YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Mina

lines on the record: 159
first: 2020-12-19
most recent: 2020-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly. We would have seen spikes and they would have been kind of like off immune responses that the shape of them just looked a little bit different, but they would have been growing and we would have seen it. And it could have saved tens of thousands of lives in New York City.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some reason, people aren't developing an immune response to this coronavirus that seems to be spreading to these normal things that, you know, and it just looks, the profile looks different. And we could have seen that, and immediately, especially since we had an idea that there was a novel coronavirus circulating in the world, we could have very quickly and easily seen, hey, clearly we're seeing a spike of something that looks like a known coronavirus, but people are responding weirdly to it. Our AI algorithms would have picked it up. And just our basic, heck, you could have put it in an Excel spreadsheet. We would have seen it”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they waited until the first PCR tests were coming about. And then the moment they started running PCR tests, they find out it's everywhere. And so that was a disaster because, of course, New York City, you know, was just hit so bad because nobody was, you know, we were blind to it. We didn't have to be blind to it. And the nice thing about this technology is we wouldn't have, with the exact same technology we had in 2017, we could have detected this novel coronavirus spreading in New York City in 2020. Not because we changed, not because we are actually actively looking for this novel coronavirus, but because we would see, we would have seen patterns in people's immune responses using AI or just frankly using just the raw data itself. We could have said, hey, it looks like there's something that looks like known coronaviruses spreading in New York, but there's gaps.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Andrew Cuomo had no choice but to leave the city open. You know, there were hints that maybe the virus was spreading in New York City, but he didn't have any data to back it up. No data. And so it was just week on week and week. And he didn't have any information to really go by to allow him to have the firepower to say we're closing down the city. This is an emergency. We have to stop spread before it starts.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, really? Why do you need it? Why do you need it? And of course, now, you know, I mean, I've wrote in 2015 about this. Why this would be useful. And of course now we're seeing why it would be useful. Had we had this up and running in 2019, had we had it going, we were drawing blood from or getting blood samples from hospitals and clinics and blood donors from New York City, let's just say that could have, we didn't run the first PCR test for coronavirus until probably a month and a half or two months after the virus started transmitting in New York City.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. We're doing a lot of that already. And that's how we had this going. You know, I've been training to get this funded for years now. And I've spoken to governments. Everyone says, cool idea. Not going to do it. You know, why do we need it?”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that we make antibodies is by and large, it's got an element of randomness to it, how the cells, when they make an antibody, they chop up the genetic code to say, okay, this is the antibody that I'm going to form for this pathogen. And you might form, if you get a coronavirus, for example, you might form hundreds of different antibodies, not just one antibody against the spike protein, but hundreds of different antibodies against all different parts of the virus. So that gives us really rich resolution of information that when I then do the same thing across hundreds of different pathogens, some of which you've seen, some of which you haven't, it gives you an exceedingly unique fingerprint that is sufficiently stable over years and years and years to essentially give you a barcode. And I don't have to know who you are, but I can know that these two specimens came from the same person somewhere out in the world.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That works, and DNA can't really tell us apart. But this tool is one of the only tools in the world that can tell twins apart from each other. Could still be accurate enough to say this blood, you know, it's like 99.999999999999% accurate to say that these two blood samples came from the same individual. And it's because it's a combination both of your immunological history, but also how your unique body responds to a pathogen, which is random.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a twin too, right? I do have a twin. I have an identical twin brother, which makes me interested in this. He looks very much like me.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To match. Yeah, because it's very stochastic. Even twins. So, this, I believe, you know, we haven't published this yet. We will soon”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that those two blood spots are coming from the same person. They're just showing up in my lab. But I can run our technology over, and it just gives me your immunological history. But your immunological history is so unique to you in the way that your body responds to these pathogens. Is so unique to you that I can use that to tether your two samples. I don't know who you are, I know nothing about you. I only know when those samples came out of a person, but I can say, oh, these two samples a year apart actually belong to the same person.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Show up with nothing. They're literally just tubes. I know a date that they were collected and a zip code that they're collected from or even just sort of a county level ID with an IRB and with ethical approval and with the people's consent, we can maybe collect more data, but that would require consent. But then there's this other approach, which I'm really excited about, which is certainly going to gain some scrutiny, I think. But we'll have to figure out where it comes into play. But I've been recognizing that we can take somebody as immunological profile, and we can make a biological fingerprint out of it. And it's actually stable enough so that I could take your blood. Let's say I don't know who you are, but you sent me a drop of blood a year ago, and then you sent me a drop of blood today.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It roughly, I could tell you do you have COVID antibodies right now? Do you have Lyme disease antibodies right now, flu, Tripoli, and all these different viruses? Also, peanut allergies, you know, milk allergies, anything. If your immune system makes a response to it, we can detect that response. So all of a sudden, we have this very valuable technology that on the one hand gives people maybe information they might want to know about themselves, but on the other hand becomes this amazingly rich source of big data to enter into this global immunological observatory sort of mathematical framework to start building these maps, these epidemiological tools. But you asked about privacy. And absolutely that's essential to keep in mind, first and foremost. So privacy can be, you can keep these samples 100% anonymous. They are just, when I get them, they should.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this case for COVID antibodies to watch from January up through December, we're able to watch how the virus entered into the United States and how it's transmitting every day across the US. So we're getting those results organized now, and we're going to start putting them publicly online soon to start making at least a very rough map of COVID. But that's the type of thinking that I have in terms of like how do you actually capture huge numbers of specimens. You can't ask everyone to participate on sort of a, I mean, you maybe could if you have the right tools and you can offer individuals something in return like 23andMe does that's a great way to get people to give specimens and they get results back. So with these technologies that I've been building along with some collaborators at Harvard, we can come up with tools that people might actually want. So I can offer you your immunological history. I can say give me a drop of your blood on a filter paper, mail it in, and I will be able to tell you every infectious disease you've ever encountered and maybe even when you encounter.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've said instead of saying, well, how do we possibly get enough people on board to send in samples all the time? Well, just go to the source. So there's a company in Massachusetts that makes 80% of all the instruments that are used globally to collect plasma from plasma donors. So I went to this company Hemenetics and said, you know, is there a way you have 80% of the global market on plasma donations? Can we start getting plasma samples from healthy people that use your machines? So that hooked me up with this company called OctaFarm. And OctaFarm has a huge reach and offices all over the country where they're just collecting people's plasma. They actually pay people for their plasma. And then that gets distributed to hospitals and all this stuff. It's anonymous plasma. So I've just been collecting anonymous samples. And we're processing them.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. So, what we're doing, for example, there's a lot of people who go to the hospital every day. A lot of people who donate blood, people who donate plasma. So one of the projects that I have, I'll get to the privacy question in a moment. So what I want to do is the name that I've given this is a global immunological observatory. There's no reason not to have that. Good name.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a central problem. There's a couple central problems that need to be solved. One, how do you get That's not actually too difficult. I actually have a pilot project going right now with getting samples from across all the United States, tens of thousands of samples every week are flowing into my lab, and we process them.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As all day long, every single day, in case it might rain, we don't board up our homes every single day in case there's a hurricane. We wait. And if we know that there's one coming, then we act for a small period of time accordingly. And then we go back and we've prepared ourselves in these little bursts to not have it ruin our days.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, in the future, it tells us, hey, you know, there's a lot of SARS-CoV-2 in your community instead of grabbing your umbrella, you grab your mask. You know, we don't have to have masks all the time. But if we know the rules of the game that these viruses play by, we can start preparing for those. And, you know, every year we go into every flu season blindfolded with our hands tied behind our back, just saying, I hope this isn't a bad flu season this year. Why don't I mean this is in the 21st century? You know, it's becoming, you know, I mean, we have the tools at our disposal now to not have that attitude. This isn't like 1920s. We can just say, hey, this is going to be a bad flu season this year. Let's act accordingly and with a targeted approach. We don't, for example, we don't just use our umbrella.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be impossible. Of course, we know that's not impossible now. Is it always perfect? No, but does it offer, does it completely change the way that we go about our days? Absolutely. I envision, for example, right now we open up our iPhone. We plug in a zip code. And if it tells us it's going to rain today, we bring an umbrella.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is all new technology that we've been developing more from a bioengineering perspective. But then I use a lot of the mathematics tools to A-interpret that. But what I really want to do, for example, to kind of kick off this new field of what I consider public health engineering is to create maybe it's a little ambitious, but create a weather system for viruses. I want us to be able to open up our iPhones, plug in our zip code, and get a better sense, get a probability of why my kid has a running nose today. Is it COVID? Is it a rhino virus, an adenovirus, or is it flu? And, you know, we can do that. We can start building the rules of virus spread across the globe, both for pandemic preparedness, but also for just everyday use in the same way that people used to think that predicting the weather was”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I can speak to one of the major activities that I want to do. So what I normally do in my research lab is develop technology is that can take a drop of somebody's blood or some saliva and profile for hundreds of thousands of different antibodies against every single pathogen that somebody could be possibly exposed to.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, his answer right now, unfortunately, is well, I don't know why you want these to be sort of available to everyone without a prescription. We've already said that a doctor can write a whole prescription for a whole college campus. It's like, well, if you're going in that direction, then that's no longer medicine. Having a doctor write a prescription for a college campus for everyone on the campus to have repeat testing, now we're just in the territory of eroding medicine and eroding all of the legal rules and reasons that we have prescriptions in the first place. So it's just everything about it is just destructive. Instead of just making a simple solution, which is These are okay as public health tools as long as they meet X and Y metrics. Go and CDC can put their stamp of approval on them.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a prescription. And in fact, I mean, really, what's happening now, because there is this sense that tests are public health tools, even if they're not being defined as such, the FDA now is pretty much not only are they not authorizing these as public health tools. What they're doing by authorizing what are effectively public health tools as medical devices, they're just diluting down the practice of medicine.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CMS, you know, okay, can these be authorized as public health tools and not fall under your definition of a medical device? So then the FDA doesn't have to be the ones authorizing it as a public health tool. And Seema Verma says, oh, well, we don't have any jurisdiction over point of care and sort of rapid devices like this. We only have jurisdiction over lab devices. It's like nobody has ownership over it, which means that they just keep, they stay in this purgatory of not being approved. And so this is where I think, frankly, it needs a president. It needs a presidential order to just unlock them, to say, this is more important than...”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they actually explicitly say that. I mean, when I go and talk to Tim, you know, and he's a very reasonable guy. But when I talk to him, he says, look. We don't. We just do not evaluate a public health tool. If you're telling me this is a public health tool, great, go and use it. And so I say, okay, great. We'll go and use it. And then the comment is, but does it give a result back to somebody? I say, well, yes. Of course it gives a result back to somebody. It's being done in their home. So, well, then it's defined as a medical tool. Can't use it. So it's stuck in this gray zone where unfortunately there's this weird definition that any tool, any test that gives a result back to an individual is defined by CMS Centers for Medicaid Services as a medical device requiring medical authorization.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They haven't made the right distinction to say, look, okay, the FDA is evaluating these for doctors to use and all that. But we're the CDC and we're the public health agency of this country. And we recognize that these tools require a different authorization pathway and a different use, not for scratch.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they don't see it as a fight. They think that the FDA is the end-all be-all. Everyone thinks the FDA is the end-all be-all. And so they just defer, everyone is deferential, including the heads of all the other government agencies, because that is their role. But what everyone is failing to see is that the FDA doesn't even have a mandate or a remit to evaluate these tests as public health tools. So they're just falling in this weird gray zone. Where the FDA is saying, look, we evaluate medical products. That's the only thing that I meant, like Tim Stenzel, head of in vitro diagnostics at the FDA. He's doing what his job is, which is to evaluate medical tools. Unfortunately, this is where I think the CDC has really blundered.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Despite these sounding like a great idea, he looks around and he says, Well, they're not authorized. You know, they don't exist right now for at-home use. And from his perspective, he's not about to pick that fight with the FDA. And it turns out nobody is.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's honestly, it's pretty much all it is. The company. So somebody like Mayor Garcetti or Governor Baker, Cuomo Newsome, any of the DeWyne, I've talked to a lot of governors in this country at this point. And, of course, the federal government, including the president's own teams and the heads of the NIH, the heads of the CDC about this. Problem is the tests don't exist in this country at the level that we need them to right now. Make that kind of policy, to make that kind of program. They could, but they don't. And so what that means is that when Mayor Garcetti says, okay, what are my actual options today?”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple solution with essentially no downfall. You know, there is nothing bad about this. It's just giving people a result. And it's bipartisan. You know, the most conservative and the most liberal people. Everyone just wants to know their status. Nobody wants to have to wait in line for four hours to find out their status on Monday a week later on Saturday. You know, it just doesn't make any sense. It's a useless test at that point. And everyone recognizes that.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lockdowns aren't a solution. They're an emergency bandaid to a catastrophe that's currently happening. They're not a solution, and they're definitely not a public health solution if we're taking a more holistic view of public health, which includes people's well-being, includes their psychological well-being, their financial well-being. Just stopping a virus, if it means that all those other things get thrown under the bus is not a public health solution. It's a myopic or very tunnel visioned approach to a viral virus that's spreading. This is...”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the crazy thing. Everyone but the FDA is receptive. I mean, it's astounding. I mean, I advise, you know, informally, I advise the president and the president-elects teams. I talk to Congress. I talk to senators, governors And then all the way down to mayors of towns and things. I mean, months ago, I held a roundtable discussion with Mayor Garcetti, who's the mayor of LA. And I brought all the companies who make these things. This was in July or August or something. I brought all the companies to the table and said, okay, how can we get these out? Unfortunately, it went nowhere because the FDA won't authorize them as public health tools. The nice thing is that this is one of the nice and frustrating things. This is one of the few bipartisan things that I know of. And like you said, it's a real solution.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politicians I think it's a little of both. I think it's political on the one hand, and I've certainly been talking to Congress a lot, talking to senators.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Late. And so we have to keep updating that timeframe, maybe putting Christmas in the title wasn't, I should have said, how we can stop the spread of this virus in a month. It would be a little bit more timeless, but we could do it. We really could do it, and that's the most frustrating part here is that we're just choosing not to as a country. We're choosing to bankrupt our society because some people at the FDA and other places just can't seem to get their head around the fact that this is a public health problem, not a bunch of medical problems.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Besides three or four or five or six months ago, right now is the best time to get these rapid tests out. And we need to, I mean, the country has the capacity to build them. We're shipping them overseas right now. We just need to flip a switch, get the FDA to recognize that there's more important things than diagnostic medicine, which is the effectiveness of the public health program when we're dealing with a pandemic. They need to authorize these as public health tools. You know, frankly, the president could. There's a lot of other ways to get these tests to not have to go through the normal FDA authorization program, but maybe have the NIH and the CDC give a stamp of approval. And if we could, we could get these out tomorrow. And that's where that article came from, you know, how we can stop the spread of this virus by Christmas. We could get...”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know if it's going to stop transmission. And if it doesn't stop transmission, then there's herd immunity is much, much more difficult to get because that's all based on transmission blockade. And frankly, we don't know how easily we're going to be able to roll it out. Some of the vaccines need really significant cold chains, have very short half-lives outside of that cold chain. We need to organize massive numbers of people to be able to distribute these most hospitals today are saying that they're not equipped to hire the right people to be even administering enough of these vaccines. And then a lot of the hospitals are frustrated because they're getting much smaller allocations than they were expecting. So I think right now, like you say, right now is the best time”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even more. The vaccine rollout isn't going to be as peachy as everyone is hoping. And I hate to be the Debbie Downer here, but there's a lot of unknowns with this vaccine. You've already mentioned one, which is there's a lot of people who just don't want to get the vaccine. You know, I hope that that might change as things move forward and people see their neighbors getting it and their family getting it and it's safe and all. We don't know how effective the vaccine is going to be after two or three months. We've only measured it in the first two or three months, which is a massive problem, which we can go into biologically because there's reasons to very good reasons to believe that the efficacy could fall way down after two or three months.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that you say the engineering solution. So, this is something I've been really trying to, I'm an engineer, my previous history was all engineering. And that's really how I think. I then went into medicine and PhD world, but I... I think that the world, like one of the major catastrophes or one of the major problems, is that we have physicians making the decisions about public health and a pandemic when really we need engineers. This is an engineering problem. And so what I've been trying to do, I actually really want to start a whole new field called public health engineering. And so eventually I want to try to bring it to MIT and get MIT to want to start a new department or something.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He has the capital to do it without the U.S. government if he wanted to. And you know what? The return on investment for him would be huge. But frankly, the return on investment in the country would be hundreds of billions of dollars because it means we could get society open. So I know that his first experience with these rapid tests was confusing, which is how I ended up having this Twitter kind of conversation with him very briefly. But I think that if he understood sort of a little bit more, and I think he does, I really, really love to talk to him about it because I think he could totally change the course of this pandemic in the United States single-handedly. You know, he loves grand things.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to be honest, I've been trying to get in touch with him again. I think take somebody like Elon Musk with the engineering prowess within his ranks, you know, too, Easily build these at the tens of millions a day. He could build the machines from scratch. You know, a lot of the companies, they buy the machines from South Korea or Taiwan, I believe. We don't have to. We can build these machines. They're simple to build. Put somebody like Elon Musk on it. Take some of his best engineers and say, look, the US needs a solution in two weeks. Build these machines, you know, figure it out. He'll do it. He could do it. This is a guy who is literally, he has started multiple entirely new industries.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suggest that it was doing its job. And you just want to. And the nice thing is because these can be produced at such scale, getting one positive doesn't immediately have to mean 10 days of isolation. That's the CDC is more conservative stance to say if you're positive on any test, stay home for 10 days and isolate. But here, people would just have more tests. So the recommendation should be test daily if you turn positive, test daily, until you've been negative for 24, 48 hours, and then go back to work. And the nice thing there is, right now people just aren't testing because they don't want to take 10 days off. They're not getting paid for it, so they can't take 10 days off”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are most infectious. So with the Elon Musk, generally that test, we don't have the counterfactual. We don't have his results from three days earlier when he was probably most infectious. But my guess is the fact that it was catching two out of the four, even when he was down at a really, really”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, really, what was happening is my guess is he found himself right at the edge of his positivity, of his infectiousness. And so, you know, the test worked out it was supposed to work. Probably had he used it two days earlier, it would have been screaming positive. He wouldn't have gotten discrepant results. But he found himself right at the edge by the time he used the test. So the PCR would always pick it up because it will still stay positive then for weeks potentially. But the rapid antigen test was starting to falter, not in a bad way, but just he probably was really no longer particularly infectious. And so it was kind of when it gets to be a very low viral load, it becomes stochastic.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then he got a PCR test and it was a very low positive result. So I think what happened is he just tested himself at the tail end of, and this was actually right before he was about to send those. It was the day of essentially that he was sending the astronauts up to the space station the other day. So he was using these rapid tests because he wanted to make sure that he was good to go in. He got discrepant results. Ultimately, they were correct. But, you know, two were negative, two were positive. But what really happened once he got his, he shared his PCR results and they were very low positive.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was using a slightly different one. One of these, but that requires an instrument called the BD Veritor. And he got a false positive. Or no, I shouldn't say he didn't necessarily get a false positive. He got discrepant results. He did this test four times. He got two positives, two negatives.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. These companies, I mean, the rest of the world has these. They can be scaled up. They already exist. You know, SD Biosensus, one company is making tens of millions a day, not coming to the United States, but going all over Europe, going all over Southeast Asia, and East Asia. So they exist. The U.S. is just, you know, we can't get out of our own way.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is essential. It's got batteries, it's got a Bluetooth thing. It's a great test, but to be honest, it's not any better than this one. And so, you know, I want this one It's nice and all. The form factor is nice, and it's really nice that it goes to Bluetooth.”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“FDA loves this stuff, you know, because they can't get it out of their mind that this is a public health crisis. We need, I mean, just look at the difference here”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a paper strip test right inside there, but you can see that there's like a whole circuit board and all this stuff. And so This is the kind of thing that the FDA is looking for. For home use and things like that, because it's kind of foolproof, like you can't go wrong with it. It pairs with an iPhone. So you need Bluetooth. So it's going to be more limited. It's a great test. Don't get me wrong. It's as good as any of these. But when you compare this thing with a battery and a circuit board and all this stuff, it's got its purpose, but it's not a public health tool. I don't want to see this made in the tens of millions a day. And thrown away. But F”
2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source