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Dr. Eric Topol Dialogue | Munk Debates

August 9, 2022

Dr. Eric Topol Dialogue

Variants and the future of COVID-19

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Eric Topol
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About this episode

The future course of the pandemic seems anything but resolved. The emergence of new variants have caused a major reassessment of the trajectory of COVID in 2022 and beyond. What is the likely course of pandemic this autumn and winter? What role could the new highly infectious variants play in transmission, illness and death? Are the current public health measures, radically scaled back in much of the developing world over the course of 2022, appropriate to the risks and challenges COVID currently presents? And what is the next phase of this pathogen likely to be? Are we up collectively to the task of living with endemic COVID? To answer these questions, we discuss with Dr. Eric Topol, a renowned physician, scientist, and author.

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Eric Topol

We haven't put in the effort, the priority, the resources to develop a pan variant vaccine, which would be anticipatory. One thing that's striking in this entire two and a half years-plus of the pandemic is we're always chasing, never getting ahead of the virus. We're smarter than that sucker. [...] It's almost like we're ignoring the potential there to squash this virus once and for all.

Eric Topol

We haven't put in the effort, the priority, the resources to develop a pan variant vaccine, which would be anticipatory. One thing that's striking in this entire two and a half years-plus of the pandemic is we're always chasing, never getting ahead of the virus. We're smarter than that sucker. [...] It's almost like we're ignoring the potential there to squash this virus once and for all.

Dr. Eric Topol is the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Professor, Molecular Medicine, and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research. As a researcher, he has published over 1,200 peer-reviewed articles, with more than 300,000 citations, elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. His principal scientific focus has been on the genomic and digital tools to individualize medicine.

In 2016, Topol was awarded a $207 million grant from the NIH to lead a significant part of the Precision Medicine (All of Us) Initiative, a prospective research program enrolling 1 million participants in the US. This is in addition to his role as principal investigator for a flagship $35M NIH grant to promote innovation in medicine. He was the founder of a new medical school at Cleveland Clinic, Lerner College of Medicine, with Case Western University. He has over 660,000 followers on Twitter (@EricTopol) where recently he has been reporting insights and research findings for COVID-19. Besides editing several textbooks, he has published 3 bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now, and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Lastly, Topol was commissioned by the UK 2018-2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service’s integration of AI and new technologies.

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