Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I have on the show today back by popular demand. A lot of you have requested that I would have back on the show for I think the third or fourth time. The one and only John C. Bavona, if you don't remember John is a senior bio safety officer for the University of Chicago.

He has over 15 years of experience working in high containment laboratories with high consequence pathogens like anthrax, highly pathogenic avian influenza. He's got a history of training lab workers, clinical care workers, first responders, first receivers, custodial workers.

To safely work and control high consequence pathogens such as mayors, SARS, and Ebola. In other words, John knows more about COVID than you do.

And he knows more a lot more about this than pretty much everybody you'll hear talk about on TV and I'm so excited to have them back on. We talk about the vaccine. We talk about variants. We talk about politics a little bit.

We talk about herd immunity. We talk about the lab leak theory. That's not the right term. He gives a better term for it. We talk about masks again and we talk about all kinds of other things related to COVID-19.

And I'm very excited for you to engage this conversation because again, John knows a ton about it. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theologinaraw, support the show for as little as five bucks a month.

And huge thank you to those of you who are supporting theology in the raw, all of the info is in the show notes. Please do consider leaving a review of this show so that others can find out about it.

So without further ado, let's get to know the one and only once again, the John C. Bavona.

All right, welcome back to theology in the raw, John. I just told you offline that I think you are the most requested guest on theology in the raw.

So thanks for coming back on and being willing to give us an update on on what in the world is going on with COVID these days.

Yeah, yeah, you're not going to get too much theology, but yeah, almost said, well, they don't get that from me anyway, but for those who don't know who you are, just you know, already read your bio and everything, but just maybe in your own words explain, you know, what's your what's your nine to five job? What do you do?

Sure. Yeah. So I am a senior bio safety officer for the University of Chicago. I work out at Argonne National Lab in a high containment laboratory. It's called the Howard T. Ricketts laboratory.

So there's 12 in the United States. They're called regional bio containment labs and I work in one of them and our kind of mission is to come up with therapeutics and vaccines for emerging infectious disease.

So obviously anthrax plague Ebola in the past, but obviously the the one on stage now is COVID serves to so.

So that's what I do. I do a lot of training. I do a lot of training with personal protective equipment risk assessment.

Kind of in the in the high containment world. So we have it's been in the news a lot now with Wuhan with high containment lab and how they were working with working with it.

So you see a lot of the experts on TV with expertise and high containment, but there's only 12 in the United States, right, that are regional bio containment labs. There might be some small ones.

We're a lab or two, but we were designed after 911 with the anthrax lab 12 in the US to do this high containment lab, high containment work, emerging infectious diseases with with these high risk pathogens.

I risk pathogens their pathogens are usually rated. They call risk assess, you know, one through four and we work two and three risk group pathogens.

And we work with a BSL through so a bio safety level three. So you have you have pathogens that are rated one through four.

That's how how virulent or you know dangerous the pathogens are and then you have biosafety levels where how do you manage those pathogens.

And we're a containment lab and we're a biosafety level three. So are you what is your lab is that similar to and we can maybe just go to the lab leak stuff that is being in the news now that the lab and Wuhan is that basically a Wuhan version of what you do.

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