Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

#425 - Are We Prepared for the Next Pandemic?

12 snips

Jul 21, 2025

Sam Harris welcomes Marc Lipsitch, a leading infectious disease epidemiologist from Harvard, to discuss pandemic preparedness. They dive into lessons learned from COVID-19, including the critical need for effective communication and rebuilding public trust. Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation are explored, alongside the debates surrounding the origins of COVID-19 and gain-of-function research. Lipsitch emphasizes the dire implications of budget cuts to scientific research and outlines future pandemic threats, arguing for urgent action to safeguard public health.

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INSIGHT

Importance of Trust and Policy Flexibility

Public trust and solidarity are crucial in effective pandemic response.
Policies must be regularly revisited as new information emerges to avoid harm.

INSIGHT

Communicating Science in Crisis

Communicate scientific uncertainty honestly during peacetime to build public understanding.
Establish regular updates and set expiration dates for policies to manage evolving crises better.

INSIGHT

Why Vaccines Terrify More

Vaccines provoke uniquely intense fear partly because they are given to healthy individuals, especially children.
Psychological factors and targeted fear campaigns amplify vaccine hesitancy beyond actual risk.

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Sam Harris speaks with Marc Lipsitch about pandemic preparedness. They discuss what we learned from Covid, loss of trust in institutions, how to effectively communicate scientific information in the current media landscape, vaccine hesitancy, the safety of mRNA vaccines, the origins of Covid, gain-of-function research, virus hunting, the Trump administration’s assault on scientific research and universities, future pandemic threats, and other topics.

Marc Lipsitch is an infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist who leads the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research for three decades has focused on how to use vaccines, antibiotics, and other measures to protect public health as efficiently as possible, and has spanned experimental microbiology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiological approaches. For over a decade he has been advocating for stringent limits on experiments that could create pandemic pathogens in the lab. During COVID-19, he led both CCDD's research response on characterizing the threat, evaluating interventions (including vaccines), prioritizing the distribution of vaccines, and evaluating long-term scenarios, as well as CCDD's communications effort that held 150 Zoom-based press conferences to share insights with the public. In 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appointed him as founding co-director of CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, where he served until recently as Senior Advisor.

X: @mlipsitch

For more information about CCDD: https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/communicable-disease-ccdd/

To donate: https://hsph.me/CCDDfund

For more information and to donate to the Botswana Harvard Partnership: https://bhp.org.bw/

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/425-are-we-prepared-for-the-next-pandemic

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