Hello and welcome to the plague cycle edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week, which is going to be

very plague-centric this week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of

Huffpost. Hello. And we have the one and only Charles Kenny. Welcome, Charles. Hi.

Introduce yourself and tell me about the new book you have out.

My name's Charles Kenny.

Sorry, you know that.

I'm a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development,

which is a think tank in Washington, D.C.

And the new book is called The Plague Cycle.

It's about how infectious disease has basically dominated the history of the planet.

Everything you see in the planet from, you know, which countries are rich and which countries

are poor and racial makeup and how men and women are structured comes back in some way to

the history of infectious disease. It's a great book. We're going to talk a

bunch about that. We're going to talk about how COVID is changing things in terms of trade,

in terms of migration, in terms of women's participation in the economy. We're going to talk about

vaccines. We're going to talk about how best to optimally distribute them and how close we are to

that. We're going to have a whole Slate Plus segment about IP in vaccines. It's a fascinating

conversation. I'm really happy with this one. So do stay tuned for Charles Kenney's insights into

everything plague-related coming up on Slate Money.

So, Charles, you were writing this book long before COVID came along.

Yep.

And then I guess the first question would be like, did anything change?

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