Theology in the Raw - 788: #788 - The Truth about Covid-19: John C. Bivona

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

In this podcast, John C. Bivona shares a wealth of information about the truth about Covid-19. John is a Senior Biosafety Officer for The University of Chicago – Howard T. Ricketts Laboratory, a Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, as well as a Registered Biosafety Professional with ABSA International (American Biological Safety Association). John was a lead trainer with the Duke Infectious Disease Response Training (DIDRT) Program, funded through an NIEHS-NIH Grant, that was designed to prepare workers at risk of infectious disease exposure. Additionally, he is a certified HAZWOPER/HAZMAT Trainer. John has over 15 years’ experience working in high containment laboratories (BSL3) with high consequence pathogens (i.e. anthrax, plague, highly pathogenic avian influenza, Brucella abortus), with an effective history of training lab workers, clinical care workers, first responders, first receivers and custodial workers to safely work with and control high consequence pathogens such as MERS, SARS and Ebola. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw, the truth about COVID-19. That's kind of a bold title intended to be, but I have been searching for a guest who knows what they're talking about to help me think through our whole virus pandemic. And, you know, things are moving so fast that who knows in a couple of weeks, maybe this podcast will be outdated. Maybe there'll be new revelations about COVID-19 that will augment or correct or enhance what we talk about on this podcast. But I got a fantastic guest to help us think through COVID-19. He's a solid believer in Jesus Christ. I met him a year ago, I believe, a year and a half ago Out in Dyer, Indiana at Faith Church

When I spoke at that church John C. Bivona He shares a wealth of information in this podcast about COVID-19 He is a senior biosafety officer for the University of Chicago Howard T. Ricketts Laboratory, a regional biocontainment laboratory, as well as he's also a registered biosafety professional with the ABSA International, that's American Biological Safety Association. He was a lead trainer with the Duke Infectious Disease Response Training Program, DIDRT. There's just a lot of, I'm reading this bio here because I have this

stuff. I don't know. I don't even know what it is, but it sounds really awesome and prestigious. He is a certified HAZWOP or HAZMAT trainer, H-A-Z-W-O-P-E-R dash or slash H-A-Z-M-A-T. I don't know what that means. He's got over 15 years of experience working in high containment laboratories with high consequence pathogens. He's worked with anthrax, other highly pathogenic avian influenza, like, you know, flus and viruses or whatever. They're airborne. He really knows a lot about the airborne nature of infectious diseases. Anyway, I can keep going on and on. He's, um, he's, yeah, anyway, he's, he's well-learned and he knows what he's talking about. I, in this podcast, I, I just, I, he's just so thoughtful, data-driven, um, and for lack of better terms, balanced because even something like infectious diseases can be

politicized. We just, we're just, as Americans, we especially are just, we can't help ourselves. We will politicize anything. You know, if somebody sneezes, we'll politicize it. If we go to the grocery store, we'll politicize the grocery store. We're just prone to polarized politics. And John is, I think, really well balanced in that area. So anyway, without further ado, let's dive. Oh, no, one more further ado. I released this conversation on my YouTube channel. I'm trying to resurrect my YouTube channel. I'm going to start putting more stuff out there. Okay, so if you go to, I don't even know, Press and Sprinkle in YouTube or whatever, you'll probably come across my channel. So if you want to watch this conversation, the raw footage of this conversation, you want to look at John, see how he talks, you want to look at me in my basement, then you can go to my YouTube channel, press and sprinkle and look at this interview, along with a lot of other stuff on that channel and stuff that I'm going to keep putting up on my YouTube channel.

Okay, so now without further ado, I don't know, whatever that means, please welcome to the show for the first time, but hopefully not the last time, the one and only John C. Bavona. All right, I'm here with my new friend, John Bovina. Is that how you pronounce your last name? I should have asked that ahead of time. Bovona. Bovona. Okay. And so you saw me from a distance, I guess, when I came and spoke at the church

in Dyer, Indiana. Is it Faith Church? Faith Church. Yeah. Do you live in Chicago? I know you work in Chicago. I'm out in Northwest Indiana, but I'm 20, 30 minutes from Chicago. We're right in Northwest Indiana. Stone's throw from Chicago. Okay. So why don't you tell us a bit about what you do? And then we're going to get into the whole COVID-19, and probably we'll just see where the wind blows in that conversation. But tell us what you do, your background, and, yeah, what you do for a living. Sure. So I'm a senior biosafety officer for the University of Chicago.

So I've been there for 20 years with the Office of Research Safety. So I work for the University of Chicago, but I work out at Argonne National Lab. So there's a couple of national labs in the United States and one of them is here in the Chicagoland area. So I work at a high containment facility. It's called the Howard T. Ricketts Laboratory. So there's different biosafety levels. I don't want to get too much into the weeds, but one is the least hazardous and four is the most hazardous. So I work in a biosafety level three facility. So it's a high containment facility. We're a regional biocontainment laboratory. There's 12 in the United States and we serve the Midwest. And we work with high consequence pathogens. Like if you think about

from years, biblical times, the plague, Yersinia pestis is technically the name. And then more recently is anthrax, right? Bacillus anthracis is the virus. So that's anthrax. So that was from 2001, if everybody remembers the anthrax letters. Yeah. To give a little history, so pre 9-11, anybody could work with any pathogens at any time. Post 9-11, we became very regulated. So we went from zero regulation. to now we're probably a little bit hyper regulated, but that's the world we live in. So not only are we working with high consequence pathogens like anthrax, plague, high path avian influenza, 1918 flu, that's been on the news a lot. So that's the Spanish flu, we work with that. And then more

emerging infectious disease, which brings us to the SARS virus, the new SARS COVID-2, which is, you know, causes the disease COVID-19. Yeah. So what we do is we're coming up with vaccines and therapies for, you know, a plethora of those pathogens. Okay. What I do, I'm a biosafety officer. So what I do is I train researchers. We kind of have the first part of training in this stuff is we, you got to do like a character, like a pathogen profile, like, okay, so COVID-19, how is it transmitted? What's the infectious dose? What's the incubation period? So basically from the time that you're exposed to you start having signs and symptoms. What type of personal protective equipment will protect you while you do this type of research?

So that's what I've been doing for probably about 16 years and almost 20 years, but about four years ago, everybody remembers the Ebola outbreak, right? Well, Ebola came and there was in the hospitals, there was a bloodborne pathogen standard. So basically that is nurses, clinicians, doctors, therapists, they all knew how to be, how to work safely around bloodborne pathogens like bodily fluids. Right. But nobody had experience in a clinical care set, you know, environment like a hospital room,

how to navigate working with patients with emerging infectious diseases like Ebola. Right. So if you remember, down in Texas, there was a nurse that she was working with a patient and she contracted the disease. So nobody knew how to put the personal protective equipment on, how to take it off. I mean, we live, we are regulated. We, you know, we're step-by-step how you put, you know, equipment on, how you take it off, how you work with it. So we do the whole entire risk assessment, really soup to nuts. Anything you do in a laboratory. So 2014, the National Institute of Health, they reached out to people that worked in high containment facilities that were day-to-day putting on equipment, taking off equipment. And we started

teaching people around the United States, clinical care workers, emergency responders, how to deal with infectious agents. So I got the opportunity. We did the whole state or the whole Washington, D.C. fire department because that's a high-risk high risk area at DC. So we went out there and trained emergency responders and we did a lot of the hospitals in the United States. So just a little background about me is that I kind of felt like it was, this is a Christian program, so I can bring Christianity into this, right? Absolutely.

But I felt like that was my first Joseph moment where I was a small kid, you know, I lost my dad when I was 10. You know, so my mom, she raised me and my brother, or me, my brother, my sister, we didn't have a lot. And here at the, at the, you know, the apex of this, I was in front of the Chicago Public Health, IDPH, all these hospitals from around the Chicagoland area. And I was doing the training, just because that's what had been my expertise for years. So that's really what I've been doing the last 20 years. And then obviously the last couple of months, you know, we're swimming in COVID-19 and all the research and protocols and the media and all that stuff.

So I got a bunch of questions already. So just, um, I'm going to say for my audience that might not know a lot, and actually I'm asking for myself, can you define a few things? So let's start with pathogen. When you say pathogen, what does that mean? I just mean an infectious agent, anything that can cause an infection, like an example would be flu. Everybody knows the flu. Everybody knows a cold. So that's just a list of from a minor cold to something like Ebola, which would be, you know, something that like has a 50% mortality rate. So anything that can cause infection. Ebola is that high? 50% mortality? Yeah, that's a 50% mortality rate. And that might come down a little bit, but

during the pandemic in Africa, it was around 50%. And then you use the term emerging infectious diseases. Is that right? What would constitute? Is that just like a new one like COVID-19? Right on. So that would be something like in the last couple of years, we've heard of MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Those are things that have never been on planet Earth. And then they pop up in these regional biocontainment laboratories because a lot of universities don't have the facilities to work with this. Because if it's not known, you need to start at the top level of safety, right? You don't start off in some, you know, laboratory that doesn't have the best equipment and personal protective equipment. You want to start at the top, And that way you do your risk assessment. And then if you can move it to, you know, other areas, you can do that.

From my understanding, and if I speak out of ignorance, just feel free to jump in and correct me. There's some kind of similarity between SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Are they in the same family or are they just all new or what's the... No, that's very... Yeah. So they're all coronaviruses. They're all coronaviruses they're all coronaviruses

okay the family of disease is coronavirus okay so coronaviruses have been around for years and years but within the last you know 10-15 years mers popped up right sars popped up so this does have some similarities to sars um that's why it's called SARS-CoV-2. Right. But there are, because it's new, that's why I'm cautioning so many people based on one study or based on a past study. It's new. So we're gathering information so fast, so quick, but it's, the nature is it's going to change a little bit, right? So we can take, we can take a lot of information from SARS, where we see like the epidemics, you know, in different parts of the world, where you see, you know, if you have like a bell curve, we can see about how long they last.

So when we got this information, I know, I mean, we've been tracking this for months since last year, but the information that we were getting is probably from the start, it starts hitting your community. It's about a three or four month, you know, stint based on that. Now, this could change. This could be a little bit longer, depending on some factors that we'll probably get into a little bit, you know, later. But yeah, so it's a family of coronaviruses and that can be anywhere. The symptoms can be anywhere from just a minor cold to to you know to death where people are really having a lot of people that have compromised immune systems heart long they're really struggling um yeah so also which is new

with this one and this is why this research is so important is because in the beginning of this there were many researchers out throughout the world that said, I've been working with coronaviruses for 20 years, and I've never heard of asymptomatic transmission. So is that the big deal with this one? Because we've had these outbreaks. I just learned recently, yeah, I mean, SARS, MERS, Ebola, outbreaks, these kind of things are not unusual, and even ones that have killed more people is that what makes this one so unique the asymptomatic like people could have it spread it and we don't even know it absolutely so that's that's um if there's there's different you know triggers where it changes the game a little bit yeah that's one of them okay is

being asymptomatic meaning you can have no symptoms at all and you can transmit it. Okay. No cold, no cough, nothing. If you have the flu, you've got the flu, like you're throwing up, diarrhea. I mean, you feel horrible. Like you don't have, nobody can have influenza and not have symptoms, right? Or it's very rare. I wouldn't say nobody, but very, it's not it's not, it's not, it's abnormal to have

the flu without symptoms. It's possible. Okay. Where this, I mean, you're tracking, I'm seeing between 20% and it really is trending a lot with younger people. If you see some of the NBA athletes and stuff like that, they're like, yeah, I have it. I tested positive. I don't have any symptoms. The risk there is that obviously you can be asymptomatic and see grandma and grandpa and forget it. You said a percentage, there's a slight glitch in the internet. You said 20 to something percent are asymptomatic? 20 to 50 percent because it's new. Any numbers that I throw are at the best available at this time. So when I talk about, I'll talk about morbidity date, morbidity rate.

So that's the rate of infection. Mortality rate is the death rate. So that's all fluid because we don't have a lot of information. You know, even patient information is very limited. Even so you think, you know, a couple couple of thousands tens of thousands of patients compared to millions and millions for flu right so it's you got to be really patient with that so so and i'm gonna i'm gonna try to just so my audience knows i'm gonna try to ask questions that i think are popping up in people's minds because i hate it when i listen to a podcast or a youtube video

and like oh go there and you the guy doesn't go there. So, um, so early on people kind of compared it to the flu. And even, even now like statistically, I didn't see, I mean, this whole COVID thing has opened up all kinds of, you know, pockets of knowledge that I wasn't even aware of. I didn't know that like 50,000 people in America die from the flu every year. Is that in the ballpark? I mean, yeah, that's, that's ballpark 20 to 60. And if that's true, then what, is it just a rate of how many people that have it per people that die? The morbidity rate is, is that why COVID-19 is so much

worse? Because right now we're still what at 20,000, 22,000, you know, which is a lot in a couple of months, but I mean, it's, it's, I didn't realize that we've been living with this for years. I mean, the flu killing a good number of people. Right. Let me just give you the difference because you're right. Many more people die of the flu right now. I mean, right now, I think if you look at like a weekly, you know, snapshot, which is not a year, but weekly COVID-19 is pretty high.

Three or four I've heard, you know, between three and 10, you know, of people are dying of that, but that's a really short sample size. Right. Yeah. But the flu, remember with the flu is that we have a vaccine, which is not a perfect vaccine, but it really reduces the, your symptoms. We have herd immunity. So that means that people everywhere have some sort of immunity to the flu. With this, nobody, it's new. There is no immunity. Nobody has immunity, right? So when we talk about, there's a thing in research with public health we call the reproductive number. So the reproductive number is one person may give it to so if you think about the normal flu is about one to one and a half so one person will give it to about one and a half people okay with this it's about one two three and a half oh that's that's a huge huge game-changing difference

so um and why is that Is it because it's transmitted through aerosols or we're not sure? Well, so that's debatable. Let's talk about that in a little bit. Um, because I want to explain that there's a big, you know, there people jump on that bandwagon, but, um, the thinking now is because, um, it's has a low infectious dose. So everything is bait with a low infectious dose. So everything is based with pathogens, infectious disease. It depends. There's a lot of it depends, right?

So different pathogens have different infectious doses. So just an example, like anthrax, you need to be exposed to a lot of particles. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Where fluid could be just a couple particles and you can get sick. With this, we don't know the infectious dose. There's been no, just because it's so new, even with SARS is pretty new. We don't know the infectious dose.

The thinking is that it's really low because it's so stinking infectious, right? If we did not have, I know I'm pretty apolitical now. I used to be political in my younger days, but I'm pretty apolitical now. I used to be political in my younger days, but I'm very apolitical now. My loyalties, and you've helped me with this too, my loyalties are really to the kingdom of God. My allegiance now is to God's kingdom and God's word. But I forgot where I was going with that. I'm celebrating that, by the way. No, I appreciate that. So with the infectious dose, that's much different. And talking about it got really political early on in regards to, you know, the curve, flatten the curve. Preston, if we didn't do this, I go to a regional biocontainment meetings every year.

So the, these 12 facilities, you know, all around the United States, we meet once a year, we got canceled this year. We usually meet at Boston or Galveston. Those are the really big containment facilities. And we talk about it's, it's, it's not if a pandemic will happen, but it's when a pandemic, that's what my training is, right? That's what we do every year. And every year we say when this happens, it will completely be unsustainable.

Every part of life, it'll be unsustainable. Emergency rooms, health care. So once you go above that peak, it's absolute chaos. Now, if you look at New York, New York is really the only place right now where we're starting to flatten the curve there now. But for a good two weeks, they were bringing in ships, you know, to, it's for the, you know, in the Atlantic, just, you know, where they were starting to treat patients there. The emergency rooms, they were turning people away. They had, you know, when you go to a movie theater and it's packed inside, you have turns

that, you know, you have those things outside, They had that. So that is, that would have been the game changer of all game changers in the United States is if we didn't do the social distancing stuff. of Chicago, which is one of the biggest medical centers in the United States, and we haven't been above the curve, but the city of Chicago has been, I mean, politics aside, they've been, they did a pretty good job of telling people, kicking people out of parks. It still hit, you know, in general, it hit the city, the African-American community with pretty public, you know, information pretty hard, because they, for some reason reason on the news, they were saying, even the mayor was saying that there was a myth going around that African-American people couldn't contract the disease. So you had all this misinformation and it was starting to peak and the city came out

and they, you couldn't go into parks, you couldn't go jogging at city parks, stuff like that. So we're really starting to flatten it. But that is something that would have been unsustainable everywhere okay so so social distancing you're i mean i think most people are like yes that's we should be doing that now like you you would agree is there any debate about that or no not at all yeah i think that's just that's a to me uh um basketball now that's just that's a to me uh um basketball nail that's a slam dunk okay and that is just makes so much sense um for because the the main thinking is that it's droplet transmission so i'm going

to get into the weeds a little bit about droplet aerosols yeah so basically when when you have uh your secretions come out of your face your nose your eyes so. So those are droplets, right? And the difference between a droplet and an aerosol is the size, right? So when I sneeze, my droplets, the particles are big enough so they settle with gravity. So they go in the air and then they settle, right? An aerosol is smaller. So you think of a droplet like a sneeze, right? You sneeze, you can kind of see 90% of the particles and then they go down. An aerosol is smaller, really small. So it's like a smoke. So it goes with the ventilation system, right? So that is, that's the studies that are going now. We know it's droplet transmission. So meaning that I can sneeze in your face and it gets in

your mucous membranes, your mouth, your nose, your eyes, and you can get sick. Or I can sneeze in your face and it gets in your mucus membranes, your mouth, your nose, your eyes, and you can get sick. Or I can sneeze and I can pick my nose and I can touch a door handle. And then you can touch that same door handle and stick it in your mouth, your nose, your eyes and get sick. So that's the slam dunk. I'm so creeped out, but keep going. That's what we know for sure, right? Okay. What the conversation now is, is it aerosolized?

Because that, well, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So getting into the weeds a little bit about aerosolization now. So again, those are smaller particles. And just because you can find a particle, you're seeing a lot of studies by people that are asking the wrong question. The question the media is asking is, is it aerosolized? Yeah.

That's not the right question. The question is, can an aerosolized particle infect someone? That's what people really want to know, right? Because it can be in the air and we don't know the infectious dose. So with chemicals, we talk about, let me get this phrase right, dilution is the solution to pollution, meaning as it dilutes, it becomes less hazardous, right? So the further I am away, so if I have COVID-19, and someone is six feet away, and I sneeze, as it moves, it will exponentially the infectious dose will exponentially go down,

right? So I've seen things on social media that if you're running with someone and you sneeze and then it goes back, it's aerosolized. True. I've seen stuff in hospitals where they've measured certain areas where they've seen aerosol particles, they've measured aerosol particles in a hospital room. True. That doesn't mean it's infectious, right? Those are two different questions. And those are really two important distinctions, distinctions that people need to understand it just because it's aerosolized does not mean it's infectious. So go ahead. And that has to do with the amount of particles that are aerosolized and how many particles it takes to be infected? Is it simply a quantity of particles or does it have to do with the potency of the particles once

they're aerosolized or both? Both. Okay. So that's why you're not going to see any public health that people that know what they're talking about that say it's aerosolized. You're going to see some studies from, you know, a good corporation that wants to get on the news and say, Hey, we, we, we, we, we did some air samples and we saw some positive hits, but that really depends because you can really pick and choose where you want to do sampling. You know, I saw one study where they went to a hospital room with three patients and they saw air samples. Well, you know, no crap, right? Of course, you're going to get that.

I say crap on your podcast. You can say more than that. But of course, you're going to find it. So but the study is it's going to take a long time to figure that out. Because you have to remember, we talked about earlier about the people that talked about asymptomatic the people that did research for years no i've never seen it and now it's between 20 and 50 so they're going to have to do it in a laboratory and one of the things that we call in in research we call proof of principle so we can all do that with gravity right we can we can put stuff take a pen drop it. And we can prove that principle by doing it over and over again. And we can be 95% confident that if I drop a pen, it's going to, it's gravity is going to take, and it's going to fall. So the same is true with really any

research that we do is that we need to prove the principle over and over. It needs to be peer reviewed. So that's going to take time to confirm aerosol transmission, not aerosol, that's aerosolized, but aerosol transmission not aerosol that's aerosolized but aerosol transmission aerosol okay so real practically um i'm trying my wife and i were trying to reduce the number of times we go to the grocery store but we do go we got to eat so like maybe maybe once a week maybe once every week and a half one one of us will go out and idaho is among the more milder us will go out. And Idaho is among the more milder places. I think we had a 2% increase today, like 50 people have been tested positive. We're typically between a 2% to 10% increase every day.

Sure. When I go to the grocery store and I walk by somebody, and let's just assume they have COVID-19, and they're just not sneezing off. I mean, if they did that, I'd probably renounce my nonviolence and hit them. But I mean, they're just breathing and say I'm a couple of feet away. They have this virus. Should I hold my breath? Should I wear a mask going? Is washing my hands enough? Is it, is there chance I'm not going to get it even if I breathe in a few of their particles? Or how would you if you're – when you go to the store, what do you do? Yeah. So first, that's really low risk.

So remember, we know for sure droplet transmission, which we talked about. So going to the grocery store, even going out in public if you have a six feet, it's really, really low risk. Remember, we can't eliminate, we can never say zero. Right. You know that we can say, you can't say zero for driving. All right. And which, you know, is a much higher risk of driving and getting an accident. But when we go, me and my wife go grocery shopping.

So we have to wear a mask in the Chicagoland area. Okay. So remember a mask, let's get into the weeds a little bit now. So a mask is just for, it's not for your protection. You wear a mask to protect, to keep your secretions inside your mask, right? And it also protects the environment. So if you're sneezing or coughing, my droplets aren't going on the groceries, not going on door handles. It's being contained inside my mask. So we'll talk about a respirator in a second, but for a mask, what a

mask does is it protects other people, the environment, and to a lesser degree, it can't prevent you from touching your face, right? I saw a guy on CNN, he was a, he was a pediatrician. And I love that all doctors can speak with expertise on this being sarcastic. Yeah. Kind of like, you know, I have a couple of brother in laws that build houses, and that would be have like an electrician speaking on like the foundation. Yeah, right. They're all in the medical field, but this pediatrician was telling that a mask does nothing for personal safety. And I wanted to do an experiment with him. I wanted to sneeze in his face with the mask on. And then I wanted to sneeze in his face without a mask.

And I wanted to ask him which one reduced the risk, right? Because it does reduce your risk a little bit. It does. Okay. It does. Correct. But the main reason we wear masks, not respirators, the reason we wear masks is to protect the environment and protect other people. It does help you from touching your face because you have a barrier between your mucus membranes and your fingers, which could be potentially infectious. And then if someone were to sneeze right in your face you know it could still go in

your eyes but you do reduce you do reduce your risk from somebody outside i just don't know when's last time i or i've seen somebody else just sneeze in my face in a store well i guess i'm more concerned with yeah i'm walking around the store and i i feel i literally feel like i'm breathing in just deadly anthrax very very very low risk to inhale something just because of that solution is their dilution is the solution so you know if someone were to cough and there were to be aerosol particles and you were a couple feet away by the time it got into your breathing zone you know but by the time you breathe it in um it would be so diluted and we don't know the infectious dose and the body is in fact it the the route of transmission when it get into your

when you inhale something is different than like your mucus membranes and that's what we don't know yet that is tpd to be determined because it's what we don't know yet. So that is TPD to be determined. Because it's novel, we don't know how an aerosol, because we don't have, you know, we know droplet transmission. We can study that in a laboratory. We can do that in clinical care in a hospital. But aerosol, there's no numbers there. So down the road, and it's going to take time,

they'll have to do animal studies. Some of the people might not like that, but that's really that knocks that. So we're not even sure. If I'm passing somebody in the store and we're six inches away and we're just breathing the same air for that one second, they have COVID. I actually breathe in some of their particles. I don't touch my face. They didn't sneeze on me or cough.

We're not even sure if even then I would actually get it, even though we did kind of. Yeah, what I do know, I'm not going to give you any kind of like a blanket statement, but that would be very low risk. Okay. Not, not impossible. Right.

So you, I don't want to get onto dumb and dumber. So you're telling me there's a chance, right? But no, it's very low risk i'll just say that so i go in when i go into the store i actually don't i don't have a mask i've got this painting mask that makes me look like darth vader you know i don't do that um i i in my hands i hold these um these um what are they called the lysolysol wipes, you know, I hold my, I hold a nice wet, sloppy, you know, you know, 99.99%, whatever alcohol based. And anytime I grab something, even when I pushed a pin pad, I'm using that as a barrier. I do keep my distance. I don't wear a mask.

Um, I actually, I actually have been holding my breath just like as I'm passing. So, so, so would you say, man i i could get it of course i could but it's um yeah when i go grocery shopping i don't wear gloves remember your hand is a great barrier to disease unless you have a cut or a nick you know that yeah that prevents infectious disease with your hand so when i go shopping i do wear a mask because we have to it's a general guideline you know so i do wear a mask i don't wear gloves but when i'm done shopping i have hand sanitizer in my car and i just sanitize sanitize my hands remember with hand hygiene there's um removal and disinfection right so when i sanitize my hands i

get it about 99 percent um kill rate on my hand but then 0.1% it's still on my hand right so that's why washing your hands is the best thing if you were to think about if you ever go to a beach and you had sand all over your body you take a shower that's removal so you think if you had that in your hands and you run water over your hands that will remove it disinfectant soap this kills it so that's why the best thing is to disinfect and remove even if you were outside at a grocery store and you had no disinfectant and you had you know no no means to wash your hands this you know wiping your hand on your shirt or your pants removes that that is a method of removal it does does. Towel that removes stuff. The best is disinfection and removal. That's why washing hands is disinfection and the water is removal.

Okay. So you think I'm doing pretty good with my, what would you wear? Would you wear a mask if it wasn't required? Um, probably to protect other people. I guess if I, because I knew it was asymptomatic,

meaning that I would, I wouldn't know if I had it unless I was tested. Um, you know, sometimes, um, and this would be tough and it would be a personal decision, you know, conscious thing, but, you know, I know there's a lot of scriptures that talk about, you know, consider others better than yourselves, especially with elderly. So I just think that principle would drive me to do that. Okay. But for yourself, you were worried about getting it yourself. Yeah, no, I wouldn't. Even though it might, I mean, if you went in with rubber gloves, tons of Lysol,

a mask, I mean, everything you're doing there is taking a tiny, is taking that percentage down, right? Right. And some people will email me, some of my friends will say, Hey, this is what we're doing when we come in the house. And I'm like, I work with anthrax and I don't even take those procedures. You know, it's just like, you know, and I'm like, no, you know. But it's the fear that people don't know that drives the fear. Right, Preston? One thing I've thought, I mean, right now, the percentage of confirmed cases against the mortality rate is what one to two percent one percent um yeah it's probably right around two but remember too that the infection rate the known cases is the tip of the iceberg right maybe not the tip of the iceberg but at least and of there's about 50 unreported

well and that's my point like if if we actually knew all the people that actually have it, would the mortality rate be about the same as a seasonal flu? Could it be that 0.1% or whatever? The only thing that I would say is a little bit different is this disease is crushing people that have compromised immune systems. Okay. So people that are elderly, this is the 18-month, 12-month out fear. Not fear that I have, but if there's no vaccine, no therapy, the elderly, I don't want to get too much into that, but that's a really risk.

Right. Just because, boy, but they go to the hospital. much into that but that's a really risk right just because boy but they go to the hospital once you're on a ventilator you know your your uh your chance of surviving is yeah easily below 50 with compromised immune system so that's the one thing that is just yeah crushing the elderly yeah right now i'm curious i i just thought about this the other day i mean i i we like my family and i we do things to boost our immune system. We take all kinds of stuff. The older you get, is there something a 70-, 80-year-old can do

to really maybe get their immune system back to like a 40-, 50-year-old? I mean, if they just bombard it with like echinacea, silver, vitamin C, whatever, all these things you do. I mean, do you know much about that? No, but I do know that there's the combination nature-nurture, right? Sometimes some people are just born with fantastic immune systems. Yeah. We really have to work at it. So I think it's a combination of keeping a healthy lifestyle. That's really important exercise and vitamin, you know, vitamin supplements and vitamin D and, you know, stuff like that. But I think that really

helps people that are in general in good shape. I think when you have heart and lung issues, that is in 18 months, two years, it's really gonna be interesting to see what the mortality, the death rate will be. I don't know what it is, but it could really take a toll. Yeah. Okay. So as you look forward to May, June, July, next fall,

and I'm not making, I'm not actually asking you to make a prediction at all, but how do you view the near future? Two months out, six months out, do you have any kind of hunches or where you would put your money if you had a gun to your head? Right. Most, those are, that's the most prominent question. Besides the aerosol question, this is the question I get all the time. So I think it's going to depend, right? We always say that in biosafety, it depends. So I think it's going to depend where you live.

I think it's going to depend how well, so that I think that'll be the big, big factor is where you live, you know, where in regards to how, you know, how populated your area is. But I do. So I think and, you know, this is just a projection and this is really based on the experts. But just with my professional experience in it and talking to a lot of virologists and all the different doctors, epidemiologists that I talk with at the university of Chicago, I, I'm hoping in mid May that some of the bigger cities, um, will be able to do a slow rolling open up, right. Um, where they're going to could start opening up restaurants.

They could start opening up. Um, I don't know about, I think schools are going to be fall right i don't think there's going to be summer school right i think restaurants may may open up but i think there's going to be flexibility where a lot of the researchers that i'm talking to and these guys are the best of the best think that this might be a seasonal seasonal virus they do that's where they are okay so so just like the. So now you have the flu seasonal and now you have the coronavirus seasonal. Oh, wait, you're saying seasonal, like every year, it's going to flare up in the winter time.

Maybe not winter time, but seasonal. Yeah. Wow. That's very, very possible. Yeah. So I think, I think states are going to hold on to that, you know, stay at home order where it's not a one and done where there are going to hold on to that, you know, stay-at-home order where it's not a one-and-done, where there's going to be areas, especially in bigger cities. Boy, New York, they're not going to wait long. They waited too long. They're not going to do that again. Right. You know?

So now if you're in Wyoming, Idaho, it's going to look a lot different. Yeah. You know, I'm really hoping that I don't want to get into any politics. I don't mind talking about politics, but just about my apolitical stance. But I hope that the science drives it. I was thinking before I was talking to you, Preston, that I, this is not a political statement,

but I don't want the president driving my theology and I don't want the president driving the science. That's a good point. I just don't, I don't want the president driving the science. That's a good point. I just don't, I don't want that happening. I want the experts that do this every day to do it, you know, and I want states to have, you know, I think that's constitutional that the states have it, but I'm hoping it's like that, that they have the freedom to do that.

Yeah. Who should we be like, uh, Deborah Burks, uh, Anthony Foshee. Do you say like, man, yeah, these are as, as good as they get. These guys are really. Absolutely. I've been hearing their names for years and years. Really guys. Those guys are spot on. A lot of the conferences we do. That's who comes. That's our keynote speakers. People like that. Really? Okay. Probably not a lot of excitement for most, but when these guys come,

like the head of NIH, NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Can we just dabble in the politics just to keep our audiences? Sure, absolutely. I don't mind talking about it. What are your personal thoughts on how, in as much as you followed it, on how Trump has handled everything? Yeah, so I think he gets out of it. No, there's some really good things that i like about the president you know um but he gets way over his skis on some of the science yeah i think he gets

way overseas when he talks about medications that will work or not work it's just too early it's just you know i i want i don't want him answering those questions. You know, I think in general, he was ahead of the curve. I don't know why he wanted to shut down China. You have the one side of the spectrum that will say it was a fantastic move. And the other one will say, no, he's just, you know, he's being racist and stuff like that. But he made the right decision. I was telling people early, early on they need to shut shut off all travel this is way before the politics were talking you know politicians were talking about because i know once you once you start it

you can't stuff it back in the bag man you can't do that so i think he's done some good things but that's just who he is right he he fights with everybody yeah um i mean he's kind of he's done some good things, but that's just who he is, right? He fights with everybody. Yeah. I mean, he's kind of incapable of not being overly confident in anything that comes out of his mouth. It's just kind of, I mean, that's just kind of his Enneagram. He is. There's some good things about that, you know? I mean, how many people are fed up with politicians saying one thing?

So part of that is refreshing, you know i mean how many people are fed up with politicians saying one thing so that part of that is refreshing you know but when it comes to this stuff boy my biggest fear is that when he said he was going to open it up around easter i was like oh my goodness you said that way too that's not even possible it's not even yeah okay no way so yeah so there's some things that i like and just you know um historically with him since he's been president there's some things that I like, and just, you know, historically with him, since he's been president, there's some things that I like, but there's, I just don't want him driving this boss, man, because I think he, and he's a politician, right, left and right, their life is at stake, and there's an election coming up, and so I'm not naive to think that people aren't going to do stuff that will make or break their, you know, their policies. I don't, from my vantage point, I don't, I don't follow politics enough. And I'm certainly not a scientist to even voice any kind of authoritative position, but I don't, I mean, yeah, he closed down China and Europe in like late January. And from what I know after the fact, I think even, I think even Foshee,

Foshee, is that how you say his name? Anthony Foshee? Yeah. I think even he was like in late January, like, yeah, it's not like kind of down. Like, I don't think Trump was the only one in the world that was like, not a big deal. Like if he closed down the economy in late January, he would have gotten crucified, I think. No matter what he did, he would have gotten crucified. So I don't, maybe he waited too long, maybe not. But I mean, I don't, I mean, what about Italy?

What about China? What about China? What about, you know, Iran? What about, like, everybody's trying to scramble to do the right thing, it seems like. So I don't know. I mean. We always say with this, darned if you do and damned if you don't.

Totally, yeah. And to get a little more, this is more coming out with the research. And even Dr. Burke said said this she's the lady that the information that we were getting from china up front yeah was was not on target i mean that's a whole nother thing so you make decisions based on the best information that you have right so dr burke was saying that she was in africa and she heard that 50 000 people in china had covet 19 so they're like oh gosh, how many people are in China?

A billion and a half. I don't know. 50,000 that's nothing. Right. So why would they even think about closing anything? So now we see how infectious it is. They wouldn't let CDC in for months, you know? Wow. So, I mean, they're a closed society they're communist society so you know there's probably some advantages to that but there's a lot of disadvantages when you're a closed society and um yeah i think i think when this is all said and done you're gonna

really so what's the deal with china not having like any cases hardly any cases in the last month is that just a blatant lie that everybody knows but is scared to say something about or i mean that just i mean either they're just killing it and how they're addressing this or they're lying. Is there another option? I mean, I don't. No, I think those are, those were the two options. Now remember, because they're a closed society, they could shut everything down like that. Yeah. But I think that helped, but I don't think that they were transparent at all. I mean, now it's like, yeah, we had 50 cases yesterday.

I'm like, really? 1.25 billion people? You had 50 cases? I don't know if you ever remember talking to me when you were at faith, but one of the things that I told you is I like the quote that you said where it says, wherever the scripture leads, that's where I go. Whatever my bias was, and I grew up in kind of a charismatic church and so some of the theology that i look back i'm like wow that didn't you know they didn't have the bible as the foundation right like

you bounce it off so my thing with this whole china thing is wherever the science goes that's where i'm gonna go okay and it's just not good science to say 50,000 cases and it's spread like it's a pandemic based on 50,000 cases. Those are self-contradicting statements. OK, so I read this book called The Deadliest Enemy by some epidemiologist. Is that how you say it? Mark, I forgot his name. Fascinating. Published in 2017.

And he was talking about exactly what you said, not if, but when. And he even said, it's probably going to be a coronavirus. It's probably going to come from China. It's going to spread like wildfire. And he even has this whole section where he's like giving a fictitious scenario of what's going to happen. It's almost like he's quoting, almost word for word, like what politicians are doing this, that. I was like, this is eerie. And he, in that book, he talked about the combination of density of population, even moving into areas where these diseases exist, jungles or whatever. And we're kind of stirring it up or even, you know, I know bats and other kind of different creatures

are kind of carriers for these kind of things. And as animals and people become more intertwined, he says that he was basically saying, it's just we're going to keep encountering viral pandemics. I mean, this is like maybe even above climate change. Like this is kind of the thing we should be really concerned about. Would you totally resonate with a lot of that? Absolutely.

I mean, wet markets is like the perfect storm where you have just, you know, for people that know wet markets, it's just, you know, we have butchers. We get our meats at the supermarket. you know, supermarket, there's some places in China, in Wuhan specifically, where they just skin animals alive and they hang them up and you look at it like you have a piece of fruit, you put it back and the next person does the same thing. And so, yeah, I mean, you are, boy, you're increasing your risk big time for pandemics, especially in a populated area like China, you know? Yeah, those are not the best of both worlds, that's for sure. So what's the, what do we, how do we, how do we prevent another one of these things from happening?

Is that possible? I mean, Yeah, I think so. I think what will happen next time is especially if it depends where it comes from. So if it's, if it's an air, you know, Europe, people that have, you know, open societies where people are upfront with what's going on, I think you'll get better information. But I think if anything ever happens have, you know, open societies where people are up front with what's going on. I think you'll get better information. But I think if anything ever happens from, you know, just in general, you know, communist countries, people are going to shut it down really quick.

They're not going to take their word for it just because they have their own to protect. So I think that'll be different. No matter where it's at, I think people will shut down stuff really fast to protect their countries. What are your thoughts on, when will we start going back to church or maybe more generally, and this is really pertinent to me as someone who makes a living off of

speaking at large gatherings, will we be gathering in large settings, NFL, Major League Baseball, church gatherings. What are your thoughts on that? When's that going to happen next? Not until we have a vaccine or. Yeah. So that's a really good question because we go to, I go to a large church, you know, they have three different services of at least 500 or more. So I think that this year we're done with,

I don't think you're ever going to this calendar year. I'd be shocked if in late fall we had concerts, you know. Really? Football games. For sure the summer, you know, maybe, you know, because without a vaccine, you get in those gatherings, press, and it just, you know. Think about 60,000 people and that infection rate of one to three and three and a half I mean that that's like those numbers are what it's like a hockey stick exponential growth overnight right so I don't know that's a good question I do I do think they're going to roll it out so I think if you remember when they shut it down it was 250 100 and 10 so I So I even told our pastor, I said, I don't know when they're going to open up to 250 or more.

And we have above 250. So I said, just start thinking about that. That's not my call. That's not my expertise. But I know with the bigger groups that you get together, it can exponentially, that growth can go up exponentially. So what if they had, what are those masks? Is it N95? So N95s are respirators, right?

So those people can't even find those. I work in a high containment lab and we can't order them. So N95s, I'll get into the weeds a little bit so n means that it's not for oil right the 95 means that it's 95 efficient at filtering particles that are i'm going to get into the weeds that are 0.3 size in microns so i'll explain that a little bit. The most penetrating particle, I feel like this is good information. This is great. I love it. I love the specificity of it all. I don't understand it all, but this is great. No, but this is the stuff I train on every day. So the most penetrating particle is a particle that is 0.3 microns in size. So if you think there's a million,

for every meter, there's a million microns, right? So the most penetrating particle is the one that's 0.3 in size. There's a whole science to it, but I won't get into the weeds. So an N95 is 95% efficient at capturing a 0.3 size particle. 0.3 size particle. So the efficiency, if the, if the agent is the particle is bigger than 0.3 or smaller than 0.3, your efficiency actually increases from 95 to higher. Okay. We've all heard of HEPA filters, high efficiency, particulate air. We have them in the house. Those are 99.97% efficient,

efficient at capturing 0.3 microns particles. And then if your dust is bigger particles bigger or smaller your efficiency is greater than that 99.97 percent so that's what an n95 is that's for a respirator so an n95 respirator that's really really important that clinical care workers work it use those because those are not only for droplets but those are for aerosols okay the reason it's really important for hospitals is because they do procedures that they aerosolize people's secretions so when they intubate people you know their holes and skins skin and then their secretions are aerosolized or They're like a gas that comes out.

So that's why it's so important for those guys to have the proper personal protective equipment. And not for me going to Walmart to wear an N95 where these hospital care workers can't find them. So that's a little different between a mask and a respirator. So that's a little different between a mask and a respirator. This is maybe a different kind of question, but why aren't we just mass producing these N95 things? How come we're not opening up companies everywhere? I mean, people make a killing off of being – you just think the market would be flooded with people making these things. Is it that hard to make them or what's the – Yeah, so there's a lot of regulation.

So respirators are governed by NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational and Safety Health. So they oversee respirators manufacturers. So you can't just open up your outlet mall and start building respirators because when you wear a respirator, you have to have medical clearance to wear them. And you have to be tested to wear them to make sure that they fit you know um efficiently so you're not breathing in particles so there's a lot to respirators so um i know 3m has been in the news a lot north there's a handful there's only a handful of companies that make respirators because the supply or the demand has never been right you know so high where it is now.

So they're playing catch up. And it's worldwide, Preston. Every worldwide hospital clinics, they're wearing this. These respirators are designed and manufactured for one-time use. And then you throw it away. Oh. That's it. So one time to throw it away.

Well, now hospitals are at a stance where it says okay now i have a decision to make as administration i'm going to have them throw i i have just thrown around numbers i have 100 respirators and i have three nurses those are going to last me one two ten days i can't get any you know a lot of them are made in china or other places i can't get any, you know, a lot of them are made in China or other places. I can't get any. So now I have to make a decision for my clinical care workers and say, no respirator or you have to reuse the respirator. So this is the, if you, I don't know if you get asbestos commercials over in Idaho, but it says, were you exposed to asbestos 30 years ago when you're at school and you can sue. exposed to asbestos 30 years ago when you're at school and you can sue.

So this is going to come in the next five years because clinical care workers are being asked to do something to wear a respirator over and over again. The N95. There are other respirators that you can reuse, but N95s are designed for one-time use. Can't, I mean, can't some, what if somebody created the N90 mask? It's not N95. It's an off brand. Yeah, so there are different respirators.

So there are, they're called P100s. So they're 100% efficient. But those are still one-time use. If you've ever seen like a half face respirator, so they kind of go over your face or a full face. They have cartridges called P100 cartridges. So they're HEPA cartridges. And those are for repeat use over and over and over. I have told so many people, so many hospitals, if you order them now, when something happens, they're a little more expensive.

So N95s, you can buy 20 for 20 bucks. Oh, really? Now they're on eBay. I sell them for like 20 for 5,000 bucks, people trying to buy them, which is just crazy. I guess they focus. Capitalist, man. We'll do anything to make a buck.

But I've been telling hospitals, get these N95s. So when someone comes on you spend a hundred dollars on a respirator and they have it for the rest of their life for the rest of their career there they can you know have it but again that's a people don't make financial decisions short term so here's a fictitious scenario what if by august we've got tons of n95 masks available like there's just there, there's, if you want one, you can get one. And say, I'm going to put on a conference. And let's just say any kind of gathering over 200 people,

it's required that everybody wears one of these masks. Maybe even they're required to wear leather gloves or rubber gloves. They've got a mask on. They have to sit six feet apart, whatever. Like, could we, if the products were available, is it theoretically possible that we could get back into larger gatherings but take some of these precautions to coddle it? Some of the precautions you mentioned, yes.

Respirators, so you need to, you can't have facial hair. So if you have a beard, you can't wear them. You've got to be fit tested. You've got to go to a clinic or someone like me who's a biosafety officer that tests you to wear them. So it would just, I don't know if we could sustain that. We could do the six feet, the mask thing. That would make sense. And that would really reduce the risk of large gatherings.

But when I say large gatherings, you reduce the risk of you know place of 250 where you sit every six chairs yeah and you fill up every six chairs so because we saw that might that might be that that could be so i just throwing out scenarios you know how they throw out models they throw they show the worst case and best case. So that could be a model that we live with for the next couple of years about social distancing on and off. So a room that holds 500, we say we're only going to let 100 in. So, I mean, just to get really personal and practical, you know, a big thing that we do through our ministry is doing, you know, gatherings where we talk about sexuality, gender, anywhere from 150 to 350 people. And one thing that we've just, just literally today tossed around is what if we actually said,

we're going to cap these at 100 people in a room that holds 500 people and just do maybe two in a row, like day one, day two, ton more work on my part. But it's, could something like that be feasible? Yeah, that will be, yes, but it will be driven by public health because public health, they're going to make the rules. They're going to say yes or no. So if they say something like that, like you have to have a, you know, someone can sit every, unless, you know, married couples can go in

or some families can sit together. But if you're not family, you know, it's every six chair or something like that. Possible. Wow. So you think, though, I mean, just in general, church gatherings, large gatherings in 2020 are kind of... I just told my pastor, just think that through. It might not happen.

Yeah. But I think preparation is a good big biblical principle, right? Just to think things through. Hey, where are we at and stuff like that. Okay, now what about the second wave? So here's from a naive perspective, I think, okay, let's say we flatten the curve, we reduce the number, there's fewer and fewer people getting it, but people still have it. Once you start opening things up, it's just going to, from my vantage point, it just seems like it's going to start growing again. up, it's just going to, from my vantage point, it just seems like it's going to start growing again. So like, it seems like this whole idea of a second wave of cases is inevitable if we open up society to any extent. Is that? I think as not, as it is now, yes. So there's so much money that's

being flooded into infectious disease research now. I work with a guy by the name of, he's a doctor from Ghana, Dr. Osei Osu. And he's a Christian. And he told me, he goes, you know, if you think about it, a white man's disease from a European disease. I said, what do you mean by that? He goes, well, if you think about I'm sorry, a black man's disease, he said, from poor countries. Because in general, the white man's disease is cancer. And there's so much money. And there should be. We all are affected by cancer.

And there should be so much money for that, right? But in general, infectious diseases are third world, Africa, Asia. And there's never been funding. Republicans, Democrats, they don't fund it. Now we have so much funding, you you know because it's in our backyard but it was a really good point and it was a perspective from someone that didn't grow up in the states and saw how much money goes to cancer research as opposed to where he grew up where people died from infectious diseases every day and there was no money wow so um but to get back to your point, I think

that will, what's going to be different hopefully the next time is that we'll have therapies, um, or a vaccine, you know, to, um, mitigate, um, a lot of this, um, exposure. Can I, um, can I ask a really controversial question just because I dabbled in it in one of my recent podcasts? What are your thoughts on vaccines? It's not controversial to me. And I am. That's what I do. So let the bias be known that I work with vaccines.

And I have seen, I mean, if you think about measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, smallpox, these things that have been eradicated from the United States and the world have saved millions and millions of lives. So to me, it's a no braininer for vaccine research. When you talk about risk-reward, the risk of taking a vaccine, the numbers of people that have issues with vaccines are so low that if people live their life with that risk, they'd never drive, they'd never go out in the storm, they would never eat fat, they would never drink a beer, they would never do any of that stuff so if you're talking from a scientific risk-based information um vaccines are fantastic the only caveat here is where people um in my opinion they have a little information is the flu vaccine we don't have a universal flu vaccine, right? So we don't have a vaccine that works because people still get sick. So that is, I see that argument, not for safety,

but for how effective it works, right? And they used a flu as an example of these don't even work that well anyway. They don't even work, right? Or I knew a brother's sister's mother who vaccinated their kids, and now they have some disease. And if you do the genetic testing, they'll tell you, no, it wasn't from the vaccine. It was from this or that. I mean, technology is so good now where you can pinpoint 99%, not 100%, but you can pinpoint where diseases come from and how they enter and stuff like that so so what is what is the best if there is a best in your opinion the anti-vaccine argument because so i addressed this question on a podcast and i got a flood of people on both sides just shooting me stuff because i haven't done a lot of research on it um what is

what is the best anti-vaccine argument or Or do you think there just isn't one? Why are so many people anti-vaccine? I don't know. I mean, Preston, you know, we live in a world where, so if you think about an older generation, basically everything they got on the news was good information right so if you grew up in the 50s 60s you saw the news and it was good information right there was three sources a lot of that stuff was vetted peer-reviewed hey let's take it to the news and let's send it out now nothing is peer-reviewed not i mean on the news it's not they run with stories where it's garbage you know national

stuff is garbage it's so political now you know everybody's got an agenda um the truth is not truth doesn't matter anymore and now we have social now you add social media which i've seen so much information on social media just in regards to COVID-19 that is garbage and is wrong but it's passed on as truth so to me the anti-vax starts so let me tell I was listening to a behavior scientist talk and he was talking about that when we get noise in our life right and we're promised noise in this life right that's a that's a promise that one of the promises that we don't love from God. In this life, we're going to have trouble. So when there's noise come, if you have bad information, so I want you to kind of look at this in the audience to look at this from a spiritual perspective, but also from a practical

perspective. You have noise in your life, a disease, death, whatever the case may be. If we don't have, it's important to get good information. So from a spiritual perspective, you have noise in your life, a disease, death, whatever the case may be. If we don't have, it's important to get good information. So from a spiritual perspective, that's the word of God and people that know how to teach it right. From a worldview, it's getting peer, like science, getting peer reviewed information and getting news that's from trusted sources, right? So if you have bad information, and then you add either control or lack of control. So from a biblical perspective, we know there are certain things that we can control in our lives. There's some things that we can't, but there's a lot of things that we can really do to, you know, help from whether

it's practical grocery shopping or, you know, just practical spiritual stuff. So if we have bad information, so we have fear and panic, or if we have fear, noise in our life, we get good information and we prepare. What that does is it reduces fear in us. It reduces panic in us. And it reduces, we call it overbehaving, where you actually increase your risk as a christian you can increase your risk to other people great example is toilet paper runs what doesn't make sense people are buying so much toilet paper that you can't go to the store to get toilet paper yeah so that's a silly example but if you think about um stuff that people really need, medicine, food. You overbehave because you get bad information. It makes no sense.

So I really think an anti-vax stuff or anything that is just, whether it's from a biblical worldview or scientific, you've got to get good information. It's so important to get trusted information. And I just think, I don't know if we'll ever get back to getting good information just because it's so political so what are the claims though like what are they are i i still i haven't done a lot of research into it i just think you know just the aerosol we talked about it's aerosolized you know not even talking about the transmission i've seen stuff about mass are you talking about the vaccine or

the anti-vaccine the people why wouldn't why do c so against it? The anti-vax is that it doesn't work or it causes autism or causes some sort of, you know, disease in my kid. I think those are the two big things, you know? And you're saying there's no evidence, there's no evidence for that, or at least it's the risks are so minor that it's. Yeah. You know, I'm not ever going to say that if you do a million vaccines, that there might be some issue with one, right. But it's yeah, you know, I'm not ever going to say that if you do a million vaccines that there might be some issue with one. Right. But that's with anything. That's what's eating pizza. Right. You could eat pizza and die because of something that was food poisoning. Right. You know, so when people start making that risk to be much bigger than it is compared to what it does, you go to.

to be much bigger than it is compared to what it does. You go to, there's some memes out there that we do in the vaccine, the pro vaccine, where you have someone from Africa looking really crazy at Willy Wonka and saying, so let me get this straight. You guys don't believe in vaccines, but you know where all those people are dying in there, right? They're like, so just the disconnect from third world countries where they're dying every day because they don't have measles, mumps, rubella. They don't have these basic things that our kids get. We don't even think of it. You know, so I'm 49 and I want to think about,

I can't think of the disease that in the seventies people had, but I forgot what it was. I don't want to get into a tangent but i remember kids had this and then a vaccine came out probably in the 60s and 70s and it's eradicated basically polio polio i remember going to school in the early 70s and i had a friend whose sister had polio you know anybody that has polio maybe a handful and it was rampant right and that's because of good vaccines i just so what if someone said well why do i need to vaccinate my vaccine vaccinate my kids against polio since it's already been done away with yeah so the same thing is true with measles but you're

seeing a start come back and a lot of times not all the time but a lot of times it's from the anti-vaxxers where you're starting to see little outbreaks in certain areas and it's kids that didn't get measles you know um or you know um vaccinations so it's possible right but so um i just think that the the information to me it's a it's a slam dunk and i'm not talking a hundred you know a million out of a million? But if they rate that with all the other risks that they take every day, it's just the risk reward to me is just because I've seen, I've seen it work, right? You go to conferences and you see rates that are thousands in countries, and then you see vaccines come in the countries and then it's zero or it's one or two or one, you know? So you see the data and you got to be driven by data with these arguments.

Do you think polio, TB, measles, mumps, rubella, are they making a comeback because people aren't vaccinated? Are they starting to creep back in? I haven't done too much research, but I know there's been studies of measles coming back. You know, not large. Measles is airborne, right? That's one we do know that's transmitted droplets and airborne. Oh, wow. So remember about vaccines, too.

I had my brother-in-law. He was not anti-vax, but he didn't get the flu. He didn't get the flu vaccine. And I said, Jeff, he's flu vaccine. And I said, Jeff, he's a Christian. And I said, sometimes it's not about you. Sometimes it's about the other people, right? So you might not think it's effective. You might get the flu. You don't get the vaccine. You get the flu a little bit stronger than you normally would. Now you go see grandma and grandpa and you give it to them. So again, that's a Christian principle too, to consider others

better than yourself. So that's another argument again, that's a Christian principle too, to consider others better than yourself. So that's another argument, I think from a Christian perspective, and it's personal, you know, too. So I get that. And I don't want to take anybody's conscience away, conscience, but I just think that there's so much information about how it can not only reduce your risk, but other people's,

you know, people that we love or people that we don't, you know? Yeah. Well, John, I've taken you over an hour and we've got, we've had so much to chew on. This has been so good. Hold on. You can't, I have one question for you. I need a theologian for this. So before we end, can I ask you this question? Absolutely. Anything. Okay. So I um everybody's facebook

post is covet 19 is less than psalm or is psalm 91 right that's that god will protect you from the plague and um he'll keep your tent and and there was a pastor in Virginia that met, right? And he quoted Psalm 91 and he said, God's bigger than this. He died, right? So people in churches have done that and died. So where is that? So I'm not a theologian like yourself, but where is that? I mean, is that just like a statement of, it can't be a statement of fact, right? It's not an absolute promise, Psalm 91.

I've had people quote Psalm 91 to me. What's interesting is they don't seem to be aware of Psalm 88, which Psalm 88 is the one Psalm that just talks about nothing but like, God, where are you? There's these trials happening. I'm being persecuted unjustly. You don't seem to be present. The end. There is no, unlike most Psalms, it doesn't even end on a promise of hope.

So you have this spectrum within the Psalter of these kind of seemingly absolute promises. You will protect me. If we love you, you'll come through to Psalms of despair, like Psalm 88. And I just feel like we should never take one Psalm, you know, take it out of the bookshelf and apply it to this one situation as if the author of Psalm 91 wrote it to speak directly to COVID-19 in the year 2020. So I think it's, I mean, if you read, my wife had somebody talk to her about that Psalm and she came to me really troubled. She's like, like, I'm disturbed by the Psalm. Are you saying like, if I love God, then I won't get this disease. And if I get this disease, it means I don't love God, which is a clear implication if you take this psalm and apply it.

That's just insane. Like that's, can you imagine how distorted of a view of God you're promoting if you map that Psalm directly on our situation. So I think we should take the Psalter as a whole, as this variegated perspective on the trials and blessings of life. And I just don't, I'm just nervous about taking one Psalm, one verse and applying it to this situation. I mean, I don't, I would, it would interrupt my faith if I thought Psalm 91 was designed to be directly applied to this position, especially if my daughter got COVID-19. Now the logical implication is she doesn't love God. She is an enemy of God because that's clearly what this says, that Psalm 91 says.

The diseases fall on the enemies. Now, I confess, I don't know, how do we apply Psalm 91? I'm not quite sure. There's a specific historical context I haven't looked into. All I know is it's theologically irresponsible to take this psalm and just, yeah, post it on Facebook and say, here is the Christian psalm for COVID-19. So, yeah, as passionate as you are about vaccines, I am about misapplying. No, I appreciate that. No. And, and I do want to, I want to say this too, before we wrap up, I just want to charge the church to whoever's listening and, you know, as, you know, an image

bearer, and we believe that, you know, our allegiance is with Christ is that, you know, when we have the word of God, that's the foundation and the church should continue to engage, right? Not to be fearful, but to have love, power, and a sound mind. And also we're going to need to learn to adapt, man. You know, there's a lot of churches that they can't think outside their church building. So I think this is kind of the perfect opportunity to look at everybody's ministry and say, we need to adapt and we need to do something different. I think most thoughtful Christian leaders will say, yeah, church isn't a building.

It's not a large gathering. It's not a church service. It's not a sermon. I think that proclamation is being tested right now. Do we actually believe that it costs nothing to break bread and be the church? It costs nothing to disciple people. Large gatherings have their place. Again, I engage in large gatherings all the time, but you can be a faithful, passionate, world-changing disciple of Jesus without attending a large gathering. Do we actually believe that?

I think that's going to be tested in 2020. I'm excited about the test, man. I think it's going to be, I've been having a lot of conversations about church leaders about this. Like what does church look like in a post-COVID-19 world? And it's going to be interesting, but I think throughout church history, we've had these kind of, and I don't, well, I'll just say it. We have these kind of cleansing moments or worldwide trials that prod us to kind of reimagine what it means to be a Christian. I think we're in that moment now. And I think we, you know, it's tragic. The economic fallout is tragic.

The deaths obviously are tragic. Um, so in no way do I celebrate that. Um, but there is, there is, there are, um, really interesting possibilities on the other side of this that I hope that we can latch onto. Yeah. I think it should be a net gain for the church, you know, after all this is said and done. Yeah. Yeah.

And the gates of hell won't prevail. Like I, you know, I, ultimately we, I guess we should end on a message, message of hope. Like, you know, like the gospel is so much more powerful and God's so much more, so much bigger than, you know, pandemics even, you know, viral. Yeah. Right on. Well, thanks, John. Thank you so much. And yeah, I'm excited to release this podcast. I'll probably release the next Monday.

So yeah. Thanks for taking time to speak into this. No worries. I appreciate it. Nice meeting you too. Yeah. You too. All right. Take care. Thank you.