Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldment. Ever since COVID nineteen broke out, I
Speaker 1: have been extremely eager to hear the thoughts of Partis Zabetti.
Speaker 1: Partis has actually been on the show before this outbreak,
Speaker 1: talking about her extraordinary work on ebola. She's a computational
Speaker 1: biologist in the Harvard Biology Department in the Broad Institute.
Speaker 1: She's also a professor in the Department of Immunology and
Speaker 1: Infectious Disease at the Harvard chance School of Public Health.
Speaker 1: In short, Pardis is the person who knows the most
Speaker 1: of anybody that I know about the complexity of developing
Speaker 1: understanding of a virus and what you do under circumstances
Speaker 1: of outbreak. I knew that whatever Partis was thinking about
Speaker 1: right in this moment would be fascinating and significant and
Speaker 1: would shed new light on the circumstances that we're facing,
Speaker 1: how we reopen, how we track the virus, and how
Speaker 1: we reach a vaccine. And sure enough, Parties said extraordinary
Speaker 1: things to say on all of the above. Partis, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being with me when we last spoke,
Speaker 1: which is just a few months ago, but it was
Speaker 1: before the coronavirus really hit. We talked extensively about your
Speaker 1: experience in addressing pandemics in Africa, and in just a moment,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about Africa and coronavirus, but
Speaker 1: first I want to ask you about what it means
Speaker 1: for you that suddenly the work that you've been doing
Speaker 1: for years is literally in your front yard right here
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts. I've actually been working with the Massachusetts Department
Speaker 1: of Health for many years, and in fact actually do
Speaker 1: as much work in my own backyard. We've been seeing
Speaker 1: outbreaks in our own backyards for many, many years, and
Speaker 1: I became really passionate about as part of the Harvard
Speaker 1: Outbreak Response Committee, started seeing cases of momps in the
Speaker 1: sports teams at Harvard University that then moved into the
Speaker 1: residential homes, and then to the freshman dining hall where
Speaker 1: staff were infected, and to health services where nurses were infected.
Speaker 1: And so I have long been passionate about the spread
Speaker 1: of infectious diseases here in Massachusetts and in residential colleges
Speaker 1: more generally, knowing that they're one of the places where
Speaker 1: you have the most high risk of infection spreading because
Speaker 1: you have lots of students from around the country who
Speaker 1: don't know each other now living with each other on
Speaker 1: top of each other. So this is something we have
Speaker 1: been concerned about and thinking about for a long time.
Speaker 1: So none of this is news to you, but at
Speaker 1: least in the United States, many people are really for
Speaker 1: the first time waking up to the realities of pandemic
Speaker 1: effects for them immediately at home. Does that strike you
Speaker 1: as an opportunity to change people's perspectives on something that
Speaker 1: has been one of your central research vocide for many years. Um,
Speaker 1: you know it is, But when the way I think
Speaker 1: about things, uh, it's not. That's like not where my
Speaker 1: head is at. You know, my head is at what
Speaker 1: is this lockdown doing to our communities? Seeing the rise
Speaker 1: of suicide rates and you know, eight hundred percent, like
Speaker 1: increase in suicide line usage and domestic violence being up
Speaker 1: and mental health being up. I find myself just very
Speaker 1: in the here and now of the existential threat that
Speaker 1: we're facing to our entire way of life, and it
Speaker 1: is frustrating to you know, have been one of many
Speaker 1: people who have been calling for more attention to this
Speaker 1: for many many years. Um, there's there's all of that
Speaker 1: frustration from the past and all of that. Know that
Speaker 1: there's an opportunity in the future to try to change this,
Speaker 1: but right now we have to deal with this crisis, um,
Speaker 1: and just I'm just spending all of my mental capacity
Speaker 1: just trying to figure out how to best help navigate
Speaker 1: and right now just even thinking about how do we
Speaker 1: bring how do we or if we bring college kids
Speaker 1: back to campus. I mean, there's just so many very
Speaker 1: specific needs that we have right now. Is there any
Speaker 1: way to bring college kids back to campus in September
Speaker 1: anywhere in the United States right now? Is there a
Speaker 1: credible path that you can see where that happens. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm thinking through. Before the outbreak, I had
Speaker 1: actually written a number of proposals that I sent around
Speaker 1: and actually couldn't get funded. But I actually had a
Speaker 1: piece of it that was a mobile app that students
Speaker 1: use at trace contacts and that help them help us
Speaker 1: stop infections happening on college campuses and in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, like if you think about a college campuses,
Speaker 1: their contacts are most known. You know, they're going to
Speaker 1: be in the interno genetics class and back in their
Speaker 1: dorm and on their sports team. There's like three places
Speaker 1: they can be, and so it's actually a place where
Speaker 1: I actually in the proposal I always had, I said
Speaker 1: that college campuses are the best place to model outbreak response.
Speaker 1: They're the most vulnerable, but they're also really a great
Speaker 1: audience in which to try to build such a system.
Speaker 1: The path would be extraordinary surveillance campuses. Like one of
Speaker 1: my students went to Middlebury, and you know, Middlebury is
Speaker 1: thirty four miles away from the nearest other city. She
Speaker 1: sort of argues, why did they even send the students
Speaker 1: home when there was no cases of a coronavirus at
Speaker 1: Middlebury and only one in the state of Vermont. You
Speaker 1: just put them at more risk. Or if they happen
Speaker 1: to be infected unbeknownst to them, you just sent their
Speaker 1: parents at risk. Right, There's there's a lot of questions
Speaker 1: about that. I do think that if we had extraordinary
Speaker 1: amounts of surveillance and real buy in from the students
Speaker 1: who wanted to be there on how to manage and
Speaker 1: test for COVID and protections for the staff who would
Speaker 1: be engaged with them, you could bring them back. I
Speaker 1: would imagine that it. The way that it would have
Speaker 1: to happen is not by creating social distancing between individuals,
Speaker 1: but creating a circuit around those people. Right. A closed loop,
Speaker 1: in my mind, is the way we don't actually need
Speaker 1: to all social distance from each other. We need to
Speaker 1: have closed circuits and a lot of close monitoring amongst
Speaker 1: those closed circuits. I think that would be the way.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a tribal or communal version of it.
Speaker 1: It's really fascinating, and it's counterintuitive because one thing that
Speaker 1: I've heard from some university administrators is the dorms. The dorms,
Speaker 1: we have the problem that we can't really have students
Speaker 1: back to campus potentially because we might get rapids spread
Speaker 1: of the virus in the dorms. It would be one
Speaker 1: thing some of them have said, if we could have
Speaker 1: social distancing and people lived off of campus, but if
Speaker 1: they all live together, that makes it worse than what
Speaker 1: you're saying is one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite.
Speaker 1: You're saying that it's precisely the fact that you could
Speaker 1: have a relatively self contained college community or university community,
Speaker 1: and that that might even be easier to do in
Speaker 1: relatively rural liberal arts colleges than it is to do
Speaker 1: a new, major urban university. That's basically the premise, right
Speaker 1: is like, because people we're talking about it right now
Speaker 1: in the laboratories, and I'd sort of originally reached out
Speaker 1: to laboratories that I know have residences on campus, saying, hey,
Speaker 1: what's the chance we could commedy er your lab and
Speaker 1: just create an institute there where you have a closed
Speaker 1: circuit and you just make sure the infection doesn't get in.
Speaker 1: A few investment banks did this with their traders. They thought, well,
Speaker 1: our trading operation is absolutely crucial, and they took over hotels,
Speaker 1: fancy hotels, but they took over the whole hotel and
Speaker 1: isolated everybody and said here's where the team is going
Speaker 1: to sit. And of course they got a lot of
Speaker 1: bad publicity for that on the theory that somehow they
Speaker 1: were putting capital first. And maybe that was true, But
Speaker 1: what you're saying is that's actually not at all an
Speaker 1: irrational way to think about it. If those folks never leave,
Speaker 1: they become an isolated community and they can actually be
Speaker 1: there and be relatively safe provided that the virus isn't
Speaker 1: coming in. Yeah, and for me, from the standpoint of
Speaker 1: for like a research scientist, I thought about this, and
Speaker 1: there is bad press that you get from it, of like,
Speaker 1: oh wait, the researchers have all hold themselves up and
Speaker 1: protected themselves from others. It's more that I know that
Speaker 1: my lab, for example, works on diagnostics or sequencing, and
Speaker 1: I think that's important for the response. But if I'm
Speaker 1: to do that work, the only way I could actually
Speaker 1: do it in isolation putting myself in some sort of
Speaker 1: like a protected shield, is to actually have a blogger
Speaker 1: who every day says, this is what's going on. Let's
Speaker 1: open this up to the entire world and say, let's
Speaker 1: move as fast as we can. Let's bring everybody on
Speaker 1: board of how fast we're trying to work. Can I
Speaker 1: ask you to put on your virus tracker hat and
Speaker 1: think about the virus as a strategic opponent, as you
Speaker 1: often do. And I want to ask you about the
Speaker 1: way that this particular coronavirus is spreading, first domestically in
Speaker 1: the United States and then more broadly globally. Why are
Speaker 1: we seeing such outsized outbreaks in certain locations New York
Speaker 1: and maybe increasingly Boston, New Orleans, and less severe attacks
Speaker 1: in places where it looked initially like things might be
Speaker 1: just as bad. San Francisco is a good example. Why
Speaker 1: don't we see a much broader degree of outbreaking? Is
Speaker 1: that just a response to these social distancing measures? And
Speaker 1: if so, why didn't it work as fast or as
Speaker 1: effectively in places like Boston and New York. I think
Speaker 1: that there's so many different parameters you have to think
Speaker 1: about it. I mean, in some of the places where
Speaker 1: you don't we're out seeing cases, it might actually be
Speaker 1: that we're just not testing for them and there is
Speaker 1: enough asymptomatics that we don't really have a good perspective
Speaker 1: of what's going on. That said, you know, places like
Speaker 1: Boston and New York have a lot of cases because
Speaker 1: they are really dense populations, and I'll know San Francisco's one.
Speaker 1: But I'll give a counterpoint to that in a second,
Speaker 1: Like big cities are places where you're going to see
Speaker 1: a lot of cases happen, because you know, people don't
Speaker 1: want to be siloed in a tin can kind of
Speaker 1: a room. Also, I mean I think Boston. When I
Speaker 1: think about Boston, I think the first cases were actually
Speaker 1: isolated very very well. The tipping point was this Biogen conference,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I think that was just one of
Speaker 1: those things. Conferences are places you bring a lot of
Speaker 1: people in from all around the world, have them all
Speaker 1: like hang out together in all crazy ways, and then
Speaker 1: send them out into the world. And so a lot
Speaker 1: of the outbreaks that were very bad just had a
Speaker 1: bad entry event. So the Biogen conference set off something
Speaker 1: in big motion. If I hear you correctly, what you're
Speaker 1: saying is that there can be a lot of contingent luck,
Speaker 1: good or bad in these circumstances. One event where there
Speaker 1: may have been a super spreader or where people we're
Speaker 1: all clumped together and then went to the four corners
Speaker 1: of the Earth can really have a tremendous impact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you know when we talk about the sort of
Speaker 1: can we come bring back residential colleges, I'm less worried
Speaker 1: about residential colleges all as long as you because you
Speaker 1: have this like longer time frame to think about people
Speaker 1: going in and out as I am about conferences. This
Speaker 1: is an existential threat to conferences, right, because conferences do
Speaker 1: the perfect thing. They bring a lot of people from
Speaker 1: around the world together, they read something for a while,
Speaker 1: shake it up, and then send it out everywhere, and
Speaker 1: so people will really have to think about those in
Speaker 1: a very different way. And there's a chance that conferences
Speaker 1: will come back for some time. I would be very
Speaker 1: sad if we lost residential colleges, not to mention out
Speaker 1: of a job, but if we lost academic conferences for
Speaker 1: some period of time, I for one, but I will
Speaker 1: not be profoundly crushed. Let me ask you about basically
Speaker 1: the developing world. One way of thinking about this is
Speaker 1: that we're not hearing about massive outbreaks of this particular
Speaker 1: coronavirus in the developing world because there's not testing, but
Speaker 1: it's in fact happening on a major scale right now,
Speaker 1: we don't know about it. The other possibility is that
Speaker 1: for some set of reasons, that hasn't happened yet, not
Speaker 1: that it may not happen, but that it hasn't happened.
Speaker 1: Do you have an instinct between those two answers, and
Speaker 1: if so, which one? I don't have an answer, and
Speaker 1: I could probably say it's like some of it's all
Speaker 1: of the above. There. You know the fact that there's
Speaker 1: not testing, ubiquitous testing is a lot of why you
Speaker 1: don't see things. And we know that, like my group
Speaker 1: wrote a paper in twenty twelve. It was a perspective
Speaker 1: in Science magazine that said emerging disease or diagnosis question mark,
Speaker 1: and it posed the question, are these diseases we think
Speaker 1: are emerging actually emerging? Are we just emergingly? Do we
Speaker 1: have emergent technologies to detect them? And have these things
Speaker 1: been circulating for a long time? Because most viruses can
Speaker 1: be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and just fly under the radar,
Speaker 1: And so there COVID and other viruses could be breeding
Speaker 1: and coming in even to patients at the hospital not
Speaker 1: being detected because they didn't make enough of a statement
Speaker 1: for us to be aware of them. So it's hard
Speaker 1: to say. Are my collaborative, Christian Happy and his team
Speaker 1: in Nigeria sequence the first case of COVID in Africa
Speaker 1: and is part of a large group of people working
Speaker 1: with the Nigerian CDC and others surveying what's going on
Speaker 1: in Nigerian and their cases and their cases all throughout
Speaker 1: the country. So it's definitely emergent. The one thing on
Speaker 1: the other side I just want to make a point
Speaker 1: of is should kind of come back to your first
Speaker 1: question of like is it surprising to you that the
Speaker 1: United States now is seeing this and experiencing this working
Speaker 1: in Africa, and I was like, no, I've been more
Speaker 1: worried about the United States than anywhere for a long time,
Speaker 1: because actually, those other countries have been thinking about infectious
Speaker 1: diseases for a long time, and they have an entire
Speaker 1: network to manage this to some degree, So we shouldn't.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that there's not a lot that needs
Speaker 1: to happen in those healthcare systems, but there's a lot
Speaker 1: that they do have that we should appreciate, Like the
Speaker 1: idea of healthcare workers to go out into people's homes.
Speaker 1: They know that it's a bad idea to bring COVID
Speaker 1: or a bowl of patients to the hospital in order
Speaker 1: to be detected for a virus the way we do.
Speaker 1: Like the hospitals are probably the breeding ground for most
Speaker 1: of the infections. Somebody came in just to check in
Speaker 1: on one thing and they left with COVID. The massive
Speaker 1: health system that we have here is a problem for
Speaker 1: infectious diseases. We'll be back in just a moment. Well,
Speaker 1: the genomics work that you're doing now being most useful
Speaker 1: for tracking, will be most useful for potential cure. What
Speaker 1: are the different angles from which genomes can contribute going forward.
Speaker 1: So there's genomics large and then there's genome sequencing, and
Speaker 1: so for genome sequencing there are multiple great values. I
Speaker 1: wrote an article early in the outbreak to say, actually,
Speaker 1: we are in a good place because the folks in
Speaker 1: Wuhan had identified the virus very early and had sequenced
Speaker 1: the virus and made that data available to the community,
Speaker 1: and the genome sequencing told us that the virus hadn't
Speaker 1: been around very long, because it can give you a
Speaker 1: sense of date how long a virus has been the population,
Speaker 1: and the evidence from the genome sequencing tools it had
Speaker 1: just recently urged into the human population. And then we
Speaker 1: already had this genome sequencing data for it, which made
Speaker 1: it possible so that labs all over the world, including
Speaker 1: my own and many you know, my colleagues, had working
Speaker 1: diagnostics within days of the paper being published, Like that's
Speaker 1: sort of that's what we do. And as the virus changes,
Speaker 1: it can improve, Like we're already seeing that a lot
Speaker 1: of the diagnostics out there, the virus has already mutated
Speaker 1: against them, so that the diagnostics actually tag the genome sequence,
Speaker 1: and the diagnostics have to be kept updated. So that's
Speaker 1: an important piece of that is that we didn't use
Speaker 1: that information the right way because then we waited for
Speaker 1: a long time and there are a lot of regulatory
Speaker 1: barriers to having hospitals around the country have those diagnostics available.
Speaker 1: But also it is really important for understanding transmission events,
Speaker 1: understanding how many cases there are, where they're coming from,
Speaker 1: where the introductions. It gives you a lot of information,
Speaker 1: particularly as we try to wind down. It'll give us
Speaker 1: a sense about how many cases are likely circulating in
Speaker 1: this population. It can really inform epidemiology and how we
Speaker 1: how we think about our response. As you watch the
Speaker 1: speed with which this particular virus is evolving, does that
Speaker 1: give you an intuition Obviously you can't make a firm prediction,
Speaker 1: but does it give you an intuition about the question
Speaker 1: of vaccine. So one of the great things that we
Speaker 1: have going for us here many people believe that SARS
Speaker 1: or stars like virus is going to be a next
Speaker 1: big pandemic, and for that reason, a lot of the
Speaker 1: vaccines that have had an early start and we really
Speaker 1: got off to the races were people who had been
Speaker 1: working for some time on Stars, and this virus is
Speaker 1: not that different from SARS, and so we're already in
Speaker 1: a really good position having spent time developing vaccines, diagnostics,
Speaker 1: other things for Stars. And as far as you know,
Speaker 1: will we have a long term vaccine that will capture
Speaker 1: all of COVID forever? Probably not, But will we have
Speaker 1: something that will make a big difference in people's lives
Speaker 1: right now and kind of stop the major event? I
Speaker 1: think so. The fact that there weren't really good animal
Speaker 1: models for COVID early on was a bonus because companies
Speaker 1: like Maderna, who are being vaccines got to skip animal trials,
Speaker 1: which is a really can slow the vaccine development process.
Speaker 1: So they went straight to human clinical trials, which is
Speaker 1: unheard of. Hopefully the human clinical trials go well and
Speaker 1: they're safe, because that is a risk jumping straight to
Speaker 1: human trials. But whatever that outcome, it did move things
Speaker 1: forward much much more quickly, and so we may say
Speaker 1: vaccine that can help to really stem the tide soon,
Speaker 1: and when it will be manufactured and when it will
Speaker 1: get to all the corners of the earth, that's a
Speaker 1: whole different question, and that's why people are talking about
Speaker 1: the fact that we may be social distancing to twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, because that might be how long it takes
Speaker 1: to really get you know, where we need to be.
Speaker 1: And there's obviously a lot of debate on that too,
Speaker 1: but it's something as a possibility perdue in the best
Speaker 1: case scenario where we do get to a functional vaccine
Speaker 1: relatively quickly, what are the barriers to getting it out
Speaker 1: to the world that push us into this possible twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two scenario. Are such vaccines just very difficult to
Speaker 1: manufacture at scale? Is that the challenge? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: that in general, it does take a while to manufacture vaccines.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of work that's been done toward improving
Speaker 1: a vaccine manufacturer. But take, for example, the flu vaccine.
Speaker 1: It takes six months to a year to really create
Speaker 1: enough of that vaccine to make available to everybody. Couldn't
Speaker 1: that be scaled up though very substantially. I mean the
Speaker 1: reason I say this is I had Larry Summers on
Speaker 1: the show the other day and he was saying, it's
Speaker 1: costing the United States economy eighty billion dollars a week
Speaker 1: every week that we're shut down. He said, so anything
Speaker 1: that you spent that is not more than eighty billion
Speaker 1: dollars a week is money saving. We're definitely not talking
Speaker 1: about that scale. So I mean, are there actual bottlenecks
Speaker 1: here that could be overcome? Well, I mean, that's again
Speaker 1: coming back to the whole point of the other part
Speaker 1: of our conversation, which is how do we get people
Speaker 1: back to work if they're social distancing at work? And
Speaker 1: we I mean, I only have about a third of
Speaker 1: my team able to work right now. That's why I
Speaker 1: started being obsessed with the idea of how do I
Speaker 1: comedy or somebody's lab with residential housing and how to
Speaker 1: put people in because that is the interesting dance that
Speaker 1: we have, which is that we are trying to do
Speaker 1: it in the midst of a lockdown, So how do
Speaker 1: we get essential personnel back and running? So no, we
Speaker 1: actually are going to be going slower right now based
Speaker 1: on the practices we have of getting things back up
Speaker 1: to speed. And so you know, I was actually talking
Speaker 1: about because diagnostics are one of the first things we
Speaker 1: need to get to be able to get surveillance to
Speaker 1: move things forward. And so I was like, the diagnostics
Speaker 1: groups that are building and manufacturing the new diagnostics that
Speaker 1: are FDA approved. One may argue that they should be
Speaker 1: test doing their own testing and using something testing on
Speaker 1: their own people on a regular basis, because if they
Speaker 1: shut down then they can't get more diagnostics to the world.
Speaker 1: So we are and I agree with you that we
Speaker 1: should be trying to move it forward. There are some
Speaker 1: just infrastructurally, we can't go much much faster unless we
Speaker 1: build new plants altogether, and so I think we could
Speaker 1: all be thinking about that right how to create plants
Speaker 1: that themselves have an ecosystem where they can keep running.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you about the future, the post COVID future.
Speaker 1: We may never be a fully post COVID, but you've
Speaker 1: done a huge amount of work on early detection. That's
Speaker 1: been one of your central goals. What kinds of plans
Speaker 1: and programs do you have in the works, because my
Speaker 1: guess as those will now be extremely popular and likely
Speaker 1: to be very well funded. Yeah, so my lab has
Speaker 1: been really passionate about early detection for a very very
Speaker 1: long time. Began with our work on lass of fever,
Speaker 1: but then really was really came to bear during the
Speaker 1: able epidemic, seeing that this outbreak likely happened in some
Speaker 1: remote village in Guinea, you know, with one boy, and
Speaker 1: if it had been detected there, the outbreak might have
Speaker 1: been averted. But instead it was four months later with
Speaker 1: cases across the country where we became aware of ebola,
Speaker 1: and the same thing here in the United States. I
Speaker 1: mean many many cases and time passed before we were
Speaker 1: aware of COVID, and with COVID we saw things faster.
Speaker 1: But COVID moves so much faster that it really does
Speaker 1: show you you need very rapid detection. And so we
Speaker 1: have been envisioning with our partners in Africa something called Sentinel,
Speaker 1: which is essentially this idea that each of us stand
Speaker 1: guards over the other, and if we create a system
Speaker 1: by which every person is cared for within the system,
Speaker 1: that will allow us to stand guard on each other
Speaker 1: and identify what we have share that information with everybody.
Speaker 1: And so we help and partner with a lot of
Speaker 1: different groups developing very creative diagnostic tools and then sequencing
Speaker 1: to be able to identify new things that are just
Speaker 1: completely unheard of and just kind of keep characterizing what's
Speaker 1: out there. And then a dashboard that includes these mobile
Speaker 1: applications that allow you to report to healthcare when you're
Speaker 1: sick and to get diagnostic information and share that with
Speaker 1: your community through the healthcare system. Also dashboards that allow
Speaker 1: everyone to immediately see where clusters of cases are emerging
Speaker 1: and beyond. And so that is the world we see that.
Speaker 1: The idea behind all of it is empowering every actor
Speaker 1: in the system, empowering every individual to be able to
Speaker 1: get to the care they need immediately, empowering the healthcare
Speaker 1: workers to engage with them and to get the best
Speaker 1: information in real time. And that will be the world,
Speaker 1: you know, where everyone is engaged, everyone feels empowered, everyone
Speaker 1: has the information that they need, and we can have that.
Speaker 1: I mean, the technology is there, the funding has not
Speaker 1: been historically and that may change, and I think the
Speaker 1: will seems to be clear, and definitely the case has
Speaker 1: been made. COVID has made that case for us of
Speaker 1: the value of having something like this perde Before I
Speaker 1: let you go, what am I not asking you that's
Speaker 1: really salient to you? I mean, you already were my
Speaker 1: go to pandemic person before any of this happened, and
Speaker 1: I'm thrilled to have you here for the moment. What
Speaker 1: do you want to tell the listeners about the situation
Speaker 1: that we're in and about where we might go. Gosh,
Speaker 1: a lot of things that I want to hear from
Speaker 1: a lot of your listeners. I mean, I think that
Speaker 1: to me, actually, like the listening part is so important,
Speaker 1: and I realize like most of my ideas and thoughts
Speaker 1: that I have is just by trying to be a
Speaker 1: good listener and learning from people. And this is a
Speaker 1: moment in which it's like it's one of the most
Speaker 1: human moments because there's this existential threat that binds us
Speaker 1: all that requires every person to think of each other
Speaker 1: to do it right. You know, you can, you can
Speaker 1: do the thing where we distance each other and hate
Speaker 1: on each other, but actually to really do it, it's
Speaker 1: a cooperative game against a common enemy. And in my mind,
Speaker 1: I think the thing I just really want is about
Speaker 1: thinking about our communities, thinking about how to engage everybody
Speaker 1: and to work together. You'll actually do your best work
Speaker 1: and probably get the most reward by being the most generous.
Speaker 1: I made my probably my best professional success was by
Speaker 1: sharing data which I did not to get credit, and
Speaker 1: that got me credit. And so this is a moment
Speaker 1: to not think about getting credit, and that's how we
Speaker 1: will all get the most benefit and the most credit.
Speaker 1: And I just hope that for the world that we
Speaker 1: just hone our skills by thinking about each person, each
Speaker 1: of our neighbors, and each of our fellow citizens on
Speaker 1: the earth. Thank you, Bertie. That's a truly inspiring vision
Speaker 1: of how we ought to go. And it's a ray
Speaker 1: of sunshine and what is otherwise a very time thank you.
Speaker 1: Thanks though I was such a pleasure to do this,
Speaker 1: wish wasn't under these circumstances right now. Well, we'll see
Speaker 1: each other in persons soon enough, before twenty twenty two, hope.
Speaker 1: So all right, take care, take care bye. As always,
Speaker 1: Partise is thinking outside the box about viruses and how
Speaker 1: to fight them. Unlike just about everybody else who thinks
Speaker 1: dorms are the danger, Pardise raises the possibility that university
Speaker 1: campuses might be ideal circumstances for us to begin the
Speaker 1: fight against coronavirus by using contact tracing and a high
Speaker 1: degree of voluntary surveillance. Academic conferences, she says, are the enemy,
Speaker 1: not for the reason that they make you crazy, but
Speaker 1: for the reason that they spread disease. Those, she says,
Speaker 1: may not be back for the foreseeable future. And I
Speaker 1: for one am not going to mourn that, But perhaps
Speaker 1: most significantly, partis wants us to remember that the way
Speaker 1: we succeed in fighting COVID is by viewing ourselves as
Speaker 1: engaged in a cooperative endeavor where we all together have
Speaker 1: to defeat a common enemy. That's a message that's all
Speaker 1: too easy to miss in our current political moment, and
Speaker 1: yet it's vastly significant, and for me, that's the most
Speaker 1: powerful takeaway of what parties had to share with us today.
Speaker 1: Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia gene Conn with research help from Zoie Dwynn.
Speaker 1: Mastering is by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Guerra.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feld. I also write a
Speaker 1: regular column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com slash feld. To discover Bloomberg's original slate
Speaker 1: of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts. You
Speaker 1: can follow me on Twitter at Noah r. Feld. This
Speaker 1: is deep backward