Know Your Enemy
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UNLOCKED: How the Pandemic Changed Everything (w/ David Wallace-Wells)
🕑 Added 2025-03-31 11:00:17 +0000 UTCWe heard you! We've unlocked this episode due to popular demand, so you can share it with anyone and everyone! (Can also be found on other platforms.)
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This month marked five years since the formal start of the pandemic in the United States in March 2020, when the federal government declared the arrival and spread of the novel coronavirus to be a national emergency. The official Covid death toll in the United States now stands at over 1.2 million; globally it surpasses 20 million people. Tens of millions of others were hospitalized, and many who survived infection are facing long Covid or related health complications. Our lives were upended, whether by sheltering-in-place, working from home, and barely leaving our home or apartment, or, for others, by endangering themselves by continuing to show up to work in hospitals, making deliveries, or staffing essential businesses. And yet, as David Wallace-Wells recently argued in the New York Times, "We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us."
We wanted to have a conversation with David about that reality: why, collectively, we resist acknowledging what Covid really cost us, and the ways it continues to shape our lives. The discussion begins by revisiting the first weeks and months of the pandemic, the fear we felt, and the remarkable displays of solidarity that occurred in blue states as well as red states. From there we explore the different "phases" of the pandemic, how public-health measures became culture-war fodder, the impact of the vaccine on how both the public and elected officials perceived the risks of Covid, the pandemic's profound influence on our politics, the fallout from school closures, the Lab Leak Theory, and more.
Listen again: "How to Survive a Pandemic" (w/ Peter Staley), Feb 21, 2021
Sources:
David Wallace-Wells, "How Covid Remade America," New York Times, Mar 4, 2025
— "The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else," New York Times, Feb 26, 2025
— "We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong," New York Times, Feb 28, 2023
— "Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong'," New York Times, April 24, 2023
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)
Nicholson Baker, "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis," New York Magazine, Jan 4, 2021
Zeynep Tufekci, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," NYTimes, Mar 16, 2025.
Sam Adler-Bell, "Doctor Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci," The Drift, Jan 24, 2021
— "David Leonhardt: The Pandemic Interpreter," NYMag, Feb 24, 2022.
Jacqueline Rose, "To Die One’s Own Death," LRB, Nov 19, 2020.
Comments
Ryeman
As healthcare worker it took me a couple months to summon the strength to listen to this. I was definitely in the head space Sam mentioned of, “I don’t want to go back”. I’m glad I did though.
Holly Beck
Late to the party, but just want to add to the chorus of thank-yous for this episode. It wasn’t easy to listen to, but for the sake of collective self-honesty, it feels super important and I’m sharing it with everyone I know.
Know Your Enemy
I'm not sure how to answer your question. We don't suggest lab (or zoonotic) origin has been "conclusively proven," and no responsible person should. At around 1:36:30, David says: "My own view about the core question is... that we don't really know and we are not ever going to know." But if you're interesting in arguments for the plausibility of a lab origin, there are links in the show notes. - Sam
Burdperson
Thank you very much for sharing that interview! It cleared up a lot on a subject (lab leak vs wet market origins) that I didn't know about, and probably never would have looked into if I didnt stumble across this
Big Honkin’ AG Fanboy
Could you please share some citations as to where you’re getting your information that the Wuhan lab leak was conclusively proven?
Subodh Kafle
I did enjoy this episode as I do every episode but I thought the lab leak section was really bad. Both of you have hinted believing in lab leak before this episode but you've never gone into it. In this episode you do go into it a little bit and the main things you mention are the WIV researching coronaviruses, vague references to how gain-of-function research is bad, somehow, and how Fauci gave bad answers in a senate hearing. You guys are not virologists and you don't claim to have any particular scientific knowledge so I feel a little bit bad going on about this. But have you spoken to any coronavirus researchers about the origins of COVID 19? I know there was a reference to one of you interviewing some people who gave cagey answers, but there are virologists who will answer questions. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5QWtsr9T5RD7ZvbqLglI4s?si=qkYh4EBmTIqTpf73qCDaUg This is a good interview with three virologists. They discuss COVID origins in imo a fairly accessible way. I'm not expecting this to convert you but I hope you will listen to these people and at least appreciate their arguments.
Charles Gabel
I’m a Humanities academic going back to school for public health (PH), and I found this episode especially impactful; I wrote a reply, posted it, then deleted it (out of being nervous?), but here I am again. I’ve noticed that there’s a deep desire for scientific and evidence-based thinking to be non-political (and non-partisan). This orientation, however, is an ideological project in itself, and PH as a field needs recognize that. In other words, PH and other science-focused institutions don’t take political power and building a constituency seriously at their own peril. That’s kind of my working thesis right now, anyway. I’m in a Global Health Case Studies course right now, and the unifying component of every successful intervention is political will. There was an intervention in Argentina that was championed through political actors and maintained by various successors because of its excellent outcomes at low cost. But what happens when someone like Milei gets into power? I'm guessing the chainsaw. However, those who work in these fields seem to treat the political landscape as something to be reacted to, rather than something to act in or even shape. It’s clear that the opponents and cynics of public health are very active in building a political constituency (see: RFK Jr.), and that’s a major reason why we the country essentially blames the public health establishment for the pandemic. Even internally, there's endless critique of CDC's pandemic response, which certainly left something to be desired (and certainly should be critiqued), but I find myself wondering, "whose side are we on?"
Lauren Bickel
This is another conversation that is so good and necessary that I wish it was on the main feed so I could share it around.
Sam D.
One of your best episodes. This kind of recollection of the pandemic is SO needed, because of the denial that so truly did set in. So many of us were caught in the crosscurrents that are described here, and because of the denial around us, have had so much difficulty processing it. As someone who got long Covid in the fall of 2020, and was mired in immense controversy surrounding that, including multiple abandonments, this episode was very healing for me. Thank you so much.
