COVID Part 2: Masks, long COVID, boosters, mandates, treatments, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to another special episode of The Drive. This is a follow-up to our recent COVID-19 podcast with doctors Marty Makary and Zubin Damania.
That episode was released on January 3rd. It was very popular. We received a lot of follow-up questions and requests from listeners to revisit the subject matter. For this episode, in addition to being joined by Marty and Zubin, we're also joined by Dr. Monica Gandhi. Monica is an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She earned her MD from Harvard Medical School, did her internal medicine residency and ID fellowship at UCSF. She also holds an MPH in epidemiology and biostatistics from UC Berkeley.
Before getting into the lay of what we discussed, I want to highlight a couple of things. First, along with the previous podcast on this subject matter, this is kind of different from a traditional podcast. It's more of a discussion between the group of us. That format seemed to resonate quite well based on the feedback, so we thought we'd revisit that. Along those lines, we again tried to call out the distinction between fact and opinion. And I think in this episode, we have a pretty healthy mix of both of those things. My hope is that going into this, you're familiar with at least what we spoke about in the previous episode. If not, it might be worth going back to listen to that.
This episode was recorded on January 17th, 2022 in an effort to get it out as soon as possible. It's not going to have the most robust set of show notes. And of course it will be audio only, not video. Now with that preamble, let's talk about the episode itself. The things that we get into in some detail are the newest data on Omicron since our initial conversation. And of course we have a lot more information on Omicron since that discussion. We talk about how viruses evolve and change over time and how that affects antibodies. Monica gives a great explanation of what B cells and T cells do and how antibodies work and what the implications of that are for different types of immunity, vaccine and natural. Talk about the ideal timing and the number of vaccines for long-term immunity and how natural immunity plays into this and whether or not you should be boosted depending on those things. We also discuss some of the side effects of current vaccines. We get into the controversial topics of vaccine mandates, masking Canada's lockdowns, kids in school, Sweden's approach to COVID, Robert Malone's recent podcast on Joe Rogan where Zubin does a pretty good point by point discussion of where he thinks Malone is off the mark and where he's potentially saying something valid.
We spend quite a bit of time talking about this sort of fact versus fear approach to discussing COVID. And it's clear that we're still in largely a fear-based approach, although it's not entirely clear to me why that's the case. In fact, this morning, shortly before even recording this intro, it's January 20th today, I just saw an article that talked about how by March, the United States could see an additional 50,000 to 300,000 deaths. And the reality of it is that's simply fear-based thinking.
Very unlikely we're going to see 300,000 deaths in the next 40 days. So it's not clear to me why that type of language is being used. And I think we try to do a good job here of bringing this back to facts as opposed to wildly extrapolated models and things like that. We end this conversation again, talking a little bit about the future and what the exit strategy looks like here. I think it's very clear to anybody who's paying attention that we are in an endemic. This is no longer a pandemic and therefore we should have strategies geared towards that. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy my followup discussion with Marty, Zubin and Monica.