Episode 79: Transcript

Episode: 79: The War on Viruses

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of Victories Greater Than Death, a young adult space opera coming in April. 

Annalee: [00:00:21] We're in a war with a virus. It's called COVID-19 and it's done a lot of damage to us in the past year. It’s killed a lot of people, it's sent the rest of us hiding inside. And it's gotten us thinking a lot about stories about viruses and stories about our relationship with viruses and pandemics. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about the science of viruses, what viruses are really like, but also the kinds of stories we tell when we talk about our relationship with viruses, even just whether we even admit that viruses are alive at all. 

[00:01:00] And joining us is a special guest, Sarah Zhang, who is a staff writer at the Atlantic who's been covering the coronavirus pandemic for about a year now. And she's going to tell us about what she's found. And then we're going to talk about where this takes us in science fiction and the future.

[00:01:19] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion. 

Annalee: [00:01:47] I'm here with Sarah Zhang, who is an amazing science journalist. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic and I actually know her from many years ago when we worked together at Gizmodo back in the prehistory of humanity.

Sarah: [00:01:59] Yeah, Annalee was my boss. 

Annalee: [00:02:01] I was… Yeah, I guess I was technically your boss. Yeah. So I wanted to talk to you about the coverage you've been doing of the coronavirus, but also viruses more generally. 

[00:02:14] So to get everyone caught up and on the same page. Tell us a little bit about the coronavirus, specifically the one that we're dealing with, COVID-19 and how it's a little bit different from other viruses that we've met before or maybe how it's the same?

Sarah: [00:02:32] Yeah, well, it's actually quite similar to SARS, which has led to this very confusing thing where we call it COVID, the disease COVID-19 but scientists actually call the virus that causes it SARS-CoV-2 to distinguish from what is now SARS-CoV-1, which was the virus that was first discovered in 2003 in China. And they really are quite similar. That's why scientists gave them the same name, to everyone's confusion. 

[00:02:58] So coronaviruses for a long time we're kind of, as one scientist described to me, the backwater of viruses. They were seen as just these viruses that infected animals. They're sometimes kind of seen in livestock. There's actually a cat disease called FIP. It's also caused by a coronavirus. Weird side note,  Remdesivir seems to be effective for treating that cat coronavirus. 

Annalee: [00:03:22] Okay.

Sarah: [00:03:22] And people have actually been buying a black-market version of that for their cats that otherwise die of this incurable disease. We can talk about this at another time.

Annalee: [00:03:33] Sidebar on cat viruses and the black market in cat medicine.

Sarah: [00:03:38] Yeah, very, very strange world. Yeah, so for a long time, they were seen as like not really that important. They didn't really seem to cause human diseases. I think a lot of us know now, but I doubt many of us probably thought about it before that there are four coronaviruses that also cause the common cold. So there are actually lots and lots of different viruses, including rhinoviruses and adenoviruses that also cause what we all call the common cold. But there are four coronaviruses that cause a common cold and they are so unimportant that they have boring names like OC-48.

[00:04:09] So for a long time, people just thought these viruses were not very important and kind of boring. And then SARS comes along. And it's really the first time you see this virus being really deadly in humans. And that's a big wake up call. So there's a lot of research after SARS to try to figure out where this is coming from. And it's I think, at the time, it's kind of like traced to bats. So bats have this interesting thing where they're able to just live with a lot of viruses inside of them but they don't make them sick. It's almost like they're a microbiome of viruses. They have like a virome inside them. So they seem to be allowing viruses to kind of be changing and evolving inside them and are a reservoir for spilling over into other animals, including humans. 

[00:04:51] After SARS, we have MERS coming out of Saudi Arabia which seems to be also—it’s not clear exactly where it comes from. But it seems the immediate host was going from camels to humans and then we're having some human to human transmission.

[00:05:06] SARS goes away, obviously. MERS is kind of still ongoing but never causes huge outbreaks. It’s not as infectious as COVID. And then of course, now we have coronavirus that is taking over the world.

Annalee: [00:05:20] Is it typical or entirely common for coronaviruses to be zoonotic, that is to jump from non-human animals to people or do they also incubate naturally in humans, too?

Sarah: [00:05:32] I think most of the ones that we know about are jumping from animals to humans, but also humans to animals. So, I think one of the things we've seen is that minks are also getting sick from them. And they, wild minks might be a reservoir word that could then reinfect humans even if we managed to somehow eliminate it in humans, which probably is not going to happen at this point. But you know, sci-fi scenario we do, it's possible that there are still animals that carry the virus and actually that is what happens with ebola, for example, is that even if we stop the outbreak, there might be still ebola circulating in wild animals and then someone might get sick and you might get a new outbreak. 

[00:06:09] One of the really fascinating things is that this is really the first time we've seen a new coronavirus, emerge and kind of spread around the world. And there's a lot of questions about what the future of this coronavirus will look like. And a lot of scientists think that maybe these four common cold coronaviruses did also initially start with a pandemic, a really long time ago. And then over time, either the virus became less lethal, or we sort of all kind of built up some immunity as kids when it's not very dangerous to us, and we just have a little bit of immunity and the viruses are no longer very dangerous at all. 

Annalee: [00:06:43] And would that be good for the virus to evolve to be less lethal? Because then it can hang around in our bodies longer? Right?

Sarah: [00:06:49] Yeah, totally. That is a much better evolutionary strategy. If the whole purpose is to kind of keep replicating and spreading your genetic material. If you, for example, like a super deadly virus that kills your human host immediately, like—

Annalee: [00:07:03] Like ebola.

Sarah: [00:07:04] Right. You can't have this, the host is no longer walking around and sneezing and breathing and talking to other people. So yeah, for the perspective of a virus trying to spread genetic material, it's much better to be really mild and nobody really knows that you're there.

Annalee: [00:07:19] Yeah, exactly. So it sounds like we we knew coronaviruses before COVID-19 but they just weren't that important. They weren't that deadly. But the new thing that we've gotten out of this pandemic, other than a deep appreciation for face masks, is new kinds of vaccines. Can you tell us just a little bit about how these vaccines are working and why they're so awesomely different?

Sarah: [00:07:45] Yeah, these are mRNA vaccines, and specifically, they're ones from Pfizer, and Moderna. So, vaccines, I like to kind of think of vaccines as a wanted poster for your immune system. 

Annalee: [00:07:58] I love it.

Sarah: [00:07:59] It's like giving your immune system a snapshot of the bad guy, of the pathogen, so that by the time they see the real bad guy, they know exactly what to do. What's different about the mRNA vaccines is that instead of printing out the wanted poster and like giving it to your immune system, you're really just giving your immune system the instructions to print out that wanted poster on their own. And the advantage of this is twofold. One is that you don't have to print out the poster, right? That's less thing, the vaccine factory is not out there printing out wanted posters, all it really has to do is to create the instructions. And it's really easy to update the instructions, which as we're kind of seeing the variants, is a thing that we're probably going to want to do. And the second is that there is no actual virus in the vaccine itself. So there's no way for you to get COVID, for example, by getting one of these mRNA vaccines.

Annalee: [00:08:49] That's super awesome. And it seems like it's working really well so far, except for these pesky variants. And so this is, as we start to think about the future of humans in their relationship with viruses. I want to hear more about what causes these variants. And were we pretty sure that this was going to happen? Did the medical community know we were going to have variants, but we just hoped that we'd get these vaccines out ahead of them?

Sarah: [00:09:16] Yeah, this is actually the question I've been asking scientists all week, because I think definitely if you ask someone, is the virus going to change over time? The answer would have been, yes. But I think a lot of scientists were a little bit surprised to see how quickly it changed, and how many mutations are managed to accumulate. And I think that's because of two things. The first is that this virus has infected 10s of millions of people. That’s… and another way of putting it is that it's kind of like buying the virus 10s of millions of lottery tickets. And each time it infects someone that has a chance to kind of stumble upon these new mutations that might make it a little bit more transmissible for example, a little bit better at spreading from person to person. 

[00:09:58] The other thing is, is that, it may not change that much in a normal person who kind of gets sick for a couple of weeks, and then gets better. But scientists think that these new variants might be kind of arising in people who are immunocompromised. So you might be sick for several months. And in this case, the immune system is not strong enough to totally beat back the virus, but the virus is kind of replicating in the environment where it's kind of learning to live with the human immune system. So this might kind of just be like a training ground for virus to learn how to evade human immunity. And that might be what we're seeing with the variants in South Africa and Brazil, for example, which seem to evade the current vaccines and previous immunity a little bit.

Annalee: [00:10:42] So what's happening, then, is that the virus gets into your body and each time it replicates, it's going to have a little bit of a mutation just because of how genetic replication works. And some of those mutations might turn out to be really awesome.

Sarah: [00:10:57] Yeah, most of them will turn out to be not awesome. Most of them will probably turn out to be bad. Some of them probably won't matter at all. But a very, very small number, might be great for the virus and bad for us. And if you just—

Annalee: [00:11:08] Yeah, when I say awesome, I mean, awesome for the virus.

Sarah: [00:11:12] But if you just like let it have the enough times, literally things that are one in a million will start to happen.

Annalee: [00:11:19] Yeah, because one of the hypotheses that I've heard is that these variants are coming out of places where there have been very little social distancing restrictions, or mask mandates. And so it wasn't so much that people were sick for a long time, but just that so many people got sick. So is that another possibility? Or are now scientists saying actually, it's probably people who are like long-haulers or people who get sick for a long time?

Sarah: [00:11:43] Yeah, we don't really know. I will say in terms of where the variants are coming from, we kind of have this lamppost problem, which is that we're not looking everywhere, right. So the UK and then South Africa are two countries that have really, really good genomic surveillance, where they're looking for these new variants. It's probably happening all over the world in places where we aren't looking. So right now we’re kind of just looking under the lamppost. But there's all this stuff in the dark where variants may be happening as well. So it's hard to say exactly where they're coming from.

Annalee: [00:12:12] Yeah, we just know that it's from… anytime you have rampant viral replication, you're going to possibly get a variant that sticks, basically.

Sarah: [00:12:21] Yeah, exactly.

Annalee: [00:12:22] Yeah. So as we learn more about viruses during this time of hyper awareness about how they work, have we learned anything new about the virus life cycle? Because it feels to me like, the way that we study viruses is kind of the way we study ants or rats, which is like we study them to figure out how to kill them or get rid of them or exterminate them. We don't spend a lot spend a lot of time thinking like, what is a happy virus doing? What are aspects of a virus’s life that don't involve destroying it? I mean, what's your opinion about this whole thing with viruses being alive and not alive? Does that make sense to you? Do you think that they're also not alive, or?

Sarah: [00:13:06] So I don't know if the coronavirus research itself has really led to any of that. But if you kind of expand beyond that a little bit further, I do think that there's this whole wide world of viruses out there that's just like dark matter right now. And I think the fact that we just saw this new virus seem to come out of nowhere is an example of what all the things that we're not paying attention to and don't even know exist. We talk about the microbiome, and how we have all these bacteria inside of us. Well, we also have viruses that live inside us. And those viruses, they might infect our cells, they may also infect the bacterial cells. So those are called phages. So these viruses, might play some role in modulating what bacteria are able to live inside you which, in turn, modulates your gut. So it's just a really complicated network of life, and maybe even non-life if viruses aren't alive. As though scientists say they’re not alive, though—

Annalee: [00:14:05] It just seems such like a weird, arbitrary distinction.

Sarah: [00:14:07] Yeah. I think one thing I've learned, especially this past year in covering the pandemic, and thinking a lot about definitions of things is that nothing in science is really a binary. It's really a spectrum. Actually, I’m not sure it really makes sense to make this distinction between alive and not alive. So that the usual definition is that you're alive if you can replicate on your own. And viruses usually don't have that replication machinery, they usually hijack your cell, for example, to replicate themselves.

Annalee: [00:14:37] But like, I can't replicate on my own. I'd have to go invade a sperm sack if I wanted to replicate, so why do I get to be alive?

Sarah: [00:14:46] Yeah, that's a great question. I think as humans, to impose order on the world we have these categories. But when you really look at all the boundaries of the categories, like there is no line, it's just this blur.

Annalee: [00:15:01] Yeah, I wanted to just ask you a couple of kind of science fictional questions now about where we're headed with all this stuff. But I also want to know if we're going to cure the common cold, because there has been some talk about the idea that if we could get a coronavirus vaccine that was really effective, it might also be effective against these coronaviruses that cause colds.

Sarah: [00:15:25] Yeah, it's possible. But I think one of the problems is that the cold is not actually one virus or even four coronaviruses, it’s actually, I don't know the exact number. But there are like many different families of viruses that can cause colds. So even if we have a vaccine against like one family, it's not gonna protect you from rhinoviruses, for example.

Annalee: [00:15:44] Aw, damn.

Sarah: [00:15:45] So it’s—

Annalee: [00:15:46] So we might cure some colds.

Sarah: [00:15:50] Yes. But they'll probably still be around, unfortunately.

Annalee: [00:15:54] Right. We'll still be getting the sniffles in the winter sometimes.

Sarah: [00:15:58] Unless we do what we've done this year and just stay at home all the time and wear face masks.

Annalee: [00:16:02] Right. That's true. And I haven't had a cold this year, so that’s been really delightful.

Sarah: [00:16:07] Yeah, this is the longest I haven't been sick and who knows how long.

Annalee: [00:16:09] Yeah, so all we have to do is just stay home 100% of the time, cover our faces. So that sounds like a great, dystopian world. 

[00:16:19] So looking to the future of our relationship with viruses. I know there's a lot of things that biotechnologists are doing to basically hijack viruses to use for medical therapies like using virus shells to deliver drugs and stuff like that. Where do you see that going? Or are there other even weirder ways that we might use viruses in the future?

Sarah: [00:16:43] Yeah, and also, vaccines. AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson's vaccines use an adenovirus shell. So adenovirus is one of those viruses that causes common colds. And basically these viruses are very well evolved to try to get inside you. And that's essentially what the vaccines and gene therapies are doing is that they're using the viral shell as like a Trojan horse to get inside your cells.

Annalee: [00:17:10] I mean, it almost sounds like what you're doing is you're skinning a virus, right? You're taking its shell off, and then you're stuffing good stuff inside of it.

Sarah: [00:17:20] Yeah, yeah, that's basically it. How it usually works is that you are actually constructing a genetic sequence. So you have the sequence for the shell of the adenovirus. And then you put the thing you want inside inside of it.

Annalee: [00:17:36] So you're building the virus shell from scratch, you're just sort of stealing the code that the virus is using to build its shell, and then you're using it for your own thing.

Sarah: [00:17:45] Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, it just happens at like a level that’s so microscopic, it's invisible, right? So you have to hold it in your head of like, what it actually looks like. And it actually is just a bunch of fluid. When you look at the therapy itself. It's just a bunch of clear fluid in a bag.

Annalee: [00:18:05] But it's lots and lots of virus shells that contain therapies, basically. So do you think, is that something that we're going to continue to play around with, the idea of using components of viruses or sort of stealing tricks from viruses to get into the body?

Sarah: [00:18:24] Yeah, I think so. I mean, one way to think about viruses that infect us is that they've had thousands, maybe millions of years to try out strategies to hijack our cells, essentially. That's what viruses are. They're like a little piece of information that hijacks your cells. 

Annalee: [00:18:43] Yeah.

Sarah: [00:18:43] Yeah. Nature has had millions of years to figure out ways to get human cells to do certain things. So why can't we piggyback off of that?

Annalee: [00:18:53] Yeah. That's a nice note to end on. Can you tell folks where they can find your work?

Sarah: [00:19:00] Yeah, I am a staff writer at Atlantic so please subscribe to The Atlantic magazine or go to Atlantic.com.

Annalee: [00:19:07] All right, awesome. Thank you so much for joining us and talking all about viruses. 

[00:19:07] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Annalee: [00:19:25] That was so interesting, and I learned a lot about how viruses function. And it's funny because we have so many science fiction stories that are about viruses and they rarely deal with the actual virus itself. The virus is just kind of like a backdrop to have a pandemic, for example, and pandemic stories have been around since before we knew about viruses because of course, we've known about pandemics forever and not all pandemics are caused by viruses. 

[00:19:58] One of the very first pandemic science fiction stories was actually written by Mary Shelley, her novel The Last Man, which I always think about when I hear about Y: The Last Man, which of course, is a very recent pandemic story, that you know, something about Charlie Jane.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:11] Right. 

Annalee: [00:20:15] You might have heard of this. So what are some of the threads that we see between pandemic stories and stories about fighting viruses, and I want us to be mindful that we're not really talking about pandemics. We're really talking about this idea of humans making war on viruses and what do we see happening in these stories?

Charlie Jane: [00:20:35] Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to recognize, first off, that a lot of stories about pandemics, just use them as a cheap, easy way to get to the apocalypse. 

Annalee: [00:20:45] Yes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:20:45] It’s like, how are you going to bring about the end of civilization, it could be a nuclear war, it could be monsters, it could be an asteroid strike. But a pandemic is a quick, easy way to just kill a lot of people quickly, bring civilization grind to a halt. And one example that I was thinking about as we were preparing for this episode, which I find super interesting is the TV show The Last Ship, which is a show that aired like, 10 years ago, and I was sort of obsessed with it for a while. 

Annalee: [00:21:16] I remember. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:18] So The Last Ship is based on a novel from the 1980s, in which there is a nuclear war. And basically, the world is devastated. There's one Navy vessel that remains intact with its crew alive, and they're sailing around trying to survive in the apocalypse. And they're fighting other ships. And that's the whole book. But when they decided to adapt it for television, they were like, we don't want to make it a nuclear war, we're gonna make it a pandemic, we're gonna have like a mysterious virus that is somehow related to ancient DNA under Antarctica, and it's gonna do all this wacky stuff. And over the course of the show, they actually, one of the main characters is a virologist, and they have all this insane pseudo-science about the virus and about how it mutates and about how they can cure it. And they can like aerosolize, the cure. It’s really silly, and eventually it attacks vegetation, as well as people. It's like a really silly story. But they really commit to the virus thing. 

[00:22:13] But I thought it was super interesting that they were like, well, we don't have nuclear war be the cause of the apocalypse anymore. Because that feels to ‘80s we're just gonna randomly make it a pandemic instead, because that's an easy way to kill a lot of people and bring about the situation that we want to have in this show. So it's literally just a means to an end. 

Annalee: [00:22:31] Yeah, it's kind of the modern day nuclear war kind of thing. I guess it used to be the Cold War, and now it's the War on Viruses. 

Charlie Jane: [00:22:38] Kind of, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:22:39] That’s one way that viruses are dealt with. I'm really interested in a strand of science fiction that deals with the way that viruses change humanity. And this kind of gets into some of the stuff that Sarah was talking about, about how viruses really rapidly mutate in our bodies, and they kind of learn to live in our bodies. And I think that idea really inspires a lot of science fiction creators to think about, well, what if the virus wasn't just mutating itself, but mutating us? 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:13] Mm-hmm. 

Annalee: [00:23:13] One of my favorite novels by Octavia Butler, which doesn't get talked about that much. It's part of the Pattern Masters series. It's called Clay's Ark. And it's about astronauts who catch a virus in space that turns humans into a more doglike species. It changes us to be stronger, but also to be creatures that go into heat. And so there are all these weird, new, cultural, weird new cultural traditions that kind of have to emerge around the fact that now humans are going into heat. 

[00:23:52] And indeed, basically people speciate and so some people become what are called Clay Arks, that are these kind of doglike people, and then other people kind of become Pattern Masters who have psychic powers and so humanity, because of this virus, becomes multiple species. 

[00:24:10] But then there's other stuff like 28 Days Later, and the whole sub-genre of virus-caused zombies, where the virus turns you into, again, turns you into a more animalistic version of humanity, where we have no more higher reason, or we're only motivated by food and survival instead of being motivated by the desire to watch movies or to write dissertations or whatever it is that humans do. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:42] Yeah, I mean, one thing that I think of immediately is the novel, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which really plays around with that in an interesting way. And there have been multiple adaptations of it which have tried to get to the point of the novel and usually fall just a little bit short in various ways. Like, in the novel of I Am Legend, there's a virus that kind of turns people into kind of vampire, kind of zombies, mostly vampires, I guess. And, the hero—

Annalee: [00:25:11] And that happens in The Omega Man, which is one of the adaptations.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:15] Yeah. And that's probably the closest to the actual novel. And so the hero, Robert Neville, goes around hunting these creatures, because they're monsters, and he's got to fight them. And he's the last human and there are all these monsters who are post-human creatures. And the sort of twist of the end is that he realizes they actually are still, kind of, on some level human. They're still people. And he's the monster and like, that’s… he’s legend, because he's this legendary threat that they've been up against and that they are terrified of. In the Will Smith version, they tried to have an ending that kind of nodded towards that, but they decided it wasn't cool enough. And so they just ended with like, he kills everybody. And that's the end. 

[00:25:55] But I think it's really interesting to play around with that idea of, a virus can kind of change us and just like are recognizable, but we might still be human. It's kind of this ambiguous zone of what are we after we've been transformed?

Annalee: [00:26:10] Oftentimes now, stories about viruses and pandemics are connected with hopes and fears about human evolution, which makes me think about Margaret Atwood's novel, Oryx and Crake, which is partly a pandemic apocalypse, but it's also a story about, again, speciation. Where a new type of human is, spoilers for a relatively older novel here. But at the end of Oryx and Crake, a new species of humanity is created, actually by the people who unleashed the deadly virus because they're trying to kind of reboot humanity. And they build these humans called the Crakers who are intended to be more peaceful. And interestingly, one of the things that makes them peaceful is that they also go into heat. So they always know when they're supposed to have sex and when they're not supposed to have sex, I guess, is part of the idea. 

[00:27:05] But it's funny that I hadn't actually thought about the fact that Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler also had this feature, that there's some way in which we we keep coming back to that as some sort of weird evolutionary thing that why don't we go into heat? That seems weird. Let's just fix that. So I think it's definitely a fantasy, like our fantasy about viruses is often like, what if we were like viruses, and we could just mutate really quickly over like just a generation or two. 

[00:27:34] And of course that's not how evolution works. But for viruses, it seems like it works that way because their generations are so short that we can see like dramatic changes in their species over a very short period of time. Which we don't see, in a lifetime, a human lifetime, we don't see like, the next generation is born with feathers. But that is the fantasy, I think. And I think that's why viruses are so appealing in a weird way. 

[00:28:00] And then of course, there's silly viruses in pop culture. I could not let this episode go by without mentioning the macrovirus that appears on Star Trek: Voyager. Where, in order to imagine the war between humans and viruses, they create a virus that's just a big giant, I don't know what kind of virus it is, maybe it's a rhinovirus, but it kind of floats around on the ship. And it has a big, pointy phallic thing that it keeps thrusting at people because it's trying to break into their shells. It's got a big virus shell, right, and the virus shell is trying to break into our cells. But it's, unfortunately, because it's so big, it can't actually do as good of a job as it might do. I guess it just kills people like stabby killing.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:43] So yeah, that actually brings me to my obligatory Doctor Who reference which is that in Doctor Who, “The Invisible Enemy” there’s a virus that's like a space virus that infects the Doctor and a bunch of other people. And it takes over your brain, it mind controls you and you infect people by shooting lightning bolts out of your eyes. And that's how you infect other people with the virus. But the best part is that the doctor, in order to fight this virus, clones himself, shrinks the clone down to microscopic level and injects the microscopic clone of himself into his own brain so he can go confront the virus. And there's this amazing scene, which I'm going to have to make you watch, Annalee, where the doctor walks into his own brain. And there's this little creature there that's like the nucleus of the virus that's this little kind of like, it looks like a shrimp kind of.

Annalee: [00:29:34] Okay.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:36] And the doctor walks up to it says, you don't have any right to infect my body, get out of my body. And the virus is like I have a right to exist just like you do. I'm a life form and the doctor debates with the virus, about like, which one of them has the right to exist.

Annalee: [00:29:48] Wow. Free speech, man. Virus free speech.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:51] It's actually amazing. And then the virus escapes, it gets to be macro-sized and like it's a whole frickin’ thing. We have to watch it, it's kind of amazing.

Annalee: [00:30:01] This goes back to this fantasy again of like, what if we could be viruses? You know, it's like the Doctor turns himself into his own virus.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:09] It's super weird.

Annalee: [00:30:11] Essentially. I mean, he turns himself into a version of himself that can have a conversation with a virus, which is kind of like turning into a virus. 

Charlie Jane: [00:30:18] It's delightfully weird.

Annalee: [00:30:19] He becomes his own infection.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:22] He has to actually fight his own immune system because his own immune system starts attacking him. It's really weird.

Annalee: [00:30:27] Oh my god, I love it.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:29] There's two ways I can think of that a pandemic apocalypse is different from a regular apocalypse, like nuclear war or earthquake or asteroid strike. One is the kind of problem solving you get where you actually, instead of just being like, well, there's been a nuclear war, we're screwed. There's zombies, we got to shoot them. You can have all this story around, finding a cure, trying to stay quarantined, trying to… all the stuff that we've been dealing with in real life. And you can have people in lab coats looking at beakers and shaking the beaker and being like, is this gonna be the one?

Annalee: [00:31:01] Sure.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:01] But also the other is the paranoia, the paranoia of we have to stay away from other people. Which again, we've been kind of experiencing in real life, but it's like, in a story you can have either other people are gonna go crazy and attack you. Or we just have to stay away from other people because they might be infectious. And so that level of anxiety and paranoia is not fun in real life. But it's sort of fun in a story, I guess.

Annalee: [00:31:29] Yeah, it's interesting, because there are a lot of virus stories about people being infected with viruses that make them crazy and paranoid, like The Crazies, which was recently remade. There's this, and again, that plays on the idea of what if humans were transformed and became more animalistic? Or became something else? Something other than what we are? 

[00:31:53] The other thing that's interesting, and that Sarah brought up when she was talking about viruses, and that I find continuously fascinating is this idea that they're not alive. They are alive, but they're not alive. And there's some kind of weird border state. And so many of our virus fantasies now are about zombies, which are, in fact, creatures that are dubiously alive. They're undead. They occupy this liminal space between living and dead. And so I think it's interesting that we have a genuine scientific debate over whether viruses are alive. And then now we're also having this kind of side debate within science fiction about zombies. Are zombies really alive? Is it a situation like I Am Legend where actually the zombies are the new life form or like an Oryx and Crake where the Crakers who are kind of weird nonhumans? Are they the new life form? Or are they something that we should kill, because they're just a kind of horrible, degraded version of humanity? And so we just shoot them all, like, in 28 Days Later, where it's just, you can't do anything about… They have a virus that makes them crazy, and they'll never be better, or they'll never inherit the earth, because they're just mad dogs, basically. 

[00:33:06] So we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to finish up our conversation by talking about whether viruses are the ultimate other.

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Annalee: [00:33:26] Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about the idea that comes really from sociology that humans need to have an other. That our brains just function as an us versus them kind of deal. And that anytime we have an us, we have to have a them. Somehow we just can't function without it. And so many of our stories about fighting viruses, try to somehow personify the virus or embody the virus, turn it into something that we can fight against, that we can turn into our ultimate them. And so this is my galaxy brain question for you, Charlie Jane, which is, I think we all understand why us versus them thinking and creating an idea of another why that's toxic, and why that leads to wars, it leads to radicalization in a in an ugly way. But could viruses be a nontoxic other, if that makes sense? If we're fighting viruses, and we turn viruses into our them, like if us as humanity and viruses are them? Could that actually be healthy?

Charlie Jane: [00:34:36] I mean, I think I want to kind of turn that question on its head a little bit and be like, can we be united as a species in the fight against viruses? Can we kind of put aside our differences and be like we are all united in trying to contain this virus. And, you know, I feel like the past year and change have been kind of a yes and a no to that question.

Annalee: [00:35:01] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:01] Because on the one hand, we have really seen a lot of cooperation, a lot of people putting aside long-standing differences, because we all have to work together to suppress this virus and to flatten the curve. We've also seen a lot of the opposite. We've seen a lot of like scapegoating of Asian people, because of some idea that the virus came from Asia, so we should… You know, we live here in the Bay Area where anti-Asian hate crimes have gone up through the roof. We've also seen a lot of us versus them with regards to people wearing masks or not wearing masks. And if you wear a mask, that's a sign that you're the enemy somehow. And so it's really, it's been both, and I think that a lot of like things like this bring out the best and the worst in people. Which is one of those things that is always a challenge as a storyteller, to show how people can rise to the occasion, or they can sink to their lowest version of themselves in response to something really terrible like this. And it's not an either/or, it's both, I think. I don't know, what do you think?

Annalee: [00:36:06] I think you're absolutely right. And I think it's good to put the question that way, like, can we? It's really a question of, can we become that unified us? And I think part of the problem with the war on viruses is that we don't think of viruses as alive, we don't think of them as an enemy as such. And so because we're fighting it, we have to come up with some other kind of enemy to stand in for the virus. So if it's not going to be zombies, it's going to be, say, Chinese people, like you said. That was Trump's big thing was calling it the “China virus” and trying to personify the virus as being somehow a whole group of people from a nation that he didn't like. 

[00:36:52] And we see that in other ways too. Previous times in history where the poor have been blamed for viruses, for example. They've been blamed for pandemics. It’s like, oh, the dirty poor, they're the ones who are spreading this disease. I feel like we always come up with some stand-in and the question really is can we start to see who the real enemy is? The enemy is the virus. And also the virus could be, as Sarah was pointing out, could eventually become a friend. We could appropriate the virus shell to use for therapies. So I feel like this shows kind of the limits of our us versus them thinking, in a way. We can't actually identify the real them So we keep coming up with other crap to put in its place.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:42] Yeah, and unfortunately, from a public health perspective, in order for you and me to be healthy, everybody has to be healthy. And so the idea that we're going to be at odds with some people or that some people are not going to get the help that they need, because we don't like those people? It's literally self-sabotaging. And part of what we see with the virus is that frontline workers, especially people of color, BIPOC people, essential workers, have been harder hit than the rest of us. And there hasn't been that concern for the well-being of people who have been historically disenfranchised, because we don't think it has anything to do with us, even though we're all in this together, literally. 

[00:38:25] And also we're seeing that with vaccine distribution. There's a huge question about whether the United States is going to get the vaccine and we're not going to worry about less wealthy countries and whether they have access to the vaccine. Even though, it's in everybody's interest for the world to be vaccinated, because you don't want more mutations, you don't want the virus to get more chances to adapt and keep spreading. I feel like there's a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of short sighted thinking.

Annalee: [00:38:51] Yeah, and I think that, ultimately, what you're saying shows that my original question really wasn't the right question. Because I was saying, well, what if it's us, humanity, against the virus? But of course, the virus hits different groups of humans harder than others, not because those humans are more vulnerable to the virus, but because of the societies that we've built with systemic racism, and classism, certain groups of people are just going to be more on the front lines with the virus. 

[00:39:22] So it's hard to see a unified us when all around us we see examples of how we've been fragmented and how some people are suffering more than others. So I guess the war on viruses still ends up being the war of humans against other humans. And we still haven't figured out how to fix that. I guess my hope that we could create a nontoxic other with viruses, it's just not feasible. It's just me having utopian thinking about something kind of dystopian and maybe I'll leave it at that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:02] We need Captain Janeway with a big gun, wearing a tank top, running around the ship shooting at the virus and then we can finally have the proper—

Annalee: [00:40:11] Then we can finally unite against the virus. One day I will have my—

Charlie Jane: [00:40:15] Captain Janeway—

Annalee: [00:40:17] United humanity. I still just want someone to come in and say, “We're canceling the apocalypse. We're all in it together.”

[00:40:27] But for now, unfortunately, what we've learned is that we're not all in it together and we need to work on that a lot. 

[00:40:35] Alright, so thank you so much for listening to this episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. If you liked it, you can support us on Patreon. We’re at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and if you become a supporter, you get lots of extras. You get audio extras, you get little essays every week, you get to hang out with other people who are part of our Patreon community. And you can also follow us on Twitter. We're at @OOACpod on Twitter and we would love to see you there. You can find our podcast everywhere fine podcasts are distributed. Please leave a review of us on Apple Podcasts because it helps people find us. 

[00:41:15] Thank you so much to our intrepid producer Veronica Simonetti, who has to listen to our conversations over and over again and then edit them. And thank you to Chris Palmer for the music and we will talk to you in a couple weeks.

[00:41:28] Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:41:29] Bye!

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