If we weren’t all obsessed with the pandemic, there would be scare stories about a life-threatening fungus that’s infecting people in Texas and Washington DC. It can’t be cured with drugs that would normally be used for fungal infections. Even as we battle a virus, fungi and bacteria are evolving resistance to known drugs, and as clinical laboratory science professor Rodney Rohde says, Covid-19 may be making this other threat worse.

There’s still a strong consensus that getting vaccinated is better than not – but a surprising lack of information on which vaccines work best, how long protection lasts, and why cases are skyrocketing in some places with high vaccination rates, including Israel, where more than 60% of the population is fully vaccinated with the Pfizer shot. Here in the United States, tens of thousands are being hospitalized in a fourth wave, and many are vaccinated.

We take precautions, get vaccinated, and yet cases surge again and again. And then the waves decline unexpectedly, defying predictions. There’s no good explanation for why cases are going up in some places and not others. And there’s not nearly enough information on which venues or activities are the most dangerous. By contrast, weather forecasters look downright clairvoyant.

Vaccines aren’t perfect. Physician Art Krieg knows that all too well since his fully vaccinated 90-year-old father recently died from Covid-19. But he makes a good case that getting vaccinated still helps protect the community by lowering your odds of getting infected and vastly lowering your odds of being hospitalized. Dr. Krieg also tackles the question of whether people who have had Covid-19 should get the shots, whether some people are medically exempt, and how the delta variant changes the equation.

What can the scientific study of the delta variant tell us about the pandemic’s future? Does it make sense go back to taking precautions to deal with a temporary setback, or is it time we all learn how to live with some risk? Today I talk with immunologist and microbiologist Vineet Menachery from the University of Texas Medical Branch. He explains how the virus gets into cells, and why the delta variant does it better than earlier forms of the virus.

Hey, listeners! We’re taking a break this week to catch up and get ahead! Lots of things are changing in the world and that means we’ll have to do the same. We’re wondering if you can help us with that? We’d like to hear your opinion so far on Follow the Science. What we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and what we can do to improve!

Jubilation at the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines is giving way to debates about boosters and fears of breakthrough infections. And people are understandably confused about how vaccines work. How could they possibly help us fight a virus years or even decades in the future?

There are philosophical reasons that political conservatives are more likely to cheer for experimental Covid-19 drugs – hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin – and reasons that political liberals are more likely to cheer for vaccines. But you can’t always get what you want.

Just when Americans were getting back to normal life, a new variant is leading some public health officials to call for a return to distancing, masks and fear. How will the new, more transmissible variant change the future now that around half the population is vaccinated?

Is the stress associated with being busy harming our health? If so, why are so many people stressed out by doing less during the pandemic? Stress is confusing because the concept is built on a questionable foundation. Tobacco companies paid researchers to show that a big rise in heart disease in the mid 20th century was caused by stress. But that was deceptive – the rise was caused by smoking.

Science doesn’t lend itself to fact checking, since science isn’t a set of facts but a process for finding things out. That’s why Facebook got criticized for deleting posts suggesting the virus causing Covid-19 might have had something to do with a lab accident. The reality is we don’t know where the virus came from.

Newspapers, magazines and television played a critical role in informing people about the pandemic, and many news outlets did a good job. But some also fed misconceptions – often exaggerating risks, or equating small risks with large ones, as well as dismissing those who suggested a possible lab leak origin of the pandemic as conspiracy theorists.

We were told the first person to get Covid-19 was probably a rural farmer or hunter or trafficker in wildlife, but now the attention has turned to the possibility it was a scientist or lab technician. In this episode I’ll try to give that idea some historical context. Jamie Metzl is a WHO advisor and former State Department official who talks about the history of secrecy in China.

The history of Covid-19 is already littered with bad predictions. There are exceptions, such as AIDS expert Monica Gandhi, who foresaw from the first clinical trial results that the pandemic would wane where vaccines – and good public health information – were readily available. Her vision of the future now is that Covid will fade as a major source of mortality and fear for the wealthy.

What is going on in virology labs around the world? Are they really using genetic technology to create superviruses? Though scientists still don’t know whether a lab accident had anything to do with the start of Covid-19, the possibility has raised questions about dangers lurking in labs.

Life suddenly feels normal in the United States, with Covid cases down, hospitals clearing out, and people taking off their masks. But India, recently praised for controlling the virus, is now immersed in a crisis worse than anything seen so far in the pandemic.

On Friday, the CDC finally told vaccinated people they don’t have to wear masks anymore except in a planes, public transportation and a handful of other places. It’s an important step in the return to normalcy, but why now? And what’s taken so long? And when will CDC let up on children?

People around the country have changed their behavior in big and small ways that don’t always line up with rules or guidelines to prevent Covid-19. People flout rules and take risks, and then take measures that go far beyond the rules, including wearing masks outdoors in situations where CDC says it’s not necessary.

To cheat is human – and cheating affects most human endeavors, even science. Fake science refers to a growing problem with papers that look like they describe real experimental results but the data are made up, or copied from someone else’s work, often on a different disease altogether. Meet two scientists who’ve volunteered to become fake paper sleuths.

What do I mean by Follow the Science? I picked this title for the show because it was catchy, but I thought I should take a deeper look at what it’s come to mean. It’s not always obvious what’s real science, what’s pseudoscience, and my guest for this episode is an expert on both.

Social media has become the primary source of news for millions, and yet it’s not in the business of giving people reliable or accurate information. I’ll be talking to Indiana University computer scientist Filippo Menczer about the way social media divides us, manipulates us and deceives us.

Past pandemics have started because people trafficked, sold, ate or encroached on wild animals. In this episode we’ll discuss how pandemics start with science writer David Quammen, author of the 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. He’s accompanied international teams of disease detectives investigating how SARS1, Nipah Virus and other disease agents jumped from animals to humans and started to spread.

The World Health Organization recently sent a team to China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus that sparked our pandemic. But they returned with little new information beyond a vague assertion that the virus probably had a “natural” origin in an animal. There was no explanation for how, where or when it jumped to humans.

Now that vaccines are available to younger people who are unlikely to die from Covid-19, many are getting their shots with the understanding that they can finally bring down the barriers to normal social lives, and even dating and romance. While most experts agree the vaccines work, they disagree on whether people should feel okay about returning to normal interactions any time soon. And some warn of a pandemic that will linger for months, if not forever.

Even before the pandemic, trusting experts had become synonymous with trusting science. But there’s a world of difference between “science” and the opinion of a scientist. In this episode I’ll examine the value, and the limitations, of expert opinion. Physician, epidemiology professor and podcaster Vinay Prasad (Plenary Session) will discuss the reasons certain experts get all the limelight while others, despite being better qualified, might be drowned out.

Is it okay to deceive people if you think your dishonesty will save lives? Are some lies virtuous? Risk Communication consultant Peter Sandman says public health officials routinely lie when they think it’s good for us. We talk about the ways public health officials lie, how they justify it, and which aspects of pandemic messaging are deliberately misleading. In the end, we agree that lies generally have bad long-term consequences.

In the pandemic, science and politics are getting mixed up in an unhealthy relationship, especially in decisions about how much risk is acceptable to society. UCSF physician and science communicator Vinay Prasad (Plenary Session) talks about the way scientific discussion is being squelched when it’s deemed politically incorrect, and how, more broadly, politics can bias medicine toward pessimism and more extreme interventions.

Misinformation about the pandemic is flooding over social media and traditional news media as well. But it’s not obvious what constitutes misinformation when the we’re grappling with a new virus and the state of science changes weekly. I’ll be talking to physician and medical educator Roger Seheult about getting censored by YouTube, and about the way politics has shaped people’s perception of such seemingly neutral topics as drugs, vitamin D and vaccines.

From wiping down desks to masks at the beach – we’re surrounded by rules, some of which probably help, and others, probably don’t make much difference. Rules can be misleading if they forbid things that aren’t harmful or force people to take precautions that don’t make a difference.

The good news is the virus is retreating. The bad news is its shape-shifting in a way that might give it a new advantage. Scientists studying how SARS-CoV-2 is evolving within individual patients figured out why it’s mutated faster, and with greater consequence, then they anticipated last summer. Will vaccines be able to keep up?

Men and women have different reactions to viruses – whether it’s flu or the coronavirus. Women’s immune systems have to work a little bit differently to accommodate the foreign cells of a fetus. Scientists who study sex differences see important clues to understanding the pandemic, and they fear that not nearly enough attention has been paid to the risk of the virus, or the approved vaccines – for pregnant women.

QAnon is weird and yet wildly popular. The conspiracy theory is based on the notion that prominent people in Hollywood and the Democratic party are torturing children to obtain something called adrenochrome from their blood. It’s gathered a massive cult-like following and has generated hundreds of millions of shares and likes on social media.

The first good news of the pandemic came when vaccines were developed much faster than expected, holding out the promise of a return to normal life. In this episode I’ll be exploring just how well the vaccines work, what their deployment means for getting back to normal, and why people need a normal world that allows contact and connection.

Scientists have yet to offer a coherent picture of how, when and where the Covid-19 pandemic started. Some tests on banked blood indicate the virus might have been circulating months before it was officially identified. Meanwhile, the closest known viruses to SARS-CoV-2 come from bats that live far from Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered.

It will be months, we’re told, before the full vaccine rollout, and thousands more will die. People are being blamed for the dying, but what if the fault lies more with bad public health strategies than with bad citizens?

What does it mean that a new version of SARS-Cov-2 is spreading fast in England and now around the world? How do scientists know this is happening? Viruses can change through evolution by natural selection, just like we can, but a lot faster. Experts talk about how alterations in the virus could change the course of events for us.

What does it mean when companies tell us their vaccines work? Turns out, clinical trials weren’t set up to answer really important questions about how long immunity lasts, whether the shots stop disease transmission, or whether some of the many vaccines still in clinical testing might have advantages over the front runners.

Covid-19 vaccines are rolling out, and for many they could be mandatory. But how do we really know if they’re safe and how well they work? I’ll be talking with a variety of scientists to learn what vaccines do once they get into your body, and how they might end the pandemic if anti-vaxxers don’t slow things down.