If people actually are not commingling, if you actually manage to lock down for month or six weeks at the outside, for a virus like this, yes, theyou can quash it. But in this case, id a respiratory virus, we know that's not the case. Therere all kinds of procedures the government can implement to reduce social mixing. By the way, sometimes those procedures have paradoxical effects, which make things worse. A like, a, like curfews, for example, i can actually sometimes make things worse by making by increasing the density an stores.
Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about the lessons of the COVID pandemic. They discuss our failures to coordinate an effective response, the politics surrounding vaccination, vaccine efficacy, vaccine safety, how to think about scientific controversies, the epidemiology of excess deaths, transmission among the vaccinated, natural immunity, selection pressures and new variants, the failure of institutions, the lab-leak hypothesis, the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, boosters, what would happen in a worse pandemic, and other topics.
If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.