Kyle Harper

It's just like this terrible luck that makes it what it is.

And so to me, like there's going to be another pandemic, you know, maybe bird flu, maybe something else.

But like –

It's the real, real outliers and the weird ones that we should maybe worry about a little bit more than we do.

If you want to go to zombies, I'll go there.

You don't have to twist my arm too hard.

But prion diseases or fungal diseases where we don't have nearly the same infrastructure and level of knowledge, biomedical research, as we do for bacterial and viral diseases.

You know, something – if we create the incentive, evolution is going to find some weird ways to exploit it.

And it's not just transmissibility and virulence.

Those are like two really basic parameters.

But, you know, when you look at even COVID-19, part of what made it insidious is it just has just the right parameters to be latent for just long enough.

Like the first COVID, SARS-CoV-1, 2003.

slightly more virulent.

And in fact, it was just more virulent enough that it made you sick pretty quick.

And just that little difference was enough to contain it because you could figure out who was sick.

COVID-19 was impossible to contain because it took, you know, several days before you really presented with clinical illness.

And it's just that little quirk that made it totally impossible to control through non-pharmaceutical interventions early on.

And so, like,

you know, follow that train of thought, pathogens are going to find ways to take advantage.

And there may be, you know, pathogens that push the limits on latency that can be very, very hard to control.