Kyle Harper

COVID doesn't hate you.

You know, plague doesn't hate you.

It's just evolution.

It's just trying to steal energy or hijack your cells to reproduce its genes.

And in fact...

it has incentives to try and do that as well as possible while doing the least possible damage.

And so it's always kind of trying to thread that needle or to find the right balance because if a pathogen just kills you instantly, there's nothing to steal and it can't transmit its genes into the next generation.

And so it's a really, every pathogen has these like basic evolutionary problems.

How do I get from one host to the next?

And how do I evade my host's immunity, which our immune systems are incredible, for long enough to multiply?

And so most pathogens, you know, this is clunky.

There's not like a perfect equilibrium, but they have to like explore the space where there are these various constraints.

And

And they find all sorts of weird ways around it.

And evolution is really, really good and really, really creative unfortunately for us.

And just like the tricks that they find to like hide inside your immune system or to like fake it out are really, really wild.

But –

So one of the – I think there's two reasons why plague is so weird and like we don't completely understand why plague is so weird.

But I think there's two basic reasons.

One is that it's vector-borne, which means that it's transmitted through another organism that is the intermediate.