I think of the story of human health as like this long staircase that we're walking up.

You know, you start out with Hippocrates telling people, like, don't even bother treating this.

It's totally impossible.

And then eventually in 1882, Robert Koch figures out it's infectious,

and then we develop tools to deal with it, and then we develop better, we develop chest x-rays

and better diagnostics, and then we develop really good antibiotics, and now people are able to be

cured of tuberculosis, and we're walking up and up and up the staircase. And I want to be

clear, like, we didn't take like two or three steps down the staircase.

We fell down the staircase.

That's what's happening right now.

And we have to pick ourselves up and we have to find a way to start walking up the staircase again.

Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, one of the things we learned about during COVID, that was a really profound lesson for me and that many people have known and written about through the years, but really hit home for me, particularly when I was covering COVID and living it, is that illness and disease isn't just about the disease and isn't just about the microbe and it isn't just about the body.

And in a truly, like, weirdly intellectually invigorating way, illness, disease,

pandemic, infectious diseases are about the totality of society. Like every fractally recursive

element of how a human functions from the behaviors we have to the families

we have, the societies we have, the friend groups we have, that infrastructures we have,

like suddenly all of it is the interconnection of all of it becomes apparent in this kind of

terrifying way, but also illuminating.

And I honestly think that weird, there's a weird way in which that forbidden knowledge is part of the strange kind of let us never talk about it again.

Shame and strangeness we have about COVID.

That like it lays a society, it shows a society

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