COVID-19: Current state of affairs, Omicron, and a search for the end game

**Peter Attia** (0:10)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. This week we have two guests simultaneously being interviewed, something I don't do often. My guests this week are Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Zubin Damania, aka ZDoggMD. Both of these are close friends of mine who have also both been previous guests. Now I wanted to have Marty and ZDogg back on to talk about COVID, which is not something I've done a podcast on in some time. In fact, when I did my last podcast on COVID, I really thought that was the end of it and I was done talking about COVID. Publicly, I would obviously continue to stay as up to speed as necessary on all things relevant to my patients, but I really was done with talking about COVID policy and things like that. But truthfully in the past, I would say month, I've become a little bit frustrated with what I've seen around kind of shoddy science and even worse messaging around COVID. So I thought it was time to revisit this. So this episode, we talk about a bunch of things. We talk obviously about Omicron and what's known and understand that these podcasts are always dated, right? So the date of the recording of this podcast was Monday, December 27th. And by the time this podcast is out, that's already been a week. Three months from now, we'll know things we don't know today. That's just the nature of things. But nevertheless, we talk about what is known today about Omicron. We talk about what we understand about vaccine, both benefits and risk, focusing on the mRNA vaccines here, and specifically looking at the differences between Pfizer and Moderna, especially in the subset of young people, and further stratifying that by gender. We also talk about natural immunity, something that seems to be a very taboo subject matter, but it's a very important thing to discuss.
Let's spend a lot of time trying to explore what is the end game here? What is it that we're hoping to achieve from a policy perspective to get to living in a world that looks more like it did in 2019? Is that even going to be possible? What is the difference between a pandemic and an endemic? So this is a very conversational interaction. It's partly an interview, but really in the end, it kind of just a discussion between the three of us. Just by brief way of background, Marty is a Johns Hopkins professor and public health researcher. He's served on the faculty of Hopkins at the School of Public Health for the past 16 years and served in leadership at the WHO. He's a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves as the editor-in-chief of the second largest trade publication in medicine called MedPage Today. He also writes for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
ZDogg is a UCSF Stanford-trained internist and the founder of Turntable Health. He's also the host of a very popular podcast, ZDoggMD podcast, as well as the co-host of an excellent podcast called The VPZD Show. That's with Vinay Prasad, who by the way has also been a guest on this podcast and we reference Vinay here. In fact, I would have loved to have had Vinay on this podcast as well, other than the fact that it would have been pretty cumbersome to have four people on a podcast.
Final thing to note here is that because we recorded this on December 27th with the aspiration of getting this out as quickly as possible, our video team was not in town, so we did not do this on video and we don't really have the staff this week to put out show notes. We're doing this to be as quick as possible and responsive as possible to some of the questions that many of you I suspect are asking. I hope you'll accept our apology that this will be an audio only podcast and there won't be show notes beyond just a number of references. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Marty Makary and Zubin Damania.