The New Yorker Radio Hour - Questions about the Variant Virus, and Posthumous Albums by Pop Smoke and others

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

A new variant of SARS-CoV-2 is making its way around the world; in the U.S., it has been found in at least three states: California, Colorado, and New York. Joe Osmundson, an assistant professor of biology at New York University, speaks with the New Yorker staff writer Carolyn Kormann about why this new strain is particularly concerning. It has twenty-three mutations—far more than scientists would expect an RNA virus to have—which makes it at least fifty per cent more contagious than the original virus. The response, Osmundson says, should be to double down on reducing transmission by encouraging a culture of caution. Mask wearing, he warns, might be with us for a long time. Osmundson came of age as a gay man during the AIDS crisis, and he compares our pressing need for social distancing to the cultural change that took place during that era. “It was not a joy, growing up, to worry about H.I.V. every time I had sex, and to feel like if I don’t wear a condom, I might die,” he tells Kormann. “And yet that was part of how we cared for each other. It is a way to care.” Plus, a music editor and writer picks some favorites from a very specific genre: posthumous rap albums.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Joseph Osmondson is a molecular biologist at New York University, and he's written extensively about COVID-19. Recently, the New Yorkers, Carolyn Kormon, asked him to explain some of the new and scary questions about the virus as it develops. I wanted to talk about some of the stuff we're seeing in the news, and we're now dealing with not just one, but two strains of the original coronavirus we know so well. And these strains are distinct. Could you break down for me on a really kind of granular level?

How often does this virus SARS-CoV-2 mutate? You know, biology is never perfect. And so everything is going to make mistakes. Your cell sometimes makes mistakes when it copies all of its DNA. A virus will inevitably mutate. And those mutations are so we call them the raw material of evolution, right? So if there are differences in the genetic sequence of a virus, those differences can have phenotypic differences, which just means differences in how the virus acts. Does it replicate faster?

Does it replicate more in certain cells? And the more transmission that occurs, the more people the virus is in, the more chances it has to change. So this is yet again a reason why the NPI is the non-pharmaceutical interventions. Social distancing is so important. This virus is worrisome. I will say that it is for sure worrisome. In part because of the number of mutations it has. It has 23 total mutations.

So that's a surprise to scientists. It is. And we actually, the leading hypothesis of how the virus may have emerged. We know that, you know, most people, an individual gets COVID. They spend a couple days not yet feeling sick, but they're infectious. Then they may shed virus for another eight to 10 days after that. And then, you know, it's an RNA virus. It doesn't stick around in your.

body, even if you're testing positive after that 10 days, we think the vast majority of people, the virus is not actively replicating and they're not infectious. But we know for sure that people with compromised immune systems can actually replicate the virus for a much longer period of time. Right. So up to 70 days. So one infection, an individual has shed virus for 70 days if they're immunocompromise. And that is actually that person's immune system over a long period of time, putting a lot of pressure on the virus to mutate. Right. So that's the type of situation we think where these strains with so many mutations in them may evolve.

It's kind of an atypical infection in an individual. Wow. So you're saying that the variant with 23 mutations most likely came from a person. It evolved in a person or a series of people who were immunocompromised. That seems to be the leading hypothesis. We certainly don't have day. We haven't found that individual. and we don't have sort of the genetic sleutory to trace it back exactly to that.

But if you look at the number of mutations, that's the most sort of likely theory to why this type of evolution could occur. And this new strain first emerged in September maybe, and it seemingly has spread all over southern England and throughout London very quickly. It seems that most new cases are this strain. The way the epidemiological data work is that you basically quantify how much of the viral transmission, how many new cases come from the variant, the new strain or the typical what we would call a wild type virus. And the pattern that they saw is that this variant seems

to spread through the population quite rapidly. And this certainly is raising everyone's alarm bells. Okay. And at this point, especially in this country, we don't know how long it's been here or how much it's spreading. That's right. So we really don't have a good idea of how much much of it is here. We think based on some very preliminary studies that it's not super duper widespread. It is, of course, worrying that the individuals found to have this variant have no history of travel to the UK. We are not sequencing enough viruses, right? This was found by an incredible work in the UK to say, we need to take 5% or 10% of the people who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 and sequence every letter in the genome of that.

virus. And to try to look for exactly this type of thing, some analysis that the science advocacy group I work with and I have been doing shows that only a couple of states in 2020 even have one or two percent of their cases sequenced. Many states have none. And many states where there's tons and tons of transmission has very sparse sequencing. So we would not be finding this if it were here. It is here and we don't really know how widespread it is. You know, I find it really, as a virologist, this type of evolution is both terrifying and interesting, but what it means for people is not anything new. We need to stop transmitting this virus because this virus might be more transmissible, and that could actually lead to a really horrific outcome in terms of the number of deaths. Some sort of back of the envelope math show that a virus that's more transmissible,

will actually cause more deaths than a virus that's more deadly because it's exponential the way it spreads. Oh, wow. So it is... So it's potentially very bad news if it's more transmissible. If preliminary data on transmissibility hold up and we are slow at vaccine rollout and we don't get better at non-pharmaceutical interventions

like wearing masks, we could be in for a world of hurt You know, I think fundamentally, we need to be doing the same things that we should have been doing all along, and we need really fast vaccine rollout. So if this thing is more transmissible, but the vaccine still works, and we really hope and think that it likely still will, the faster we get the vaccine to people, the more we can start turning down the transmission, even of a more infectious virus. The good news, and this is data we've had already since the spring, is that vaccination tends to produce a more consistent and robust immune response than does disease. So that is really good news. Are you still going to be protected against this new variant? We have no reason to believe that you won't, so we think so.

I would say the other good news about the vaccines, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, as you know, are mRNA vaccines, which means that we can actually just take the MRNA that we put in the vaccine and give it the new version of the spike protein from the new virus. That could happen very quickly. Right. So if we find that the virus has escaped the vaccine, we could swap that in quickly. Right. This conversation will continue just in terms of how much mask-wearing, social distancing,

and other measures will be necessary for everyone. until really we get to about 75% of the population vaccinated. Do you agree with that? I would say even then. I think COVID is going to be with us for a very long time. It might take more than a year to get to 75%. COVID tests and COVID diagnoses, I think, will happen occasionally even when we get to 75%. Because you will never have 100% of people vaccinated.

You'll always have travel around the globe. we see from history that we don't eradicate infectious diseases with vaccines very well. It's the only ever happened with smallpox, only, right? And so I think that that history tells us that both the vaccine will make things immeasurably better. I cannot wait to be vaccinated. Does that mean I won't ever think about COVID risk diagnosis wearing masks? No, I still will even then. I am curious what kind of faith you have that people will keep up.

social distancing once they start hearing more and more people they know have been vaccinated. I don't think we have done well communicating to people how to manage risk. You know, I'm a queer scientist. I was born in 1983, the year HIV was identified as the virus that causes AIDS. Risk management has been a part of my upbringing and culture since I was a child. And I don't think we've done well to communicate how exhausting that is to people, but how much that type of thinking saves lives. It was not a joy growing up to worry about HIV every time I had sex and to feel like if I don't wear a condom, I might die. And yet that was part of how we cared for each other.

It's not fun, but it is a way to care. Well, it was wonderful speaking with you, Joe. Thank you so much. And good luck with all your work. I feel more energized now than when we started the conversation. So I think that's a marker that it's done something for me. Thank you so much. Same.

Thank you. Joseph Osmondson is a molecular biologist at New York University. He spoke with staff writer Carolyn Corman. Stick around. We're going to change. things up in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. hopefully. Sheldon Pierce joined us just a few months ago as music editor and writer for the New Yorkers

goings on about town section. And one of these days, and I hope it's this year, I'll get to drop by his desk and actually meet Sheldon in person. But for now, Zoom has got to do. Sheldon, how are you? I'm doing all right. Pressing forward as best I can. As we all are.

I imagine you in a small room. listening to music 14 hours a day. Am I kind of getting it right? A lot. A lot. Sometimes more than that. And right now you're listening to posthumous rap albums. What's that all about?

Yeah. So every genre sort of has recordings that come after the artist has passed. The Prince Estate has been releasing a ton of music since he passed. A lot of it reissues, a lot of it sort of. live outtakes, but rap is specifically different from other genres in that a lot of these artists are young artists who pass in their primes and then leave a lot of music behind. The phenomenon sort of started in the late 90s, early aughts, with rappers like Notorious B-I-G, Tupac EZ, Big Pun,

but recently in the past 16, 18 months, we've sort of sort of seen a boom in posthumous rap albums, sadly. A lot of rappers have died in shooting incidents, in drug overdose-related incidents. And what we're seeing in these specific incidents is rappers now have, they can record wherever they are. They have a setup in their house. They have a set up in their tour bus. They have a setup in their hotel room. It is easier now than ever to record music. And so they are recording hundreds and often thousands of songs. And so when these young rappers are dying, they are leaving behind massive catalog. Just to be clear, so if you are, if you are a rapper, you're able to do this sitting, you know, in your, in your kitchen with a

microphone and something coming through your headphones. Are these tracks that are formed after they're gone? Are the beats laid on after sometimes? How is it all done technically? So this is fascinating, and I want to start getting to one of our picks, Mac Miller's Blue World from his posthumous album Circles. So Mac Miller, largely independent rapper died in 2018. He was sort of just on the 180. he was sort of just on the cusp of figuring out who he was musically when he passed. Sheldon, one of the mysteries of these records is not only what makes a good posthumous song,

but who gets to decide, this business of the central creative intelligence being missing, having the music being controlled by executors, lawyers, producers. It must be quite a drama. Yeah, so one thing that we see is typically it starts with how these people want the artist to be perceived in the long term. And in a lot of cases, the best of these albums are decided by people who are close to the artist, who are putting the artist's interest first, but mostly are coming together as a tribe and deciding these things together. In the case of the Mac Miller album circles, there were many different people in the room. John Bryan, who was his key collaborator, his engineer Vic Weinstein, his manager, Christian Clancy, and his publicist, Nick Deal, all put their heads together and were trying to decide what was the best for this music.

And they bumped heads a lot. What else have you been listening to, Shelman? I've also been listening to the music of the emo rapper Little Peep. Emo rap is sort of a weird and controversial distinction, and Little Peep was among the most controversial figures of this movement. Why is he so controversial? There are emo fans who don't think that he's emo, and there are rap fans that don't think he's a rapper,

because he is blurring these lines and perhaps that speaks to how innovative the stuff that he was working on was. I want to get into the song When I Lie, which sort of speaks to how difficult it can be to create some of these posthumous records and the process that you must go through. So just listening,

get a sense for the kind of music that Pete makes. It's raw, it's woozy, it's repetitive, and a lot of his songs sound unfinished. And that is the way that he likes them. He likes that rawness to sort of stand in for emotionality. And so Pete died in 2017 and two posthumous albums have been released since. But I had a conversation with Pete's mother, Liza Womack, about how she really had to fight to become the acting administrator of his estate and ensure that his wishes were met. So in the process of the album getting made, one of the albums getting made, she kept hearing about how wonderful things were going and about this great Thai dollar sign feature that was added to this song, One Night Lie. And she thought it sounded great until she went through Peep's old files and heard the original and realized that they had taken out half the song. So it was at that point that she decided to be more involved

and help curate the compilation that this version, the original version, comes from. So you see a little bit about how these projects can create controversy without their creators to make creative decisions for them because who gets to decide what creative decisions are made in the aftermath and what music is released to which audience. Now, I think your third choice is one of the saddest events of the, I guess, the pre-COVID part of the year. In February, Pop Smoke, who was a huge figure in Brooklyn with drill music, I guess. Yeah.

And he was killed in a home break, and people broke into his house and shot him to death. And Pop Smoke is a particularly sad case because it seemed like he was at the forefront of this larger, Brooklyn movement that was just sort of pushing out and making a statement nationally. Drill is sort of this hard-hitting, dark music about sort of street violence in particular and living through it and navigating it. It originates in Chicago, but the kids in Brooklyn sort of made it their own. And he liked the way to dance She like the way to move

She like the way to rock She like the way that I woo And he was The rising tide raising All ships, if you will What has been His recorded legacy In the months since?

So after Pop Smoke died The rapper and Pop Smoke Mentor 50 Cent Executive it produced His posthumous album Shoot for the Stars Aimed for the Moon And he told Pop Smoke's mom that he'd make the album so successful that he'd get her to award shows.

But that is obviously a very different thing than saying that he'd make the best possible album. So the album in turn sort of embraced pop rap from across the country and stuffed unfinished songs with some of the biggest contemporary rappers and has been entirely different from the drill music that sort of made his name. Do you ever worry that kind of extraneous stuff, junk is going to get put out, and it's going to diminish the reputation or diminish the legacy of a particular artist? Absolutely. Every single posthumous album runs the risk of doing this. And I think the pop smoke album is a good example of this. It is so far removed from the stuff that he made his name on,

the stuff that he was best at. But on the other hand, you see this situation where the music that was on the ebbled, album reached its intended audience. And in the end, Pop Smoke ended up becoming bigger in death than he ever was in life in terms of a national audience, in terms of his songs being huge, and in terms of his album going number one in the country. So at the end of the day, even though critics like myself might say that this album is not Pop Smoke's best work, the music found its audience in the end. So who are we to say that it shouldn't have been released? You can't hang along.

She just wants to be. Got that big burking bag, work five, six figures. You might be out of your league. Can you buy that? I'll pull up on the top going on the dawn. I'm the dawn. You can read Sheldon, big swing, big dress.

Big, make a big mess. Before we done, she eggs, when we're going to do it next. Next or what if the seats in the jet. She like all that ganks. Top down. You can read Sheldon Pierce on music of all kinds at New Yorker.com. And that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us.

I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae, Ave Carrillo, Riannon-N-Corbi, Cala, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfay Chen, and Emily Mann.

With additional help from Kyle Lawrence. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.