Sunday, Aug 14, 2022 • 28min
What is Monkeypox? With Dr. Anne Rimoin
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What is Monkeypox? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice learn essential information about the history of monkeypox, how it’s spread and how people can prevent themselves from getting it with epidemiologist Dr. Anne Rimoin.
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Anne Rimoin
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Chuck Nice
Transcript
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Break
Neil deGrasse Tyson
01:52
Welcome to
StarTalk
. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk
begins right now.Share
02:06
This is
StarTalk
. Neil DeGrasse Tyson
here, your personal astrophysicist and I got with me Chuck Nice
. Chuck.Share
Chuck Nice
02:13
Hey Neil.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:14
All right Chuck. We are overdue for a show on Monkeypox.
Share
Chuck Nice
02:20
Yes
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:20
We so are.
Share
Chuck Nice
02:22
It's all the rage.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:23
It's all the rage.
Share
Chuck Nice
02:24
The country's gone Monkeypox crazy you know.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:28
And so we found someone who is in high demand. We're just so delighted she could spare a few moments with us. Please help me welcome
Professor Anne Rimoin
, an epidemiologist from UCLA
. And welcome to StarTalk
.Share
Anne Rimoin
02:41
Thanks for having me.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:42
Yeah, you're in an endowed chair there. Endowed chair of infectious diseases and in public health, named Gordon Levin. Is that one person or is that Gordon like Gordon's law? Gor
Share
Chuck Nice
02:54
Gordon Levitt the actor?
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
02:56
No
Share
Chuck Nice
02:56
Yeah. Nah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
02:58
No, it's too very generous people. And so Gordon and Levin.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
03:05
Levin. Gordon and Levin. You got it and you are uniquely qualified to be in this interview and enlighten us, because you've spent decades on monkeypox. Before anyone's thinking you're all in it before anybody in the rest of the world is thinking about it. And you're there in the Congo,
the Democratic Republic of Congo
where Monkeypox was prevalent.Share
03:28
And so -
Share
Anne Rimoin
03:30
Thats right.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
03:30
We have a million questions -
Share
Chuck Nice
03:32
So are you just precinct or like did you know this was coming or -?
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
03:39
Yeah, yeah. She wanted to be ready for this moment. So therefore 20 years ago -
Share
Chuck Nice
03:43
20 years ago.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
03:44
Before we get into all your business, does it say infectious diseases on your business card? Like what's that like when you hand it to someone do they want to claim -
Share
Chuck Nice
03:57
No longer wanna touch the card.
Share
Anne Rimoin
03:59
Back up a little bit.
Share
Chuck Nice
03:59
They immediately hand you the card right back like -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
04:04
This affect you know, they corral their hands and so what's that like?
Share
Anne Rimoin
04:09
Well it's changed a lot over the last couple of years, let me tell you. In the years before the pandemic when you'd say epidemiologist, people would say, "Are you a skin doctor?"
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
04:22
Epidermist, ooh yeah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
04:23
That was the discussion beforehand. Now today everybody knows what an epidemiologist is. We've hit the mainstream. So very, very different than it used to be.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
04:36
And you have knowledge of value to people. So that gives, that has boosted your currency presumably out there, right?
Share
Anne Rimoin
04:43
Yeah, I think that people now actually understand what an epidemiologist -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
04:47
Could you tell us. Put that on the map right for us right now.
Share
Anne Rimoin
04:51
Well an epidemiologist is studying patterns of disease in populations. So that's the point of epidemiology, and in terms of an infectious disease epidemiologist, I'm focusing specifically on patterns of disease in populations. I'm trying to understand what the burden of infections are. Who's getting them? Why are they getting them and how you can prevent them?
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
05:16
Okay, so -
Share
Chuck Nice
05:17
What, who, what, when and where and why.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
05:19
Yeah, yeah, yeah so -
Share
Anne Rimoin
05:20
So that is the mantra of an epidemiologist.
Share
Chuck Nice
05:23
There you go.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
05:23
Okay so your training is useful for any infectious disease. You just - You happen to have specialty in monkeypox.
Share
Anne Rimoin
05:32
So my training was actually just in community health sciences at
UCLA
, I got my master's degree there. We go even way back further. So my undergrad degree was history, but I specialized in African history and had a particular interest in the Congo
.Share
05:50
And then I went on to the - I went into the Peace Corps. I was a guinea worm eradication volunteer, which was -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
05:57
You and President Carter, yeah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
05:59
That's right. The Carter Foundation was funding it. Carter Foundation -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
06:03
We've had him on Star talk. It was great. Just talked - The whole program was on guinea worms. So yeah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
06:09
There you go. So I worked on guinea worm as a Peace Corps volunteer. And then when I finished I went got my master's in public health at
UCLA
.Share
06:16
Did a little bit of work for the World Health Organization afterwards and polio eradication. Something that's still ringing the bell and recently.
Share
Chuck Nice
06:31
Got news for you. You failed.
Share
Anne Rimoin
06:33
Exactly. Listen I was working on it in India Nepal and Africa. So and then after that I went and got my PhD in international health with a specialty in disease prevention and control. And that department is actually now called Global epidemiology. So my area of expertise is really global infectious diseases.
Share
06:58
And epidemiologists do a lot of different things were some of us specialize in something, some of us specialize in others. I really specialized in infectious diseases, but I started working on monkeypox when I started working in
the Democratic Republic of Congo
in 2002.Share
07:13
And at that point I had just finished my PhD. I started working at the National Institutes Of Health and because I had worked in eradication programs and worked in vaccination programs, disease surveillance. When I got to
Congo
, I was a program officer actually at NIH working on a project related to malaria and pregnancy and pregnant women in Kinshasa. I sat down with the director of the National Laboratory trying to understand the lay of the land.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
07:39
Kinshasa, Zaire -
Share
Anne Rimoin
07:40
In Kinshasa, yeah.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe
, who has also been in the news quite a bit. He is the the Congolese doctor who really was the first person to discover Ebola in 1976. Had been leading the work at the -Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
07:54
Wow, you all know each other as you must, right? Otherwise, you can't communicate anything right?
Share
Anne Rimoin
07:58
Well, I mean that was the first person I sat down with. I mean he was really wonderful and he started telling me about this problem of monkeypox and that there seemed to be a lot of cases. But at the time nobody was interested in analyzing these samples. It just - Monkeypox wasn't on the radar, everybody was busy with other things.
Share
08:14
And so I actually took my per diem and helped send those samples that have been sitting at the national lab to a collaborating lab in Germany who analyzed and found out that there was a lot of Monkeypox in there. The supposition was that there might be some
smallpox
might - Sorry, some chick chickenpox, some monkeypox, but probably not all that much.Share
08:34
We were very surprised at how much Monkeypox was there. And so that was really the beginning of this project that we demonstrated that there was a lot of Monkeypox there. And then we started an entire research program together to be able to really do intensify disease surveillance and showed that there was a lot more there.
Share
Chuck Nice
08:49
You keep saying monkeypox.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
08:50
I know, I'm -
Share
Chuck Nice
08:50
As a lay person -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
08:51
I'm distracted by that too.
Share
Chuck Nice
08:53
Yeah, you just keep saying monkeypox. And I just want to know, first of all, I mean, I know I've done a bunch of reading because it's all crazy now. You know everybody freaking out and I know that it's zoonosis virus. We know that it - I hear these terms clades. I hear this term West African basin,
Congo
basin. What is all of this? What is all that?Share
Anne Rimoin
09:20
Well okay, so Monkeypox is a zoonotic disease, meaning it starts in animals and it resides in animals, but that can cross over into humans. Monkeypox has traditionally been circulating in animals in sub Saharan Africa.
Share
09:39
It's a misno- Monkeypox is a misnomer. Monkeypox is called monkeypox because it was first discovered in a monkey colony, research colony in Denmark in 1958. So they called it monkeypox. But it really turns out this is a rodent pox. So -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
09:55
No it's a Denmark pox.
Share
Chuck Nice
09:59
It is what's rotten.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
10:01
In the state of Denmark. I see what you did there Chuck.
Share
Chuck Nice
10:05
Thank you.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
10:05
Okay. I'm sorry we interrupted you.
Share
Chuck Nice
10:11
So it's really a rodent pox. Okay.
Share
Anne Rimoin
10:13
Okay, it's really a rodent pox. And it resides - We think that the reservoir species are squirrels, house rats, other rodent species. It probably actually affects a lot of different rodent species. But that's - So monkeys can get it from rodents, just like humans can. Now it -
Share
Chuck Nice
10:37
So wait a minute, let's look at this chain of transference here. Monkeys get it from the rodents, does it then mutate in the monkeys and then they give it to us or did they just pass it along to us?
Share
Anne Rimoin
10:49
Monkeys can be incidental hosts, you know -
Share
Chuck Nice
10:52
Okay.
Share
Anne Rimoin
10:53
In
DRC
, most often the cases of -Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
10:55
DRC
, Democratic Republic of Congo
.Share
Anne Rimoin
10:56
In
the Democratic Republic of Congo
.Share
10:60
Most of the cases are associated with squirrels, other rodent species. Sometimes people will pick up a monkey that may have a rash on it, may have been infected and they'll get it from eating a monkey. But really monkeys, primates, humans, non human primates, we're all incidental hosts. This is really a virus that starts in Rome.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
11:25
By the way -
Share
Chuck Nice
11:26
You're scaring the crap out of me right now. Okay. Go ahead Niel.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
11:29
I'm just saying maybe because I'm a city person, but you just said, "Oh, if you pick up a monkey and they have a rash that could". I'm saying I'm never picking up a monkey. That is not a thing that I ever think of doing, alright?
Share
Chuck Nice
11:42
And piggybacking on that. What Neil just said, "I'm thinking, you know, Monkeypox, okay, here's the deal. I don't hang out with monkeys. I'm good. Okay. Like I'm never - I'm not going to run into any monkeys okay, here in New York city. So I'm okay." But now that you say it's a rodent pox talking about rodents and squirrels, okay, now I'm scared because we got a lot of those. So -
Share
Anne Rimoin
12:08
Yes we do. And that's gonna bring me, I mean we're - You're already ahead of the story, but let me tell you that is exactly some of the things that I'm worried about so -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
12:18
By the way, what she just told you Chuck is, let her finish the damn story.
Share
12:23
Let me translate the Professor's comment.
Share
Chuck Nice
12:27
I'm motivated by fear here. I'm sorry.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
12:30
Okay go.
Share
Anne Rimoin
12:32
So here's the deal. I'll try and make this quick. So the situation is this. Monkeypox has been spreading for a very long time. We didn't know monkeypox was out there because it looks just like
smallpox
, which is a cousin of Monkeypox.Share
12:46
And when we eradicated monkeypo- or
smallpox
from the planet, we stopped vaccinating against pox viruses. And as a result, we started to see some chinks in our herd immunity armor. And so what happened was, is over time, as people were no longer vaccinated. People when they came in contact with a rodent or a monkey, they would get infected.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
13:11
This would be people below a certain age. Right?
Share
Anne Rimoin
13:13
Well, it started out that what we really thought this was. Was a childhood disease. So in principle, it was children that were in contact with animals. And actually the very first case of monkeypox in a human was discovered in the
Democratic Republic of Congo
in 1970 in a nine month old child who had not been vaccinated.Share
13:30
And this was when they were at the end of
smallpox
eradication, they were looking for every single case of a pox like illness and making sure that it wasn't a case of smallpox
. That's part of the certification process for eradicating.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
13:43
For being extinct. Yeah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
13:44
And so that's how they discovered it was monkeypox. Once they eradicated monkeypox
or smallpox
in humans from the planet. What they did was they decided it's really important to understand what's going on with Monkeypox here. Is this going to be important? Is this something that's going to fill the ecological niche? We don't know.Share
14:03
So they started a program in
DRC
to monitor it and really the vast majority of the work that we you know is the basis of understanding monkeypox is from 1981 to 1986 in DRC
. And it was really mostly children because if you think about it, everybody was vaccinated and they only stopped vaccinating in 82.Share
14:24
It was really only young children that had any susceptibility to this virus and that's why there's so little known. So when I got to
DRC
in 2002, you know there were all these suspected cases of Monkeypox and a lot of rumors of cases increasing. And it made sense because we no longer had immunity.Share
14:47
So we started this project in
DRC,
Professor Muyembe
and I together. And we started doing intensified disease surveillance and we ended up having a real understanding that there was a huge increase in monkeypox since the 1980's, since immunization stopped.Share
15:03
So we wrote a paper that was in
the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences
. And showed this 20-fold rise in the incidence of Monkeypox since the end of smallpox
vaccination campaigns.Share
15:13
And that should have been a big warning to everybody because that just showed that, listen. As immunity goes down and exposure goes up you're gonna see cases go up.
Share
Break
Neil deGrasse Tyson
17:33
Let me go back a little bit.
Share
17:35
If we all know, many people know that the immunity that some milkmaids had to
smallpox,
came from their exposure to cowpox. Are you saying that the people most susceptible today to monkeypox? Are people young enough to have not gotten a smallpox
vaccine? Because does a smallpox
vaccine protect you against Monkeypox in today's world?Share
Anne Rimoin
18:04
Neil that is exactly what I'm saying.
Share
Chuck Nice
18:06
So how old do you have to be to have a
smallpox
vaccine?Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
18:09
I've got a scar. I got my small part - How about you Chuck? You're 10 years younger than I am. Chuck?
Share
Chuck Nice
18:14
Yeah. I don't know 75. What's that?
Share
Anne Rimoin
18:16
You're too young.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
18:19
You got a scar on your sto- I got one.
Share
Chuck Nice
18:21
No I don't. I don't have a -
Share
Anne Rimoin
18:23
Chuck, were you born here in
the United States
?Share
Chuck Nice
18:25
Yeah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
18:26
Okay, Well then you wouldn't have been vaccinated. Vaccinations in
the United States
stopped in 71.Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
18:32
So now, how does it spread?
Share
Anne Rimoin
18:34
So, wait a minute. Just another point here. That it is
- Smallpox
vaccination probably does provide some protective immunity, but we don't really know how much in this particular outbreak. And because there are all these different modes of transmission that aren't the standard modes of transmission that we've been studying all these years, we just don't know for sure.Share
18:59
So, Chuck. You don't have to feel that jealous of Neil. You guys can both be jealous of me. I've been vaccinated. I was vaccinated in 2004, so, sooner than both of you. Just because I work on monkeypox.
Share
Chuck Nice
19:14
You got the industrial strength. Super concentrated.
Share
Anne Rimoin
19:18
I did.
Share
Chuck Nice
19:18
Yeah, mpsv, like solution.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
19:21
Okay, so this is this is on the skin. So can we presume it doesn't ever go airborne?
Share
Anne Rimoin
19:27
Well, I always say we should be humble about what we know and what we don't know about this virus. What we know about this virus is really, as I mentioned before, really concentrated in those early studies in the 1980s, in villages, in remote rural villages in
Congo
. And that is a very different context.Share
19:45
And so, you can imagine that the studies that we have. We have some animal model studies. We have a little bit of knowledge from what happened in the 2000, there was a small outbreak in
the United States
in 2003. 47 cases from imported Gambian rats that were put into a facility next to prairie dogs. So -Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20:02
Why would anyone import a rat?
Share
Chuck Nice
20:05
What is going on? Bats and rats and monkeys and - What is going on?
Share
Anne Rimoin
20:13
Don't shoot the messenger here.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20:16
Okay, I'm just damn! Damn!
Share
20:21
I'm just thinking of the sewer rats in New York. Look, this is our place.
Share
Chuck Nice
20:26
Tell me about it.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20:27
Important African rats into the sewer.
Share
Anne Rimoin
20:33
We got a pet trade. That's a whole different topic.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20:34
That's another - Oh my gosh. How do we stop this?
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Anne Rimoin
20:37
Well, that's a really good question. So as we're talking about these - So the way that we stop it is, we have to get in front of it. How do we get in front of it? We have to really good disease surveillance. We have to really have good situational awareness. We need to have great testing. Testing has to be widely available to everyone that even suspects that they've been - That they have potentially been exposed.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20:59
You left out the most obvious answer. Stop touching each other.
Share
Chuck Nice
21:04
I'm out for that one. Time for that one.
Share
Anne Rimoin
21:07
Well, on these zoom calls make it much easier.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
21:10
I know! Until zoom figures out a way to transmit a virus through the computer. You know, the zoom call is the great protection of of us all.
Share
Anne Rimoin
21:20
Well, there you go. But the truth is it's gonna be through of right. So you got to have really good situational awareness that's testing good clinical definitions, clay conditions know what to look for. Then we also need to have really good vaccines. Now there are a couple of vaccines that are out there.
Share
21:37
There's the genius vaccine which is this vaccine. It's a two dose vaccine and that's what's being distributed right now. But it's a really short supply. So we just don't have enough of it. And and we don't really know how effective it's going to be in particular in this scenario.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
21:59
So every day is a new set of data for you.
Share
Anne Rimoin
22:01
Every day is a new set of data and there are a lot of knowledge gaps, a lot of things we have to understand. We have to be humble about what we know, we have a good base to start from, but there's a lot more we need to know. And you know, you've been in academia, it's really, it takes a lot of time to be able to get studies up and running to be able to understand what's happening. I mean it's not just today, there's a new virus and you can turn around and start it.
Share
22:24
You have to write protocols, you have to get funding, you have to get ethics approval. You have to then have the logistics of rolling these things out. So it does take a lot of time to get this done. And this is the fact we just don't have the funding and the infrastructure in place to be able to do what we need to do.
Share
Chuck Nice
22:39
How transmissible is this? How can I get it? Actually, how can I not get it? That's the real question.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22:43
That's the real question.
Share
Chuck Nice
22:44
Yeah.
Share
Anne Rimoin
22:45
That's a really excellent question. It you know, it transmit through various routes. It's not as transmissible as something like SARS Covid two. Virus that causes
Covid 19
. It transmits most efficiently from person to person, skin to skin contact, sustained contact. Very close contact.Share
23:04
But it can also transmit through what we call phone mites, contaminated objects. So sheets, towels, clothing, contaminated objects. And so it's prob probably much more contagious. The closer you are, the more virus you're in contact with. And so when you're in contact with the lesions that it causes, direct contact, that is probably the most efficient route for transmission. And that sexual transmission is perfect example that -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
23:38
I remember reading about the milkmaids. They were very specific about it. They would have to have an open sore while they were milking a cow with cowpox.
Share
Anne Rimoin
23:47
Exactly.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
23:47
So, if my skin is intact, how does someone else's monkeypox get into my skin?
Share
Anne Rimoin
23:54
Well it might not. I mean the skin can be a good barrier. It just it really depends because you can have -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
24:00
I have thick skin. I'm a thick skin person, okay.
Share
Anne Rimoin
24:04
You could have - You might not know how thin your skin actually is until you try, you test it.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
24:10
Okay.
Share
Anne Rimoin
24:11
So that's one way. I mean you can also get it through respiratory secretions. You could be breathing it in and inhaling it. But it's there a variety of different ways to get it. But I think -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
24:22
Respiratory secretion that would be like a sneeze or a cough.
Share
Anne Rimoin
24:24
Right. So big respiratory droplets that you might expel when coughing or sneezing.
Share
Break
Neil deGrasse Tyson
27:36
Beyond skin legions, how might monkeypox also show up on your body?
Share
Anne Rimoin
27:42
Monkeypox also, it infects can, you'll have lesions in the oral pharynx, it can be down your throat. It can, it causes what's called a cytokine storm which is similar. Sars cov two also does that. So you can see you're gonna have a massive inflammatory response. You know, people, there were just two cases of individuals in Spain that died from from inflammation for blip from brain inflammation from in encephalitis.
Share
28:12
And so this can be -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
28:14
Triggered by the monkeypox.
Share
Anne Rimoin
28:15
Triggered by monkeypox. So this can be a very serious disease. Fatality rates are low relative to other things. And in particular this this West African clade, not the
Congo
basin clade. So this the West African clade is what's circulating and that tends to be milder.Share
28:32
But there have been a few deaths. And of course the more cases that we see, the more likely that is. And of course when it gets into people who might have a suppressed immune system, it could be a lot worse.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
28:44
Can it cause blindness?
Share
Anne Rimoin
28:47
It can and there - We've seen many instances of that in
DRC
where we have a fair number of cases that it can in fact cause blindness if you can get - If the virus gets into your eye it can really do some damage.Share
29:02
So and a reminder to it isn't even just about these very acute problems that we have really learned in the last several years how important it is, how viruses can create a lot of long term consequences.
Share
29:19
It isn't just about the acute infection today which is substantial and painful and scary and and can be very distressing. But you know we've learned a lot about what viruses can do and causing long term consequences. I think that once we get more vaccine into the system and have better surveillance and better testing that we will have this under much better control.
Share
29:49
And I do not anticipate that this will end up being something like SARS covid two where you see - You know that everybody's going to have to be taking precautions all the time. That's a very different kind of virus spreads very differently.
Share
Chuck Nice
30:03
I know we're getting out of time but this is a philosophical question, because in
America
we tend to think of infectious diseases, something that we need to protect ourselves from. But the more and more it looks like the world is closing in on us. So do we need to change our thinking like it is an investment for us to fight disease outside of this country so that we can protect ourselves inside the country?Share
Anne Rimoin
30:31
Chuck, absolutely. I mean I say this all the time an infection anywhere is potentially an infection everywhere. And we really do need to take that to heart because you live in a global community and what happens elsewhere eventually can affect you yourself at home.
Share
30:51
And so that's why we we need to be doing better. We could have averted this situation with monkeypox if we had invested in helping countries like
DRC
. Be able to understand what was happening and get in front of it.Share
31:04
But we failed to do so and now we are paying the price. And this falls under, I also say this quite a bit, "It's much easier to stay out of trouble than it is to get out of trouble." And now we are in get out of trouble mode. Once again when we have the writing on the wall for a very long time.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
31:21
Well, all I can say is you and your fellow epidemiologists, especially those who are specifically focused on legislation that affects public health.
Share
31:33
I don't know where we'd be without you. I mean maybe we'd all still be in the caves dying of everything else that we look at these woodcuts and paintings of you know, the black plague and all of this. So I don't think you guys are hero worshiped as much as you should be. And let me add to that. Chuck, I don't know if you noticed. The candor with which
Anne
spoke of what they don't yet know.Share
Chuck Nice
32:02
Right.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
32:02
Okay, that's how you know she's a real academic. So what happens is, and what's wrong with you. You spent your life and you still don't know, I did two hours of research and I know way more than the internet and I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have a podcast. I'm gonna tell everyone what I do know and you should listen to me. This is what's going on.
Share
Chuck Nice
32:20
How come you don't know stuff when I was on TikTok and I just learned everything about it.
Share
Speaker 5
32:25
So
Anne
, my last question to you,'cause this is a shared space in our two Venn diagrams. What do you do about misinformation and rampant or people taking what they think is information and politically weaponizing it socially, culturally weaponizing it? What do you do as a public health professional?Share
Anne Rimoin
32:47
As a public health professional I try to go on podcast, for example.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
32:52
What an idea!
Share
Anne Rimoin
32:52
Audiences here, but -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
32:58
Why didn't we think of that?
Share
Anne Rimoin
32:60
It's really true what things that you have to do or you have to get out there in front of it and you have to be vocal. And you have to get in to as many different places as you possibly can. And you don't always want to just talk to the people who are agreeing with you.
Share
33:14
You want to talk to everybody and you have to be willing to listen to everybody too, because it's reasonable to have questions. It's reasonable to question things, including questioning scientists. But sometimes you end up with social media today, the speed with which disinformation gets out there. It's very hard to combat. It's very hard to get in front of.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
33:44
Just like the quote from
Mark Twain,
"In the early morning, you know, when you wake up, a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put on it's pants."Share
33:56
So I'm maybe misquoting it a little bit, but that's pretty much what he said. Anyhow,
Anne
this has been, I don't wanna say delightful'cause you're telling us about infectious diseases. But it's been highly enlightening and informative. And as monkeypox continues to develop either to go back in the can or escape even more. Can we get you back on and get an update? Could we?Share
Anne Rimoin
34:17
Absolutely, I'll be happy to come on anytime.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
34:20
Delighted. Okay, thank you very much for being on
StarTalk.
Chuck, always good to have you.Share
Chuck Nice
34:25
Always a pleasure.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
34:26
And
Anne
, where do we find you on social media?Share
Anne Rimoin
34:29
You can find me on Twitter @Arimoin and also -
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
34:32
Arimoin is R. I. M. O. I. N.
Share
Anne Rimoin
34:35
You bet. And also on Instagram at AnneRimoin.
Share
Neil deGrasse Tyson
34:38
Okay, excellent. We'll look for you there. Keep us enlightened, keep us informed and keep us smart. And you've already been doing a great job at that. All right.
Share
34:48
This has been
StarTalk
. I'm Neil DeGrasse Tyson,
your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.Share
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Anne Rimoin