The Progress Report: Would You Let Snakes Bite You for Science?

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Zachary Karabell: What could go right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my co-host Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network. And this is our weekly shorter form podcast, The Progress Report. And so Emma, what have you found for us this week?

Emma Varvaloucas: All right. Let’s talk about China.

Zachary Karabell: China. China, China.

Emma Varvaloucas: China. Let’s talk about China. This is from Carbon Brief, which is a great climate outlet. People are. Searching for those. There are many now they tell us that for the first time, the growth in China’s clean power generation has caused the nation’s CO2 emissions to drop despite rapid power demand growth.

So there have been, um, drops before in their emissions, but they were due to low demand, weak growth. This is actually like due to their clean power buildup that this drop is happening, of course doesn’t mean that it’s very much 1.6% year on year in the first quarter of 2025, 1% in the last 12 months.

And it doesn’t mean that it’ll be sustained, but it is the first time that you’re seeing reflected in the emissions that, uh, clean power generation is causing a dent. So more grist for the mill of when are China’s emissions finally going to fall for good.

Zachary Karabell: You know. It is fascinating, the legacy over the past 10 years of how the Chinese government, the Communist Party, Beijing, has dealt with pollution, air pollution in particular, and it’s been one of the few ways that people have been able to voice opposition to or discontent with the party, with the Chinese Communist Party.

Most descent is not tolerated and is suppressed with various levels of, you know, fear and force. But the one thing the party can’t really defend or deny is if the air is so polluted that kids are getting sick or people are falling ill, or worker productivity is declining rapidly because people are literally unable to breathe the air they’re in.

And so there’s been this intense internal pressure within China for the party to clean up the environment. In a way that mitigates against this belief of like, oh, they’re just gonna be the polluter in chief for the next 50 years because they’re more committed to economic growth than to clean economic growth.

In fact, it’s much more complicated. And because they are, because the party is held responsible and claims to be responsible and does have more power than would be the case in most democratic societies. They’ve actually made these massive strides to make that transition.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, not only that, but people may or may not know. I mean, they are the electric vehicle leader by far in the world. They are by far the biggest battery producer in the world. They are the ones that are manufacturing all of the EVs that are basically outside of Europe and the United States.

I mean, they are like miles ahead of the European Union and the US in a lot of clean energy stuff. So despite the fact that they are the world’s biggest polluter, very reliant on coal, still trying to meet, you know, demand for energy there, there’s also this other side of them that they are this huge also clean energy leader. It’s a, it’s an odd dichotomy.

Zachary Karabell: It absolutely is.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m gonna do one more clean energy. Just a quick one, I love these like surprise stories. I think we did this kind of, kind of surprise story about Pakistan last time. Being a massive solar panel importer and now we have new data from a research group, Ember. They also do a bunch of clean energy data reports all the time, and we have a new leader in solar energy integration.

So basically like they have the most solar. It used to be Chile, which is now number two. Would you like to make a guess for number one?

Zachary Karabell: Oh dear. Number one user of solar panels? No

Emma Varvaloucas: Electricity generation from solar. 

Zachary Karabell: SorryI feel like we should have the final Jeopardy music playing while I do this and I have to phrase my answer in the form of a question. What is, uh, I’m gonna get this wrong. The United States

Emma Varvaloucas: You’re definitely gonna get this wrong. It makes you feel any better. No, not the United Stats.

Zachary Karabell: Okay. Well, I meant, and maybe in terms of aggregate, are we talking percentage absolute, or, or, or?

Okay. So absolutely in the United States might be close an.d

Emma Varvaloucas: Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn’t tell you, but in terms of percentages,

Zachary Karabell: Percentage. Uh, right. Gimme a continent.

Emma Varvaloucas: Europe,

Zachary Karabell: Europe. Wow. I wasn’t gonna guess that. Uh uh, Malta?

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s an unexpected guess. No, it’s actually Hungary.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Wasn’t, that wasn’t happening anytime soon.

Emma Varvaloucas: No one would guess that. I mean, I, I, there’s absolutely no way that anyone would guess that solar is now accounting for 25% of their electricity generation, and they, they just overtook Chile. So fun. Fact, did not know that.

Zachary Karabell: Well, there you go.

Emma Varvaloucas: So moving beyond clean energy. Let’s talk a little bit about the RSV vaccine. I definitely talked about this in the progress report when the first RSV vaccine was developed, we have now had the first flu slash rsv slash general illness season with the vaccine in effect. And there’s also a new treatment for RSV that, um, came out recently as well. And there has been a pretty dramatic drop in baby hospitalizations in the US because of that.

And also a small decline in infant mortality rate. But yeah, a lot fewer babies going to the hospital with RSV, which is amazing.

Zachary Karabell: Guess we’ll have to see how many people are gonna keep getting the vaccines under the new regime at the Department of Health and Human Services and headed by the Vaccine Skeptic in Chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Although he has been backtracking a lot on his, there was a congressional hearing I think this week where he said, no one should take medical advice from me, and it doesn’t matter what I think.

And I mean, there were actually interesting answers and that he was sort of saying there’s a difference between what you know he as an individual believes and what the policies of the federal government and or collective public policy is about healthcare. I mean, there’s a lot of vaccine skepticism, and we do know that the amount of percentage of kids in school being vaccinated is going down.

So we’ll see if that continues in its merry way.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, it’s such a fascinating question for me. I mean, I know like the stakes are high, so it’s much more fun to pontificate about this thing really like live it. But the question of like what happens when you put someone like RFK into the system is so fascinating because you’re right, he, since he is been leading, he is had a number of like tweets, a couple of editorials that are like, not exactly vaccine forward, but he is like, Hey, the, the vaccine is your best option.

I’m like, wow, who inside of his office wrote this tweet for him and made him press post? I’m fascinated what happened? I would love the inside story, you know, because this is not normal RFK, but clearly like there. He’s gonna be interacting with a bunch of pro-science people there, regardless of his own personal views.

So curious, curious where that goes.

Zachary Karabell: Curious indeed. Do you have a final one for us?

Emma Varvaloucas: I have a final one. It’s fun. I love this story. So people probably don’t know because why would you know this, that, um, snake bites are considered a neglected tropical disease because there

Zachary Karabell: Snake bites are considered a neglected tropical disease?

Emma Varvaloucas: Correct.

Zachary Karabell: Huh?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. And part of the reason why they are neglected is because there’s so many different types of snakes there.

The, the whole like goal for this is to, to develop a universal anti-venom. So if someone comes into the hospital with a snake bite or doesn’t come into the hospital with a snake bite, you don’t have to figure out what snake bit them to treat it. And there’s this guy who is American, ’cause of course he’s American.

He has spent the last, I don’t know how many years developing a natural tolerance against venomous snakes. So he has been letting himself get bitten by snakes like over 200 times by all kinds of different snakes. And he has this crazy story where he was at some kind of like gala and he was sitting next to somebody who was working on a snake bite anti-venom.

And they’re like, yeah, it’s really hard to get like the antibodies, right? And he was like, well, like would you be interested in some of my blood? So they have actually developed a, it’s not quite a universal anti-venom, but it’s getting there using the antibodies from this guy’s blood. It is fully protective against 13 of the 19 most deadliest, most deadliest, deadliest stakes in the world, and then partially protective against the rest of them in mice. It’s still being tested. It’s still being tested.

Zachary Karabell: I want to be a fly on the wall for that guy’s discussion with his parents when he told them what he planned to do with his life.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Of like, I’m just gonna let snakes bite me repeatedly so that I can develop a tolerance for venom. How many people have tried to do that and, and basically not made it through the first five bites? Right?

Emma Varvaloucas: I was hoping there’s a special word from the Greek about like people that specialize in letting themselves getting bit by snakes.

Zachary Karabell: For those of you who have made it this far into the Progress Report, we will reveal next week the, the Greek word for person who lets themselves be repeatedly bit by snakes to develop immunity to the venom.

Emma Varvaloucas: I am gonna do it on the spot. I’m gonna call it a “pharmacophysiologist.”

Zachary Karabell: So good. You heard it here first, coming to an Oxford English dictionary near you.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes. Yes.

Zachary Karabell: All right, well on that note, we should all develop immunity to something maybe by forcing ourselves to confront that, which. If it doesn’t kill us, we’ll make us stronger. I, I don’t know.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and I’m actually just reading right now. It’s, it’s, it’s actually more than the 200 direct snake bites. He also self-administered, self-administered 700 doses of venom. So we’re talking 900 interactions with Snake venom.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a lot.

Emma Varvaloucas: As an adult, he started milking scorpions and spiders as a hobby.

Zachary Karabell: Okay.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, bless this man. Anyway.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a whole other.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well hat was the end of the progress report.

Zachary Karabell: That’s, that’s like a whole other thing going on there.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, two more years I think, before they start testing it in humans. And of course, you know, it’s a process, but we’ll see.

Zachary Karabell: All right then. Well, thank you for your time. Bet you didn’t see those few last ones coming. I certainly didn’t. I don’t, Emma doesn’t, we don’t discuss these stories in advance. We feel it’ll be a, a fresher conversation if all these stories surprise me, which they do and did. 

I’m temporarily rendered speechless by the idea of someone self-injecting themselves with 900 different varieties of venom. So if I seem slightly stilted at the end of this, that’s because I’m just trying to picture living my life in that particular fashion. 

I want to thank you all for listening this week. Not all solutions are grand and noble, but all of them are in their own particular way, important and will shape the warp and woof of our lives in fundamental ways in the years to come, including anti-venoms, which will save a lot of lives and a lot of kids’ lives.

And is just one more example of like, there’s a lot of stuff going on where people are just dealing with elemental human problems and finding solutions. And that is easy to forget, easy to overlook, and easy to miss in a world where we just don’t focus on such things. So we will be back with you next week.

Thank you, Emma. Thank you to the Podglomerate for producing, and thank you all for listening.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone.