Are We Prepared for the Next Pandemic?: A Conversation with Marc Lipsitch (Episode #425)

Sam Harris speaks with Marc Lipsitch about pandemic preparedness. They discuss what we learned from Covid, loss of trust in institutions, how to effectively communicate scientific information in the current media landscape, vaccine hesitancy, the safety of mRNA vaccines, the origins of Covid, gain-of-function research, virus hunting, the Trump administration’s assault on scientific research and universities, future pandemic threats, and other topics.

Marc Lipsitch is an infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist who leads the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research for three decades has focused on how to use vaccines, antibiotics, and other public health measures to protect public health as efficiently as possible, and has spanned experimental microbiology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiological approaches. For over a decade he has been advocating for stringent limits on experiments that could create pandemic pathogens in the lab. During COVID-19 he led both CCDD's research response on characterizing the threat, evaluating interventions including vaccines, prioritizing the distribution of vaccines, and evaluating long-term scenarios, as well as CCDD's communications effort that held 150 Zoom-based press conferences to share insights with the public. In 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appointed him as founding co-director of CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, where he served until recently as Senior Advisor.