Welcome to Season 4 of Plenary Session.

I'm Dr. Vinay Prasad. I'm an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, and I'm a practicing he-monged doc here at UCSF.

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And with that, let's start the show.

I'm back in plenary session. I'm joined via Zoom by friend of the show, Zeb Yamrojik.

Zeb, it's a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

You're one of our most favorite guests.

Thanks, and I.

It's great to speak for you again.

People have really enjoyed these conversations, and I appreciate your time and thankful

that you're coming back on.

When I emailed you to schedule this, I thought to myself, hmm,

there's a chance we won't have much to talk about. But then, of course, we have a new

variant. We have a lot to talk about. So I guess I was wondering when, I mean, where to begin.

But I guess the first thing is, of course, the folks in South Africa did, I think, a wonderful job in being able to

sequence this variant and reporting it to the international community. And they got the reward

they deserve, which is a blanket travel ban from all the other nations. So I wonder if you

might want to walk us through your thoughts on the initial reporting, what we knew at the time, and the global response of a travel ban.

Yeah, I think there's lots to talk about there. But to take one step back, and I think that just about all the panic surrounding variance has been shown to be unjustified since the very start of the pandemic.

I mean, people seem to have very short memories. We're in the situation of the kind of story

...