How Accurate Are Antibody Tests?
Deep Background with Noah Feldman
Pushkin Industries
4.4 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Alex Marson, the Director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute for Genomic Immunology, explains what antibodies tests can and cannot tell us.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:08.7 | It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here? |
| 0:13.8 | Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn. |
| 0:17.6 | In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history. |
| 0:30.5 | So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on theHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. |
| 0:41.9 | From Pushkin Industries, this is deep background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. |
| 0:49.3 | I'm Noah Feldman. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, antibody tests are gradually becoming increasingly |
| 0:56.8 | available to ordinary people. You can get one online, and some employers are even requiring |
| 1:02.8 | that people take them to go back to their jobs. But how accurate are these tests really? |
| 1:10.0 | And if it turns out that you do have antibodies that show you've been exposed to coronavirus, |
| 1:14.5 | what does that actually mean about what you should or shouldn't be doing next? |
| 1:19.9 | Here to answer these questions is Dr. Alex Marston. |
| 1:23.7 | He's a biologist and an infectious disease doctor. |
| 1:26.9 | He's a tenured professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California in San Francisco, |
| 1:32.3 | where he's the director of the Gladstone Institute of Genomic Immunology. |
| 1:37.3 | Alex, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:40.3 | Alex, your lab ordinarily does high-throughput genomic engineering research, which is |
| 1:46.6 | very cutting-edge stuff. And then when the COVID-19 pandemic started, you went to your lab team and |
| 1:54.0 | you said, okay, we're completely changing course. We're going from the highest tech to relatively |
| 1:59.3 | lower tech. And we're going to look at the antibody tests that are out there and we're going from the highest tech to relatively lower tech, and we're going to look at the |
| 2:01.4 | antibody tests that are out there, and we're going to see if they work. |
| 2:05.6 | So, first of all, what gave you the idea to do this? |
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