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

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  1. “But we are unfortunately doing it right at the peak of viral transmission when millions and millions of people. And when we do that, that just gives this virus so many more opportunities. I mean, orders of magnitude, more opportunity to mutate around our immune system. Now, if we were to vaccinate everyone when there's not a lot of virus, There's just not a lot of virus, and so there's not going to be as many. I don't even know how many zeros are at the end of however many viral particles there are in the world right now, more than quadrillions. And so if you assume that at any given time, somebody might have trillions of iris in them on any given individual. So then, you know, multiply trillions by millions.”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Absolutely. It's. Yeah, I'm completely fascinated by this idea of. Social media in particular, how it replicates, how it grows, you know, I've been, how it actually starts interacting with the biology of the virus, masks who's going to get vaccinated, politics. Like these seem so external to virus biology, but it's become so intertwined. And it's interesting. And I actually think we could find out that the virus actually becomes obviously not intentionally, but we could find that choosing people choosing not to wear masks, choosing not to counter this virus in a regimented and sort of organized way effectively gives the virus more opportunity to escape. We can look at vaccines. We're about to have one of the most aggressive vaccination programs the world has ever seen.”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I hesitate to say that we're good at responding to things because there are some aspects that this particular virus, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 has found a sweet spot where it's not quite serious enough on an individual level that humans just don't, we haven't seen much of a useful response by many humans. A lot of people even think it's a hoax. And so it's led us down this path of It's not quite serious enough to get everyone to respond immediately and with the most urgency, but it's enough, it's bad enough that it's caused our economies to shut down and collapse. And so I think I know enough about virus biology to be terrified for humans that it can, it just takes one virus, just takes the wrong one to just obliterate us or not obliterate us, but really do much more damage than we've seen.”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'm very much a scientist, and so it fascinates me much more than it terrifies me. But knowing enough, I know just how well, you know, we get the wrong virus in our population, whether it's through some random mutation or whether it's this same COVID-19 virus. And these things are tricky. They're able to mutate quickly. They're able to find new hosts and rearrange in the case of influenza. So what terrifies me is just how easily this particular pandemic could have been so much worse. This could have been a virus that is much worse than it is. You know, same thing with H1N1 back in 2009. That terrifies me. If a virus like that was much more detrimental, that would be, it could be much more devastating. Although it's hard to say, you know, the human species were...”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “They replicate faster. And so there's this system with viruses with flu and bacteria where the influenza has these proteins that cleave certain receptors And the bacteria I want to cleave those same receptors. I want to cleave the same molecules that gave entrance to those receptors. So instead, the bacteria found out like, hey, we could just piggyback on these viruses. They'll do it 100 or 1,000 times faster than we can. And so then they just piggyback on and they let flu, cleave all these cyclic acids. And then the bacteria just glom on in the wake of it. So there's all different interactions between pathogens that are just remarkable.”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think in that sense, it's just coincidence. It probably is a good way for measles to measles to essentially be able to survive long enough to replicate in the body. It just replicates in the cells that are meant to destroy it. It's utilizing our immune cells for its own replication. But in so doing, it's destroying the memories of all the other immunological memories. But there are other viruses, so different system is influenza. And flu predisposes to severe bacterial infections. And that, I think, is another coincidence, but I also think that there are some evolutionary benefits that bacteria may hijack and sort of piggyback on viral infections. Viruses can, they just grow so much quicker than bacteria.”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What I've found and what my research has found is that this one virus was responsible for as much as half of all of the infectious disease deaths in kids before we started vaccinating against it because it was just wiping out children's immune memories to all different pathogens, which is, I think, just astounding. It's just amazing to watch it spread throughout body as we've done the studies in monkeys and you can watch it just destroy and obliterate people's immune memories in the same way that some parasite might destroy somebody's brain.”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “One system which is highly detrimental to humans, but what I think is just immensely fascinating is measles. And measles gets into a kid's body. The immune system picks it up and essentially grabs the virus and does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to take this virus and bring it into the immune system so that the immune system can learn from it, can develop an immune response to it. But instead, measles plays a trick. It gets into the immune system, serves almost as a Trojan horse, and instead of getting eaten by these cells, it just takes them over and it ends up proliferating in the very cells that we're supposed to kill it. And it just distributes throughout the entire body, gets into the bone marrow, kills off children's immune memories. And so it essentially”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Wow. Well, that's a great question. You know, I love the pathogenesis of viruses. One of the things that I've worked on a lot is trying to understand how viruses interact with each other. And so pre all this COVID. How viruses impact other pathogens. So, how if somebody gets an infection with one thing or a vaccine, does it either benefit or harm you from other things that appear to be unrelated to most people? And so one...”

    2020-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #146 – Michael Mina: Rapid Testing, Viruses, and the Engineering Mindset · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source