New Variants: How Worried Should We Be?

Facebook has created it own Supreme Court, yes you heard it right, and this Supreme Court will decide in a matter of days if Donald Trump can be let back in. To talk to us about how this body came to be, what a Harvard professor’s college friendships have to do with it, how they managed to get Nobel Prize winners and what this major decision will mean, we have the great pleasure to be joined by Kate Klonick, a leading expert on internet law who was given exclusive access to sit in rooms with Mark Zuckerberg and co.

When COVID hit, it sent a chilling message to those who have lived through the HIV epidemic --  the last big one in the US -- and know very well what can happen when governments ignore people in a health crisis and when poor countries can't afford the treatment. I’ll give you a hint. By the end of 2019, the global death toll from AIDS was about 33 million people, and scientists estimate another 1.7 million people to get infected with the virus every year. That is what can happen.  To help me understand what is at stake in this pandemic and the best lessons learned, I have the great honor to talk to the remarkable Professor Gregg Gonsalves, who left school to become one of the leading AIDS activists. He carried the fight against the disease in South Africa, decided to get his Bachelor’s degree at Yale in his late 30s and later a PhD and received the MacArthur “Genius Award”.

Dr Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and one of the most important voices on COVID-19, lets us know how optimistic we can be, what kind of summer we should be expecting and how high of a risk there is for a variant to become so strong that it makes the current vaccines useless.

For all the controversy about China’s relationship with the West, you cannot deny two things: it involves everything from nuclear weapons to climate change, and the stakes -- for the world -- are high. There is no one better to discuss this with than Harvard’s master of international relations, Joseph Nye. His theory of soft power shaped how both China and the US engage with the world. Now he’s here to tell us what comes next. Later on, we are joined by China expert Philippe Le Corre, who breaks down a recent deal the EU signed with China and discusses if the US thinks this is a slap in the face.

It has been a little over a year since we started to grapple with the pandemic. Just as we were celebrating the incredible scientific efforts that brought us the vaccines, we now see that the virus is mutating into new variants. These variants are making the virus spread faster, and there is talk that they could make these much-awaited vaccines ineffective. To help me understand all things COVID variants I am joined by a leading expert on the issue, Professor Florian Krammer, who leads the Krammer laboratory at the renowned Mount Sinai hospital in New York. This is the Dive, the show that brings you the world’s leading experts to break down news topics for you.

Anand Menon knows Brexit through and through. He is the director of http://ukandeu.ac.uk/ (The UK in a Changing Europe) and professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London. In this episode, he wonderfully breaks down what the UK has gotten itself into, why an agreement was so hard to reach and who came out as the winner of Brexit.

Dr. Michael Mina is a Harvard epidemiologist and immunologist.  When the pandemic hit, he put aside all of his previous work to fight the virus. Since he has developed a strategy to stop the pandemic and is consulting governments to implement it. The strategy does not focus on the vaccine but on easy to produce, and even easier to use, paper strip rapid tests. As the pandemic claims 1,7 million deaths, even with a speedy rollout, many more people will die before getting vaccinated; except they don't have to according to Dr. Mina’s plan. 

Chasten Buttigieg, a beloved educator, rose to public fame when his husband - Pete Buttiegieg - became the first openly gay major presidential candidate. At first, Chasten, who is in his early 30s, did not think he'd fit in political circles. However he had a great deal to share with the American people, and I am not just talking about his great sense of humor. His struggles of coming out, student and medical debt, and failing to find the promised American dream are relatable for millions of people across the country. On this episode, he's decided to open up about all of them

To help us understand the final stretch of the presidential race and what to expect on election week, we sit down with Margaret Talev. Talev is the White House & politics editor at Axios, a CNN political analyst, and a Harvard Kennedy School lecturer; so in other words we could’t be in better hands!

Voting in America is very difficult, from registering, staying registered to having the vote ultimately counted. Renowned voting rights activists and experts LaTosha Brown and Tova Wang explain how millions of Americans are left out of voting and what we can do about it.