open-ended or should we ask you questions? Like what's on the top of your brain about all this Omicron stuff? Well, we are seeing it spread very quickly. So it's clear to us now that it's highly transmissible.

So what people are hoping is that the higher vaccination rates will protect against severe outcomes for most of the people infected by it. But the problem is that if you have just millions of people getting infected with this, you will see hospitals being overwhelmed. So I think it's still good for people to be careful in this time. You don't want to be one of the rare people having to be in the hospital at this time. So my friend Dan there, we just found out he has COVID, presumably Omicron, because Omicron seems to be taking over. Now, he did something very foolish.

He took the J&J vaccine. What do we know now about that? That's what they gave me. Perrielle made me an appointment in the Bronx. So bad enough I had to go all the way to the Bronx, but then the story doesn't end there because when I got there, what they had was the J&J. It wasn't my decision. So let me preface this. I think a lot of the guidance we've gotten from the government has been very mealy-mouthed about just saying the blunt truths. For instance, I think we're a year past the time when the government should have been telling people,

don't take the J&J. There's no scarcity. Take the mRNA. Similarly, we're way past the time where the government should have been saying, wear a mask, as opposed to wear an N95 mask. If you're not wearing an N95 mask, you're really not wearing a mask at all. So what do you say about those kind of messaging things? So the J&J is still effective, but at this point, it's really about the number of doses you've received, right? So even people who took the Moderna and the Pfizer, the two shots, they still have to go back in for a third shot. So they still have to get like boosters. And this is going to be a thing in future is that every, let's say six months or so people who are more

vulnerable, so elderly people with pre existing conditions will need to get boosted, especially people who travel a lot. So people are just on planes all the time, or going to you know, company salis or to public events where the hundreds of people coming in from anywhere, they will need to be constantly boosted because you again, you don't want to take that risk that maybe you don't have very long lasting immunity, and you get exposed, you might catch it. So ultimately, hopefully, these vaccines, they will prevent against severe outcomes, but it doesn't mean that you won't get infected. But the severe outcomes, yeah, it's great. But the mRNA, especially the Moderna, seems to really increase your chance of preventing infection,

which to me also means your chance of spreading it to your kids or your grandmother or whatever it is. So it seems... One thing to know is the Moderna dosage is actually quite higher, much higher than the Pfizer dosage. So it's actually three times the dose. So I got the Moderna. So essentially you're getting six doses versus the two doses that the Pfizer's are getting. So I would speculate that that's one factor. If you're

getting six times of something versus two times of something like it's you expect a much more robust immune response. Right. Yeah. And that's right. And I just took my fourth shot four months after my booster, just like Israel is now a recommend for shot of Moderna. And what about mass and 90? I mean, and 90. Why are people wearing cloth masks? Why? Why? I mean, talk about all the stuff that the government could have done for zero money. A year ago, they could have been telling people very clearly, do not wear cloth masks and wear N95 masks. There was no scarcity. They're not expensive.

The government could give them out if they wanted. How do you explain that? Well, I know that it's scarce in some countries. Talk about America. Yeah, yeah. But I've heard some of my friends even asking for people here in the US to send N95s to them. So I would say that there's probably some concerns about messaging globally. But yes, I agree. Within a wealthy country like America, they could probably afford to tell people a bit more about how to arm themselves against like infections. I think part of the problem is that it's taken quite a long time for the public health authorities to grapple with the fact that this virus is airborne. So a lot of the messaging we heard in the early days was about hand washing. So this is still

stuck in my mind, like how much hand washing we had to do. It's just like singing the birthday song twice while you're washing your hands and like my kids did that washing everything washing your chips washing you know everything you buy from the grocery grocery store when the when the thing we should have been really concerned about was being stuck in like meeting rooms or or train or cars or like buses where people are just breathing the same air for extended periods of time. I think the focus was really misinformed, I would say. It came from a place where they weren't thinking about how this virus is usually transmitting. Yeah, I'm wearing an N100 mask now.

Well. I'm not necessarily. Last question, or maybe there's more. So they used to tell us you needed to be, as you said, a prolonged period of time with somebody breathing the same air. It was like a 15 minute rule. I know that was probably not that accurate, but it was some sort of approximation of how long, of course, the closer you are and the sicker they are, all these variables, but, and, but they, and they say that Omicron is 70, something like 70 times more

contagious, whatever that means. Does that mean that it takes one seventh of the time of breathing the same air? What does it mean? No, I don't think they measure it like that. They measure it by the number of people get infected by the same person. So they measure the speed of spreading and the size of the clusters that start from Omicron versus the original virus. Right. But the speed of spreading is related to the fact that people are getting quicker, right?

But they don't measure how long does it take for someone to be in the same room as someone else. I think that that might be difficult to measure and maybe even unethical if you try to expose someone for like three seconds to someone else in the same room. But it's probably safe to say that if you thought you could be, if you tried to expose someone for like three seconds to someone else in the same room. But it's probably safe to say that if you thought you could be, if you thought 10 minutes was safe, it's probably not. Whatever you thought was safe or whatever was safe, whatever that cosmic reality number is, it's definitely accelerated now, right?

Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't say that people should be holding a timer, no, and going into the room of someone else and saying, okay, like 70 seconds are up and I'm going to leave now. So I think the best way is just to be extra cautious and to do everything outdoors if possible. And go ahead, Dan, you have any questions? I was wondering if your opinion about Noam's opinion about Johnson and Johnson, if he's being unfair. And, you know, us Johnson and Johnson people have taken a lot of crap in the past few months, and we're kind of tired of it.

Well, I have to say that I actually wanted the Johnson & Johnson. I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, right? So the one shot really appealed to me. But right when I became eligible to get vaccinated, because I'm not in any vulnerable population, that's when they actually had that pause on the J&J. They said that they were seeing some very rare effects in women of my age group. So that's when I was like, yeah, then I can't get that now. So then I went to the nearest CVS and they had the Moderna for me. Well, she's giving some credit to your opinion, Dan, but I would have to, even though I have no business,

I'm just a club owner. I haven't read what I've read. I would say if you take the J&J right now, people at home, that is not, if you're worried about getting COVID, you take the Moderna right now. Based on what we know now, that could change tomorrow. We could find out anything, but you have to go with the best information you have at the time.

I'd say any vaccine within your reach is what you need now. It's better than nothing. Yeah, it's better than nothing. So I think getting a booster like Pfizer or Moderna is very good in this climate where omicron is just spreading like crazy like you look at some places like washington dc and it's a the line is it's just vertical the number of cases is just vertical so new york too although i i went online today and i made an appointment for my wife for a fourth uh modern and you can you can get a modern shot today in new york city if you want to. And Christmas Eve is really all clear.

So, you know, it's worth saying we're so lucky to live in these countries that we live in. You know, I can't even imagine what they're going through in other parts of the world now. It's really, we're so lucky. Well, let's get into the book that Alina has written, in which she asserts that the origin of COVID was in a lab. Is that correct? So I don't say that it's definitely from a lab, but I do lean towards a lab origin of the virus. But the whole book asserts that what we need is an investigation.

So right now, there's no direct evidence for either a natural or lab-based origin. What needs to happen is a systematic and credible investigation that involves not only scientists, but also forensic investigators, so intelligence officers, other experts who can go in and understand what is the most likely origin of this virus? What sorts of evidence should we be collecting? How can we get to a more confident assessment? So let me ask you like a broad question. I'm presuming because you have a slight accent that you were not born in Canada. And that, where were you born? Actually, I was born in Canada. Yeah, yeah. But I was raised in Singapore. And then I went back to Canada as a teenager

It's kind of really messy And I feel like a lot of people my age Have that kind of messy background That's a good story That's why I said it's a slight accent But anyway, so like if my wife If my wife accused me of cheating And I wouldn't show her my cell phone

That would be it Like it's clear i'm cheating right so so in a different cultural environment you say well if they won't let they won't allow us to investigate that's that's all i need to know but is there is there a cultural explanation which would account for the the chinese being reluctant to give us information or to be open with us that that would not be the fact that they're hiding, you know, the fact that it was evidence of a lab leak. So some people on the side of the natural origin, so I'm talking about people who very strongly believe that this virus came out of an animal at a market. They think that the Chinese government might even be covering up evidence of a natural origin. They think that China wants to not even say that

this virus came from that country, but they're blaming it on lobsters from Maine, or salmon from the Faroe Islands, or a pangolin from Thailand or something. So they're trying to place the origin outside of the country so that China takes zero responsibility for the virus. And how much do you credit that? Well, it's also speculation. So we need to investigate. I'd say that all these theories of it coming from lobster and that kind of thing, they're completely bunk. It's not really worth any time or energy looking into because there's no precedent. There's no example of another respiratory virus emerging and causing an

outbreak from frozen foods. So there's no like previous SARS or even MERS virus like emerging from a block of like frozen shrimp and causing an outbreak at a buffet. So this is not even a viable hypothesis. So I guess as I'm thinking out loud, there's another question then. Do the Chinese, like I was presuming until a second ago, the Chinese know what the evidence is.

They just won't share it with us. They know whether it came from a natural origin. Do you agree that they know? I agree that they have a lot more information than us, and they are not sharing that information. So, for example, information about early cases, they claim that they could not identify any cases earlier than December 2019, which i find to be quite incredible because they had the world's best experts in that city in that city of wuhan they had arguably the world's best lab at tracking these sounds like outbreaks in that city like this was a home ground

so for them to not to suddenly have forgotten how to do all the basics of tracking a sales like outbreak is not very believable to me. When the World Health Organization sent some experts in there this year, in January, they could not access any primary data. So they were not shared. They didn't see any hospital records. They couldn't interview anyone they wanted, just the people who had been picked out for them by the Chinese authorities. So i bet that there's a lot of very critical information not being shared with the rest of the world um yeah i mean i don't want to keep dominating the questions i have more questions you guys want to ask anything no what would be the um if it was indeed a lab a lab based virus is does that mean that this was done on purpose or if it was an accident,

where it escaped from the lab by accident? So I can say that there's nothing that makes me think that this was done on purpose, because this would just be self-sabotage in the worst extreme. So it looks like they were very surprised by this. And you can be surprised by a lab accident too. So for example, this virus, SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, actually escaped from a high biosecurity lab in Taiwan recently. The case was diagnosed only on December 9. And by December 20, just a couple of days ago, they cracked it. They confirmed that it leaked from the lab. But the fact remains that this person who was infected, she had been fully vaccinated with Moderna. She was in her 20s. She walked around town, developed symptoms and didn't get

tested for even a week. Only when she lost her sense of smell and taste, then she went and got a COVID test. So everybody was shocked. Everyone was surprised. So I'd say that even if this came from a lab, people can be very surprised. So I don't think that it was a deliberate release of a weapon or virus. And this virus, so if you had been studying it in a lab, you wouldn't have known that it could spread asymptomatically in humans, that kind of thing. So it's very difficult to know how a virus will behave in humans, even if you study it in a lab. So now, yeah, I don't think it was on purpose that I mean, I think only I mean, I don't think many people believe it was on purpose, except for like, you know, nutty people. But that's to be distinguished from the issue of whether it was the product of some gain of function research, which I don't have an opinion on, but I know that's out there. What can you tell us about that? So it's on the table. So it's on the table,

whether or not this virus was genetically modified and potentially enhanced, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The reason why I say that is because of a document that was leaked in September of this year. It's called the Diffuse Proposal. It was a research proposal submitted by an organization actually in New York City. It's called the EcoHealth Alliance. And they were collaborating with other scientists in the US as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so the WIV. And in this proposal in early 2018, they told the funders that they wanted to insert novel

cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses. So it sounds very complex, but the analogy I use is like you find this proposal that says we're going to put horns on horses. And at the end of 2019, a unicorn shows up in the city of one of the people on that proposal. So when you see that kind of striking coincidence, you're like, yeah, maybe this unicorn is not a product of nature. Maybe we need to investigate and see whether these scientists had actually collected a unicorn.

Maybe they had found a rare SARS-like virus with a rare cleavage site. Or maybe they put it together in the lab as part of their plan, which is not a conspiracy. It's literally what they wrote well your analogy leans towards of course this is a gain of fun yeah it may not be your intention but obviously if i see a unicorn i mean that would have been enough for me but this may not be as as uh you know ridiculous as that well but some some of the scientists on the natural origin side so they say that other animals have horns too so you know like moose and all these other animals they also have things protruding

from their heads so it's possible it's technically possible that there are horses on their very rare horses that have horns on their head and that maybe it's just a big coincidence that a unicorn shows up in a city where these scientists said they were going to put horns on horses so i still i still leave a natural origin on the table but what is clear is that it is knowable we can actually go to the eco health alliance based in new york city and ask them to share their documents and exchanges with us um i have two more questions come to my one is kind of political so did you see the, the, um, mini series Chernobyl? I think it was on HBO. Yeah. I watched that. Yeah. And so there were a lot of, there were a lot of parallels to that. One of them just to, as an aside, was that early on they said, uh, well, it's only 30 Rengen of radioactivity, uh, just like a chest x-ray.

And it turned out, well, that was the limit of the geiger counters that that reminded me very early of when they were saying there's only 50 cases of covet in new york but but that was just we only had 50 tests right so it clearly was much much higher so but but another lesson kind of chernobyl is just how incompetent dictatorships are and just how perverse the incentives are within a dictatorship. So you would imagine in a Western lab, if something is unsafe, a Western scientist would hopefully immediately blow the whistle, go to the supervisor, call the papers, whatever it is. Whereas I fear that a scientist working in China would just keep their head down and be very afraid. I'm not going to be the one to blow the whistle on this.

I could get killed or something like that. Is that, am I right about that? And do you think that that would mean that Chinese labs in general just are more dangerous and we can't trust them? Well, I think that some cultures definitely favor more cover-up

and less transparency because they're life and death situations. So if you tell the government something that you don't like, your whole family could get disappeared or all your students could get disappeared. So I don't see it as a judgment on people, but I see as a judgment on the situation that they're put in. That being said, I'd say that even in the US, there's a lot of cover up that nobody likes to admit to wrongdoing, whether it's a mistake,

or whether it's something bad that was done on like intentionally. So wherever we are, there are ways to make things more transparent to incentivize or to mandate reporting of mistakes made. So for example, in the US, there is a mandatory reporting of exposures, accidental exposures or losses of select agents. So these select agents are the most terrifying toxins and pathogens around. And we know from records that in 2019, there were on average more than four accidental exposures or losses of select agents per week. More than four per week on average in the US in

2019. So that's only the worst of the worst pathogens. Before this pandemic, if you look at SARS-CoV-2, no one would have said it was a select agent. They would have said it was just a regular virus. In fact, the scientists in Wuhan were experimenting with similar viruses at a very low biosafety level, BSL-2. This is a level where even if you get sick, you don't have to tell anybody. Even if you spill things on the floor, you may not have to tell anybody. So that is this. I think now everyone around the world should have a much more cautious approach to working with novel pathogens. But I'd say that it's probably more difficult in

places where there's less of a culture of transparency. Yeah, I have a fundamental deep mistrust about any dictatorship. This is definitely not about Chinese people, because the example I gave was Russians, of any dictatorship, like Iran handling nuclear material or whatever it is, I just don't believe they will have any protocols. I picture like the circuit breakers in the Iranian nuclear lab, you know, with duct tape on them because they're blowing all this up. Like I just, I think we in the West don't fully understand how different these authoritarian dictatorships are and how that translates into real risk of them handling technologies that can end the world or ruin it. You know, it scares me.

Yeah. And there are very practical things we can do to make even research in these dictatorships more transparent. And people kind of don't believe me, but these are very small steps that can have a tremendous effect. And one of them is that in the scientific community, that these top journals, they're kind of like the most prized places for people to publish their work. If these journals all just agreed that we will no longer publish any more research where pathogens are enhanced, whether intentionally or not, if they all agree, I'm not going to publish any more papers where I see you've been sitting on novel pathogens for years and years, this would eliminate the problem almost immediately because no one will want to work on things where they

cannot publish in these top places. And another way is just to build a very luxurious research island somewhere where all of the researchers can go from any country to do this research in the most safest, most controlled manner. So it shouldn't be, you know, in Alaska, like Antarctica or something. It should be in a really nice place, maybe one of the Caribbean islands or something, but a place where all the scientists will be begging their bosses, like, please let me go here so I can do this dangerous research. And then everyone there is quarantined and properly tested and contact traced even after they leave quarantine. So that way we bring all of the research around the world into this very transparent place and the place where all the work is being done openly. That

way we don't have right now the situation where we have dozens of pathogen labs spread out across the world, all engaging in research that we have no idea what it is. You know, we go to that island and there's horses with horns on them, like the island of Dr. Moreau. Maybe a bit. I wonder what island would volunteer to be the location for this. We should use the one from Jurassic Park. I mean, the islands are all taken you know at this point and uh so i have another question maybe here on this island here

in new york city rikers island uh uh we uh we hear a lot of like pop scientific truisms that the virus wants to get less lethal because that's how a virus, you know, and I'm not sure that's not a simplistic way of presenting this. It seems to me that a mutation is random and that it's not because of a virus has any will or there's any particular force making it less lethal that this particular Omicron mutation was less lethal, then the less lethal virus would eventually win out over a long term, which is natural selection. So in the end, 100 years from now, yes, we would see the less lethal virus. But I think people are putting too much faith in this kind of idea that just inextricably, the virus is going to get less lethal. Am I right about that? Yes. And so we actually discussed this in the book. And the reason for some of this hypothesis is actually that some virologists had brought

it up several years ago. But those virologists had written those hypothesis without being aware that the virus like SARS-CoV-2 would appear in 2019. And SARS-CoV-2 has some very striking characteristics that are different from other viruses. So it can spread before a person even shows symptoms. If half of the transmissions are happening before symptoms appear, then it doesn't matter what it's like after symptoms appear. And it has extremely long incubation time of 14 days. So five to 14 days, which is the first SARS virus was like three to five days or five to seven days.

So imagine a person being able to think that they're not sick for two weeks, but they're just traveling everywhere, you know, going to all the weddings and funerals they want to, and then accidentally super spreader events happen. And this virus also has this whole range of symptoms. So it's not, you don't necessarily get a fever or cough or sore throat. Some people even just have like diarrhea. That's the only symptom that they have just because the virus is infecting a different part of your body. So in this case where you're so confused about whether or not you have COVID-19 or something else, the flu or allergies, it's really difficult to contain this virus. So I don't think that we

can apply any of the old rules to this virus anymore. It's even difficult to tell whether Omicron is milder, because so many people now have been infected by the original SARS-CoV-2 virus. They don't know whether they were or not. But that means that there's some subset of the population that has pre-existing immunity. They just don't know. They're not necessarily aware. And so many of us are now vaccinated. So it's difficult to estimate whether or not this virus, this new variant, Omicron, is milder compared to the original. Unless you intentionally expose similar groups of people to this virus and then see what happens. We can hope that the dictatorships do that for us. But you, they will. But I do have one kind of theory, not a theory, but at one

pot, like it just occurred to me, what if in general, it was more difficult for a virus, given all the different possibilities of DNA, like if you could, if you had every single possible combination of DNA out there, what if it's less likely just in general for a virus to be lethal? Because it has to all come together just perfectly to actually be lethal. Then, just because the odds are less likely for a virus to be lethal, you would see a virus most likely becoming less lethal with mutations just based on probabilities, right? I'm not too sure about that. So the way I think about virus evolution or generally evolution is that it's exploring a landscape, a landscape with a lot of mountains and valleys. And depending on how it travels and how much travel is allowed, so for example, if SARS-CoV-2, we allowed it to spread through at least 300 million people today.

It has traveled all over this landscape. So it's not necessarily traveling to a place of lower lethality or to a place of higher transmissibility. It's just where it goes and how even just luck or chance. It's that if someone carries a variant that has higher transmissibility

and they go attend like a wedding, then that's it. Like it just goes boom and the whole world catches it. So there's a lot of luck and chance at playing. And it depends where the virus is traveling at that time. I think Noam was asking is a random mutation more or less likely to be lethal? Oh, so a random mutation is most likely to be lethal? Oh, so a random mutation is most likely to be a loss of function, but that doesn't translate to loss of lethality.

It means that the virus might be less capable of infecting people in the first place or less capable of replicating itself to making more copies of itself. Yeah. And I guess the final question, let's get, we have more is, how do you see- Can I just follow up on that very briefly now? Sure, of itself. Yeah. And I guess the final question, let's get, we have more is, how do you follow up on that very briefly, Noam? Yeah, of course. I don't know that we've necessarily answered Noam's question. So do we, do we as a general matter see virus is getting

less lethal, more lethal over time? Or, or it, we can't say? We can't say because let's say it has a random mutation that tends to lead to a loss of function. So that means that this mutant doesn't get given to the next person. So it's less fit. It doesn't win the survival of the fittest experiment. Only the fittest get transmitted and lead to super spreader events.

So there's some element of luck there. So maybe someone is very sick for a long time and they've evolved this very highly transmissible variant. But if they live in a cabin in the woods somewhere and nobody ever comes to visit them while they're sick, that's a dead end. But if someone else who carries a less transmissible variant or something, but hosts like a thousand person pool party, everyone that gets infected, that virus has much more of a running start. So there's some element of luck there. But I'd say generally, most random mutations lead to loss of function and are not given a chance to spread. Yeah, I was kind of thinking of analogy of like, if there's a million lottery tickets and only 20 of them are winning tickets and you have a winning ticket,

that's the lethal virus. If you just write, it's lethal. And then your ticket mutates and you get a different ticket number. There's only 19 other lethal viruses out there. So you're likely to become less lethal simply because the odds of lethality are more remote than the odds of non-lethality. I don't know if that's true scientifically. I'm just saying,

if that were true scientifically, that could explain why they, that would be a non-natural selection reason why it becomes less lethal. That's just something I was thinking about. And then you can give me your theories about comedy after that I'm thinking about that night I think it would differ from virus to virus because like each virus is so complex as it's like this moving part it's like a complex of at least like 20 moving parts and some of these viruses so you don't necessarily know what what are the changes to make to make a virus more or less lethal. So it's tough to know whether it's easily within reach for it to mutate and become lethal or not. Although I'd say that this question

is what drives a lot of gain of function research. So there's some scientists who said that their friends dared them to make a virus more lethal or transmissible, and they wanted to prove that they could do it. So they did it. So I'd say that sometimes they find that the answer is a lot closer than we expect but a lot of scientists don't think that this type of work should be done because of how easy it is to define a more dangerous virus and and how easy it is for these viruses to escape from the lab and cause an outbreak what do you think yeah I think that this work should be, again, put on a very remote island where you'd bring all the people from every country

and they all just do it on this single island where there's very good surveillance of the wastewater from all the labs and everything and the people entering and leaving. Then you can have a blast, like just do whatever you want on this island, but don't put it in like every major city. Like why are these

labs being placed in Boston, in Wuhan City, in Singapore? It makes no sense that these would be within 20 minutes drive of the nearest international airport and within a half hour train ride to the nearest wet market, all the hospitals. Could we see another Black Death scenario, which killed a third of the people in Europe? Is that possible that that could happen again? Or does modern medical technology make that impossible or very unlikely? I think it depends on luck and what types of viruses we see in the future. But I'd say that one very important movement that's emerged because of COVID-19

is this COVID is airborne movement. So there are some scientists who say that we very important movement that's emerged because of COVID-19 is this COVID is airborne movement. So there's some scientists who say that we need a revolution in how we think about clean air. So with all these very long time ago pandemics, the solution was just cleaning the water. So just telling people you shouldn't be drinking out the toilets anymore and the water should be filtered and things like clean before it goes into everyone's homes. So they're saying that we need the same kind of thing today, but with air. So filtering the air with heap of filters, like having buildings built so that there's more airflow. Just very simple things, but they somehow require quite a cataclysmic revolution in how we build buildings. Should we prepare for the nuclear option? So

from what I read, they can turn around now these mRNA vaccines very, very, very quickly. Have it on the drawing board literally within hours. And then within a couple of weeks, they could actually have a vaccine ready to test. And of course, was that a Moore's law? Is that what it is, Dan? That's to do with computers. Right, but by analogy, you would presume that every technology speeds up that way. And before you know it, it'll be like Star Trek.

They'll be able to have the actual vaccine within a few hours. And then the rest is testing. But of course, how long you test and what your protocols are for testing are measured against the risk of what it is. So if you have time to test, you test. But what if Omicron, everybody's just dropping dead?

Should there be a nuclear option where we're all geared up to produce a virus immediately? I mean, produce a virus immediately? I mean, produce a vaccine immediately? Should we determine that, listen, we just can't test, we're just going to have to go for it based on everything we know in the past, because the risk of not vaccinating is, you know, is much higher than the risk of letting this thing spread. Should that be where we're going in terms of pandemic policy? Yes. And so a lot of money should be invested into vaccine manufacturing infrastructure. So even in this pandemic, it was quite a miracle that the mRNA vaccines worked because it was the first time it was being deployed on such a wide scale in humans that a lot of people

are skeptical, right? So even till today, a lot of people will not take the mRNA because they're so fearful that this new technology hasn't been tracked for enough years. So, and most someone who's been in the trials has maybe one and a half years of safety tracking. So not a lifetime tracking, but I think the money for future pandemic preparedness should go into diagnostics and vaccine manufacturing and distribution. So I think we're even test driving that right now,

because with the Omicron, when are we going to get updated boosters? When are we going to get a booster that is targeted towards the Delta, Omicron, Alpha, maybe even a cocktail vaccine, one where you're given all three spikes at once so that you develop a very robust immune response to a diverse range of variants. So I wish that would come out faster. I would rather get that as a booster than more of the SARS-CoV-2 1.0. But I think it might take time. It might take even till like April. Yeah.

Well, by that time, everybody will be naturally boosted again. Yeah. Yeah. I hope we're just working towards a time when, and you know, and what's this 2021 in 2040, when there's a few cases of a virus and they immediately can produce a vaccine and stop it in its tracks. You know, that's it. That seems possible, right? Is there evidence now that if you've contracted Omicron, that you're then protected from getting it again?

So I think most likely if you're a young and healthy person or if you're healthy in general and you get exposed to a particular variant of the virus, you will develop a robust immune response to it, and that will protect you from reinfection with at least the same variant. So if you get infected by Omicron, you should be protected against Omicron. But the issue is that there are lots of pockets of people who are not, who don't have very healthy immune responses. And if you're a person like you're a doctor or a nurse or a teacher, we just constantly surrounded by people getting sick, then even if you have a strong immune response, just constant bombardment of the virus on you means that you still have a good chance of getting reinfected, what if we run out of Greek letters, alphabet, or do we start with alpha, but say alpha two?

Oh, they, they say it's now going to constellations. Oh, that's good. Yeah. And I guess, how do you see this all ending and has Omicron hastened that ending? So I don't think that this is going to end anytime soon. And this speaks to the unequal burden of a pandemic on the globe, is that there are some countries where there would just never be proper vaccine distribution.

So at any time in the future, there will always be places where this virus is just having a free, like joy ride and just evolving into whatever new variant there is. So even with influenza, with the flu, we get a new vaccine every year. And at the beginning of every year, they have to pick the strain, like what they predict will be the main flu epidemic that year. And they give us that vaccine. So the same thing will happen with COVID-19. There's no way to eradicate it now. Even if you shut everyone in their houses miraculously for 2.5 months, like Wuhan did. It is in the animals in our country too, like deer are infected. Probably other animals are infected too.

We're not sure yet. So unless you wipe out all these other animals and shut everyone up in the house for 2.5 months, there's no way to eradicate this virus. There's an interesting additional irony. I don't know if it's true or not, but if it's true, it's an additional irony that they say that this extensive mutation of Omicron might be because it developed within a person with AIDS,

who the irony is was being kept alive with antiviral technology, which is now allowing viruses to mutate. Do you give any credence to that theory? Yeah. So I think at least a few hypotheses of how Omicron might have emerged. And one of them is this, is that it was in an immunocompromised person for extended period of time, maybe more than a year even. So what this means is that in some immunocompromised people, they don't have the ability to clear the virus from their body. So it's always there at some low level and maybe even at the undetectable level,

but one day it flares up again and that's when accidents can happen and outbreak can happen. Some other hypothesis include it being an animal reservoir. So maybe being in a pool of animals that has only occasional contact with humans. And after a while it spilled back into humans after we gave it to them.

So it's like exchanging variants, punching each other in the faces repeatedly. But one more is that it might have even been in a village or a small population of people or a country where there's very little surveillance. And so when that happens and you don't track the spread of a virus in some countries for a year, and that's probably quite true for some places in Africa and South America, other places that have very little surveillance because of issues of resources, not having enough resources to go out there, collect samples and

sequence them and put the data online. That's when you have all these blind spots around the world. And anytime someone who just travels to the main city could give what they have there to that city. So this whole Omicron thing, it really says we need to be doing more surveillance of immunocompromised patients of animal populations and of places that are underserved, that don't have the resources to be surveilling the spread of COVID-19. Well, I don't want to pat ourselves on the

back, but I don't think I've ever heard a more informative interview on the subject of COVID than this is. They should run this interview on CNN. It outclasses everything that's ever been done. Do you agree, Perry Allen Dan? I don't know. I haven't seen all the COVID interviews, but I often think that we do a decent job. No, I mean, obviously Alina deserves the credit, but I'm saying, wow, this was a really good interview. I think a lot of it, one has to give me a certain degree of credit. I direct things and keep things moving. And Perrielle did send out the Zoom links.

We got to give her credit for it. Hey, method. You found Alina. No, I said Alina. So that's fantastic. All right. That's it, I guess. Any other questions, Dan?

Alina. Well, no. Alina, you're in Massachusetts? Yes. Well, if you make it down to New York, I know Noam often extends the invitation, so I'll do it this time to come to the Comedy Cellar. We'd love that. And do you go now in your personal COVID safety protocol, what are you doing?

Are you going out? Are you wearing an N95 mask? Well, I think I've been on the safer side of things so i haven't gone to large events or anything like that uh at least not in places where it's not ventilated so at any time even if it's like a christmas party you have to be very selective about which one you go to and you keep all the windows and doors open so everyone is freezing to death but you you're at least safe from omicron uh safer from omicron. And, um, yeah, just, I think people don't necessarily need to panic and buy all the N95s in the shop and just practicing some common sense of saying maybe this year I'm not going to like party hop, maybe this year I'm just going to stay with my close family.

So I don't expose them to more variants than the Omicron virus. Uh, just, uh, yeah, not, not making people go to work in person as well, unless absolutely necessary. I think that's really important. Unfortunately, I'm still seeing some companies mandate that their employees come in and sit in meeting rooms all day long with each other. And I think that's not very pandemic-minded.

Well, okay. Then I do have one more question. I'm happy you said that because it triggered in something that I, that I should have asked, which is, I had felt that if the current risk profile of Omicron, let's, let's just limit this to a highly vaccinated place like New York. I don't want to comment on like Africa, which might have a totally different answer to this question,

but if the current risk profile of Omicron were, had been the initial risk profile of COVID when it first appeared, essentially where it's mild, almost nobody's dying, you know, I feel like we would have done nothing as a society to react to it. We'd have just said, there's a new, there's a new cold going around, you know, try not to get it. But we wouldn't have thought about not going to work or anything like that. So it makes me think that much of this is PTSD. Like, I don't want to get it.

I don't want my wife to get it. I don't want my kids to get it. And that defies a certain amount of rationality because everything I know says, this isn't the virus of two years ago and they are vaccinated. And why shouldn't they get it? You don't freak out about a cold. You don't freak out about any number of things which are really no threat to them. So how do we put that all in a rational order? Yeah. So there's some individual liberty to think about. So some people might say

that I am OK with getting COVID-19, so I will do whatever I want. Or some people might say that I am okay with getting COVID-19. So I will do whatever I want. Or some people might say, actually, my parents are elderly, and I don't want to be the one bringing Omicron into the house to them. Even if they've been boosted, there's a chance they might still get it. And because of their age and pre-existing conditions, they might develop severe conditions. And there's also people who are thinking beyond the individual and their families, but thinking about the healthcare workers. So I do have some friends who are nurses and doctors and they are getting slammed. So it's okay for me to say that I don't need to go to all these parties this year, just in case.

I don't want to be one of the people in this ICU or being an extra straw on the camel's back. Because there are people paying the consequences of other people's actions and so actually this book that I've published with Matt Ridley I'm splitting my proceeds I'm donating half of it and I'm splitting the proceeds three ways one third is going to go to health care workers nurses in particular half is that Matt Ridley's half no no each each each of us are donating half so he actually did that for his previous book, Rational Optimist. So I'm just following in his footsteps. So another third is going to wildlife conservation. So again, I do think that natural origin is still on the table.

We still have to conserve wildlife and prevent these animals from being brought into urban centers where they can give us diseases. And the last one, I'm looking for an organization that protects whistleblowers. So this is very important. So a way for people to stand up and tell us what they know. And I'm actually very optimistic about finding the origin of COVID-19. I believe it's only a matter of time. So we saw even with the anthrax leaks in the Soviet Union in the 70s, it took many decades. It took basically a regime change before someone felt that it was safe enough to come out and tell us. But we know. And also in the 70s, again, this H1N1 pandemic, it was only decades later that a U.S. scientist told us that his Chinese counterpart wrote a letter to him telling them that they basically know it's from a lab. So it takes years for things to come up. And I think more needs to be done to

protect whistleblowers, encourage them and incentivize whistleblowers. Wasn't there? Yeah, that is incredible. Wasn't there a Chinese professor and COVID researcher who was found dead in like a very mysterious quote unquote suicide murder. I think his name was Bing Liu or Bing Liu. Does that ring? No, I'm not. I'm not familiar with that case. I'll send you. Look it up. Send her the meme that you saw it. I can I can try Googling it. By the way, your previous answer, and we'll let you go, your previous answer about the healthcare workers, it is interesting, and you could help various agencies improve their messaging because a lot of the messaging we're getting doesn't really ring true because we

all kind of know, well, this is so mild. I have 40 friends already who have gotten it. They barely a step. And so what am I really worried about? But if you explain to people, it's not about that. It's about we're all in this together. And these people have been suffering in the hospital for two years already, and now they're going to have another wave. Maybe, you know, that that's, I mean, I don't want to be overly optimistic about what people will actually do when they hear a message like that at least it's an honest message at least it's a message that i can't just say oh come on that's bull you know that matters yeah i think it matters to hear from nurses and doctors and for some reason i have a lot of friends who

are nurses and doctors like i have friends who are in there in the front line like doing great uh like graveyard shifts like just every night in in ICU, just like seeing all these patients, not even COVID-19 patients, but just that the combination of the COVID-19 patients and people who regularly need healthcare, need treatment like cancer, or, you know, heart attack and that kind of thing, just all of that slamming them at once in a huge peak of cases, it results in a lot of burnout. There are a lot of people quitting healthcare. So I think we need to make sure that this pandemic doesn't obliterate our healthcare system. We still need healthcare for other things than COVID.

If you were the mayor of New York City right now, what would you be mandating in terms of regulations for the city? I don't think I can say that. So I'm a scientist, not a politician. And I think sometimes, I think that there should be more scientists in politics working closely with policymakers to enact science-based policy. And I've seen some efforts on the COVID-19 airborne front is that we really need these aerosol scientists, people who study how

viruses travel through the air. We really need them in these policy making sessions, like telling us how we should make our air cleaner, how to prevent unnecessary deaths. So it's so crazy to think that just putting an air filter in a room or a carbon dioxide monitor in a room can save lives. But it does, right? Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure to meet you and speak with you.

I'm very happy we did this. So that's it. I guess you're free to go. People, let's tell everybody where they can find you. Oh, yeah. On Twitter? Oh, yeah. People can find me on Twitter at A-Y-J-C-H-A-N. And I'd be really happy if you want to read the book.

So in my opinion, it's extremely well-researched. Like 15% of the book is citations because it was co-written by me, a scientist, and Matt Rilly, a science writer, a very well-known science writer. And so this book, I think, will stand the test of time. It was written so that no matter what is found in the future, this book really is a very good resource for anyone who wants to understand the complex issue behind where this virus came from and who are the key figures in this so we just spent the last hour talking about just the impact of a single variant on our lives and this is just going to keep happening again and again and we have to do everything in our power to make sure we are not just meeting waves upon waves of new pandemics like we are in a new era where there's not only the pre-existing wildlife origins of pathogens,

but now we have proliferating pathogen research. And people need to know more about that. I'm just, I'm on your Twitter page right now. Our different Judah Friedlander is following you. Oh.

Comedian and a somewhat of a hypochondriac. I didn't know that. You're also writing here about contact tracing. We won't get into it, but that's another interesting question. If America is culturally able to contact trace, it seems like it would be great if it worked,

but it just never, never worked out. But all right, we're going to let you go because you've been here. From the wet, from the great city of Vancouver, Canada. Thank you for even though she lives in Boston now. Bye, everybody. Are we are we are we finished? Are we finished? We can do a few minutes wrap up the book is called viral the search for the origin of covid 19 okay bye alina bye alina thank you dr shan no alina

works alina works just fine no i'm like normal and i always have to remind him that uh that he goes too far with that thank you alina happy holidays bye bye thank you so much so what are we wrapping up i think we're finished aren't't we? Still here. You got to click leave. Okay, bye. She can stay as she wants. I don't want to keep her. Very pleasant lady. Very knowledgeable. I guess that's it. I didn't want to ask her what recommendation she would have for you,

because I was afraid you might not like the answer. At the club? With regard to the club. I was sort of hoping you were going to ask that, but. I'm not crazy. No, I mean, I'm not going to unilaterally shut down the club when the most left-wingish alarmist people are saying that people can continue to go out

I mean Nobody's dying I've been very good about this but I don't see a reason To I mean people I presume the people who are coming to the club now are people Who are vaccinated And boosted and young And they don't feel that they have to worry about this

Well again as long as everybody's Yeah I mean it's a swim at your own risk like we like like your slogan is that still is that still the official uh policy uh stated policy yes yes it's still the official i really like that expression um what would you go sit inside with a mask on somewhere noam uh i i definitely would if i didn't have one unvaccinated child i would yes even with your 47 boosters you wouldn't do it now no because the i well i mean these are tough questions because you have to say well how important is it how like what was at But like, just in general right now.

Yeah, just in general right now. It's not- I'm staying home and I'd like to take the next few weeks to let things blow over. I'm going to go to work and check on things periodically a few times a week. You know, I'll put my M100 mask on and go to work. I don't plan to stay and socialize

or eat indoors with my mask off. But I wouldn't go see a comedy show now and take my mask off and have drinks. Why would I do that? No, no, no. But you would go, you're going to go inside with a mask on. With an N100 mask on, yes. I think that's safe to do. I do too. I'm just curious. Dan, what are's safe to do. I do too. I'm just curious. Dan, what are you going to do when you're allowed back into the world?

I'm going to try to make some money and take those spots from all those people that are sick. Once he knows he's immune to Omicron, he's going to hit the strip clubs and the escort services. I know Dan. Is Mark Norman well? How the hell is the guy

connected you to that i mean i i saw his name on his schedule i'm like how the fuck is this guy not got omicron with his lifestyle a lot of people have a lot and and there's always a certain number of people who are not telling us so well it's it's it's hard to hide it if you you know i mean you know um but anyway it's not hard to hide it well it's hard to hide it if i showed up at the comedy so you'd know something was wrong i'm just not quite as sharp and you know i don't think we noticed it but um so a podcast at comedyseller.com This episode was obviously a lot different than our last episode. We're all over the place, folks. So, which do you prefer?

Do you prefer this very, very science-based episode or the last episode where we talked about writing new jokes? Let us know. Or do you like when we alternate between the two? Let us know. Podcast at ComedySally.com. Perry L's books, The Only Bush I Trust is My Own and On My Knees,

available on Amazon. My book, Iris Spiro Before COVID, also available on Amazon. Comedy Cellar High Show is seven nights a week. You don't have to buy a drink. You can keep your mask on the whole time. Don't encourage it, Dan. Just tell me.

But that's your personal risk profile will dictate it. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.