Why Can't We Get Back To Normal? Public Health Expert Leslie Bienen on Learning To Coexist With Covid

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2022

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's a very special "Meghan has Covid" edition of The Unspeakable! With barely any voice, Meghan speaks with Leslie Bienen, a public health expert and author of dozens of op-eds calling for a saner approach to covid safety measures. Unlike most people, including (and especially?) most journalists, Leslie knows how to read and interpret scientific data. She's also a veterinarian who has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans. In the fall of 2020, her dismay over seemingly nonsensical school closures led her to become outspoken about the growing hysteria around Covid illness and transmission, particularly as it pertained to children. In this conversation, she explains what was and wasn't known about things like masking, vaccines, and transmission at various points during the pandemic. She talks about what the pandemic revealed about people's chronic anxiety, why masking children makes no sense at this point, and how best protect vulnerable populations. Finally, Leslie explains why she told Meghan not to get the second booster shot, even though Meghan got Covid anyway. (Spoiler: that's the exactly the reason.)

Paying subscribers to The Unspeakable's Substack page have access to about thirty minutes of bonus content related to a completely different matter — the myths and unnecessary stigmas around fertility treatment. Visit meghandaum.substack.com and join now to hear it.

Guest Bio:

Leslie Bienen is a veterinarian and professor at the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health. She has studied and written about zoonotic diseases that spread from wildlife to humans, including rabies, brucellosis, tuberculosis, hendra virus and others, for many years. She teaches courses on global health, writing, and other topics and has published more than thirty op-eds on Covid policy during the past two years, particularly around children and school closures.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast.
0:05.0	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:07.2	This, you can hear it my voice, is a special COVID edition of the podcast, meaning I have COVID.
0:15.2	The interview you're about to hear, I recorded, and in fact, I'm still speaking to you now, while
0:21.3	suffering pretty acutely from a first time COVID infection. I'd gotten pretty self-congratulatory
0:27.5	about never having gotten it. And I also happened to be short on a guest for this week,
0:34.3	and I didn't feel like I could take a week off. So I called a friend. Specifically,
0:39.3	I called Leslie Beenan and invited her to come talk on the show, and she agreed to.
0:45.2	Leslie is an expert in global health and public health policy. She's published more than 30
0:50.9	op-eds on COVID policy over the past two years, mostly around issues of children
0:56.2	and school closures. I thought I would talk with her about what it means to get COVID at this point.
1:03.4	It seems like most people have accepted pretty much that we're all going to get it eventually,
1:08.6	but there's still a lot of confusion about what constitutes
1:12.0	reasonable safety measures, who should get tested and why, who should get boosted and why,
1:17.8	what you're supposed to do when you get a positive test. Since Leslie is actually the person
1:22.6	who told me that I didn't need to get a second booster shot, She was the first person I called when I got sick.
1:29.1	So we're going to talk about that in this conversation. Did she steer me wrong? We will find out.
1:35.2	Excuse me. Okay. I will also say that if you are a paying subscriber to this podcast,
1:41.1	new substack page, you'll have access to about 30 minutes of bonus content
1:46.1	about a completely unrelated topic that I discussed on a completely different podcast.
1:52.2	That would be a special place in hell, the podcast I do with Sarah Hater.
1:56.9	Not too long ago, Sarah and I got into a discussion about fertility, specifically whether
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Meghan Daum, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Meghan Daum and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.