Michael Osterholm, Ph.D.: COVID-19—Lessons learned, challenges ahead, and reasons for optimism and concern

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome back to another special episode of The Drive focusing on COVID-19. My guest today is Dr. Michael Osterholm. You may have seen Michael on the Joe Rogan podcast a few weeks ago. I saw him then and was immediately impressed, reached out to him and asked if he'd like to come on our show, which he graciously agreed to. Michael is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He's also the author of a book that in many ways foreshadowed this. The book is called Deadliest Enemy, Our War Against Deadly Germs. In that book in particular, he foreshadows a lot of what we're going through today. Mike and I in this discussion talk about everything from our best understanding of what's happening in the United States with respect to the spread and the slowing of the virus.
What he's optimistic about, what he's pessimistic about, what he thinks the end state looks like, and what you'd have to believe is true if that is to be altered. We also get into the weeds a little bit on some technical things around supply chain limitations with respect to drugs, with respect to masks, with respect to vaccines. There are a number of things we discuss. Again, I think just for the purpose of simplicity, rather than get into a laundry list of everything we talk about, I think if you've got this far, you're probably interested in hearing it. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Michael Osterholm.
Mike, thank you so much for making time to sit down with us for some time today. Again, I want to thank you because I just know that you are constantly being bombarded by requests. There's a challenge you have to deal with, which is on the one hand, you want to be able to do your job, but on the other hand, it's somewhat important for people like you doing your job to be able to communicate with the rest of us what you're seeing and more importantly, what the implications are and what can be done about it.

**Michael Osterholm** (2:45)
Well, thank you very much, Peter. It's very good to be with you.
I think that it's venues like yours that serve a very important role in getting information out today. Far too much of what we deal with is in soundbites. It's in three-minute segments.
I think that's really hard to convey the complexities and the overall short-term, long-term view of what's happening here. I'm really pleased to be with you. Thank you.

**Peter Attia** (3:08)
Well, yeah, you're in the right spot. We're not fans of soundbites here, so we'll get right to it and we'll get deep. Let's start with the 30,000-foot view, which is when we sit here today recording this on March 30th, it feels like an eternity ago that you were on Joe Rogan's podcast doing what I thought was just an excellent job of giving Joe and Joe's audience an overview of what we knew at the time, what we didn't know at the time, what the concerns were.
What do you feel more optimistic about relative to that time, which has probably been three weeks? What do you feel less optimistic about?

**Michael Osterholm** (3:46)
Well, first of all, I think that it's important to understand, as Lewis Carroll once said, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
And I think that one of the things that I've been very concerned about is we don't really know where we're going.
And that's not because the virus hasn't given us lots of clues. Just very briefly to take a step back, just to remind everybody where we've been, we've been following this situation very closely since the end of December last year.
I have been very actively involved, I was involved with the SARS investigation in 2003, very involved with MERS on the Arabian Peninsula, and have obviously done a lot of work in influenza pandemic preparedness and planning.