Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, a cluster of Ebola cases emerged in
Speaker 1: Guinea in West Africa. It was the start of what
Speaker 1: would become the largest Ebola outbreak on record. Ebola is
Speaker 1: one of the most deadly pathogens on Earth, and it
Speaker 1: started to move through densely populated cities at the time.
Speaker 1: Two scientists, Christian Happy and Party Sabbetti, were already fighting
Speaker 1: other infectious diseases in West Africa, and when Ebola hit,
Speaker 1: they threw everything they had at containing the outbreak, even
Speaker 1: if it meant putting themselves in danger.
Speaker 2: I might get Itbora, but my thinking is is better
Speaker 2: for me and a few orders to die and saved
Speaker 2: millions of people than be selfish and lefty. Disease spread
Speaker 2: and eventually paid a high price by seeing menials of
Speaker 2: people dying around me.
Speaker 1: Today, on the show the twenty fourteen Ebola Outbreak and
Speaker 1: how the lessons we learned from that moment may help
Speaker 1: us prevent future pandemics. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is Incubation,
Speaker 1: a show about viruses. First today is my conversation with
Speaker 1: Christian Happy. I talked with him about his work hunting viruses,
Speaker 1: and in particular about his role in fighting the twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen Ebola outbreak. Christian grew up in Cameroon and he
Speaker 1: decided at an early age to become a scientist. He
Speaker 1: was inspired by malaria.
Speaker 2: I grew up in the rainforest area and there was
Speaker 2: a lot of malaria there. I grew up knowing that
Speaker 2: my mother has lost two of my siblings to malaria.
Speaker 2: I think the day I met up my mind to
Speaker 2: become a scientist was when I was about eight nine
Speaker 2: years and I got one of the worst part of
Speaker 2: maya that I could ever remember, and my mom took
Speaker 2: me to the hospital. I got treated by nouns and
Speaker 2: then on the way back, she stopped under a tree
Speaker 2: and I was lying against a tree, and I do
Speaker 2: remember asking my mom, why was that sick?
Speaker 3: Why is it that there's no.
Speaker 2: Treatment or cure or anything to prevent this disease from
Speaker 2: hitting me this hard? And our response was I have
Speaker 2: no idea, And that day I remember telling her and
Speaker 2: when I grew up, I will find a cure.
Speaker 1: Christian Happy did in fact grow up to study malaria
Speaker 1: and other infectious diseases that are common in West Africa.
Speaker 1: He got a PhD in molecular parasitology, and then he
Speaker 1: did a postdoc at Harvard. He was at Harvard when
Speaker 1: he met Pardis Sabbetti, the other scientist will hear from
Speaker 1: on today's show. In two thousand and eight, Christian started
Speaker 1: working on a disease called loss of fever. That experience
Speaker 1: laid the groundwork for the work he would do when
Speaker 1: the Ebola outbreak came. Loss of fever, though not as
Speaker 1: well known as Ebola, is deadly and it's endemic in
Speaker 1: West Africa.
Speaker 2: We find ourselves in a place where whole families have
Speaker 2: been wiped out by these virus. I realized that at
Speaker 2: that point that hospital is a nogal area. I'm being
Speaker 2: told that the place is called like a burier ground.
Speaker 2: When you go there, you get infected by this mysterious disease.
Speaker 2: There's no care for, it's almost impossible to diagnose, and
Speaker 2: then you die. And the first thing I did when
Speaker 2: I get to that place is to ask a lot
Speaker 2: of questions, and I realized, one, they don't have diagnostics.
Speaker 2: Two they need to be trained, and then thirdly we
Speaker 2: need to actually make sure that we provide them with
Speaker 2: the necessary drugs and medicine in order to actually help
Speaker 2: stop this while we're doing the research and guess what,
Speaker 2: I leave the place and then come back to Boston,
Speaker 2: have a discussion with by this and we started guarding
Speaker 2: the resources to go there. And then within a few
Speaker 2: months we set up the first molecular diagnostics for last
Speaker 2: of fever lab. Molecular diagnostics Labs for lasta fever in Nigeria.
Speaker 1: Okay, you and parties, you set up this a lab
Speaker 1: at a hospital. It lets the people at the hospital
Speaker 1: diagnose loss of fever in patients there. What happens next.
Speaker 2: We cut down the test fatality rate in the hospital
Speaker 2: from ninety percent to about twenty three point eight percent.
Speaker 2: Why because when they used to have disease outbreak, people
Speaker 2: will come from Germany or a team of researcher will
Speaker 2: come from Germany, take the sample to Germany and then
Speaker 2: they will have the result only about a month three
Speaker 2: weeks to a month after.
Speaker 1: So there were people who had this potentially fatal disease
Speaker 1: in a hospital in rural Nigeria and in order to
Speaker 1: test for the disease, people had to take a sample
Speaker 1: from the patients from rural Nigeria to Germany and do
Speaker 1: the test.
Speaker 2: Yes to Germany, Yes, and if you take about a
Speaker 2: month for them to have the result.
Speaker 1: And would the person be dead by then.
Speaker 2: By the time they get the result, ninety percent of
Speaker 2: those people were dead. But the introduction we brought the
Speaker 2: diagnostics by the patient bedside, that's really what our very
Speaker 2: first huge impact.
Speaker 1: And so that's the just a simple, simple idea, which
Speaker 1: is like, if somebody might have a deadly disease, let's
Speaker 1: figure it out right here, rather than sending a simple
Speaker 1: to Germany.
Speaker 2: That's the whole idea, normal senning simple to Germany, doing
Speaker 2: it within Africa, using the data within Africa to inform
Speaker 2: policy makers in real time so that they can use
Speaker 2: the data to respond faster.
Speaker 1: So now let's jump forward to twenty fourteen and we
Speaker 1: have what's gonna become the biggest recorded ebola outbreak in history.
Speaker 1: Tell me about that.
Speaker 2: The Ebola outbreak start in the remote part of Guinea
Speaker 2: and at that time, the world is looking away. The
Speaker 2: disease is crawling and the disease is killing people. And
Speaker 2: the first thing we did at the time is sit
Speaker 2: down and think about what we can do to support
Speaker 2: the response. Can we activate this This is so system
Speaker 2: that we were setting up through this epidemic, and we
Speaker 2: identify diagnostics as the weakest link of all of the
Speaker 2: things of the chain.
Speaker 3: And the reason is being simple.
Speaker 2: If you cannot diagnose a disease, it's going to be
Speaker 2: very difficult for you to contain it because you need
Speaker 2: to know what you're trying to contain.
Speaker 1: You need to know who's got the infectious disease, and.
Speaker 3: You need to go who has infection.
Speaker 2: And we decided then to start training people in Syralllion
Speaker 2: because Syrillleon was neighbor to Guinea, and we train people
Speaker 2: in Nigeria because Nigeria being the most popular country in
Speaker 2: West Africa. But then the second thing is also the
Speaker 2: fact that we were already working in Syraleion on last fear.
Speaker 2: So those two countries where we're working, we prepare the
Speaker 2: ground by training people on how to diagnose a bowler.
Speaker 2: We also go quickly to develop a molecular diagnostics test
Speaker 2: for a bowler. We test and do the validation in
Speaker 2: the lab. Around May twenty twenty fourteen, we confirmed the
Speaker 2: first case.
Speaker 3: Of boler in Seria leone spreading out of Guinea.
Speaker 1: So the disease is spreading. It has started in Guinea.
Speaker 1: Now you've identified it in Sierra Leone, but it hasn't
Speaker 1: yet reached Nigeria. Yes, you are in Nigeria. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: a passenger arrives at Legos Airport with a suspected case
Speaker 1: of ebola, first suspected case in the country. You're there, Yes,
Speaker 1: what do you do at that moment? That day?
Speaker 2: On that day, I got a call, a very strange
Speaker 2: call around eight four pm and that call is coming
Speaker 2: from one of the foremost virologists in Africa. He calls
Speaker 2: me and he says there is a suspectic case of
Speaker 2: a boler in Legos. There's a lot of argument about
Speaker 2: whether it is or it is not. But I've told
Speaker 2: the public health authority is that the only person that
Speaker 2: will give me a result, and I believe is Christian
Speaker 2: because I know his ability.
Speaker 1: They're saying like we were one person in this country
Speaker 1: to do the test, and that person is.
Speaker 2: You, right, I mean, the stexts are very high. And
Speaker 2: he tells me what do we do? And I told
Speaker 2: him that evening, I am driving from a house to
Speaker 2: the lab that they should send the sample. We'll meet
Speaker 2: in my lab and I'll collect the sample and then
Speaker 2: do the testing that night.
Speaker 1: And what are you thinking. What do you think when
Speaker 1: you get this call?
Speaker 2: Of course, it sends you chills in your vertebrate because
Speaker 2: this is a suspected case in a country of two
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty million people. So if this spread, the
Speaker 2: consequences are going to be very disastrous, not only for Nigeria,
Speaker 2: for Africa and then the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: And this patient collapsed at the airport. The nightmare scenario.
Speaker 2: He collapsed at the airport, He's taken into a hospital,
Speaker 2: He's probably been handled by people with are suspicion, and
Speaker 2: I am to face it. I was going to deal
Speaker 2: with the beasts, which means I may not come back
Speaker 2: home alive because we don't have a BIS facility, be.
Speaker 1: A self force like the super safe High Security facility.
Speaker 3: The super safe HAST best safety level.
Speaker 1: Four and you don't have that. So you mean by
Speaker 1: going to do this test, you might get a bolder.
Speaker 3: I might get a border.
Speaker 2: But my thinking is it's better for me and a
Speaker 2: few orders to die and save millions of people. If
Speaker 2: it is confirmed, then be selfish and left the disease
Speaker 2: spread and eventually paid a high price by seeing millions
Speaker 2: of people dying around me. So I turn to my
Speaker 2: wife and I tell hell, this is a situation. I
Speaker 2: want to go do this. If I don't make it
Speaker 2: back home, take care of the children, it to be okay.
Speaker 2: And she said, I'll pray for you. You'll be back.
Speaker 2: I know this is what you've always wanted to do.
Speaker 2: You always want to work for the people. You always
Speaker 2: want to save lives. I left home with a back,
Speaker 2: with a change of clothes and I drive on that
Speaker 2: road is a lonely road in Nigeria at time, one
Speaker 2: of the most dangerous ord in Nigeria. But I drave
Speaker 2: alone in the night and I go to the lab
Speaker 2: and then the ambulance come from Legos and meet me.
Speaker 2: And I went into the place. We have a bs
Speaker 2: A level too. It's a laminar. I mean'd be very
Speaker 2: low level of contentment and we prepared zero point five
Speaker 2: percent bleach and I will all put up our ppees
Speaker 2: and we're in a very tiny small room without air conditioners.
Speaker 3: I'm sweating like a pig into the ppe.
Speaker 2: My eyes and fast side is fuggy because you know
Speaker 2: of the heat.
Speaker 1: Your safety goggles are fugging.
Speaker 2: I'm wearing the safety goggle and that is fugging up
Speaker 2: and then I'm really looking through that and then working
Speaker 2: in the night very carefully.
Speaker 1: And it's what, you have a blood simple I got
Speaker 1: a blood sample, yeah, okay, and ran the first test
Speaker 1: and then the first test turned out to be positive.
Speaker 3: That really sends chills in my spine.
Speaker 1: I mean, this disease is transmitted through blood, and you're
Speaker 1: sitting there working with the blood.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But my mind is like started running through the number
Speaker 2: of people that came across this guy. How many people
Speaker 2: are being exposed? You asked yourself many questions. I repeated
Speaker 2: the test just for confirmation purpose, and then that test
Speaker 2: actually the result is consistent, and were repeated it the
Speaker 2: tod time and then in the morning around like six
Speaker 2: o'clock the result turns out to be positive.
Speaker 3: Then I know that while we got a problem in
Speaker 3: the country.
Speaker 2: I do court the then Minister of Health and I
Speaker 2: told him that, sir, we have a baller in the country.
Speaker 2: I remember for about a minute when I told him this,
Speaker 2: the line was quiet. And then the question was how
Speaker 2: do we organize ourselves the reality that at that time
Speaker 2: were really not organized.
Speaker 1: What do you and your colleagues do over the coming days.
Speaker 2: We start saying Okay, when I know that this case
Speaker 2: is confirmed, we start thinking about who are the people
Speaker 2: that came in contact with this case.
Speaker 1: So people are like going door to door, who are
Speaker 1: doing knocking on doors saying you need to come with me.
Speaker 1: You were exposed to a bowler.
Speaker 2: Basically, that is exactly what im because we form immediately
Speaker 2: form an emergency operation center. Were actually create a group
Speaker 2: that is tracking down with these individuals, and that group
Speaker 2: is led by a general and we're getting people out
Speaker 2: of their homes. Once we tuck you down, you know
Speaker 2: we're in contact. We're taking them to a solution center.
Speaker 2: And this is how we're actually picking the cases much
Speaker 2: more earlier before the cases become serious and we start
Speaker 2: managing them.
Speaker 1: So this is at this moment when there is this
Speaker 1: large outbreak in several countries near Nigeria. You have this
Speaker 1: first case in Nigeria. You're trying to do testing and
Speaker 1: tracing really aggressively in Nigeria. Does it work?
Speaker 3: It works?
Speaker 1: It works.
Speaker 2: It works because we're able to issolate as many cases
Speaker 2: as possible. We're basically also providing the results the test
Speaker 2: result in the E real time and sharing these with
Speaker 2: public health authorities and guess what Nigeria comes out of
Speaker 2: it with only twenty cases and AED debt and in
Speaker 2: the country of two and tenty million, that is unprecedented.
Speaker 3: It's unbelievable. But then it shows that it works.
Speaker 2: We showed in the context of our program that you
Speaker 2: need two major things to contain an epidemic.
Speaker 3: One is speed, that is.
Speaker 2: Your speed of execution, your speed of response, your speed
Speaker 2: of characterizing the virus.
Speaker 3: And then secondly is accuracy.
Speaker 2: If you do this with accuracy, you should be able
Speaker 2: to contain any epidemic.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Christian Happy is the director of the African Center of
Speaker 1: Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemers University in Ede, Nigeria.
Speaker 1: So for the next part of the show, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk to parties, yep. And I'm just curious to
Speaker 1: hear you talk about your friendship with her, your work
Speaker 1: with her.
Speaker 2: I do call parties my academic betaph I will say
Speaker 2: it is a friendship that is transcending, you know, the
Speaker 2: RUSSA that we're doing, it will become family.
Speaker 1: For the second half of today's show, I talked with
Speaker 1: Pardise Sabbetti. Partise is a computational geneticist. She has an
Speaker 1: MD from Harvard and a doctorate from Oxford and she
Speaker 1: runs a lab at the Broad Institute. And she says
Speaker 1: she and Christian have been through a lot together.
Speaker 4: Well, Christian is like, you know, we call each other
Speaker 4: our academic better haves. That's what he always says. And
Speaker 4: I always calling my writer Di because we've been in
Speaker 4: situations where it's like, what are we even in? You know,
Speaker 4: We've been in some really banana situations together.
Speaker 1: Parties and Christian's work on malaria and loss of fever
Speaker 1: and ebola has made them really world experts on how
Speaker 1: to prevent outbreaks. Later in the show, I'll talk to
Speaker 1: Parties about her book on culture and Epidemics, but we
Speaker 1: started by discussing this outbreak surveillance system that she and
Speaker 1: Christian have developed to reduce the risk of future pandemics.
Speaker 1: It's called Sentinel, and it grew out of the work
Speaker 1: that Christian and Parties did on loss of virus and
Speaker 1: in bola. Sentinel was created to solve a couple of
Speaker 1: deceptively simple problems, including getting fast, accurate tests to the
Speaker 1: places where people are getting.
Speaker 4: Sick we need detection of pathogens wherever they're occurring, because
Speaker 4: these pathogens all look the same and we don't know,
Speaker 4: you know, like what's brewing inside of us until it's
Speaker 4: pretty late. It's no coincidence that every time we identified
Speaker 4: a virus in the world it was when somebody had
Speaker 4: access to testing, right, Like, for most of these viruses,
Speaker 4: we don't see them, and so LASA viruses won't the
Speaker 4: one we started looking at, and everywhere we looked we
Speaker 4: found it. Like in twenty twelve, we were saying, we
Speaker 4: think Ebola and Lasa are circulating undetected in West Africa,
Speaker 4: and if we just set up the capability to test
Speaker 4: for it, we'd find it. And we are already doing that.
Speaker 4: When Abola appeared in West Africa, it appeared in neighboring
Speaker 4: So what exactly.
Speaker 1: Were you setting up just just before that twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: Ebola outbreak.
Speaker 4: We essentially set up the capacity to train individuals on
Speaker 4: the continent to do diagnostic testing and the tools to
Speaker 4: share that information and track pathogens. So it was basically
Speaker 4: a training program as well as the tools and technology
Speaker 4: to detect pathogens around West Africa at the time.
Speaker 1: And then how did that play out as the Ebola
Speaker 1: outbreak emerged.
Speaker 4: Honestly, our timing is kind of wild in that we were,
Speaker 4: you know, working and working and working to get the grant.
Speaker 4: We got the grant in like December of twenty thirteen,
Speaker 4: and we launched the program in March of twenty fourteen.
Speaker 4: And right at that moment, like literally the program launched,
Speaker 4: we're like meeting with the World Bank leadership, you know there,
Speaker 4: and that was when they identified Ebola and Guinea. We're
Speaker 4: like just hearing Ebolas here and we're there. The frustration
Speaker 4: is deep. It's exciting because at least we're there, but
Speaker 4: we haven't even set up anything yet. But we were
Speaker 4: able to move so we were able to set up
Speaker 4: diagnostics March twenty fourteen. You know, the cases were detected
Speaker 4: in Guinea, We had working diagnostics within a matter of
Speaker 4: a week or two from there.
Speaker 1: So what did you learn from that experience that led
Speaker 1: to this kind of next generation surveillance system that you
Speaker 1: are working with.
Speaker 4: So, I mean the idea of Sentinel it is predicated
Speaker 4: on having these different technologies. So there's three kinds, Like
Speaker 4: there are these point of need tests, things that could
Speaker 4: be as sensitive as PC are tests that you know,
Speaker 4: you could run in villages at home that could pick
Speaker 4: up the pathogen everyone's worried about circulating or ones that
Speaker 4: are known to circulate. These other kinds of tests that
Speaker 4: you could do a lot more of, and you could
Speaker 4: test a lot of different pathogens and a lot of
Speaker 4: people and just be like picking up what's making people
Speaker 4: sit coming into the hospitals.
Speaker 1: And as I understand it, some of these tests are
Speaker 1: using using a technology related to crisper to the genie
Speaker 1: editing tool. Tell me about that.
Speaker 4: Sure people know about crisper as the technology to edit
Speaker 4: genes and how it might be changing gene therapy and
Speaker 4: designer babies and all that stuff, But what is crisper.
Speaker 4: It was actually originally discovered in nature as a bacteria's
Speaker 4: immune system to viruses. It was designed in nature to
Speaker 4: detect and to destroy viruses. So that's what it's good at.
Speaker 4: It's good at detecting viruses. And there's certain classes of
Speaker 4: crisper that have properties that make them really good for
Speaker 4: just detection. You could engineer that detection signal to like
Speaker 4: light up when something is found in a sample, and
Speaker 4: that could be used as a diagnostic. So it's very
Speaker 4: very sensitive, very very specific. It makes really good point
Speaker 4: of need tests, and it's also so sensitive specific you
Speaker 4: could combine it in a multiplex test and do a
Speaker 4: lot of testing simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Okay, so those are the point of need tests. And
Speaker 1: then there's this other category, which is the genetic sequencing
Speaker 1: machines that you were able to get into hospitals in
Speaker 1: West Africa. What do those allow you to do.
Speaker 4: In the clinics when people come into the clinics or hospitals.
Speaker 4: You want to be able to test for like a
Speaker 4: patient comes in and you test for twenty things right
Speaker 4: at the same time, because it could be any of
Speaker 4: those things.
Speaker 5: We don't know a lot of times.
Speaker 1: Like in that instance, are you just like what are
Speaker 1: all the pathogens in this person's body right now?
Speaker 5: Is that what you're doing in that Yes, that is
Speaker 5: the goal of it.
Speaker 4: We're not there like we know everything, but we but
Speaker 4: it's getting close to that.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's like the dream right then you can
Speaker 1: just say, like tell me everything that's there, Like that's
Speaker 1: the one that I thought you couldn't do.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you're saying you're getting there.
Speaker 5: Well, you were getting there, yeah exactly.
Speaker 4: Right now, It's like expensive and time consuming, but like yes,
Speaker 4: that would be the kind of holy grail, right, And
Speaker 4: so we've been building these like really super exciting tools
Speaker 4: that allow people to really in a very user friendly way,
Speaker 4: see you know what, all the different pathogens that they're detecting,
Speaker 4: where they're occurring, and start to really kind of make
Speaker 4: sense of all of that data.
Speaker 1: And has there been an instance more recently when you
Speaker 1: were able to use this set of tools to you know,
Speaker 1: stam an outbreak?
Speaker 5: Definitely?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean the funny thing about the kind
Speaker 4: of work we do is like when we're successful, you
Speaker 4: don't know about it, right, yes, right, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know all of the pandemics. We didn't, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because of that's it.
Speaker 4: Well, and so we we have lots of great successes.
Speaker 4: The fact that when COVID hit, we had working COVID
Speaker 4: diagnostics in serri Leone, Senegal and Nigeria our main sentinel
Speaker 4: sites before any US hospital, like any that's sort of
Speaker 4: like what you don't hear about.
Speaker 1: So okay, so that's your work on this, you know,
Speaker 1: very small scale, right, genetic screening looking for molecules in patients.
Speaker 1: I want to sort of go up many many orders
Speaker 1: of magnitude here make a big turn and talk about
Speaker 1: your work on thinking about outbreaks at the scale of society,
Speaker 1: at the scale of country in the world. You actually
Speaker 1: co wrote a book about this side of things. It
Speaker 1: came out before the COVID pandemic in twenty eighteen. It
Speaker 1: was called Outbreak Culture. Tell me about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Outbreak Culture was kind of born from conversations
Speaker 4: I had with a journalist, Laras LAHI just kind of
Speaker 4: processing what we were in.
Speaker 5: Like, I think I said that, you know, the bowl
Speaker 5: outbreak was really like a lot. I mean a lot.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: Obviously now people know the kind of a lot that
Speaker 4: pandemics can be from COVID, but it was different because
Speaker 4: it was like it was extreme and nobody else seemed
Speaker 4: to know about it, about us, but there was this
Speaker 4: group of people that were like just deep in it,
Speaker 4: and we just saw a societal breakdown, you know. So
Speaker 4: I often say that viruses expose and exploit the cracks
Speaker 4: in our society. They prey upon us and the division
Speaker 4: between us. And at the end of the day, it's
Speaker 4: like outbreaks are crucible, right there is this It's just
Speaker 4: like something that's insidious. It spreads without you knowing that
Speaker 4: weaponizes your neighbor, that suddenly makes your neighbor like a
Speaker 4: dangerous threat. And so it's kind of everything is so
Speaker 4: much going on, you know, and the lockdowns and all
Speaker 4: of it. So it essentially was this realization I was
Speaker 4: trying to like process what was going on and why
Speaker 4: was this so insane? And one of Nathan Yosback, who
Speaker 4: was my team, he had great insights always and he
Speaker 4: basically when he was in first came back to Sierra Leone,
Speaker 4: he had said something like, it's funny thing is nobody
Speaker 4: seems to even care about the virus.
Speaker 5: The virus is like the backdrop, you know, it's what
Speaker 5: does that mean? It's so proper between people.
Speaker 4: It's a political battle, you know, and the virus is
Speaker 4: the thing around it, but it's actually about who's in charge.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: There's so much politics, and I think ultimately the most that.
Speaker 1: Is wild foreshadowing, right, And like, yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: you wrote about this and the book came out in
Speaker 1: what twenty eighteen or something, and like when you talk
Speaker 1: about that, when you say, what everybody starts talking about
Speaker 1: is politics, like that's like, you know, chills down my spine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, I had a lot of people who were like,
Speaker 4: thank goodness you wrote this book, because then I just
Speaker 4: knew what was happening during COVID.
Speaker 1: There's a really deep human nature thing that happens, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the interesting piece of the book. In
Speaker 1: a certain way. It's like it's not because some particular
Speaker 1: politician is craven or something right as you describe it.
Speaker 1: It's just like, this fundamental thing that.
Speaker 4: Happened doesn't have to happen by the way. It doesn't.
Speaker 4: I thought out the places where people were doing it
Speaker 4: the right way. Early in the outbreak. I was like
Speaker 4: advising everybody in their mother and you know, kind of
Speaker 4: just around talking to people, and I stumbled upon this
Speaker 4: like really just interesting place at Colorado Mesa University in
Speaker 4: Grand Junction, Colorado.
Speaker 5: They had, you know, a.
Speaker 4: Community that was very diverse politically, ideologically, ethnically, and they
Speaker 4: were trying to figure out how to work through it.
Speaker 4: And they didn't have money. They couldn't just throw money
Speaker 4: the problem and test everybody, so they had to figure
Speaker 4: out how to be creative. And that's where we brought
Speaker 4: our data analytics system to them, and we brought some
Speaker 4: of our support to help them be like smart about it.
Speaker 4: And the things that they did that were different from
Speaker 4: all the other places in the United States was they
Speaker 4: tested smartly. They supported testing in the community, not just
Speaker 4: like testing themselves. I would always basically liken it to
Speaker 4: being in a place where there's wildfires and a shortage
Speaker 4: of fire alarms, and you went and you bought like
Speaker 4: a thousand of them and putting them in your own
Speaker 4: home and nobody around you has one, Like you will
Speaker 4: pick up a fire when it gets to your house,
Speaker 4: but at that point it's burning to the ground. Wouldn't
Speaker 4: it be smarter to set up, you know, put fire
Speaker 4: alarms in every one of your neighbor's homes so when
Speaker 4: they get it, you get the signal. Right, And that's
Speaker 4: basically what we proved in using like an epidemiological model
Speaker 4: that yes, actually even randomly testing your neighbors will be
Speaker 4: better than testing yourself. That's like one example, right, And
Speaker 4: they were thinking that way. We were being creative and
Speaker 4: we weren't just in this like isolated box of protect myself,
Speaker 4: protect myself.
Speaker 1: So we are at this place now where the whole
Speaker 1: idea of pandemics and epidemiology is is weirdly politicized, and
Speaker 1: it seems like we would be screwed essentially socially politically
Speaker 1: if there were to be another outbreak. What do we
Speaker 1: do about that?
Speaker 4: I think that we need to be way less toxic
Speaker 4: in the way we talk about it. You know, we
Speaker 4: have to basically decharge how we think about these things together,
Speaker 4: and we have to use every like mini event as
Speaker 4: an opportunity of like building better systems. When RSV is
Speaker 4: going through the schools, we can help parents think about
Speaker 4: basically just really think about what are the parents' incentives, right,
Speaker 4: Parents who don't want their kids vaccinated, they're just scared parents.
Speaker 5: At the end of the day.
Speaker 4: We need to tell them about how to keep their
Speaker 4: kids safe. And that's what's important, you know. And we
Speaker 4: should be showing value at every point and respecting autonomy
Speaker 4: where we can and trying to you know, support that conversations.
Speaker 1: Is there anything we didn't talk about, anything else you
Speaker 1: want to talk about?
Speaker 4: I guess the thing I just don't express to you
Speaker 4: is the joy that we have in Sentinel. You know,
Speaker 4: when I think about Sentinel, why it matters to me,
Speaker 4: right is as somebody who's a nerd at the heart,
Speaker 4: you know, I love math, and I love computer science,
Speaker 4: and I love building things, and I love it. But
Speaker 4: I also just want to say it's joyous and the
Speaker 4: joy that is important responding to outbreaks, Like you will
Speaker 4: not respond to an outbreak by walking around with your
Speaker 4: head down. You're going to respond to this kind of
Speaker 4: existential threat by pure joy. And so I love our
Speaker 4: training programs because they are fire. The students are that
Speaker 4: we like, you know, would go canoeing on the Charles
Speaker 4: River altogether, Like we're creating a network of people who
Speaker 4: are friends with each other. So to me, I think
Speaker 4: that's like the most powerful part. And what I'm really
Speaker 4: proud of is that we're bringing the best technology, but
Speaker 4: we're bringing it with like extreme joy and communication and friendship.
Speaker 4: That's how we will overcome the next pandemic, you know,
Speaker 4: by doing it together.
Speaker 1: Thank you for your time. It was great to talk
Speaker 1: with you, Kate, to talk with you too. Partis Sabetti
Speaker 1: is a professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious
Speaker 1: Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is
Speaker 1: also an Institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT
Speaker 1: and Harvard. Thanks to both my guests today, Christian, Happy
Speaker 1: and partis Sabbetti. Next week on the show, Epstein Barr
Speaker 1: the first cell for Christ's say Somebody's on his side,
Speaker 1: I'll tell You. Incubation is a co production of Pushkin
Speaker 1: Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Kate
Speaker 1: Ferby and Brittany Croman. The show is edited by Lacey Roberts.
Speaker 1: It's mastered by Sarah Bruguerer, fact checking by Joseph Friedman.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano. I'm
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.