Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D.: Continuing the conversation on COVID-19

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome back to another COVID-19 special episode of The Drive Podcast. I'm once again joined by Dr. Peter Hortez, a renowned vaccine scientist, pediatrician, and an expert on the current coronavirus outbreak. We released an episode with Peter on March 14th, which received a lot of feedback. People were very grateful for that and wanted to have him back on with other questions. It is difficult to immediately address questions that are posed in the aftermath of a podcast that's five days old because five days in this outbreak is an eternity. So a lot of the stuff we talked about today is not actually stuff I thought I would talk about with Peter at the time that we finished our last episode. And again, that means it might not be germane a week from now, but nevertheless, this was recorded March 19th in the late afternoon evening. And as such, it's probably only as relevant as that timing. Given the temporal nature of things at this moment in time, I think podcasts become pretty obsolete pretty quickly. So hopefully you're all able to listen to this today, March 20th or shortly thereafter. Moving forward, I will continue to release shorter and more irregular podcasts, probably trying to get out two or three a week. Also, I'll continue to post videos on Instagram and eventually they'll make their way onto YouTube, usually the next day. Again, everything at this point in time is open to subscribers, non-subscribers equally. And we're also in the process of putting together a specific page on our site. That's at peterattiamd.com that will house all of the information we're posting on this SARS-CoV-2 virus that's the responsible agent for the disease known as COVID-19.
So again, podcast now with Peter, please enjoy it. Keep in mind, hopefully within a couple of days we'll aggregate all of this stuff, all podcasts, all videos, plus all of the internal memos that we are sending to our patients. We're just gonna start putting all of that stuff out there for everyone and that'll be on our site. So hopefully you enjoyed my discussion here today with Dr. Peter Hotez.
Hey Peter, thank you so much for making time again to speak. I know it was less than a week ago that we sat down to do this, but a week in terms of this coronavirus seems like a year with respect to the knowledge and insight that we're gaining with respect to everything else in healthcare.

**Peter Hotez** (3:17)
I really appreciate the opportunity to be on. This was our first podcast together and maybe it was the topic, but the response has been extraordinary. I've been getting emails and texts from people, so many individuals and all of them really enthusiastic and supportive and saying that we did such a good job explaining some complicated science and asking questions that people actually wanted to know the answer to, but maybe never articulated before and tied so many things together and connected a lot of dots. And then in a few cases, we've even gotten people reaching out, asking if they can help to support our vaccine development efforts.
And we've had a lot of really good follow-ups. So thank you again for that opportunity.
I was really also impressed with, I expected to hear only from either physicians or healthcare professionals, but I've heard apparently this podcast is reaching people in all walks of life and people who just really are kind of sick of things so dumbed down in the mainstream media. So I think we hit it at a really good level.

**Peter Attia** (4:27)
Well, thank you. That means a lot coming from you. And I agree. I've sort of always rejected the notion that people need dumbed down sound bites. I think that's probably just an assumption that when really vetted is probably not true for the majority of people. I think if people in medicine and science can explain things clearly and patiently, then I don't think you need to have a great background in this to understand complicated topics. And this is a case in point.