Tuesday, Nov 9, 2021 • 7min
Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks to a future living with COVID in 'World War C'
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We've all heard talk about "the new normal," whatever that even is. CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta has his own ideas, and despite the harsh realities of nearly two years living through a pandemic — quarantines, hospital staffing shortages, massive loss of life — he remains optimistic. In his new book World War C, he says, COVID is something we'll likely live with... forever. But that doesn't mean it has to control our lives. He sat down with NPR's Rachel Martin to talk about it in today's episode.
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(3)
Sanjay Gupta
Rachel Martin
Andrew Limbong
Transcript
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Andrew Limbong
00:01
Hi, it's
NPR's
Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong, not to bum you out, but I saw someone on twitter the other day make a bleak joke about how we're about to enter year three, the pandemic. And I don't know why, but that number three years really elucidated this idea that yeah, this is just life now.Share
00:23
That's a point Dr
Sanjay Gupta
arrives at in his new book, World War C, Lessons From The COVID
19 Pandemic And How To Prepare For The Next One. And despite that ominous-sounding title, it is ultimately hopeful in a way, because he makes the argument in this next interview that we can live with this, that just because COVID
is sticking around doesn't mean it has to control everything about our lives here he is. Talking with NPR's
Rachel Martin
.Share
Break
Rachel Martin
01:08
I talked with Dr
Sanjay Gupta
recently, he is CNN's
chief medical correspondent and he's got a new book out about the pandemic.Share
01:15
I asked him to characterize where we're at right now in this crisis and this is what he said.
Share
Sanjay Gupta
01:21
If I were to think of the country as my own patient, I think you know the patient is still in intensive care.
Share
Rachel Martin
01:28
Gupta talked with the country's top public health experts for his book including
White House
advisor, Dr Anthony Fauci
and former head of the CDC
Robert
Redfield
. He came away from all his research convinced that it just didn't have to be this bad.Share
Sanjay Gupta
01:43
In the beginning, the idea that a pathogen would come indiscriminately sort of affect the wealthiest countries in the world more so than other countries. I don't think that really crossed anyone's mind. And it was a bit shocking in retrospect to sort of hear the thoughts on that will be okay. Was sort of, I think the idea from a lot of people, it's
the United States
.Share
02:02
And then there was this idea that we're going to swing for the home run sort of hit or the knockout punch, everything's going to be on the vaccine. We don't really need to lean in as much to the basic public health measures. That's not something we need to do.
Share
Rachel Martin
02:17
So I think there was all these things thus all the confusion about messaging on masks, "Do they really work? And do we really need to social distance? " That kind of stuff.
Share
Sanjay Gupta
02:26
You know, with masks, for example, I think when the evidence became really clear this was a virus that could spread robustly, even if someone didn't have any symptoms that was a real novel thing. I think a respiratory pathogen that spreads predominantly through people who don't have symptoms. That was really, really surprising and even shocking, but it also made masks mandatory.
Share
Rachel Martin
02:51
The development ultimately, of the vaccine was just a monumental achievement, obviously. But I hadn't heard the anecdote you have in the book about
Dr. Fauci
finding out and how emotional it was for him and that really did underscore how significant it was to turn this vaccine around so quickly.Share
Sanjay Gupta
03:09
Dr. Fauci
his life's work has really been HIV
AIDS for 40 years. We don't have a vaccine for HIV
AIDS. People look at this and they say well it's great we got a vaccine within a year. You know that's just the way it is. 40 years.Share
03:24
He's been working on a vaccine for
HIV
AIDS. We still don't have one. So the idea that we would have one at all wasn't preordained for him. The idea that we would have won within a year. I think it boggled his mind.Share
Rachel Martin
03:37
Yeah. Here we are. The
US
has the lowest vaccination rates of any of the G7
countries. How does that change vaccine?Share
Sanjay Gupta
03:47
Hesitancy is not a new thing. I immersed myself in this so deeply I went down all the rabbit holes. I started talking to people who had worked on vaccines for smallpox. I said you know what what is historically like what are we dealing with here? I think it's it's more common in wealthy countries.
Share
04:08
One hand they want the vaccine because it's that home run hit. On the other hand, they're very suspicious of it. There are some people who are just frightened of new things or some people who pointed the really terrible history with regard to experimentation with medical therapeutics like... there's other people who just think, look, I'm healthy.
Share
04:27
I don't really need this. So there's all these different reasons. And when you boil it all down, about 15% to 20% of the population will fall into this category and they will die on this hill. And I don't mean die. I'm not trying to be pejorative. I mean, this is their issue.
Share
Rachel Martin
04:42
Dr.
Redfield
told you this virus is with us probably for as long as this nation is a nation. So what does that mean for how we live our lives?Share
Sanjay Gupta
04:52
It's it's a tough way to look at things I realize. But ultimately, what I've, what I've learned having covered not just this outbreak, but but other outbreaks, even pandemics and travel to places around the world is that it's the hospitalizations probably more than any other metric that make the biggest difference in how much attention we're paying to this, hospitals are overwhelmed in many places around the country that affects everybody, 66% of our ICU patients are
COVID
patients, 95% of those COVID
patients are unvaccinated.Share
05:25
So it feels very, very preventable. But my point is that I think once the hospitalizations rates go down and they are going down now. I mean, we are starting to trend downward. That's why I'm guardedly optimistic.
Share
05:38
Once they go down to a point where we're not feeling the impact on society as much. I think we live with this, we dance with this, we'll have outbreaks that occur from time to time. But through vaccinated immunity and through natural immunity it will have a lot less of an impact at some point.
Share
Rachel Martin
05:55
But in the book, you really drive home the point that as we try to negotiate what our lives look like living with
COVID-19
in some iteration, the odds are the same of another pandemic happening today as they were in the fall of 2019 before COVID
. So we have to constantly be negotiating the current pandemic while preparing for the next one, which is still is likely to happen even though we just went through one.Share
Sanjay Gupta
06:23
Absolutely. The two things that sort of struck me as I was interviewing people and they were leading me to this idea of just just how likely is this to happen? We used to think of this in 50-year cycles, right, 1918, 1919, 1968, 1969. That was 50 years later, 50 years after that. Oh wait, 2019 50 year cycles.
Share
06:43
But when you start to really look at what's happening with these emerging pathogens, these viruses that are constantly jumping from animals to humans, you realize those jumps are happening much more frequently. But what I would say is that emerging pathogens I think are inevitable.
Share
07:00
But the idea that they have to turn into a pandemic is not I I really believe that from the point of first interaction between an animal and a human, the virus hunters that are out there finding these pathogens of concern to the immediate sort of mitigation containing of that virus, to the therapeutics that were developed so rapidly.
Share
07:26
There's so many things that can be done to prevent these emerging pathogens. These these organisms with which we dance on this planet earth constantly. But that dance can be a pretty controlled one. It really is not that hard to do when you start to put all these puzzle pieces together.
Share
Rachel Martin
07:44
The book is called World War C Lessons From The
COVID
19 Pandemic And How To Prepare For The Next One. Dr. Sanjay Gupta
, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.Share
Sanjay Gupta
07:52
Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Share
07:55
If you ever wonder how the world's most successful leaders got to where they are, what struggles they faced and what kept them going. There's a show for you. Each week on my new podcast my guests reveal how to think more like a leader. Check out wisdom from the top from
NPR
and Luminary.Share
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Andrew Limbong
Rachel Martin
Sanjay Gupta