#1779 - Michael Osterholm

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Dr. Osterholm, welcome back.

Michael Osterholm (0:14)

Thank you very much, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Very good to see you again.

It's been basically two years from the day, and I think when you were on the podcast, for a lot of my friends, that was the first real fear that they felt about the pandemic. You scared the shit out of a lot of people.

Michael Osterholm (0:30)

Well, you know, my job is not to scare anyone out of their wits. It's to scare them into their wits.

And to do what they can to deal with the situation. As you know, at that time, March 10th of 2020, no one wanted to believe this was gonna be a pandemic.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Yeah, there was a lot of denial about how it was gonna play out, and people were thinking that it was inflated or it was not that big of a deal. And then, like I said, when you came on the podcast, I got a bunch of calls from friends, like, oh, Jesus.

Michael Osterholm (1:01)

Yeah, I think the understanding of where we've been, where we're at, and where we're going still, I think, isn't really completely clear.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

Where we're going in particular, right? Now, as an infectious disease expert, it's very rare that you have an opportunity during your lifetime, during your career, to examine a pandemic and to be through it and examine the responses to the pandemic.

You know, how, when you look back at it, what mistakes do you think were made and what do you think was done correctly?

Michael Osterholm (1:37)

Well, first of all, let me just say that one of the things I think that's been missing from a lot of the response that we've had so far is an incredible sense of humility.

Joe Rogan (1:48)

Humility.

Michael Osterholm (1:48)

Every day when I get up, the first thing I do is I look over at my nightstand and I see this crystal wall. It has five inches of cake mud on it. And I try to scrape it off and then decide, what do I know for the rest of the day?

And I think that we've had far too many answers before we really had the answers.

And while we always want to use that term, quote, follow the science, I think we didn't do a good job sharing with the public and even within ourselves. What did we really know and not know? And what did we have to do to learn more? So I'd say it's humility.

Joe Rogan (2:21)

Do you think that it's overwhelming? Like, the reason, is there a reason why they didn't do a good job sharing the information with the public? And do you think that some of that might be just the fact that being involved in something with such a massive footprint, something that literally overwhelmed the entire planet Earth, that there's so many variables, there's so many things to deal with, there's so many things to manage that that became part of the problem?

Michael Osterholm (2:51)

Well, you know, Joe, I think that if I had to look at it, there were days that I felt like I was trying to plant my petunias in a category five hurricane. I mean, it was just one of those situations where there was so much going on. Look at the politicization. Look at the misinformation, disinformation. I mean, look at the debates. They often weren't really about the substantive issues of what was happening.

And so we had a lot of these countercurrent issues. And the question was, what do we really know or not know about this virus? I mean, I'm sure there are people after I'm on here today, they're not gonna be happy at all with what I have to say, because I don't think we're done yet. And as I said a year ago, right now, a year ago right now, when the world was basically seeing the curve come down from that early January peak, and the vaccines were flowing, that we were done. Everyone wanted to clear independence from COVID.

And I said, no, I think the darkest days of the pandemic could still be ahead of us because of variants. These variants are really challenging. We don't know what they're gonna do. They kind of like 10 mile an hour curve balls. And so I think that even going forward, we surely are at a better place right now. And we're gonna be this for a while.

But I don't know what the next variant is gonna bring. And will it evade immune protection? Will it mean that the antibody, the immune response we've had so far, the vaccine protection we've had so far, what will it be like with the next variant?