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Airborne Assumptions and Subventilated Science
00:45:38
Carl Zimmer joins to discuss Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, a book that excavates the forgotten science of airborne disease transmission—from Louis Pasteur’s broth experiments to why COVID’s airborne nature was...
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Carl Zimmer
Foreign.
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Mike Pesca
It's Thursday, July 31, 2025, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. So over the last couple days, I've led the show with news stories that were, let's. Let's call them what they were, complaints about how the New York Times covered something. And so today I make it up to the Times. Now, to be fair, there's value in my critiques. It holds the Times to account. They can recalibrate their coverage based on what the gist says. But I'm thinking about you. Let's say you're not a Time subscriber. Well, you could always get a couple of stories for free, and then some of their stories run in other papers. But just listen to the gist and you'll figure out what they've been talking about. And you'll also know the bad parts of the stories even better than what the Times would give you. So now I want to make partial amends by pointing out a couple of very good stories the Times has run recently, but also to note that it's not just the Times that's deserving of criticism, specifically the kind of criticism I leveled yesterday, which was when they allowed a mass shooter to essentially set their news agenda. Now, I get it. Someone takes a gun, goes into a New York City office building, kills people. There's going to be curiosity about which tenants he was targeting. And in this case, the answer was the NFL. But he couldn't get to the NFL's offices, so he went to the office of the real estate company Rudin, which owns the building. So I discuss all this on the Just list today. That's Mike pesca.substack.com Mike, Bloomberg ran with the root and angle, just like the New York Times ran with the NFL angle yesterday. Today's Bloomberg subhead was the deadly day at 345 Park Ave. Is thrusting a longtime private real estate family, the Rudens, into the spotlight. Well, Bloomberg, you're the ones doing the thrusting, and it's your spotlight that's shining. But that's fine. You know, I always default to more information on over less. I'm not really shaming Bloomberg for covering an important real estate family who, by the way, once rented me an apartment. And they did a straightforward enough story on building security. If you don't subscribe to Bloomberg, here.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Was the takeaway from that.
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Mike Pesca
You can't really harden every target from every gunman, I would say, just as you can't keep a gunman out of every building, I guess you can't keep them out of every newsroom editorial meeting, but you should maybe try. Now, the other Time stories that I want to cite fall into the category of important news that's a bit surprising to see in the Times. Over the last few days, they've been running multiple pieces about organ transplants. Now they're just human nature a little bit. Audience capture the worldview of the people who write the Times, probably similar to the worldview of the people read the Times, but I'm infrequently surprised by one of their findings. The right stories, the stories will be true, the stories will be valuable. But they're the kind of stories that you expect to see in the Times. Legal experts increasingly concerned about Trump's norms violation. There's a Time story for you. Liver transplants that are taken a bit too soon. Heart transplants where the heart's still beating and the brain might still be alive. I did not expect that from the Times, but it's a good story. I'm glad they did it. I expected it from a tabloid. If it were a tabloid, the headline might be so grabbing. You might have known about it. Right? Something like still Alive Liver Giver. But the Times does a good job. In fact, the fact that it was the Times maybe adds heft to the idea that this is really going on, you know, excavating a spleen a bite too early. Then there was the front page story by Jason DeParle, who I've had on this show before, who I think is the best at big picture reporting and finely rendered portraits of poverty in America. The headline on this Time story was Study May undercut the Idea that cash Payments to poor families Help Child Development. Yeah, that was the headline online, but the actual front page. On the front page, cash stipends did not benefit needy children. And this is all I ever wanted from the press. Do a thorough job reporting the data. Even if the data doesn't match the hopes and the dreams or the worldview of the typical Times reader or writer, you still got to report it and do so prominently. The study called into question this pilot program that I had heard about. It gave poor parents $333 a month for four years. And guess what? Those payments did nothing. They did nothing measurable for the families compared to the control group. No better language skills, no fewer behavioral problems, no improvements in executive function or brain activity. And if that's what the study shows, the Times should put it on the front page. And they did. I don't think the Times or other papers like them consciously misreport stories. I know they don't, but I did notice, for example, that there are lots of studies that show that SAT scores strongly correlate with school performance. But I don't think this was in keeping with the ethos of what was going on a couple of years ago, especially when these cases were before the Supreme Court. And it's not that the Times misreported that, but the emphasis was definitely elsewhere. I also worry in the hypothetical but probable upcoming Mamdani administration they'll have beautiful free government grocery stores and they'll be selling exquisite organic artichokes for 99 cents. But I got to hope that the Times will put together shoe leather reporting that tells us those 99 cent artichokes cost taxpayers 1299 each. And then you got to rely on the tabloids to come in with the governor's angry reaction. Artichoke choke. Hochul. You know those two are going to brawl. So I am now hoping for and expecting more honest to goodness news coverage no matter who's subsidized. Gourd gets gourd. Great job New York Times on these stories lately and great job to all of us. I'm saving you on your time subscription so now you can afford private sector produce. On the show today, a full length interview with a fantastic science writer. Let's see who he works for. It's the New York Times. Also discover National Geographic. So many books and his new one goes straight to the heart of what we once knew, then forgot and are now relearning about airborne diseases so vital during the pandemic. Carl Zimmer is my guest here to talk about his new book, Airborne the Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.
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Unnamed Co-Host
I will now read a small passage that gets at why the book was written and the book is Airborne the Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Health officials did not take the threat of airborne infections seriously. They largely failed. Infectious disease experts who led the fight against outbreaks and prepared for the emergence of new diseases mostly ignored the aerobiologists, even when it meant accepting some basic mistakes about the physics of air. That is perhaps the most turgid passage. But it really gets at the point of this book, Airborne by Carl Zimmer. In it, he does what Carl Zimmer does. He weaves in stories of history, of anecdotes, of people who become characters in his book. But it's really eye opening in a way that I didn't quite expect.
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Mike Pesca
Because for all the debate about COVID.
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Unnamed Co-Host
And what we got wrong this seems.
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Mike Pesca
To me should be right at the.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Core of it, and it's kind of at the outskirts, maybe. Until now. Carl, welcome to the gist.
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Carl Zimmer
Thanks for having me.
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Unnamed Co-Host
So you start off with a famous and infamous choir in Washington state. Remind us of who these women. Mostly women. Right.
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Carl Zimmer
Men and women.
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Unnamed Co-Host
These people. Okay, so remind us of who these people were.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah, so this are.
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Mike Pesca
Still are.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Mostly are.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah, yeah. This was. This is a. A singing group called the Skagit Valley Chor, and they're in northwestern Washington state. And, you know, they. Before COVID they just went about their business. They loved to sing together, and they put on a couple concerts a year for the local community. And in early 2020, when there were the first, you know, reports of COVID they went on with their rehearsals, being careful, however, taking all the precautions that people were telling them to take. For example, keeping a distance of a few feet, not making contact. Because that was the idea was that Covid was spread when you handled a contaminated surface, or maybe someone might just sneeze in your face and some big heavy droplet hit you. Yet out of about 61 people who came to rehearsal on March 10, 52 of them got Covid. And that was a spectacular demonstration that Covid is airborne. You really can't make that many people that you can't infect that many people without it spreading around like smoke. That's the conclusion that a number of scientists came to.
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Unnamed Co-Host
And you're there watching the concert, not just as a fan of great music, but you have. Because you are a science reporter. You have a carbon dioxide monitor. And what is it telling you? What is the empirical data as you let the music waft over you?
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah. So I went to visit the. The Skagit Valley Corral, you know, a couple years after this. You know, they. After. I mean, they had a terrible time. They got. You know, almost all of the people at this rehearsal got sick. Three of them were hospitalized, two of them died. And the whole experience was very traumatic for them because they became the subject of world attention, and really, a lot of. Got a lot of hate mail.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Yeah, like, you did something wrong. You started this.
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Carl Zimmer
Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, no, they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. They were fine, but they. But they just got bad advice. And so, you know, and it was very. It was a very long process for them to get back to what they loved, which is singing together. And so while I was working on the book, I went to one of their first, you know, in person performances at a. At an auditorium in Mount Vernon in Washington. And, you know, I brought with me a carbon dioxide meter just to sort of get a sense of, like, what was happening in that room, because, you know, the way that Covid spreads and some other diseases spread is through the air as people exhale, and they exhale these tiny droplets, some of which have viruses and bacteria in them, and they're also exhaling carbon dioxide. So you can look at your carbon dioxide meter. I have one right here with me. And, you know, like, you can see, like, what the concentration is in wherever you are. And so, you know, under a thousand is safe, over a thousand, you know, not. Maybe not so much. And, you know, I could watch in this big auditorium, I could watch the carbon dioxide levels rise over time, which is telling me that, you know, we are changing the air as we are together. And it didn't get to a level where I got concerned that I was going to put on my mask, but it was just something that to be mindful of, especially given this singing group that had gone through such a traumatic experience with. With the air.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Yeah. The book is a contemplation of the air, and what if we could really see all the things in the air? And then it's a history of the air and the people who looked at the air and thought about the air. But what was the state of science? I'm not going to say of science, but what was the state of the popularizers and communicators of science pre Covid? Just in general. And then we'll get to the specific about the threat of airborne contagions.
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Carl Zimmer
So if you looked at, you know, public health guidelines before COVID I mean, they pretty much were downplaying even the possibility of airborne infection, except for a couple special cases. So tuberculosis, for example, like, everybody agreed tuberculosis is spread through the air, but beyond that, there were very few diseases that they considered it. And in fact, there were all sorts of claims that you would see that, well, you know, the only way that an airborne disease can spread is if it's in a droplet of a certain size smaller than five microns.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Five micron. The five micron myth. Yeah.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah. So that really led people to not really think much about airborne diseases as a potential threat, except, paradoxically, in science fiction, you know, whether it's the Andromeda strain or the cobra event or outbreak or something like, you know, it's a really scary thing to think that a disease could be airborne, and yet, you know, we didn't really go through our lives really thinking like, oh, I could get Sick from just breathing in air.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Like breathing in smoke, and did downgrading. The risk of airborne diseases was that because there was good, careful experimentation that led to empirical researchers to say, okay, except in the rare case of, say, tuberculosis, that's not a thing. Or was it more groupthink assumptions, just listening to what another person said before you without actually looking at the evidence?
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Carl Zimmer
I think it was just a lot of, you know, deeply entrenched assumptions that, that went way back. I mean, the kinds of ideas that people had about how diseases spread went back to the early 1900s. Because in the early 1900s, I mean, this was the golden age of microbiology where scientists were discovering, oh, here's a disease that spreads through contaminated water, and here's a disease that spreads through sexual contact or contaminated food. So all these microbes were spreading in these different ways and the air seemed pretty much harmless. People couldn't even picture, like how, how could you, how is it even possible for microbes to really spread in great numbers from person to person through the air? And so, yeah, so in the early 1900s, but it did, but it did.
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Unnamed Co-Host
With tuberculosis, they couldn't picture it. But the very well known and horrible disease spread like that, right?
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Carl Zimmer
Yes, it was spreading. Yes, exactly. But, you know, there were all sorts of ideas about how it's, how what its cause was. I mean, originally people thought that tuberculosis was some sort of hereditary condition and so that people of a certain constitution, if they went through stress or something, it would just develop tuberculosis. But, and once, and once the tuberculosis was discovered, like it didn't, you know, bacteria don't just say to you, like, hello, here's how I spread. You have to do experiments. And those experiments aren't easy. And so for a long time, a lot of people thought that the way that tuberculosis spread was in dust. They thought, oh, people spit because they get all this phlegm in their lungs. They spit and the spit turns to dust. And if you stir up the dust, maybe you'll inhale it. And so there was a lot of efforts to get rid of dust. But the fact is you don't need dust to get tuberculosis. It's just our own breath.
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Unnamed Co-Host
And so your book details how the tuberculosis fights. You know, what caused tuberculosis were a lot like the COVID fights, Although the COVID fights took place in a more advanced time, in a more concentrated timeframe.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, it. So scientists, husband and wife team named William and Mildred Wells, they really, you know, did the main work to demonstrate over years and years and years of effort that indeed tuberculosis is airborne. And you know, like, it was. It's. It. It's really hard to. To pull off those sort of experiments to demonstrate it, especially when, you know, the, you know, community of scientists at large kind of already assume that it is an airborne. So how do you get the support.
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Unnamed Co-Host
And the old ideas. And the old ideas, concept like miasmas were seen as, you know, something going back to ancient Greek times or the times of a Victorian era where we thought that exciting, the humors and the blood had some ill effects.
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Carl Zimmer
Right. And the whole thrust of modern medicine, based on the germ theory of disease, was to kind of overturn these old ideas, these incorrect ideas. This idea that cholera was spread by miasmas in the air, that was wrong. That really was wrong. But unfortunately, what happened in the process is that the very possibility that an airborne disease could cause really serious harm got eliminated as well. And if we.
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Mike Pesca
There was tuberculosis, like, that's the thing.
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Unnamed Co-Host
That I always kept coming back to. There was tuberculosis. The remedy was to tell someone to go to a mountainside like in Haiti.
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Mike Pesca
You know, fresh air would actually help.
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Unnamed Co-Host
So it seems odd to me that the medical community, I don't know what.
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Mike Pesca
Did they just asterisk that or said.
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Unnamed Co-Host
It'S inconvenient for the march forward that we're doing on microbes. It does seem to be a failing of conception that should have been noticed a little more at the time and should have been kind of contemplated when this new disease emerged.
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Carl Zimmer
Well, in hindsight, yes, it would have been nice. But. But, you know, I, you know, in fairness, you know, you have. I think it's important to recognize that the. The research to demonstrate this sort of stuff is really difficult. And so if you combine that with sort of, you know, baseline assumptions, then you do get into this situation where a really dangerous thing like, you know, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis today kills over a million people a year. I mean, it's still terrible, and it's only spread through air. And it's true that for decades this idea that it is airborne, you know, was being presented and dismissed. And. And, you know, and, you know, honestly, like, I mean, I think that, you know, some expert public health experts were kind of expecting, like, very high levels of evidence for airborne infection, whereas they weren't really expecting. Demanding the same thing if someone said like, oh, this spreads on, you know, contaminated surfaces, you know, the. And so, you know, that sort of.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Okay, so a higher threshold of proof based on what assumptions were going in.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I have a lot of reason to think that this is true, that, you know, that airborne infection is not important. You're going to have to really persuade me with some amazing evidence. And, you know, in general, this kind of research is really, really hard. How do you rule out different ways that things are getting around? I mean, these are tiny, invisible pathogens. And so to. To. To really kind of nail down it's spreading through the air as opposed to contact or drinking water or whatever.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Yeah.
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Carl Zimmer
It's not easy and I understand, I.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Give a lot of allowances, but it's a little like the drunk looking for his keys under the. Under the streetlight. Right. The whole. But it's hard to find out if it was airborne as an excuse for not finding that out in time.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Rejecting it as, I think, a little bit of dogma and a little bit of under. Understandable difficulties. A little bit of a dogma. Little understandable difficulties. A little bit of the inertia of groupthink.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah. And I think once people start learning things in medical school or public health and sort of there's a. Taught them as, you know, as a given, as like, oh, we figured this out, then there's not much incentive to go back and be like, wait a minute, is that really. Is that really true? And, you know, I certainly talked to people who in the experience of COVID said, like, wow, like, I really got taught the wrong things.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Mm. And also, and this is really interesting, bioweapons comes into play and makes. Well, I want you to explicate this, but makes the taking seriously the threat of the airborne seems as from your reporting, to have. Give it. Given it a negative sheen. Is that fair?
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Carl Zimmer
Yes. The. In the 1930s, you have people like William and Mildred Wells making the case that. That there are a lot of diseases that can spread through the air. And they devise all sorts of clever instruments to. To measure this and do experiments and so on. Really brilliant.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Give me one example, because they're. They're great.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah. Well, there. One thing they called the. The infection machine. And so basically this would be like a big bell jar and you could put some mice or a rabbit inside of it, and it had these long tubes that were connected to it and. And they could actually like, basically release sort of a mist that. In which droplets contained bacteria or viruses. And then those. They would travel down this tube and then the animals would breathe it in and they could. They could show that, like, if they just increased the dose to a certain level, they would get sick, and if they increased it more, they would start to die. And this was true for tuberculosis, influenza, a bunch of other things that they worked with. So these are beautiful pieces of equipment that they had built, like hoping to protect people from getting sick. And then in World War II at Camp Dietrich, the United States government said, hey, all this aerobiology research, we really like this because we're looking to understand how you can turn airborne diseases into weapons. And so we're going to take all this, this basic equipment and these concepts, and we're going to use them to sort of flip this on its head. Instead of trying to protect people, we're going to make anthrax bombs. We are going to make bombs full of viruses that will give people all sorts of weird, obscure diseases.
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Unnamed Co-Host
And when you were describing this very beautiful, efficient rabbit killing machine, I said to myself, ooh, that's like Mengele for mice.
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Carl Zimmer
Well, I, I, we have, we have learned a huge amount of what we understand today about how to keep people healthy has come through animal studies. I mean, so I think I wouldn't, I would not use that kind of Nazi reference.
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Unnamed Co-Host
No, me, me neither. But I thought that, but then I decided to jettison that from my head. But I think I kind of interrupted you. So the, the end or the conclusion of that anecdote is science, pure science, science giving us knowledge taken over, used by the military, military applications. It becomes discredited, or it becomes anathema, to use a somewhat scientific term, to the rest of the scientific community afterwards, perhaps unfairly.
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Carl Zimmer
Well, you know, certainly in terms of a branch of science, aerobiology got really sidetracked because thousands and thousands of people, instead of studying aerobiology to keep us healthy or to keep our crops safe or to, you know, to understand how life in the air works in, in, in the natural world, they were all building bombs, and they kept doing it after World War II, they did it right up into the 1960s. And so that just, and a lot of that work just remained classified. So, so it was a real life.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Because humans are, humans are social animals. A different type of person went into that. A different type of person who wasn't public health oriented. Or maybe if you were a clever young biologist and you looked at all the different fields, you might say, why would I want to go into that one?
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Carl Zimmer
You know, initially there were just a lot of scientists who said, what can I do to help fight fascism? That's what they said. And the same reason that the nuclear weapons were built, people really felt like, we have to save the world from the Nazis. I mean, that was, that was the goal. And then after World War II. Like, all these programs, nuclear and biological, just kept going. And so you started to have some of those very same people who had been champion architects of biological warfare became its biggest opponents. But, but yeah, you know, like in the Cold War, you know, I, There were people who said, like, well, now we're fighting the Soviets and the Soviet Union was definitely building biological weapons. And so I think they justified it, like, well, we need to build them. We have to understand how they work. Maybe we'll need to use them someday if the Soviets use them. That's how they justified it. In the same way nuclear engineers would continue to build missiles today.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Is there an analogy? Or maybe it's more than an analogy. Maybe it's just the germinal scientific term version of gain of function research, which we learn about during the COVID debates.
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Carl Zimmer
Well, you know, I mean, I, yeah, I, I, you know, the term gain of function is super loose. I mean, you know, gene therapy and charged. Yes, it's very char. Like, when people use it today, they kind of, you have to sort of, you have to stop and say, like, oh, what do you mean by gain of function? Like, if they're talking about, like, working with viruses to make them able to infect humans as opposed to animals, that's one thing. But if you're just talking about giving a virus or a pathogen any sort of added ability, then the fact is that, like, gene therapy is going to function because you're taking viruses that can infect human cells and you're equipping them with genes that let them do something new. That new thing is actually to cure people of diseases, but that's still gain of function, you know. But yes, they were certain. They were certainly, these scientists in World War II and beyond were certainly like, taking existing airborne pathogens and making them better at being weapons and sometimes even taking pathogens that aren't particularly airborne, like anthrax. Anthrax is, you know, in the soil. It gets into animals, but skins of drums. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Hide and so on. Now it can become airborne like in a, in a wool sorting factory where the spores would be released into the air. And actually there was something called wool sorters disease. And so, yeah, so there was a lot of tailoring to make anthrax that would be very, very effective at infecting people as a fine dust through the air. I mean, this was actually what the Amerithrax, you know, anthrax terrorist used in the United states in, in 2001 and 2002. This, that same strain and we'll be.
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Mike Pesca
Back in a minute with more of Carl Zimmer. We're back with Carl Zimmer, author of Airborne and Carl, can you take us through the effort to raise awareness or get funding for Ebola research and how that plays into what we've been talking about so far?
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Carl Zimmer
So in the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of infectious disease experts who were warning that we needed to be thinking not just about sort of the old enemies like tuberculosis, but to be on guard for entirely new diseases, diseases that are infecting animals and then are going to spill over into humans. They're saying this is something we have to be really concerned about for a lot of different reasons. Reasons because humans are disturbing natural habitats and getting in contact with wildlife. And most of these spillovers won't come to anything, but every now and then they will. And so Ebola was one of these. It's carried in bats and probably other hosts. And in the 1970s, it caused a really frightening outbreak in Africa. These scientists who were warning about emerging diseases in to try to try to like, gin up more concern about it, they also pointed out that, you know, maybe people might use these things as biological weapons. And, you know, we know now that indeed, you know, when the Soviet Union found out about Ebola, they said, hey, could we weaponize that? I mean, there was some effort in that regard. So, so they, they were raising that. That specter of emerging diseases that could either be made airborne through as a weapon or might just naturally become airborne. And so, you know, this, you know, Richard Preston, and when he writes the hot zone about Ebola, he raises the specter that maybe Ebola might naturally evolve. They become airborne, you know, and that is like a very frightening idea. And in fact, this then led to a lot of research on emerging diseases and, but also a huge amount of money put into what's called, you know, biodefense, in other words, trying, trying to create defenses against possible biological terrorism.
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Unnamed Co-Host
So I do not want my listeners to get the idea that this is all a Covid book, but that is what my mind most went to, and there's a lot of implications. So I just want to take a second or two to talk about some of the older experiments and scientists that you talk about and you write about. And there's pictures of Louis Pastor holding a bowl of broth above his head on the side of a mountain, and experiments with kites over the ocean and there. And you read about them and you have respect for the scientists from the 1890s and the 1930s. I want to know as a science writer, when you, is there a pleasure you take or do you love getting and sinking your teeth into these kind of older analog experiments? Because they're really understandable, especially if through your skills you make the audience understand them. But when you write about what's going on with the new, the cutting edge of investigation, it's kind of like a black box. And you can make some analogies, but it's not as mechanical, it's not as present, it's not as easily translated to the mind of the reader. The brilliance of these experiments, these older ones.
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Carl Zimmer
Yeah, I think that there's some truth to that in the sense that, you know, if, you know, as a, as a, as a journalist, you know, writing about science today for places like the New York Times, you know, I'm writing about the work that scientists are doing with like unbelievable tools. I mean, you know, sequencing genomes is just what you do as a matter of course. Like, you know, 30 years ago, nobody could sequence a genome. And it's, it's stunning and, and, but it brings in a huge amount of complexity with it. Whereas, you know, in 1860, Louis Pasteur had this idea like, I think that we are surrounded in the air by floating germs and everyone said, you're crazy, that can't be true. And he said, well, I'll prove it to you. And all he did was he created these flasks with very long necks and he would fill them with sterile broth and then he would seal the necks and then take them to some place like a street in Paris or a farm in French countryside, or the top of a glacier and he would open it and see if bacteria would settle into the broth. And they did. But you know, it's just waving around a flask of broth like. And that's. Yeah. When you're trying to tell a story that's, that's pretty easy compared to. Yes. Someone who's doing, you know, doing some multi dimensional study of all the, you know, transcripts in a cell or what have you. Yeah, science is more complex, but that's, that's a good thing.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Do you think in a hundred years readers will look back on the genome sequencing and it will be as easily understood to them as bacteria in a flask of broth?
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Carl Zimmer
Maybe. I mean, you know, I've been in this business long enough to. That, you know, when I started writing about science and I was writing a lot about biology, a lot about genetics, and I would say to my Editor, like, so when I talk about DNA, do, do I need to define that, do you think? And sometimes my editor would be like, yeah, why don't you just remind people what DNA is? You know, like, no, you don't have to remind anybody. Like, kids learn about DNA in grade school, you know, you know, kids in high school learn about things that, that it took, you know, Newton, Isaac Newton a long time to figure out. So, yeah, so I think in the future we'll look back and be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, then they did this, then they did that. I don't know how easy it'll be for science writers 100 years from now, but we'll see.
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Unnamed Co-Host
Oh, I guess blockchain crypto, these aren't exactly science.
- [33:04]
Mike Pesca
Exactly. Like we're gonna. I don't know, maybe people don't really.
- [33:07]
Unnamed Co-Host
Understand fiat currency today anyway. They don't. You know, every, every six months, I see an explainer on that.
- [33:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, so.
- [33:15]
Unnamed Co-Host
So just on, so going back and if we're to do a critique of the WHO or the cdc, you laid out why it was understandable that they didn't get it right immediately. And you can't, you can't criticize them too much for that. But where do you put the criticism? When do you put the criticism? Were they too slow, too entrenched? Did they make mistakes that became unreasonable during the course of the pandemic, or do you think they adapted pretty well?
- [33:44]
Carl Zimmer
They adapted very slowly. So the World Health Organization right now is very clear about COVID being airborne in their printed materials. And they're actually supporting a lot of really innovative work actually on developing sophisticated models that you can use to sort of figure out what is the risk in any particular indoor space about COVID or some other airborne disease. That's great. Unfortunately, you know, they were not that open minded in, you know, February, March 2020. Not only were they not themselves considering the possibility it was airborne, not just the World Health Organization, but, you know, the center for Disease Control, you know, lot, lots of public health organizations, they weren't considering it. And then when people were telling them, you need to consider it, they were saying, no, you're not persuading us. I mean, the fact, and, you know, it's really striking to me that the people who were right, you know, just a few people like Joseph Allen at Harvard, Lindsay Marr at Virginia Tech, people who were right and were actually writing up like warnings and then trying to get them published in scientific journals were being rejected over and over and over again like that. People didn't even want to publish that. So that's a, that I think that that's kind of shocking and, and we should still be shocked by that even if, you know, the, the scientific community has come to recognize the importance of airborne infection.
- [35:16]
Unnamed Co-Host
Now what was the cost in human life of that rejection for that period of time?
- [35:21]
Carl Zimmer
You know, I wonder about that because I think, and I think it's really hard to calculate. I mean, you know, the fact is that we had this period from, from January 2020 or late December 2020 to you know, sort of middle of 2021 where there, there weren't vaccines available for a large number of people. And so the only thing to do was to try to protect people from getting sick. And the only way you can protect people from getting sick is understanding how a disease spreads. So deny, just rejecting the possibility that Covid was airborne was a mistake. Now if people had recognized that it might be and then indeed was airborne, then what, you know, like then what would people have then acted on it? I think if people had acted on it, then I think a lot of many, many lives, thousands, I don't know how many thousands of lives could have been saved.
- [36:15]
Unnamed Co-Host
I read a book by, and had them on Macedo and Lee and they point out that the npi, the non pharmaceutical interventions before the pandemic, had no effect, no statistically significant effect between states, implemented them in a rigorous way, states that barely implemented them. Maybe you read the book, maybe have thoughts on that. But give me one difference, that had we known as early as we could have that yeah, it's an airborne born disease, what might those, you know, six bullet points from the cdc, would one be rewritten? Would there be a seventh, you know, staying six feet away, going outdoors, any of those things? What would have changed had we known?
- [36:55]
Carl Zimmer
Well, one thing we might have done is we might have followed the path that Japan did. Japan looked at the evidence and pretty early on said, you know, it looks like this, this looks like, you know, this might be airborne. And so they just said, okay, stay out of crowded, poorly ventilated spaces. That's it. It was pretty simple. And, and so, you know, you could, you could, could you could hang out outside or you could just, you know, don't if you're, you know, open windows or what have you, as opposed to this idea that if you just, you know, stay three feet away from somebody that you'd be fine or somehow like Plexiglas would protect you. Like, you know, all these, all these things that didn't, didn't actually Help. So there could have been, there could have been some very simple things, public health measures that have been taken, or there could have been more ambitious ones. So for example, in July 2020, Joseph Allen, who I mentioned from Harvard, and Richard Corsi, University of California, they said, hey, look, now we have shown you folks that Covid is airborne. Schools are closed. Like, we think that schools should reopen, but safely. You can't just open up willy nilly. And they're like, it would cost a billion dollars to get air purifiers in every classroom. So why don't we drop a billion dollars to, to make sure kids are safe and in school and.
- [38:24]
Unnamed Co-Host
Or in places where the temperature is right. Just do it outside. Is that a huge, wasn't, wasn't that a huge intervention that was somewhat emphasized, but could have been a massive game changer outside versus inside?
- [38:37]
Carl Zimmer
I think. But yeah, I mean, there were some schools that did do that, but just sort of on a hit or miss basis. Yeah. So there were certainly lots of missed opportunities. I mean, I don't agree with, I think that you mentioned that book about COVID policy and I mean, I've seen a lot of critiques of it from actual epidemiologists like Adam Kucharski has a very good rebuttal of that, pointing out that if you're trying to look at the difference between the states, you have to recognize that, that a state like New York got hit first by an overwhelming wave and then put measures in place, whereas a state like Florida got hit much later and didn't put efforts in place. And so that, so this, this sort of comparison, not taking that into account doesn't make sense. And so there are lots of countries.
- [39:32]
Unnamed Co-Host
That might be a decent comparison too, better than states.
- [39:35]
Carl Zimmer
So I. So, you know, there's been a lot of, a lot of, a lot of thoughtful critiques by people like Adam Kucharski, actual epidemiologists. Those authors of that book are political scientists. So, yeah, I take the, you know, the comments by people that Kacharsky quite seriously.
- [39:53]
Unnamed Co-Host
Why Japan? Get it right.
- [39:55]
Carl Zimmer
Good.
- [39:55]
Unnamed Co-Host
What about Japan and the scientific community or the journals over there?
- [39:59]
Carl Zimmer
Yeah, I don't know, it's. Well, I don't have a full answer, you know, like, but because again, you have to remember that like the whole idea of airborne infection, you know, had, I mean, it's kind of astonishing to think about this, but it really had been. The basics of that were presented by William and Mildred Wells quite Clearly in the 1930s, almost a century, and they were Then largely forgotten. And after William Wells died in 1963, there were just a few people who sort of carried on and said like, hey, like pay attention to this. So it's not like Japan knew about the Wells's, but they sort of had a general idea like we're seeing a lot of these weird super spreader events and maybe somehow it's traveling through the air. So let's just be prudent. They also had a culture of, in which wearing a mask was not a big deal.
- [40:54]
Unnamed Co-Host
Right.
- [40:55]
Carl Zimmer
You know, so, so people would just put mask on just because they didn't want to get sick or they didn't want to get other people sick. Whereas like in the United States where we didn't have that tradition, it became this huge identity politics thing. So you know, the best, the best studies, the best reviews that I've seen, you know, recently indicate and talking with epidemiologists indicate, you know, overall masks, you know, might have, you know, if masks are used in widespread and used carefully and they're good masks, you can reduce transmission maybe say 20%. That's not 100%. But cutting down 20% is really, really helpful in combination with a lot of other measures, especially when a, when a pandemic is starting. That's the other problem. It's like there weren't a bunch of measures that we could just sort of switch on right when the pandemic hit to deal with an airborne pathogen. If we had, I really think that, that history would have played out differently.
- [41:56]
Unnamed Co-Host
I also come back to, and I don't know why this is. It has something to do with the culture, use that word about Japan. The culture of who gets listened to and who doesn't. In the sciences, the journals, the gatekeeping, they need to be gatekeepers. But you can make a mistake, false positives and false negatives and I don't know the answer, or there's a heuristic that cuts through all these very difficult subjective questions. Certainly there's, you know, when we think about RFK Jr and some of the things he's promulgating, there needs to be gatekeeping in these scientific journals. And maybe that, I don't know, has an effect of, of arousing them and stirring them and making it seem like their role is to say no, we won't let this junk science in. But then they overinterpret that role and keep the good science out. It's about culture and it's about some method of who gets to be listened to and who doesn't. And I think it is a bigger problem than maybe we even thought it was a decade ago. Do you think that's fair?
- [43:03]
Carl Zimmer
I think that, I think there's something to that. But I think that, you know, I think expertise matter does matter. You know, you actually need to know what you're talking about, rather than being somebody who just, you know, gets on Twitter and says, hey, I think I know what's happening.
- [43:20]
Unnamed Co-Host
But we're talking about these professors you write about in the book and, you know, Virginia Tech and fine institutions.
- [43:26]
Mike Pesca
Great.
- [43:27]
Carl Zimmer
And I think this is a phenomenon in science that I've seen in lots of different areas of research, which is that people get into different disciplines, different branches of science, and they talk their own language and they get really good in that particular branch. And meanwhile other people in another branch, they're not talking to them, you know, so. So in this case, a lot of the. The split was between infectious disease experts who were like, oh, airborne infection, we've known forever, that's not a big deal. Like, we're not going to take that seriously. And then people from branches like physics or people who studied air pollution, like from cars. So, you know, we just talked about that five micron rule. Like, somehow infectious disease experts convince themselves that a some somehow infectious disease experts convince themselves that only particles smaller than 5 microns can float. So therefore that's how airborne disease works. And like any physicist will tell you that's nonsense. Much bigger particles can. So how it was that infectious disease experts fashioned themselves as physicists and then got it so wrong is really astonishing. But it just tells you people in these different branches need to talk to each other. They need to get together and bring their different kinds of expertise together.
- [45:02]
Unnamed Co-Host
The name of the book is the Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.
- [45:06]
Mike Pesca
Thank you so much, Carl Zimmer.
- [45:07]
Carl Zimmer
Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- [45:14]
Unnamed Co-Host
And that's it for today's show. The Just is produced by Cory Wara. Our production coordinator is Ashley Khan.
- [45:21]
Mike Pesca
Astrid Green runs our socials and Michelle.
- [45:24]
Unnamed Co-Host
Pesca is in charge of it all.
- [45:26]
Mike Pesca
But with a light hand. Peru G Peru do Peru.
- [45:29]
Unnamed Co-Host
And thanks for listening.