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David quammen is with us today, courtesy of diane and robert levy. I didnt say shes over there. Shes hiding the second row David Quammen has 16 previous books. I notice that this does not include the two you wrote as fiction is correct. Doesnt it does include. Okay. My my bad 16 previous books include the tangled tree. The song of the dodo, the reluctant. Mr. Darwin and spillover, a finalist for the National Book critics circle award and a recipient of the merck prize in rome. He has written for new yorker harpers magazine, the atlantic, national geographic, and outside among other magazines, and is a three time winner of the National Magazine award. Kwame and a home in bozeman, montana with his wife, betsy gaines quammen, author of american zion and with two russian wolfhounds, a crosseyed cat and a rescue python python, we wont hold that against you. Please give a warm savannah. Welcome to David Quammen. Thank you. Thank you, nancy. Thank you all. Nancy does not like snakes, but thats okay. We talked about that. We talked to that. Snakes. Spiders everybody has their their boundaries. Thank you so much. Thank you, bob and diane levy. Thank you, nancy. Thank you, savannah book fest. Thank you. Parishioners of trinity is at trinity church. Its great to be here. Im im im honored and delighted to be here. Its been, i think, thousands five years since ive been in savannah. And when i was last here, i was heading into the okefenokee swamp with john croft howard, john crawfish, crawford. One of your cherished local teachers, naturalists. And hes this afternoon, which delights me john. And we were headed into okefenokee for five days of canoeing around and enjoying that amazing. And sleeping on the platforms and. It was a magazine assignment for me. Ive had very fortunate magazine writing, career giving me license, go to wild places and see wild things and write about them. Im going talk about this book breathless the scientific race to defeat a deadly virus and whats in it . I also want to talk a bit first about how it came to be, how it took shape. And that goes back well, it goes back 20, 23 years to when i first got interested in dangerous viruses emerging out seemingly out of nowhere and getting into humans. That was by way originally of ebola, but more specifically, it began when i published the book that nancy mentioned spillover in 2012 spillover subtitled animal infections and the next human pandemic was a book about the broader fandom and then of new diseases that are known as zo no. Cs zoonotic diseases because they come from animals and they get into humans emerging pathogens of various sorts, particularly virus has come out of wild animals and sometimes infect humans. And if were unlucky they cause disease in us. And if were really they transmit from one human to another and you have outbreaks and epidemics and, pandemics. Ebola, nipah virus, hiv, the influenzas, hendra virus, australian bat list virus, bolivian hemorrhagic. Theres just this. Theres just this drumbeat of these things that have come upon us in the last 60 years. They roll off the tongue. So i published this book 2012, and as i was getting near the end of the research and between around ten, i asked a number. I had traveled around the world to to watch the scientists who work on this subject in the field to crawl into the caves in Southern China with them, where they were trapping bats, to look for dangerous viruses, including the original sars virus of 2003 to the congo forest where they were tranquilize, darting gorillas to look for antibes to ebola because ebola kills gorillas and infects gorillas and sometimes kills them as well as humans. Lots of interesting places, rooftops in bangladesh, trapping bats in the middle of the night looking for nipah virus and other things. And i got to know a lot of the people who were the experts in the world on this stuff. And toward the end of the research i asked some of them, some of wise heads. All right. Is is there another pandemic coming . And will it be a big one . And if so, what is it likely to look like . And the consensus of what they told me in 2010, 2011, which i into the book channeling their was yes there is a pandemic coming we cant say exactly win but could be soon or soon ish. Yes it will be caused by a virus. Yes that will be a virus new to humans. Yes, that would be a virus coming out of a wild animal. That will be a particular kind of virus with an rna rather than a dna genome. Rna is another kind of, as you may well know, is another kind of genetic single strand id rather than double stranded like the famous double helix, a single genome of m rna is more is less stable than the double helix. And its more inclined to make copying mistakes when it replicates itself and therefore, viruses with that kind of genome and rna genome are more changeable and therefore more adaptable, more likely to be able to adapt to new situations, including new kinds of hosts. So these people telling me itll be an rna virus coming out of a wild animal, maybe a bat where, maybe in a wet market somewhere where wild animals are on sale for food, where maybe in china, what kind of an virus . Probably either an influenza virus, a virus related to measles or a corona virus. Oh, okay. So i published that in 2012 and the book did fairly well, but there were people who reacted to it this way. Oh yeah, viruses that come out of wildlife and caused diseases or could cause diseases. Yeah, thats thats that kind of thing that david would be interested in. Thats that kind of creepy thing that would fascinate him. Okay, fast forward. Its 2019, its late. 2019 and i am at work on another book for my publisher, simon and schuster, a book about cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. The fact the idea of the school of thought that cancers evolve, tumors evolve, and theyre implicated signs of that that are very counterintuitive. But that are important to the understanding the treatment of cancer. This is something id been interested in for a long time. I did a piece for harpers magazine 15 years earlier on this subject, and finally i was getting back to it for a book and simon and schuster was supporting that. For reasons i wont take time to explain. The tasmania devil was very important to that subject because the tasmanian devil is in the process of suffering an epidemic of a genuinely contagious cancer, not a contagious virus that triggers cancer, but a genuinely cancer that jumps from one tasmanian devil to another when they fight, when they bite one another in the face, when theyre fighting over food or mates and it has spread the island and its killed large portions of tasmanian devils in the last five years. Scientists are studying it that case lies at one end of the spectrum of strange, counterintuitive things that the idea of cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon includes so i was going back to tasmania to do some more research. What the scientists were learning about this. Then late december 2019, we started hearing whispers out of the city of wuhan on january 2020, more people started those those whispers. I was making my plans to to tasmania early february, middle of january. I got an email from an oped editor with the new times. She was based in hong kong. As it happens, i write occasional op eds for the new york times. She was saying, hey, quammen isnt it time for you to do another op ed for us on anything that you might consider important or right now, for instance, maybe even that virus thing in wuhan . And i said, yes i definitely want to write an op ed about virus thing in wuhan. So i wrote an op ed for the times saying, hey folks, this could be it. This is a corona virus. This is kind of virus. Its been on the top of the watch list for a potential pandemic. New disease we should take very, very seriously. This could go big. This could become a pandemic for the following reasons. So that op ed appeared in the times on january 28th, 2020. And then i got on a plane and went to tasmania and i spent most of the next month in the bush with tasmanian devil biology strapping these Little Creatures and checking them for this contagious cancer. And then about this phenomenon. But every time i went back to my hotel in the city of my email was lighting up. Would you talk to us about . The wuhan virus, would you talk to us about spillover of new diseases . Would you talk to us about the danger of pandemic . China television, russian, cnn, various npr outlets, Australian Broadcasting corporation. So i spent a large portion of my time doing doing media responses to try and help people underplay, understand what might happen with this with this new virus. And then on march second, i flew back to my home in bozeman, montana. And march 20th, i think the World Organization officially declared everybody else could see, which was that this was a pandemic. March 20th of 2020 and soon after that i heard from my publisher, simon and schuster saying, david, we want to book on the pandemic and we think youre the right to do it for us because of spillover, because of your op. Eds, because, you know, people and because youre already on contract with us for a book anyway. So they said, why dont you push that book to the back of your desk and well give you a nice new contract and you do a pandemic book for us. And i thought about that very carefully for about 5 seconds. And then i said yes, realizing this was not an opportunity, this was an obligation and this is a duty. So so i said yes and i signed a contract. Based on essentially a cocktail napkin proposal that i gave them quickly. You know, ill write a book about the pandemic and find heres a contract. And he signed the contract the contract. The downside of the contract was that i signed it in about may of 20. And the end. And it had it was it had a rigorous deadline, more rigorous than deadlines are for books. Sometimes because they were giving me significant amount of money. And this was an urgent situation. And and they wanted this book out soon. So the deadline was december 31st, 2021. So i had a year and a half at that point to write this book, and i realized that i had two Serious Problems in terms of how i was going to do this book. First of all, one of my operating principles is already suggested with a book with a magazine article. Whatever has always been go there. If you want to write about the question of whether gorillas carry antibodies to ebola, go there. If you want to know something about viruses in bats, in the caves of Southern China, go there there. But i wasnt going to be able to go there. I was not going to be able to get on a plane for wuhan, china. It was very clear in may of 2020, none of us could go much of anywhere at that point. And there was no sign yet when that might change. And it change very soon. So i realized im not going to be able to do the go there thing and other problem i had was that i knew publishers all over new york talking to writers and saying, we want a pandemic. So there were going to be a bunch dozens, maybe of hundred pandemic books coming out. From new york publishers and. I needed to figure out a way to write that would be unique and uniquely valuable, interesting and another of my operating principles has always been write books about things that nobody else is writing books about. Cancer is an evolution fairy phenomenon and the tasmanian devil island biogeography and extinction, molecular phyla, genetics. But there were going to be a lot people writing about this subject. So those were my two problems. I couldnt travel, i had to create a unique book in a crowded field, and so i did what any sensible 72 year old author would do facing a serious deadline. And those problems i scheduled myself for double Knee Replacement surgery. So i spent summer of 2020 getting my knees replaced with titanium devices and, doing the rehab. I travel anyway and i had to get it done. My knees were shot and the rehab took some time went into the fall. I did do some work. I wrote a couple of pieces on the edge of the pandemic subject for the new yorker and couple of more op eds for the new york times. But basically, i was shuffling my feet trying to figure out how am i going to solve those two problems . And that went on until the end of 2020. And then around christmas i got an aha. I how i can do this book. I think. And the aha had a couple of elements. First of all i decided i would write a book about the virus itself. Ill make the virus the coronavirus that causes covid to which is technically called sas covid to covid 19, cause sas cov two ill write a book about sarscov2 critter is my main character and ill write about the science of that, the origin of that virus question of the origin of that virus, the evolution of that virus. Its fierce journey through. The human population where its going, whether its ever going to go away. Thats my thats my character you like. Well, no, im not going to compare myself to im not going to say what i was just going to say, because dont want to compare myself with john milton. But i was thinking about satan as the as the the riveting character in lost. Okay, just forget that i said that. So the virus is going to be my main character and im going to write about the science who study that virus, that the the most brilliant, leading courageous experts, the world who are working on that virus to understand its origins its evolution, etc. , etc. And im going to write about them not just as not just the work that theyre doing their views of this virus, but as people during the pandemic, im going to contact 60 or 70 of the worlds leading virologists and, molecular evolutionary biologists and epidemiologists who are at work on this virus. And im going to ask them, may i interview you by zoom for 90 minutes and record and ask you about your work and your views of this virus, but also about your life, a certain amount about your personal life. Your life is not just a scientist, but as a lab leader, as a teacher, as a spouse as a citizen, as a. As perhaps a child of elderly parents. And so i started january 1st, 2021, contacting. I made a whole list of that. I wanted to contact some of them. I knew a bit or well from previous work, some of them were famous to me, some of them i just discovered by googling around to see whos doing the interesting on this. And so i assembled this list of what i came to think of as my greek chorus. These voices that i would have ranging from famous people like tony fauci, Barney Graham at the Vaccine Research center, who led the the rna effort that became the Moderna Vaccine. George gao, director general of the china cdc in beijing, carlos morel, senior guy in rio de janeiro, ranging from them to bring and important but complete unknown young graduate students and postdocs who were working in this virus in labs around the world. Verity hill and tanya otoole to, grad students at a lab in edinburgh scotland working in the lab of a scientist named andrew rambo. I emailed. Andrew rambo. His reputation was big. I said, can i interview you for this . He said to his great, dont interview me interview. Verity hill and tanya otoole. They are driving the Software Development that is allowing us to trace by sequenced genome the diversification of this virus. Theyre the ones who discovered the alpha variant out of southeastern england, interview them. So i interviewed verity hill and tanya otoole, these two young women, and they gave me wonderful interviews and thats in the book and gave me a lot of value and a lot of humanity, a lot of important science. And then i went back to andrew rambo and said, so ive interviewed verity and ive interviewed anya, can i interview you two now . Okay. All right. You can interview me now. A good lab leader, a good a good mentor. So i did all these things and eventually it came to 95 people, 95 interviews, almost all them extended hour and a half, 2 hours. I didnt get an hour and a half with tony fauci, but i got a very interesting conversation. Tony fauci and and its in the book and then i, i had them all transcript had transcript, transcript. Scribd these 95 interviews by my faithful gloria, whos been working for me for 30 years doing this, and i had the stack of these transcripts on my desk and i had my office was filled with Journal Articles about the virus that i had read and books and things like that and, and then i knew i had to i had to get busy and write this. So about on jan june two second of 2021, i stopped interviewing. I started writing and i had until december 31st and i dont like making outlines when i write books, i care deeply about structure, about intricate, organic, functional structure that serves a great purpose. Purpose is supplying the reader with a sense of momentum and sense of connectedness, but also a sense of surprise and the end, a sense of inevitability. All those things i care about, but you dont get that by making a programmatic structure for your book. You get that. I feel by growing your book organ, this might have something to do with the that i spent 11 years obsessed with the novels of william faulkner. I my training did my education not in science but in literature. And i did my graduate work on the structure of William Faulkners novels and. So i, i learned to be able to write long, complicated science books partly studying william faulkner. Anyway, no outline, just started to write. And whos the first voice that would help me tell this story . The murmurs in december of 2019 . Well its that fellow henry easley, the chinese scientist who is now in philadelphia studying, coronaviruses in the lab of susan weiss, a great coronavirus researcher. So i talked to henry lee about what he had learned through wechat from his friends back in shanghai in, the closing days of december 20, 20. And i talked to susan weiss and she heard from henry lee that. This is a coronavirus. So she immediately were going to work on it, order some masks, order some more gowns, order some more personal protective equipment. Were starting as of january 2nd to work on this virus. And then there was marjorie pollack, who was the Deputy Editor of an internal National Infectious disease Alert Service known as promed, who picked up rumors about this on new years eve of 19 and spread the word to a network of 80,000 people around the world, including subscribers to this and and and a scientist named yanjun zhang in who studies viruses and who became very concerned about very interested in this early on yangon, zhang got hold of some swab samples from of the first patients in wuhan and they were shipped to him in a metal on a fast train. They reached his lab on january 20, 20. He immediately set his lab to work on trying sequence the the genome of this virus, assembling the fragments of rna, transforming it into dna. So it was a little bit more stable to work from sequencing fragments, piecing the fragments together like a jigsaw puzzle in order to get the complete 30,000 letter genome of this new virus. And by january 5th, he had but chinese authorities, the Chinese National health commission, was saying, dont talk this, dont work on this, do not publish anything about this without permission. So zhang is working on this. He has genome january 5th. He calls his friend eddie holmes, an international in evolutionary virology, a wonderful englishman. Ive about before. Ive known him since spill over. Hes got a bald head that he keeps and polished, and he fancies that he looks like Homer Simpson and and and hes edward c holmes. But everybody in the viral world knows him as eddie. And eddie is one of the best. Hes in sidney zhang calls him because theyve collaborated. Eddie, weve got to write a journal paper about this and submit to nature as soon as possible. Eddie says no. Zhang we can do that, but weve got to release the sequence. This sequence has to be made public. People all over the world need this to start developing diagnostic tests and working toward. We need to release the sequence. Zhang is under pressure. The government dont publish on this do not dare without permission. Finally, on january 11th, the morning, january 11th, beijing and sydney time. Its a saturday eddie calls zhang once more zhang is on plane just loading onto a plane to fly to beijing to to his superiors. And theyre closing the door. And eddie zhang, weve got to release the sequence zhang is buckling his seatbelt. Give me a minute to think about it, eddie he thinks about it and he says, okay, all right, well release it. Ill call my postdoc. He calls his postdoc, send eddie the file with the genome in it, they close the plane door. Zhang buckles then takes off. Hes at 30,000 feet for 3 hours. Nobody can reach him. Nobody can stop him. Nobody can do anything. Meanwhile, eddie has the sequence. Eddie, one of the worlds greatest intrepid of genomic sequences, doesnt look at this sequence of dna. This 30,000 letters he calls rambo and edinburgh, who runs an open web site of geology of a virological, brainstorming for things that are not quite ready for journal, papers and. He arranges with andrew to publish this genome on this website, they quickly write a little preface saying to the world this genome has come from the lab of young john, but it is not proprietary. You are free to use it. You are free to study it. You are free to share it. Here it is world the genome. Its in eddies possession. For 52 minutes between getting it from zhang and going live online out of edinburgh. 52 minutes. Eddie to me, i didnt even look at it could have been bloody glow worm dna but was up 1 a. M. Edinburgh time about 8 p. M. Washington time among the people grabbed that genome sequence and immediately start to put it to use are tony fauci and Barney Graham. Tony fauci has said to barney, tony fauci is Barney Grahams boss. The Vaccine Research center is under his institute. Just be just be ready to go on the vaccine. Ill get the money. Ill get the permission. Ill get the clearances. You just be ready to go as soon as we get the genome. Barney graham is saying, just get me the genome. Ill have my team ready to go. 8 00 catching the genome comes in. Its open to the world Barney Graham contacts his team. They begin the next morning, 65 days later, the first Moderna Vaccine goes into the arm of, the first volunteer of the first phase clinical trial. And by 20th, its cleared Clinical Trials and it starts to be given to people all over the people in this country. And eventually over the world. Thats my book is titled breathless, so ill stop there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you you. Oh, yeah. Questions, questions, questions. If you have questions at the mic step up to the mic. Great. Thanks. Thanks. Hi. I loved the ending there, but a question that i have is going back to your book, ten, 12 years ago, there were probably a lot of different places along the way or things that could have been done that perhaps could have prevented from happening if as a society, we actually wanted that to happen. So are there particular steps that you see now looking back, that we might consider for the future to prevent some of these things from happening again, or at least, you know, diminishing their impact. Oh, its it is. Thats the question and is the question. And its we have the science, we have the Public Health expertise. We need the political will. We need the financial support. We need the public support. And this whole thing has become so politicized fast that thats more than ever. Its more difficult than it. Ten years ago, 11 years ago, we failed. Then the scientists didnt fail. But one of the scientists that i talked to, a fellow named ali khan, that i knew from the cdc, hes now dean of the Public Health school at the university of nebraska, told me, heres what happened. Failure of imagination. And what he meant by that was that weve had the science, weve had the warnings, weve had all kinds of warnings that. This is going to happen. But at the policy level, at the National Leadership level. Leaders aware that this might happen, but it might not happen between now and the next election election. Preparation, preparedness is expensive in, you know, tens of billions of dollars, not nearly as expensive as response tends of trillions of dollars. And so failure of imagination meant that leaders who had heard these warnings and these warnings were loud enough at the at the science advisory level that all of our leaders had to hear these warnings. They were ignored because there was no guarantee that this would be my problem between now and the next election. And the public. We have a problem with the public. Our public this Scientific Literacy of the public has been going backwards for the last three years. Weve been getting about science less and more suspicious of it. And there a lot of reasons for that. And you are as well aware of them as i am, and i dont know what the solution is. But its a terrible, terrible weve got to fix that. And as we fix that, we can do whats necessary to protect us against the next one, whether its another coronavirus ten years from now or Avian Influenza two weeks from now. We can start doing the things that need to be done, which involve. Proactive surveillance among other things, real internationally coordinated efforts to spot the next spillover before there are 14 people dead in a village in the congo or before there are 41 people in hospital in wuhan. At the point when, one poultry worker in arkansas tests positive for h5n1 influenza, and then his wife tests positive for h5 in in one influenza screaming alarm bills. Alarm bells should ring all the world and resources should converge on that problem. And we can do it, but we have to choose to do it. Yes, sir. The an academic question, but in theory, what could china have done . What should have china done . And how much of that was political or how was that denial . Yeah, china could have done a lot more. How of it was political . 100 . Chinese scientists, including some that ive mentioned and some that are in the book that i havent mentioned, were courageous young zhenjiang has suffered consequence for what he did with eddie jones. Yes, there were consequences. And we dont even know exactly how severe those consequences are yet. Even eddie holmes, as far as i can tell, doesnt quite know communication has become so difficult. So chinese officialdom did a lot of things wrong and chinese scientists did a lot of brave things right. But. And chinese officialdom continues to do things wrong and more inclined to do things wrong now because of this polarization and the demonization the oh, this is the the the the kung flu. This is this is all chinas fault leaked from a laboratory in china. Its all all their fault. Its not a global problem. Its something that china on us that is just closing china tighter and tighter and tighter. We need to break that cycle, too. Its not going to be easy and its going to take time, but we need to do that and and china obviously was not the only country that made mistakes at the official level, but containment. It this all should have happened in december of 2019 when there were 14, 27, 41 cases of atypical pneumonia in hot. I know. Did i do something there . Its back. Hello . Im back anyway. Anybody else for the question . Yeah, just. Is that you a judgment from all of the research that youve been on this subject for so many years, at least a decade, that this was a occurring virus from the wet markets that you talked about . Were is there any likelihood or percentage chance that it did come from a lab in china . Thank you for that question. And important one. The preponderance of the evidence by far by far by far supports the idea that this is a natural virus similar to a high degree to other coronaviruses that have been found in bats in Southern China, similar to 96,. 97 level. The the genome that eddie holmes and others have. Suggests evolution by Natural Selection and not engineering in. There have been a lot of excuse asians and narratives as we all know that first of all that it was an engineered virus leaked a lab that thats just not at all supported by the genome by the science. I think thats been entirely refuted beyond plausibility is there a chance that this was a virus that was worked on in a lab, a wild virus that was maybe worked with gain of function research and then accidentally leaked from a lab . Well, theres a theoretical. Yes, 1 , half of a percent. Hard to say. Should we about that possibility . No. Should we continue to beat that drum and create narratives around that without any actual empirical evidence that that happened . No, we shouldnt do that either either. We need to solve this question and we need to do it further research that includes that possibility. But based on all of the scientists that ive talked to, that is a very, very, very unlikely possibility. And equally important, its not supported by any positive evidence. Theres no evidence that this ever existed in a laboratory. So so thats where we are with that. I think of that is the natural Origins School of thought versus the nefarious Origins School of thought and ill say one other thing. The nefarious school of thought is supported mostly on twitter or by a bunch of people, some of them intelligent people with phds. But are practicing amateur molecular evolutionary virology. And its not supported. The professionals like eddie holmes. Sir, in the history of science, theres sometimes been competition, i think, of the discovery of the hiv virus or linus pauling, watson and crick, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. And the scientists you spoke with, did you get a sense that there also an area of Competition Among different labs, important work, but still you need some sort of ego to get you into that kind of work. Did you find a sense of competition . Yes. Yes. And thats thats an interesting line of thought. Thank you. Because one of the subtext of my book is that here is what science is. Here is how science works. Its not just a matter of what science says, what science concludes, but to educate people about this virus and about science generally, you need to help people realize that science is a human process. It involves not just brilliance and curiosity and discovery and and honor, but also competition, ego, clickers, shyness frustration, all of those things. And so yes, ive seen a little bit of that about, that, for instance, there there is a little bit of a dispute about who released the first genome publicly. And george gao of then director general of the china cdc, has told me. Well, zhang and holmes didnt release the first sequence we released it two days before they did. How much does that matter to the world and to the development of vaccines . Well, probably not very much. But how much does it matter in terms of the way science keeps score . Well, if George Gallup mentioned it to me, then that means that that element, competition is still functioning even in a situation like this. I questions. So you very calmly use the term surveillance testing, which does make a ton of sense, particularly when you have a virus that you have asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers, but it doesnt feel like we ever, as a country or world had the discussion to understand the difference between. Asymptomatic, asymptomatic, pcr testing versus rapid antigen. And i feel like were just track to repeat because everybody wants to just pretend its over. So wonder if you have any insights into part of it. Yeah, well, its not over, you know. I know. We all know that its not over. The virus is still out there. Its still evolving. Its in now. Its in mink and white tailed deer and other wild as well as us having them having gotten it from us. And we need surveillance testing by whatever method theyre in. There was Something Else i wanted to respond, to that you said at the beginning right before the the ism dramatic or. Oh yeah, yes, yes. So that was one of the things that made this experience so bad, so horrible. I mean, when, when the original saas virus of 2003 emerged from Southern China through hong kong, through the metropole hotel, and then the airport and got to toronto and, beijing and singapore and a few other places. It was a horrible virus and we didnt know anything about it and it was a respiratory virus and it spread when people had respiratory crises and it it infected it and killed a lot of Health Care Workers because nobody knew that you had to suit up, you had to put on your ppe before. You dealt with a patient who was having a respiratory crisis from this virus. So in and other places, you know, a man is having a crisis. Lets get him intubated grade five. You know, and and interns around this guy get a tube down him. Hes coughing and spewing and theyre not wearing ppe because they didnt know how dangerous this virus that virus was one. But sas one infected 8000 People Killed 801 in ten case fatality rate terrible if it had been capable of asymptomatic infection, we would have had our pandemic in 2003 instead of 2020 21, etc. And the scientists including ali khan, the one i just mentioned, told me at the time when i was researching spillover sa forget about ebola, forget about it. And he had worked on ebola responses, forget about all these other viruses. Sas 2003 was the was the most dramatic and dangerous thing i ever worked on. He told me y ali well because one in ten case fatality rate respeot to three and he said we were so lucky that it did not have asymptomatic transmission and if it had had that, then we would have instead of dodging a bullet, we would have taken the bullet in the middle of the chest and so this time thats what happened. Thank you. Youre. David was very modest about this. But one of the things thats so wonderful about his is how readable it is, because as he will tell you, he is not a scientist by training. This is stuff he has learned the past 25 years or 35 years or whatever. But the beauty of it is, is because he was a literary major all those years ago, he writes in a way that makes difficult material, easy to understand. So thats what when he says his book is breathless, it really is. It reads like a suspense novel. So i encourage you to read it. Thank you all for coming and thank David Quammen

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