Welcome back to The David Pakman Show. It's great to welcome to the program today, Nicholas
Christakis, Sterling, professor of social natural science at Yale University and also
author of Apollo's Arrow. It's so great to have you on. I'm glad to
be talking to you today. David, thank you for having me. So there are so many things
that we can say about the medical handling of this global hundred year pandemic, about
governmental failures or successes, vaccine development, et cetera. But one of the things
that I find interesting, which you've talked about, are sort of the cultural aspects, what
we learned and what was exposed maybe about American culture over the last nearly year
of dealing with the global pandemic. Can you kind of frame that conversation for us and
explain what what we should be thinking about when we think about culture and the pandemic?
Right, well, I think you already highlighted one important factor, which is something I
would lead with right away, which is this way that we have come to live in the last
year. And a lot of the things that have happened, for example, the death of health care workers
or a lot of the denial and the lies that we have seen about the pandemic, many, many of
these features seem so unnatural and alien. But it's important to understand that plagues
are not new to our species. They're just new to us. We think all of these things are so
unusual and weird and unnatural and how can we? But that's just not true. And in fact,
when you study the psychological, social and economic responses to the covid-19 pandemic,
you see that many of those responses actually have obtained with pandemics and plagues going
back thousands of years. So let me give you a couple of examples. Let me start with a
really simple one, which is the death of health care workers. Many people are aware of the
fact that many hundreds of American health care workers and thousands of health care
workers around the world have died caring for patients who are sick. In fact, one of
the reasons we should behave better is to reduce our imposing risk on these people of
dying, caring for us. Well, facilities in the plague of Athens and 430 B.C. talks about
the death death of health care workers. Pope Clement, the sixth in the bubonic plague in
13 47, talks about the death of nurses taking care of patients. This is not new or lies
in denial. We've seen huge amounts of like superstitions about, you know, you could use
bleach to treat the condition or or or like, you know, Bill Gates is going to inject us.
The vaccine has microchips is ridiculous or or denial, including at the former president.
The White House saying it's going away, there's nothing happening, it's going away, which
was completely false and known to be false. This also this response is typical of human
beings during times of plague. Because we don't want to believe that this bad thing
is happening to us and on and on, I could go on. I mean, blame, for example, the desire
to blame others is, again, very typical. We we saw this during bubonic plague when there
was anti-Semitism. You know, the Jews were blamed. We saw it during HIV. You know, when
when gay people were blamed or Haitians were blamed or IV drug users were blamed. There's
always this desire to blame someone else when there's a time of plague. Anyway, I could
go on. But there are these these things that are happening to us or I'll say one more thing
and then I'll shut up. You know, the you know, there's a lot of misunderstanding about what
is happening to us in terms of the economy, for example. Yes. So people think that the
economy is collapsing because of what the state what the government is doing to us.
But if you read accounts of plague's going back thousands of years, for example, John,
of Ephesus, a priest writing about the plague of Justinian in 500 A.D., talks about how
the economy collapses. Everything slowed and ceased. People were not out and about. There
was no government that was ordering schools or businesses to close in that period. It's
just this is what the virus does. It's it stops social interactions, which therefore
stops the economy. So all of these things that we're seeing. Ah, a once in a century
event, and we just, I think, have to accept that and maturely confront it.
You know, I I interviewed Brian Greene during the pandemic earlier in the pandemic. And
one of the things he pointed out was that he thinks there's a certain naivete to thinking
that if we were to make contact with intelligent alien species, all of our our earthly problems
would all of a sudden seem sort of quaint and irrelevant. And we would come together
as a as a global people because now this thing that transcends our problems has taken place.
He thinks even that is probably naive to think that there would be some initial instinct
of that. And very quickly, we would go back to our normal problems. Is there a similar
naivety? And I think the answer clearly is yes, as evidenced by the last many months,
to think that something like this would have allowed us to cross the partizan bickering
and not to devolve into the same sort of arguments, the politically aligned arguments that we
see with abortion and taxes and so many of these other things. Is it just fundamentally
naive to think that something like a global pandemic would cross those bridges?
Well, first of all, let me back up and say there's a very famous exchange between I think
it was President Ronald Reagan and and Mikhail Gorbachev where Reagan says to they're having
an exchange about how they can work together. And Reagan says, well, let me ask you, you
know, the Earth was invaded by aliens. Would you come to our defense? And Gorbachev says,
of course, you know, and so this this trope, this idea that's in science fiction movies,
that human beings would come together to confront a shared threat. Is actually deeply fundamental,
and there's another very famous social psychology experiment or demonstration called the Robber's
Cave Demonstration, which was taken, which took place in the 1950s, where 12, 11 or 12
year old boys were taken into a summer camp and divided into two groups. Yeah, and and
then they were their group solidarity was fostered. And then it was revealed that there
was this other group nearby and then group competition was fostered. And then the investigators
contrive to have a shared threat and show that now, having created these divisions,
they could undo the divisions. The shared threat was they contrived to have the water
supply to the camp interrupted. So the boys had to work together across groups, you know,
to fix the problem. So so there's this all this background on exactly the topic that
you're mentioning. And it is true that a shared threat can bind groups together. And many
people have for years thought that a virus or a germ would have that effect. In other
words, we all are human. We're all facing this deadly threat. We should work together
to confront it. But there are a few features of play of epidemics and this one in particular
that make that hard. My guess is my guess is one is that not everybody
agrees as to the nature of the threat first. And partly that's because this this germ,
serious and deadly though it is, is not as deadly as thank God it could have been. Just
to be clear, we could have been facing a bubonic plague type situation right now on the planet.
And many people you need to people need to understand this is just by the luck of God,
that we're not facing something that's 10 or 30 times deadlier like in the movie Contagion.
Anyway, this particular pathogen is serious. It kills about one percent of the people that
get symptoms from it. But it's not so deadly as smallpox or bubonic plague, which I think
would have galvanized public interest and maybe helped us transcend some of our political
divisions. First point, second. The germ struck us at a particularly vulnerable moment in
the life of our society in terms of our intellectual life. We have as a nation lost respect for
science. We have we have politicized the notion of expertize we think that experts are elites
who are trying to take advantage of us rather than just experts. You know, like if you have
a car problem, I don't think I'm as good as my car mechanic and figuring out what the
problem is. I want to pay someone who knows more than I do about the problem. And if you
have a surgeon or anything else, there's expertize in the world or a plumbing disaster, there's
expertize in the world. So but we have begun to politicize this notion of expertize to
our detriment, we have high levels of political polarization and economic inequality already
a century high levels when the virus struck. And finally, we have lost the capacity for
nuance in our civil civic discourse. People say, oh, you're with me or you're against
me or things are black or white. But adults know that that's not true. Things are not
black or white. Most things are shades of gray. Anyway, all of those things, plus the
relatively low but still high level of death from this germ have made it difficult for
us to band together to confront it. Plus, I think, frankly, incompetent leadership in
the former administration at the White House, which minimized the threat and did not act
to protect the public interest. I'll say one more thing and then I'll shut up again. Many
people say, well, OK, Trump didn't do so well. But, you know, what about England or Italy
or other countries? It's true. Many other countries also did poorly, but many countries
did well. And not just rich islands like Taiwan and New Zealand. Germany did well. Greece
did well. You know where the United States of America. I expected more from us. I expected
us to do well in confronting this threat. Yeah. Rwanda is also an interesting example,
actually, of a country that that that did quite well, certainly better than many might
have imagined if they didn't know that much about about Rwanda. When we think about the
next year, a lot of the discussions are when will herd immunity be reached? But there's
some pretty interesting pieces that suggest that the what might be called the cultural
end to the pandemic will come before the medical end of the pandemic, particularly if the most
at risk are vaccinated first, as is happening and the deaths go down dramatically. So there's
kind of a question as to whether the cultural and the medical ends will coincide. What are
you looking for in terms of this next year when you look at the cultural impact, the
rollout of vaccinations, the transition to a new federal administration handling this?
Well, I think you're highlighting the key issues. There's this notion of herd immunity,
which is this idea that a population can be immune to a condition or immune to having
an epidemic of the condition, even if not everyone within the population is immune.
Let's understand. And and through various calculations and making an accommodation for
something known as the network effects, probably at least 50 percent of Americans have to have
acquired immunity to the condition before we get herd immunity. Now, when that happens,
the virus is not gone. It still circulates and can kill people. But we've taken the wind
out of its sails. Its epidemic force has been nullified. When we get to this critical threshold
now, we have miraculously invented a vaccine where the first generation of humans to confront
the threat of plagues that has been capable to develop a specific countermeasure in real
time. It's amazing. But as we are all seeing in the news, we have to manufacture hundreds
of millions of doses, distribute them, which is not easy, and persuade people to take them.
And I think it'll take at least a year before we get to 50 percent or more, which is what
we really need. Vaccination at least 50 percent. Meanwhile, the virus is still spreading. About
14 percent of Americans are infected. So far. This has a long runway. So either way, I think
it's going to take another year before we reach herd immunity. And during that time,
we're going to have to live in a changed world with wearing masks, with periodic school and
business closures, with gathering bands, with extra hygiene and all of the headaches that
we've come to be familiar with. And this is before the emergence of new, more communicable
strains, which is another complication. So I think at least a year and then we'll enter
the the intermediate period where. Some of the things that you mentioned will begin to
obtain, which is we're going to have to begin to confront the psychological, social and
economic aftershocks, because let's not forget, tens of millions of Americans are out of work.
Millions of people have lost, businesses have closed. Millions of children have lost schooling.
There's a disability many several hundred, probably two and a half million Americans
will be disabled by this condition. Between half a million and a million will die. So
we're going to have a lot of recovery to do and I think it'll take a while. But come 2020,
for approximately these are approximate, I think we'll finally enter the post pandemic
period. And then I think it'll be like the roaring 20s of the 20th century after the
1918 influenza pandemic. We'll have a roaring 20s at the end of the 21st century.
Yeah, one of the things that I've not seen discussed that much, which I think is important
and interesting, is I never believed at the time when in May Donald Trump was saying the
measures that some want you to take are more damaging than the virus itself. I thought
that was dangerous and a disaster. But I do think that there is an aspect of this, which
is after a year or a year and a half or however long it is of this feeling that the world
outside of your house is hostile and dangerous to you. Seeing two people close to each other
with no masks looks like an act of something more than what it used to be. Right. This
stuff becomes ingrained. That doesn't get undone in a month or in two months. And I'm
curious as to what the long term group psychology impacts of that is going to be.
That's exactly right. That's what I was suggesting, that when we get to early 2022, we'll finally
have put the biological and epidemiological impact of the virus behind us. But there's
still going to be a lot of psychological and other recovery that will take a couple of
years, judging again from also the history of past epidemics. Just like you said, not
everyone's going to take off their mask a year from now. Right. For a variety of reasons,
people are going to still be wearing masks. Some will be cautious. The virus will still
be around. Other people will have immunodeficiency. Some people will have habits, they'll be worried,
et cetera. So it's not going to be instantaneous, nor will any of the other recovery be instantaneous.
It's going to be a long and enduring shock. I think what people need to understand is,
is we happen to be alive like our grandparents were alive when the world was at war. Right.
Like when I talked to my Greek relatives in Greece about this in their 80s. Their frame
of reference is not like the typical American. It's it's like a European who's used to having
invading armies. My my father remembers the Nazis invading Athens when he was a boy. So
for him, you know, that was like a once in a century event. And now this is another once
in a century event, you know, so so I think people need to understand that. That this
is a quite a serious and unusual experience to us, again, for humans have been, you know,
plagues are in the Bible there and Shakespeare there and Homer there in servants. You know,
there's nothing new about plagues, persay, but for us, it's quite a new experience. And
we have to understand, much as we wish that this had not happened to us and much as we
wish that it would end quickly, it's not it's just not what plagues do.
We've been speaking with Nicholas Christakis, who is Sterling, professor of social natural
science at Yale University, also author of Apollo's Arrow. I so appreciate your time
today. David, thank you so much for having me.
The David Pakman Show at David Pakman Dotcom.