Everything Is Tuberculosis, But It Doesn’t Have to Be

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Zachary: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co-host, Emma Var Lucas, the executive director of Yes, The Progress Network. Certainly one thing that is an ongoing imperative is the state of global public health. What do we do about diseases, infectious and otherwise?

How do we address that? There is a collective action problem there, particularly with highly communicable and infectious diseases. So we’re gonna talk to someone today who has written a new book that bears directly on these questions. Emma, who are we gonna talk to?

Emma: So I’m very excited today to talk to John Green, New York Times bestselling author. Perhaps you’ve read one of his many books, Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines Paper Towns, the classic, The Fault on our Stars or Turtles All The Way Down, many of which have been adapted for TV or for film.

Today we’re gonna talk to him about his new book, which is Everything is Tuberculosis. And if you do not wanna catch him as a written author, you can also find him with his brother Hank on YouTube where they have a channel called Vlogbrothers. So we are going to not do YouTube today, though. We are doing books and we are doing public health, and we are going to be talking about all things tuberculosis.

Are you ready?

Zachary: I am very, very ready. 

John Green, such a pleasure to have you with us today on What Could Go Right? and you’ve written a new book that in many ways could have been titled, What has gone really wrong, but what we can do to make it really right. So quick and simple. You’ve written a lot of different books.

You’ve focused on a lot of different things. The world is your proverbial and cliched oyster. So why write a book about tuberculosis?

John: Tuberculosis for me is a disease that really exemplifies the ways in which. Things could go right or things could go wrong, and we don’t always have a choice about that, but sometimes we do. And in the case of TB, we do have a lot of choice because we know how to cure it and we have the tools. And so I was interested in how these diseases of injustice, and I think tuberculosis is in some ways the exemplary one, how these diseases of injustice that.

Thrive, not because we don’t know what to do, but because we don’t do a good job of distributing the resources to combat the disease. I was interested in how these big historical forces come to live inside of one person, and so I really wanted to tell the story of one person living with tuberculosis and Sierra Leone, but in order to do that, I had to tell the bigger story of TB.

Emma: How did you meet this one person? I mean, his name’s Henry, right? How did you meet him? Tell us a little bit of the background of that.

John: So my wife and I were in Sierra Leone to learn about maternal health, but on the last day of our trip we were asked by people at Partners in Health to visit a tuberculosis hospital, and I was surprised that there still were tuberculosis hospitals. Like I didn’t, to be honest with you, I didn’t know that tuberculosis was still a thing.

I thought tuberculosis was kind of a 19th century romantic poets disease. So we go to this tuberculosis hospital and immediately I meet this young boy named Henry, which is also my son’s name, and he looked to me about the same age as my son, who was nine at the time, and. Henry just started walking me around the hospital, took me to the kitchen, took me to the laboratory, took me to the men’s wards, where the patients were living, who were under treatment.

And eventually we made our way back to the doctors and they kind of shooed him away. And I said, whose kid is that? Is that one of your kids? And they said, no, that’s one of the patients. And in fact, it’s a patient we’re really, really concerned about. And following Henry’s story over the next five years is really what inspired this book.

Zachary: Did this feel a little different for you from other stuff you’ve done? Or is it more like some of the personal stuff you’ve done? Except in this case it’s about another person. I mean, it reminded me a little, there’s a school of immersive journalism, right? Which like Andrea Elliot and Kate Boo and Eliza Griswold, and a whole series of people who kind of construct a narrative around a really deep dive into.

A person was like that. In your mind, as you’re writing about this, and I, I obviously wanna get into the bigger picture questions ’cause in the greater scheme of things, what was in your mind about writing? This is probably less important than what we’re gonna do about tuberculosis, but still interested.

John: Yeah, I mean, I, I’m not trained as a journalist and so I don’t, I don’t really know how to be a journalist, but I, I do like those, those kinds of work. A lot like, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is one of my favorite books of all time, and I think one of the most important books that we have in English about global health and inequity and poverty.

I didn’t start out writing about tuberculosis, thinking I was gonna write a book. I started out writing because that’s the way I think. I don’t have another way of thinking. I don’t have another way of organizing my thoughts or understanding how I feel about something. And so I was just writing about TB and about Henry to help me.

Then eventually I realized, oh, I want to turn this into a book. And in some ways it’s similar to my other books, right? It’s about a smart teenager who loves poetry. So it’s not that different. But at the same time it is, it is very different because I’m, I’m telling a true story.

Emma: So, you know, you called tuberculosis a disease of injustice before. Why don’t you give us a bit of a state of play? You know, you mentioned also that you didn’t even know that it was still a thing, right? Which I think a lot of people coming into the book and the interview will feel that way as well. So how do we get to where we are now in terms of there are still people all over the world that suffer from tuberculosis.

It’s just that they’re not certainly in Europe or the United States or Canada and things like that.

John: Yeah, so tuberculosis is still our deadliest infectious disease, which it has been for the vast majority of human history. It kills about 1.25 million people per year. And that’s especially galling because we’ve been able to cure it since the 1950s. So in the United States, my great uncle, for instance, died of tuberculosis in 1930.

His name was Stokes Goodrich, and he was 29 years old when he died. But in 1930, we didn’t have antibiotics to combat TB. Today we do. And so we’ve done an exceptionally poor job of getting the cure to the people who need it the most, whereas, you know, if I got TB tomorrow, I would have no problem getting access to the latest medications.

Zachary: So we cured it in the United States with vaccinations. I mean, I

John: No, primarily with drugs. So, the only vaccine for TB is actually not that good. Not to, not to be one of those guys. It’s mostly effective in preventing severe illness in children. So most of what we did was, was with, with antibiotics.

Zachary: I mean, that does lead to this question very pertinent to the current administration and RFK and sort of attitudes towards health domestically and globally, which was not obviously in mind when you wrote the book, but is clearly gonna be in mind when people read this book. Also, in light of the cancellation of USAID or the partial or complete or, I mean, we’ll figure out how much, but it looks pretty canceled. So how do those two factors shape your sensibility of what it is you’re trying to highlight in the book? I mean, assuming it makes it even more urgent, but.

John: Yeah, it makes it much more urgent and this podcast is called What Could Go Right? And I want to emphasize my hope and optimism when it comes to the overall arc of our response to diseases and especially diseases of injustice. But at the same time, but, but we are currently taking some big steps backward, you know, almost all TB related funding, both for diagnostics and for treatment, unfortunately, has been completely stopped and it’s not clear that it will ever restart.

And the US has long been the biggest global funder of T response, and so untold number of people are seeing their tuberculosis treatment interrupted midcourse, which is a real catastrophe because we know that when people have even like a two week pause in their treatment, they’re just vastly more likely to develop drug resistance because the bacteria has a chance to evolve resistance to the drugs that have been fighting it.

It’s a catastrophe on a personal level because it means many more people will die, but also on a societal level because it means much more. Drug-resistant tuberculosis floating through the world, which is really scary like that. That freaks me out and I, I don’t usually get freaked out about this stuff, but that really does freak me out.

Emma: Is there a path forward without the USAID funding or without the US being involved?

John: There’s no short-term path forward without the US being involved. There’s a long-term path forward with other governments stepping up and finding ways to respond to the T crisis, including governments in middle income countries, but. The short term catastrophe is, it’s too complicated and too multifaceted.

Like the, the underpinning work of what the, the US was providing in terms of care, especially in the most impoverished countries. It’s irreplaceable.

Zachary: So in terms of that kind of infrastructure is the sort of the Western story. One of like increasing state capacity, meaning you develop these public health agencies. You, you did big programs. There was a collective buy-in that these diseases were inimical to the peace, prosperity, and, you know, secure future that people tend to want.

And that the inability to do that in other parts of the world is just a lack of state structure. And of course, funding the two go hand in hand. Like you can’t collect enough tax dollars, you can’t, can’t open agencies that then do public health. I mean, is it that simple or is there also resistance still to, I don’t know, drugs and vaccines in other parts of the world and we know are we can get to our own issues.

John: Yeah, so it’s mostly that simple. If Sierra Leone spent the same 12% of its GDP on healthcare that say the UK or Canada spend, they would have about $46 per person per year to spend on health. And that’s clearly not enough to build a healthcare system that can respond to the needs of the people in the country and so on.

On a fundamental level, there just isn’t enough money. These countries have been impoverished, deeply impoverished for a very long time, and that is the result of every going, going, going all the way back to the transatlantic slave trade centuries of history. However, there is also curing TB is hard, right?

Like you have to take antibiotics for four, maybe six, maybe even more months every day, and there are side effects to those medications. It’s not, it’s not an easy treatment regimen, and so there is some inevitable resistance to that. I mean, look. When I, when I get a strep throat infection and my doctor gives me 10 days of antibiotics and I feel better after seven days, I’ll, I’ll confess that sometimes I don’t make it to the full 10 days and.

With TB in particular, that is really dangerous. And so that’s a challenge that we face. But when it comes to this so-called noncompliant patient, which is the medical term for it, a lot of times there are so many reasons for so-called noncompliance. You know, my friend Henry, for instance, his dad took him off treatment when he was five years old.

And was that Henry’s fault that his dad chose to, you know, believe that the healthcare system couldn’t provide what Henry needed and faith healers could? I don’t think that’s, I don’t think Henry’s a noncompliant patient there. And more to the point, there wasn’t much reason to believe in Sierra Leone’s healthcare system at the time.

You know, I mean, there were no x-ray machines at the hospital, no running water, no electricity, no paid staff. And so how can you ask someone to believe in a healthcare system that isn’t providing basic healthcare?

Emma: I have had the odd experience of getting into a, a motorcycle accident in Sierra Leone and going to one of their hospitals and it was basically just two rooms, dirt floor, blood in places where you wouldn’t want there to be dried blood. So

John: Wow.

Emma: only imagine, I. Yeah, imagine having a

John: you okay? Are you, were you okay? That sounds really scary. I.

Emma: Yeah. The, no, I’m, I’m fine. I’m not, not trying to make this about me. The motorcycle actually slid underneath a van that had turned in front of us and that van happened to be a hospital van. So they drove us to the hospital and I was all right. And I also do not live there.

John: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that’s a sense that I have a lot of times is, you know, that awareness that like, I will get flown out. Right? I remember during the Ebola crisis, a lot of my friends who worked for lived in Western countries knowing that if they got Ebola, they would be flown out and probably be fine.

Whereas if their colleagues got Ebola, they would almost certainly die.

Zachary: So what is it that prevents the spread of tuberculosis into societies where there is not much of it?

John: Yeah, so we’re about to find out how little there is to prevent tuberculosis from spreading in rich countries. I mean, we have almost 10,000 cases of active TB a year in the United States, so it’s certainly something that happens in the US and tuberculosis anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.

It’s an airborne disease. It’s the nature of airborne diseases, right? We know that from, from covid. There are a few things that stop it from spreading. One is really good public health departments that do a great job of active case finding and, and actively figuring out chains of transmission to understand who’s at risk.

And then we also have this wonderful tool of preventative care. So if you’ve been exposed to TB, you can get one month of preventive antibiotics to make sure that you never get sick. So that’s how we can stop chains of transmission, but we need those chains of transmission to be relatively rare or else our public health systems get overwhelmed, which is what we see in many middle and low income countries.

Emma: I mean, is it also a case of just, you know, I think that there’s always like the ever present popular villain of big pharma, right? Is this also a case of like they’re overcharging for the antibiotics that people need?

John: Well, two schools have thought about that. I suspect if you asked Johnson and Johnson, they would say they’re charging an appropriate amount. But, but I, I take a different, I take a different tack on that. I think it’s really important to understand that cost is a huge barrier, even when costs are relatively low.

So an example of this is that there’s this miraculous test made by a company called Cepheid that does an amazing job of telling people, not just that they have TB, but which antibiotics their TB will respond to, which is a game changer. But until very recently, that test cost about. 11, 10 or $11, which doesn’t sound like much, but in many countries that means that it’s totally unaffordable.

Like I, I remember visiting with a lab in Sierra Leone and talking to the lab tech there, and he said, yeah, these machines are amazing. I just wish we could afford the tests. And the machine is just sitting there unused because the healthcare system can’t afford the tests. And so even moderate reductions like Cepheid dropped the price of that by $2.

And even moderate reductions allow millions more tests to be available. And the same is true for pharmaceuticals. I mean, so often companies try to extend their patents on lifesaving medication beyond the 20 years that their patents initially apply for, and that’s just devastating to people’s ability to access treatment.

Zachary: How do you frame this in the context of 2020 to 2022? You know, the Covid years that. Currently have this very weird quality to them, right? It’s as almost as if we have collectively stopped even remembering what. Was only three years ago, and we talk about politics and inflation and, but as if there was no trigger for government spending, we kind of allied that whole period as if it didn’t exist.

And I think some of that went on actually after the 1919 influenza. Like there was a reason that people were like, oh my God, there was a 1919 influenza, which people discovered at the beginning of Covid. Right.

John: Right.

Zachary: So how does that. Kind of global miasma about COVID-19, and I probably shouldn’t say global. I mean there are certainly parts of the world that learn from that experience integrated into their public health.

The United States clearly not only didn’t, but probably has, has weakened its public health as a result. So I’m just wondering like how the COVID years both shape actual global tuberculosis policy, even before the Trump administration, how it kinda shaped your own view. So just put that in context.

John: Yeah, I mean the Covid Pandemic is obviously on. Ongoing and probably will be ongoing for a long time it seems like. But the peak years when the pathogen first emerged. We’re years that I think you’re absolutely right. We have tried to forget or tried to elide from our memory. We’ve had a lot of movies come out in the last five years, and almost none of them contain CO in any way.

Right? Like we’ve had a lot of books come out. Very few of them contain COVID. And I think this is true for tuberculosis too. We don’t like to live in a world where. The big historical actors are not human beings, but microorganisms. That’s an uncomfortable place for us to live. That’s an uncomfortable way for us to live.

And so I think we try to forget about that stuff as fast as we can because it denies human agency and acknowledges the reality that there is a lot of luck and a lot of injustice, and a lot of human built structures involved in who lives and who dies. And microorganisms role in all of that is uncomfortable for us.

Zachary: Hmm, that’s interesting. I mean, again, like we, we write a lot about war, right? Because it’s a human, the with beginning, a middle and an end. And we feel like stories of clear tragedy and heroism that can be told with ni nice, neat narrative arcs as opposed to everything you just described, which is like, okay, here’s this non-human, there’s no story of virus.

I mean, there is a story of a

John: But there’s not much of a story. I mean, narratively, they’re not very compelling, and that’s part of the reason I wanted to write this particular book, is to try to find a way to construct a narrative that that could hold people’s attention, even though it’s about, you know, a, ultimately about a, a bacteria.

1. The bacteria doesn’t operate in isolation, like just as bacteria shape human history, human history shapes, bacteria, and I wanted to try to capture both those ways that, you know, we’re living with microorganisms, crawling in us and on us all the time.

Emma: I wonder if you actually, John, if you have any advice, I come up against this a lot because we write about public health a lot for, we have also a newsletter called What Could Go Right? That’s the companion to this podcast and with a lot of the public health stuff, you know, as you mentioned before, it’s on the one hand, it’s.

A lot of this stuff, it’s really, really unfair and depressing that a lot of the western world doesn’t have to deal with the type of things that a lot of people in, let’s say, Sub-Saharan haka have to deal with all the time. On the other hand, we’ve also made like incredible amounts of progress against a whole host of diseases worldwide that we didn’t use to have the capacity to deal with at all, you know, 75 years ago.

But I’ve never really found a way to make that not sound incredibly boring to people.

John: Yeah, no, I, I think every morning the headline of the New York Times should be fewer children. Died today than any day in the last 6,000 years when the population of humanity was like 200 million. That should be the headline every day because that is a miracle and that is, that is is not a miracle that happened because of some God from on high.

It happened because millions of people were working together to try to reduce child mortality together, and we’ve been incredibly successful at that since I graduated from high school. We’ve seen child mortality drop from 12 million a year to fewer than 5 million. I don’t know how to tell that story in a way that makes people say, oh my God, like, humans can be good, but, but we can be, we are capable of such extraordinary generosity when we make ourselves proximal to suffering.

And yet it is also true that we are monstrous. Right? Like holding those competing ideas in, in, in your head at the same time is one of the biggest challenges to me. They’re, they’re both true. We, we live in a much better world than we might live in, and we also live in a much worse world than we might live in.

Zachary: I’m, I’m so glad you articulated that. I mean, one of the. Themes that we highlight in this podcast and progress networks, and I try to highlight in my own work is that, you know, many ways human history is a, is a neck and neck race between the unbelievable human capacity to create and the extraordinary ability of human beings to destroy, right?

And they’re both ever present and in a ultimately. Yin and yang may be painful, maybe enlivening way, right? In many ways, what you look at is a little bit of eye of the behold, but it’s more than that. It’s what your eye is willing to behold.

John: Yeah, and part of us right wants to be. Outraged and disgusted, and there’s ample evidence for being outraged and disgusted. We should be outraged. We should be disgusted. We should be horrified that we’re taking active steps backwards away from better human health for all. That is horrifying. And yet it is also true that this is not the end of the story, right?

Like I inevitably feel like today is the last day of human history that my life started at birth and culminated today. But I feel that way because. Today’s the last day I’ve lived through, but we’re not at the end of the story. We’re in the middle of the story, and that means to me that we have all the more reason to fight for a better end.

Zachary: So there is another question I have, which is kind of a correlate to what’s going on with USAID. Another one of my, you know, like stock thoughts, which I have articulated and probably repeated on this show, is it is the height of arrogance to believe. 330 million Americans in a world of 8 billion people have a global monopoly on the human desire for peace, prosperity, and security.

You know, that being said, I guess the question is, it’s never felt to me ultimately sustainable if any global need is met by Washington. And I think maybe part of the problem of USAID is if, if we’re kind of hinging our global health on the willingness of this one entity at, at a certain amount of time.

I mean, it needs to be more diverse, doesn’t it?

John: It does unfortunately, other governments are also walking away from efforts at overall human health, right? Like we see the UK cutting foreign health aid, we see the EU cutting foreign health aid. And so it would also be one thing if we were taking steps back instead of falling down the entire staircase, right?

Which is what we’ve done. We didn’t take a few steps back and allow someone else to step up. We just jumped down the staircase. But what instead we’re seeing is just an overall pullback, an overall move toward more isolationism, less engagement with the fact that we are one human story and. That is a bummer for me, but I agree there has always been a problem.

Look, I mean, there’s always been a problem with the way that we distribute health aid in general. It’s always been neocoloniallist. It’s always been access and allies. It’s always been a game of, you know, not really what’s good for overall human health, but what’s good for the narrow interests of the United States.

And like that’s always troubled me. But to walk away from all of those commitments without any warning in a completely chaotic way. It is just devastating for the people who for many, many decades, we’ve promised that we would help in an ongoing, open-ended way.

Emma: It’s a little bit devastating too, because so few people seem to be even aware of the existence of U-S-A-A-D, just like American taxpayers being aware of its existence and kind of came out to defend it when it did fall down the staircase. And I wonder sometimes that that does have to do with the fact that this story of like, look at everything that we have accomplished through this, like, yes, there’s plenty of criticisms, but you know, if, if it was the case that like American taxpayer taxpayers were receiving little cards at home being like, Hey.

Did you know that 25 million lies were saved from PEPFAR over the last 25 years? Like maybe we’d feel differently.

John: Half a million babies were born without HIV because of pepfar. It’s an incredibly effective program and I agree. I think we haven’t done a good job of telling that story and inevitably, I feel my little piece of that.

Zachary: Do you feel the book and kind of what you’re gonna be talking about for the coming months, probably quite a bit, is in service of, Hey, look at what we have collectively accomplished. Let’s not actually stop doing that.

John: I hope it can be. I mean, I really wanted to write a hopeful book and it’s, it’s, it’s hard to write, hopefully, about tuberculosis because it is such a devastating disease and it causes so much suffering and so much needless suffering. I wanted to write a hopeful book because I believe that hopeful stories are ultimately the only true ones.

You know, I think despair is incredibly compelling, and despair tells this holistic story that it doesn’t matter what you do because nothing matters anyway. And that’s very compelling, especially to me. Like right now, I feel very close to that. That rings, rings a, a big bell with me, but the truth is much more complicated than that.

And also involves a lot more of me having a responsibility and all of us having a responsibility to each other, which is that there is cause for hope. And whether or not that hope is realized is partly something that we will decide together.

Zachary: John, I wish we had more time, but I value the time that we have had with you. I think it’s a book that people should read. There’s also a wealth of other work that you have done and content, and it would be great to talk to you about the world of content, which you are deeply immersed in, in an ever kaleidoscopic changing world of platforms and media and formats, but.

We are out of our time today, so we’ll have to leave that. I hope for another conversation maybe on the other side of the book tour, and we can talk a little more in depth about various and Sri and you are certainly a man for whom various and sundry applies in spades.

John: Well, thank you. It’s been great to talk with you. I really appreciate the opportunity and I’m a fan of the pod. Keep up the good work.

Emma: Thank you, John. Thanks so much. So that was great talking to John. I love what he said at the end about despair. I think that there’s something very oddly comforting and relaxing about despair, especially if you are living in circumstances in which you are not going to be directly affected by giving up.

Right? It’s just so easy to be like. You know what? Screw it. Like I’m just gonna live my life. I’m gonna keep my head down. I’m gonna just continue on the best I can and ignore these larger problems. And it’s much more difficult to do the opposite, but certain times call for us to not give into the comforting amnesia of despair.

Right.

Zachary: It’s a good line, Emma. Comforting amnesia of despair

Emma: Thank you.

Zachary: I think John, look, it’s a sense of elder that we clearly share. So you know, in the Amen. Hosanna chorus, obviously we’re gonna like a lot of what he said from the perspective of like, there’s a lot of frankly shit going on out there at, at all times. And the task is off.

Is, is also to look at. Yeah, what’s going right and the public health story that he’s telling is, we actually cured. We, we, we collectively over years or decades addressed one of the great killers of humanity in the form of this bacteria. Right? Not a, not a human enemy, not the Soviet Union or some sort of.

Actual human created thing, just this thing that afflicted humans and that that’s a story of, of health, triumph, and collective action. And you, Emma, write a lot about the ongoing story of public health, which I is clearly gonna be impeded by the evisceration of USAID, but we’ll continue nonetheless in other forms around the world.

You know, people don’t like dying of diseases that are curable. I mean, death obviously being the one thing that we all. I, I’m told well experience. But how you do that in an a, in an age, again, where the focus is almost entirely on, oh my God, look at what we’re losing and not, oh my God, look at what we did and how we can continue doing it.

Emma: Yeah, I try to, I mean, this is really pale comfort, but I do try to tell myself sometimes, like even with the dismantling of USAID, it’s not like we’re going back to. 1930, we are certainly regressing and it’s gonna be very, very upsetting the amount of damage that that’s going to cause. But it’s not irreversible.

It can be put back together. Perhaps it’s gonna take time and again, like that damage is going to be done, but we can always start to move forward again. And yeah, I’m holding onto that at the moment because otherwise it’s like really unbearably sad, especially when it comes to USAID.

Zachary: You only know what’s happening in the present, right? We don’t know what the consequences of what’s happening in the present are gonna be for the future. Truism. Truism in this case. So we are certainly acutely aware right now of all that is being lost and destroyed by the sudden. And I think JAMA is right to say part of the problem is the suddenness of it, right?

It’s just like we’re done. It’s not like USAD was perfect and in fact there was a lot of these programs that were weird and wasteful and actually should have been ended long ago. So, but there’s a baby in bathwater problem here, and there was a lot more, there was a lot more baby than bathwater and we’ve thrown out a lot of baby.

So like that’s just a problem. I mean, unequivocally, full stop. No sugarcoating it. You know, the question of, again, will these things with the damage that the present is doings lead to a more collective global action here, you know, and to what degree had the world come to depend on the United States because we were doing it right?

You, there’s, there’s no reason to develop your own internal or collective global infrastructure if someone else is taking care of it. Like that’s just human nature. So. I do wonder if on the other side of all this, the silver lining part of it will be more collective resiliency about health and not just reliance on the United States and or Europe for the funding.

And Yeah. You know, we can get into the whole question of where’s the money gonna come from? And some of the same questions about climate change and, and, you know, a decarbonized economy, right? But even so.

Emma: Yeah, we’ll see. I, it’s interesting, right, to compare this discussion with what’s happening or. What has happened recently around Ukraine and Europe because I think you can make a very easy parallel between what you just said with public health and foreign policy and defense. And you know, in the case of Ukraine, you saw Europe immediately being like, oh, the United States is not with us anymore.

Like, we’re gonna pump things up. And we have not seen that kind of response with the public health conversation because obviously people in Europe are a much more concerned about their own skins. So on the one hand. That is human nature. That is how it works. Perhaps a public health discussion is one’s gonna be more of a slow role if anyone steps in at all, but I certainly do hope that we see some energy around that soon.

Zachary: Indeed. Alright, well with that, I think. We will leave it. Important discussion. I wanna thank you all for listening today and listening every week. Please tune into our progress report, in addition to our interview based What Could Go Right? longer form, and we will regale you with stories of things going right that you almost certainly are not as aware of in the maelstrom of all the things that are going.

Quite wrong. So in praise of that duality, we will say goodbye for this particular episode. Thank you, Emma. Thanks to the Podglomerate for producing. Thank you all for listening. Sign up for the What Could Go Right? newsletter at The Progress Network dot org, and we will be back with you soon.

Emma: Thanks everybody.