Lies and Misinformation Led to Hundreds of Thousands of US Deaths: Yale’s Dr. Nicholas Christakis on Enduring Impact of COVID-19

Nicholas Christakis

Female : Welcome to Conversations on Health Care with Mark Masselli and
Margaret Flinter. A show where we speak to the top thought leaders
in health innovation, health policy, care delivery and the great minds
who are shaping the health care of the future.

This week Ma rk and Margaret speak with Dr. Nicholas Christakis ,
Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale, an author of Apollo’s Arrow
which examines the enduring impact COVID - 19 will have on our
future. Dr. Christakis is an expert on how social networks d rive human
behavior and health and breaks down how multiple systems including
social media amplified misinformation yielding deadly results.

Lori Robertson also checks in, the Managing Editor of FactCheck.org
looks at misstatements spoken about health poli cy in the public
domain , separating the fake from the facts. We end with a bright idea
that’s improving health and wellbeing in everyday lives. If you have
comments please email us at [email protected] or find us on
Facebook, Twitter , or wherever you listen to podcast. You can also
hear us by asking Alexa to play Conversations on Health Care . Now,
stay tuned for our interview with Yale’s Dr. Nicholas Christakis h ere
on Conversations on Health Care.

Mark Masselli : W e' re speaking today with Yale’s S ociologist and E pidemiologist Dr.
Nicholas Christakis, Director of the Human Nature Lab and C o - D irector
of Yale Institute for Network Science . He's Sterling P rofessor of S ocial
and N atural science at Yale University.

Margaret Flinter: His research is focused on how human health and biology are
impacted by social networks. He's written over 200 articles and
several books, including his latest Apollo's Arrow: T he profound and
E nduring I mpact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live . Dr . Christakis,
we welcome you back to Conversations on H ealth C are today.

Dr. Christakis: Thank you, Margaret a nd thank you, Mark.

Mark Masselli: All right, Nicholas, and what a great read Apollo's A rrow and you
wrote it right at the height of the pandemic. I t seemed to have
provided you a fertile testing ground for many of the theories that
you've expounded upon on social networks a n d health. Y ou said that
you were appalled and ashamed by how badly our country did in the
crisis. What surprised and captivati ng you most about the behaviors
you witnessed as the pandemic rolled over our shores?

Dr. Christakis: Well, I think it's very important to understand that these respiratory
pandemics come every 10 or 20 years, and serious ones come every
50 or 100 years. T his way we've come to live right now feels very alien
and unnatural , b ut it's none of those things. I mean, plagues are an
ancient part of human experience. They're in the Bible. They're in the
alien, you know, and one of the oldest works of w estern litera ture

Nicholas Christakis

that we have . T hey're, they're in Shakespeare . T hey're in C ervantes.

We have expertise in our society. We have medical historians, we
have epidemiologist . Tony Fauci was writing about respiratory
pandemic s when I was in high school, so there's a lot o f knowledge
and tradition about this . P lagues a re not new to our species , t hey're
just new to us , s o we think this is crazy what's happening to us, but
it's not , so t hey come . T hese pandemics have rightly been seen as
national security threats for decades by Republican and Democratic
administrations , a nd so you would think we would have been better
prepared. I don't think anyone looking at the American response
would say that we've done a good job.

Margaret Flinter: Well, I guess they do come every 50 to a 100 years , b ut having been in
health care all my adult life, it still was a little bit of a surprise to me
how things played out . M aybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that
not all people are inclined to act for the public good. W e really saw
this play out with masking. I think you described this in your book, I
wear a mask to protect you, you wear a mask to protect me,
therefore, we all wear mask . W e have a life saving vaccine, still a lot of
people refusing it or worse convincing others not to get it. You 've
made the point that, maybe altruism needs to be enforced in a crisis
of this magnitude. What do you mean by that , a nd can you ever
enforce altruism?

Dr. Christakis: Well, I know that sounds oxymoronic and the title for that was picked,
you're referring to an article I published in The Atlantic, but the gist of
the idea is, is that plague is a collective threat. There's c ertain kinds of
threats that we, our species confronts that are collective in nature , fo r
example, being attacked by an invading army, or we're trying to bring
down in our evolutionary past we're trying to kill a mastodon right
takes like 20 people working together, otherwise, they get ---
mastodon can squash any one of us acting alone. W e evolved a set of
tools in our evolutionary past t o cope with these types of collective
challenges. T hese tools include sort of lights pressure that we pos e on
each other.

One of the examples I give is, is that when we leave our house in the
morning, we all put on our clothes because of social norms. Thos e are
examples of light pressure by which we work together to create a kind
of collective kind of society that we want to live in. But we've also
evolved capacities to up the ante, for example, we've evolved the
capacity for punishment. Think about the tim es, for example, when
you've seen someone act poorly on a highway and you beep your
horn, you're kind of administering a small admonition , of course,
we've evolved all kinds of other ways to if people act in an antisocial
way, we sanction them. W e've all t o have leaders and to like a little
bit of leadership, not too much. But we'd also don't like complete

Nicholas Christakis

egalitarianism, either t hese desires for policing , t hese capacities for
punishment, the se taste for conformity, which can also be bad b y the
way . T hese a re all tools, we evolved to try to get us to work together
in order to confront very particular kinds of threats that threaten us
as a whole.

A plague is such a threat. So your failure to wear a mask or your
failure to be vaccinated can harm me, it's not j ust something about
your choices, and therefore that is a collective threat. T herefore, we
are want to use some of our --- these ancient tools that we evolved to
kind of get us to work together to confront the threat. Coping with a
plague requires a certai n amount of cooperation , a nd to the extent
that we don't cooperate, our responses inadequate to our individual
and collective detriment.

Mark Masselli: It seems to me what fed the threats certainly added to the threat was
this some bad actors and misinform ation that were going on at the
same time, right. W hat seems to be different this time is that the
misinformation had a force multiplier in its spread, called Facebook,
which as we know, is currently being scrutinized for allowing false
information about t he pandemic and vaccine, really to thrive on that
platform. How would you apply the lens of what we now know about
Facebook a s you think about the history of this? What's your sense
about the role that Facebook played in compromising our response to
the pa ndemic?

Dr. Christakis: Well, I'm glad you brought that up again, because your first question
was actually a question about how our response was inadequate. One
of the ways it was inadequate is , is that as a nation, both our leaders
and our citizenry happi ly engaged in denial. Now, denial and
misinformation are ancient features and plagues. We have accounts
going back hundreds of years , thousands of years of people spreading
rumors, lie , superstitions, the emergence of quack doctors selling all
kinds of nos trums that don't work have been described for thousands
of years.

There's a wonderful account, I think it was the P lague of Justinian
1500 years ago where a commentator says, you know, the r umors
have spread in the city that if you throw pots from the seco nd floor of
your house, and the pots crash on the street, it will ward off the
danger , the plague. T his observer said, now he goes because of his
crazy superstition, it's more dangerous to walk through the city for
fear of being hit by a pot than it is bec ause of the plague .

Margaret Flinter: Keeps e verybody inside.

Dr. Christakis: Yes. But the point is, is that p eople have been spreading superstitions
and rumors about plagues and also engaged in denial. D enial is a
normal human psychological defense. But h ere's the problem , o ur

Nicholas Christakis

denial was, first of all, in our lies about the pla gue were facilitated by
these online media, which I'll come back to , but relatedly or distinctly,
we had another problem, which was our leaders lie to us. I
understand the fact that lies are a part of plagues. In fact, I do write
about it, but you would expect the White House as the plague was
bearing down on us not to engage in denial. Other leaders of other
wealthy democracies also w ere incompetence , a lthough not all w ere .
Angela Me rkel did a good job. Jacinda Ardern did a good job in New
Zealand, there were leaders of rich democracies that did good jobs.
It's not an excuse . I n my view, I expect more from the United States. I
expect more from the President.

I understand that there's a normal human desire to deny what's
happening, but not from the President. The President was saying it'll
go away, it will go away. When there were five cases it will go away.
When there are 500 cases , it will go away. When the re are 5000 cases
it will go away. It never went away. He kept saying it would go away.
J ust to be clear, so this is --- I'm not seeing as overly political , t he re
were also Democratic governors who were incompetent and weren't
taking this threat seriously. But the White House is the White House
and we now know the White House was capably advised by the NSA
and the CDC about the nature of this threat.

I and my epidemiologist colleagues knew that this was going to be a
serious pandemic by the end of January 2020. And if I knew that, it is
quite reasonable to expect that the President of the United S tate s
would have more information than me . This, we now know this to be
true, and this was ignored to our great peril.

Let me be clear, from the moment this virus leaped into our species
and s tarted spreading , a certain amount of our fate was sealed .
H undreds of thousands of Americans were going to die. This is a bad
pathogen that killed many people. I said that between half a million
and a million Americans would die. W e're now at 750,000 a nd we'll
probably approach a million which was the upper limit of what I had
said w ould happened. I t was possible to know what was going to
happen in this situation , a nd we rightly would have expected the
White House to act accordingly a nd to prepare our coun try for this to
provide for PPE , to get ventilators , to get testing to work, to prepare
the American people with facts and information for the shared
challenge that we would face , and f or the need for sacrifice . W e
would have to sacrifice some of our liber ties . W e would have to
sacrifice some of our money . T his is not going to be easy.

I nstead, from the moment the virus was loose, we were going to lose
a couple of 1 00,000 lives. But if we had acted better, we would not
have lost as many lives . W e have, in m y view, lost several 100,000
more Americans than we needed to have lose h ad we acted with

Nicholas Christakis

greater alacrity and prudence and sagacity.

Margaret Flinter: W e've been following your work for quite a while. We remember the
very interesting work at Harvard that you did a few years ago on
social networks and how things spread through social networks . I
think you've looked at both happiness and influenza . T hat data
provides insights into how we could do better at predictive
surveillance . W e know we have a much grea ter capacity to collect
data from all sorts of sources. But we didn't really leverage those tools
to get out in front of the COVID crisis. Maybe we hadn't felt the need
to do that before. What are your thoughts? How do we build a better
working data survei llance system for future disease outbreaks? What
do you think about that?

Dr. Christakis: L et me give a two part answer, if I might to that . O ne is a sort of a
geeky answer to the paper you're alluding to which I think some cool
ideas there. T he first part of my answer on the geeky part, the state of
epidemic monitoring in our country, in the past, for example, annual
influenza monitoring was typically that there were reporting
laboratories around the country. T hey would, as people were tested
for influenza or other diseases, would send those reports to the CDC
where they would be aggregated, such that with some lag four to six
weeks from now, the CDC might have a sense of what was happening
in the country today. F our to six weeks from now, we might know
wha t was happening in our country today.

But 10 or 15 years ago, now, Larry Brilliant, and his colleagues
published a paper that influenced people a lot on using big data
techniques. For example, using searches for flu symptoms on Google
to be able to instant ly know based on the aggregate observation in
real time of people's behavior where the epidemic is today . W e could
use real time monitoring of some kind of data, whether it's search
behavior, whether it's human mobility data, something my lab has
done, to get a sense of where an epidemic is today. But we published
a paper that you're al luding to about 10 years ago that showed that it
was possible to use certain tricks to predict where the epidemic
would be in the future.

If you imagine a social network, you should have the intuition that
some people will be in the middle of the network, they'll have many
friends and their friends will have many friends. I f we can identify
people who are in the center of the network, you should have the
intuition that somethi ng that's spreading in the network, whether it's
a germ, or gossip, will reach the popular people in the middle of the
network sooner earlier in the course of the epidemic . A nything that
spreads , the network ’ s going to reach them quickly and soon,
whereas the average person will be reached at the average time, and
the peripheral person will be reached by the germ late in the course

Nicholas Christakis

of the epidemic.

O ur innovation was to say, if you could identify such central people in
networks and passively monitor them, t hey would foreca st the course
of the epidemic. I n fact, this is why early in COVID - 19, all these movie
stars, and politicians were getting sick , b ecause they are popular.
They a re interacting with lots of people . The y a re shaking lots of
hands. It's not ju st that they were celebrities , a nd so we heard about
their COVID, they actually were more likely to get sick. M onitoring
popular people is a way to predict like a canary in the coal mine,
where the epidemic will be in the future.

I n fact, my laboratory has been working on some techniques of this
kind that allow such forecasting not only for epidemics, but also for
product adoption, for what are going to be popular toys or ideas in
the future. But the more serious part now that we've been taught a
lesson, so to speak. K eep in mind that the plague we just had is a kind
of plague light. This pathogen is a serious pathogen, it kills 1% of the
people that it infects, but only 1% . Things like smallpox or cholera or
Bubonic plague or Ebola kill huge fractions of th e people they infect.
W e should count ourselves lucky that we are dealing with this
pathogen, this pathogen could have been so much worse. There's no
god given reason this pathogen doesn't kill 10% or 30% of the people
that it infects . L ike in the movie C o ntagion , t hat pathogen killed about
one out of three people that it infected . W e could have been facing
that .

I don't think the American people yet realize the full extent of damage
done by this plague and the extent of damage that causes could have
been d one by this plague had the pathogen been a little bit worse
genetically, nor do they realize how much damage could be done by
other plagues in the future. H ere is what I can say about that. Other
scientists have been studying the frequency with which new
p athogens move from wild animals into our species. HIV was such a
disease these are called zoonotic diseases, diseases of animals that
come to humans .

HIV , Zika, a SARS - 1 in 2003 , n ow the SARS - 2 that we've had , influenza
from 1918, the Great Influenza , thes e are all diseases that started in
animals spread to humans. T here's evidence that these diseases are
rising, even in our lifetimes you're reading more reports of these
diseases, partly because of climate change and population growth.
W e're coming into gre ater contact with wild animals and we're
getting their diseases.

Second point, there's evidence that respiratory pandemics as a subset
of all plagues are also increasing in frequency that the duration
between them is shortening. A ll of this should give us tremendous
concern that although we're putting the COVID - 19 pandemic behind

Nicholas Christakis

us within a year or two or three , n ew ones might be on the horizon so
we need to prepare our public health infrastructure and ourselves for
this possibility.

Margaret Flinter: Abso lutely.

Mark Masselli: We're feeding today with Yale sociologists and epidemiologist Dr.
Nicholas Christakis, D irector of the Human Nature Lab and C o - D irector
of Yale Institute for Network Science . H e's the author of Apollo's
A rrow . Dr. Christakis talk a l ittle bit about the during ways the
pandemic will continue impact our lives . V accine science and research
has exploded the new mRNA platform being utilized so effectively ,
and we saw this boom in telehealth as well . W hat changes do you
think our hope for w ill endure beyond this phase of the pandemic,
strengthening the infrastructure, both nationally and internationally .
L ook into your crystal ball and tell us what might be coming about .

Dr. Christakis: F irst, on an overarching level , this pathogen is going to become
endemic, right, it's going to be with us forever, it's going to enter into
the background risks that we all face. Look, what's going to happen
now is every person on the planet with few exceptions, a small
percentage of lucky people, either will be infected by the virus, or will
get vaccinated, those are your choices. I f you get infected with a virus,
you run a 1% chance of death. If you get vaccinated, you have like a
one in a million chance. It's obvious you should get vaccinated just
from a poi nt --- that point of view , a nd that's --- and we're go ing to all
have to wait until we reach a very high percentage of people that
have been acquired immunity till we reach the so called herd
immunity threshold. At that point, the epidemic growth phase of the
virus will stop . There will just be a few cases in the background j ust
like we think of measles . None of us are worried about epidemic
measles. There's an occasional case of measles in this country every
year. But it's really not something we're worrie d about b ecause
enough of us have been immunized. That's sort of what's going to
happen with COVID, it's going to eventually become endemic.

Second point, you can think of the pandemic as having three phases,
the immediate phase, which is when we're feelin g the biological and
epidemiological shock of the virus, as the virus rips through our
species . T hat's going to last until 2022 w hen we reach this herd
immunity threshold . T hen we're going to put the epidemic phase of
the virus behind us but we're going to have to clean up the mess .
W e're going to have to cope with the clinical psychological, social and
economic aftershocks of the virus during the intermediate phase , a nd
that wi ll take until 2024 j udging from past pandemics .

T hen we will enter the post - pand emic phase, which I think it’s going
to be a little bit of a party. It's like a tsunami washed ashore ,
devastated the countryside. Finally the waters recede, but we've got a

Nicholas Christakis

big mess to clean up. If you think about it , o ne thing that's not getting
enough c onversation is the fact that probably five times as many
people as die of the germ will become disabled. I'm not talking about
short or long COVID , I'm saying you've recovered, but your body has
been harmed. You've got pulmonary fibrosis, cardiac problems, renal
insufficiency, a neurologic or psychiatric deficits, pancreatic problems .
W e know that this pathogen can affect many organ systems . W e
estimate that probably five times as many people as die of this
pathogen will have some kind of long term disabili ty.

If a million Americans die, that's five million Americans are going to
need the care of the health care system. This will cost money , it will
be a burden to our system. K eep in mind as a benchmark we have
750,000 Americans with end stage renal disease , s o five million more
Americans with d isability is not a joke. W e're going to have to cope
with that during this intermediate phase. We're going to have to get
care for these people.

We're going to have to cope with a psychological aftershocks. People
will be grieving the loss of their loved ones. Millions of children have
missed school. Millions of workers have lost their jobs. These people
have psychological deficits as a result of this . E conomic problems
we're going to have to deal with . W e're borrowing trillions of dollars
from the future. Right now, Larry Summers and David Cutler , H ealth
E conomist at Harvard, published a paper that called this the $16
trillion virus . $8 trillion in economic damage, and $8 trillion in the loss
of life, disability and ill ness. This is a economic catastrophe that
surpasses the Great Depression , a nd people don't see it yet because
we're borrowing money from the future to cover up right now, what's
happening . This is as if the ho mes of tens of millions of Americans had
just b een burned to the ground, the destruction of wealth caused by
this virus, in addition to the structure of life is huge. P eople, I don't
think quite get it yet.

But eventually, we will enter the post pandemic phase, we will put all
this behind us because li fe does return to normal . P lagues always end.
I think that period of time will be like any other period, when humans
go through a crisis, like a war, or an earthquake or a famine, people
will rejoice . W e will be greatly relieved to see the other side of it . I
th
think that wi ll be a little bit like the roaring 20s of the 20 century
after the 19 pandemic . I think we're going to see all kinds of changes
in our political life . I think we're going to see an entrepreneurship, a
kind of boom in entrepreneurship . I think this mRNA platform, and
the Zoom technology that you mentioned are here to stay and are
going to change our lives . I think the hospitality industry is eventually
going to recover. But in the short term, I think we're go ing to see a lot
of changes in how people use hotels, and in restaurants in airports.
T here are going to be some changes in the way we live over the next

Nicholas Christakis

five years or 10 years. But eventually it will end .

I need to say one other thing. There's this joke , I don't know if you
guys know it. S urgeons have this joke , bleeding during surgery is very
stressful for surgeons, and finding what's bleeding is very stressful.
T he bleeding is very bad for the patient. T he surgeons have a kind of a
ride saying, which is that all bleeding stops, event ually. Eventually,
you got a control of the bleeding , a nd if you don't, the patient dies
and then it stops a nyway . The application to plagues is that all plagues
and eventually what we really care about is how does it end? Like
what do we do between now an d that end? That is ideal from our
perspective that minimizes the loss of life and the disruption that is
being caused to us by this infinitesimal thing?

Margaret Flinter: How does it end , and a lso what do we do next, I can't resist asking
you to just appl y. It seems historically these major disasters like
plagues also precipitate changes in our health care system, how we
adjust to deal with it. C ertainly 2020 and 2021 shone a very bright
light on health disparities and health inequity. At the same time tha t
millions of people probably had the experience for the first time in
their adult lives of getting a health care service in the form of a
vaccine without having to show an insurance card or a citizenship card
or put money on the table. If you look forward with your kind of
forecasting, do you see any major changes in our health care system
or public health infrastructure that will be the legacy in a positive
way ?

Dr. Christakis: Af ter the 1918 pandemic, there was huge improvements in
microbiology, the scie nce of microbiology got a big boost. Public
h ealth investments got a big boost. People treated infectious diseases
differently. Of course, there was a ton of research on antibiotics that
began in the 1930s with the discovery of many of the sulfonamides
and then the penicillin antibiotics. I think and as you already alluded
to, there's this mRNA vaccine technology plus the adenovirus vaccine
technology, plus the recognition of the importance of testing in a
public health system. I think money will be redirec ted in these rational
ways.

I think we've already talked about some of the pragmatics , people are
going to begin to question why are so many health care services tied
to insurance -- practices are tied to insurance. You don't really need to
see the doctor personally for a prescription refill. Why don't you just
do a Z oom call or many things can be done by Z oom more efficiently
benefiting the doctor and the patient . L icensing regulations , y ou
know, all those were suspended . I have licensed , I have my medical
license in a couple of states, Massachusetts and Connecticut , r eally
Why? Why do I have to be remain licensed in two states ? I mean, this
is a relic of a time when there was a lot of quack doctors and states

Nicholas Christakis

were trying to keep unqualified doctors out fro m --- we don't have
that system anymore. We don't need to stick with state based
licensure . T here should be rest, just like your driver's license.

I think there are going to be a lot of these I would call them
intermediate kind of impacts, the bigger impac ts, I think, will have to
do with how the health care system is perceived . Like if there are
political changes in our country , a nd often plagues lead to a kind of
leftward tilt in politics with the proviso that the government has to be
competent, but thing s like that I think worker demands rise after
plagues. I think this as you alluded to this demonstration that hey, I
could get free health care , t hat was pretty nice , m aybe other things
should be free to not just things related to contagious diseases.
Mayb e that will provide some political oomph and demands by the
citizenry for a different way of covering the expense of health care.
Y es, I think some of these things may happen. I do think there will be
a legacy of this plague on our health care system and n ot just on the
health of the public.

Mark Masselli: We've been speaking today with Yale ’s S ociologists and
E pidemiologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis, D irector of the Human Nature
Lab and C o - D irector of Yale Institute for Network Science . He's the
author of Ap ollo's A rrow : T he P rofound and E nduring I mpact on
Coronavirus on the W ay W e L ive. You can learn more about his
groundbreaking work by going to www.humannaturelab.net a nd you
can follow him on Twitter @NA Christa kis. Nicholas, we want to thank
you for your deep intellectual curiosity for providing insights into what drives the human behaviors around health and for joining us today on C onversations on H ealth C are

Dr. Christakis: Mark and Margaret, thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

Mark Masselli: At C onversations in H ealth C are, we want our audience to be truly in
the know when it comes to the facts about health care reform and policy . Lori Robertson is an award winning journalist and Managing
Editor of F act C h eck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer advocate
for voters that aim to reduce the level of deception in US politics. L ori ,
what have you got for us this week ?

Lori Robertson: In early September, President Joe Biden announced a plan for
vaccination mand ates for some employers, the specifics haven't been
determined yet . B ut misleading claims about which employers will be
exempt have been circulating online . One viral version of the claim list
11 businesses, government branches or federal agencies as being ,
“ exempt. ” That list includes a mixture of entities that are actually
covered under the mandates, some that are not covered, and some that might be covered, but it's unclear without more guidance about

Nicholas Christakis

the directives.

A taskforce is developing guidance on implementing Biden's executive
order requiring federal employees to be vaccinated. S eparately, the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration or OSHA is tasked with
developing a rule for employers with 100 or more workers that would
require employees t o get vaccinated or get tested at least once a
week.

Employees at the White House and in agencies within the Department
of Health and Human Services are subject to Biden's executive order
requiring vaccination. That means employees at the Centers for
Disea se Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration
and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are
required to be vaccinated. T he order only applies to executive branch
employees.

Claims circulating on social media also falsely s ay employees at Pfizer
and M oderna are exempt. Both companies already require their
employees to be vaccinated. T hat's my fat check for this week. I'm
L ori Robertson, Managing Editor of F act C heck.org .

Margaret Flinter: FactCheck.org is committed to factual accuracy from the country’s
major political players and is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy
Center at the University of Pennsylvania. If you have a fact that you’d
like checked, email us at chcradio.com, we’ll have FactCheck.org’s Lori
Robertson c heck it out for you here on Conversations on Health Care.

[Music]

Margaret Flinter: Each week conversations highlights a bright idea about how to make
wellness a part of our communities and everyday lives. M osquitoes
are considered one of the deadliest ani mals on earth, leading to
hundreds of millions of illnesses and some 2.7 million deaths per year
globally. D iseases such as malaria, dengue fever , and Zika are on the
rise.

Dr. Scott O’Neill: There is this one mosquito called Aedes Aegypti that transmits a
range of different viruses to people. V iruses like yellow fever, dengue
fever, Zika, and the consequences can be very dire .

Margaret Flinter: Dr. Scott O'Neill is the director of the World Mosquito Program , which
has developed an innovative appr oach to er adicating the threat.

Dr. Scott O’Neill: I was particularly interested in this bacterium called Wolbachia. This
bacteria i s present in up to 50% of insects naturally, but not this one
mosquito t hat transmits all these viruses. When we put the bacterium
int o the mosquito the viruses couldn't grow any longer in the
mosquito. W e're seeding populations of mosquitoes with our own ,
mosquitoes that contain Wolbachia . We’re able to spread the

Nicholas Christakis

mosquitoes across very large areas very quickly. Once the mosquitoes
have it , they're protected from being able to transmit viruses.

Margaret Flinter: Dr. O'Neill's team released the genetically modified mosquitoes into a
targeted area and the results showed a dramati c reduction in human
infections.

Dr. Scott O’Neill: In Northe rn Australia we deployed the Wolbachia over quite large
areas, entire cities, and we've seen ess entially a complete elimination,
96% reduction in dengue in those cities. We believe if we can scale
this intervention across entire cities, we can completely p revent the
transmission of diseases like dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika.

We're hoping that over the next five years, we could bring this
technology to protect 75 to even a 100 million people. We would
hope that within 10 years we could bring this interventi on to 500
million people .

Margaret Flinter: The Wo rld Mosquito Program, an effective targeted genetic
engineering approach to eradicating the threat of deadly mosquito
borne pathogens, leading to a dramatic reduction in harm to public
health , now that's a bright idea.

[Music]

Mark Masselli: You've been listening to Conversations on Health Care. I'm Mark
Masselli.

Margaret Flinter: And I'm Margaret Flinter.

Mark Masselli: Peace and Health

[Music]

Female : Conversations on Health Care is recorded at WESU at We sleyan
University, streaming live at www.chcradio.com , iTunes, or wherever
you listen to podcasts. If you have comments, please email us at
[email protected] or find us on Facebook or Twitter. We love
hearing from you. This show is brought to you by the Community
Health Center .