#425 — Are We Prepared for the Next Pandemic?

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Marc Lipsitch about pandemic preparedness. They discuss what we learned from Covid, loss of trust in institutions, how to effectively communicate scientific information in the current media landscape, vaccine hesitancy, the safety of mRNA vaccines, the origins of Covid, gain-of-function research, virus hunting, the Trump administration’s assault on scientific research and universities, future pandemic threats, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
0:22.2	samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the
0:27.6	support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:36.0	I am here with Mark Lipsich.
0:38.5	Mark, thanks for joining me.
0:39.9	Thanks for having me.
0:40.7	I enjoy your podcast and happy to be on it.
0:43.2	Oh, nice.
0:43.9	Well, I am a big fan of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, which is a mouthful, which you run at Harvard.
0:50.8	Before we jump into the topic at hand, can you summarize your scientific background?
0:56.6	Sure. I was trained as an evolutionary biologist and mathematical biologist. I'm now an
1:01.3	infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist, so I've moved sideways a little bit. But the
1:07.9	common threat is that I'm very interested in understanding how when
1:12.1	we give people vaccines and antibiotics, how that affects the populations of infectious agents,
1:17.9	and then how those changes in the infectious agents affect us and our health. And so I work
1:25.1	on how that works, how we measure it, how we measure whether vaccines are doing their job, for example, how we track antibiotic resistance over time and so forth.
1:35.8	And then more recently, I've been involved in two other things.
1:40.2	One is the response to the COVID pandemic on a bunch of different fronts. And the other is
1:46.1	areas of research policy and research ethics around potentially risky experiments and
1:54.0	human challenge trials for COVID vaccines. So I move around a little. Yeah. Well,
2:00.0	it's probably been a busy few years for you,
2:02.2	I can imagine. This has really been, the entire world came crashing into your wheelhouse somewhere
	...

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