What is Monkeypox? With Dr. Anne Rimoin

What is Monkeypox? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice learn essential information about the history of monkeypox, how it’s spread and how people can prevent themselves from getting it with epidemiologist Dr. Anne Rimoin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and I got with me Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey Neil. All right Chuck, we are overdue for a show on monkeypox. Yes. We so are. It's all the rage right now. It's all the rage. The country's gone monkeypox crazy, you know? And so, we found someone who was in high demand. We're just so delighted she could spare a few moments with us. Please help me welcome Professor Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist from UCLA. Anne, welcome to StarTalk.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're in an endowed chair there. Endowed chair of infectious diseases and in public health, named Gordon Levin. Is that one person or is that Gordon, like Gordon's Law? Gordon Levitt, the actor?

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  No, it's two very generous people. And so Gordon and Levin.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Levin, Gordon and Levin. You got it, you got it. And you are uniquely qualified to be in this interview and enlighten us because you've spent decades on monkeypox. Before anyone's thinking, you're all in it. Before anybody in the rest of the world is thinking about it. And you're there in the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where monkeypox was prevalent. And so,

• 1:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a million questions. So are you, are you just prescient? Or, like, did you know this was coming? Yeah, yeah. She wanted to be ready for this moment. So therefore 20 years ago. 20 years ago. Wait, before we get into all your business, does it say infectious diseases on your business card? Like, what's that like when you hand it to someone? Do they, they don't want to? Do they no longer want to touch the card?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Back up a little bit.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They immediately hand you the card right back, like. Disinfect, you know, they purell their hands. So what's that like?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's changed a lot over the last couple of years, let me tell you. In the years before the pandemic, when you'd say epidemiologist, people would say, are you a skin doctor?

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Epidermis, oh, yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  That was the discussion beforehand. Now, today, everybody knows what an epidemiologist is. We've hit the mainstream. So, very, very different, very, very different than it used to be.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have knowledge of value to people. So that has boosted your currency, presumably, out there, right?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that people now actually understand what an epidemiologist does.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put that on the map for us right now.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Well, an epidemiologist is studying patterns of disease in populations. So that's the point of epidemiology. And in terms of an infectious disease epidemiologist, I'm focusing specifically on patterns of disease in populations. I'm trying to understand what the burden of infections are, who's getting them, why are they getting them, and how you can prevent them.

• 3:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so. The who, what, when, and where, why?

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  That is the mantra of an epidemiologist.

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so your training is useful for any infectious disease. You happen to have specialty in monkeypox.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  So my training was actually just in community health sciences at UCLA. I got my master's degree there. Well, I could go even way back further. So my undergrad degree was history, but I specialized in African history. And had a particular interest in the Congo. And then I went into the Peace Corps. I was a Guinea worm eradication volunteer, which was a.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you and President Carter, yeah, yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  That's right, the Carter Foundation was funding it, Carter Foundation.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've had him on StarTalk, it was great. The whole program was on Guinea worms, so, yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  There you go. So I worked on Guinea worm as a Peace Corps volunteer. And then when I finished, I went and got my master's in public health at UCLA. Did a little bit of work for the World Health Organization afterwards in polio eradication, something that's been ringing the bell again recently.

• 4:32Chuck Nice?

  Got news for you, you failed.

• 4:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's an adjourned board on that one, Doc.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. Listen, I was working on it in India, Nepal, and Africa. So, and then, and then after that, I went and got my PhD in international health with a specialty in disease prevention and control. And that department is actually now called global epidemiology. So, so my, my area of expertise is really global infectious diseases. And epidemiologists do a lot of different things. We're, some of us specialize in some things, some of us specialize in others. I really specialize in infectious diseases. But I started working on monkeypox when I started working in the Democratic Republic

• 5:19Speaker 01

  of Congo in 2002. And at that point, I, I had just finished my PhD. I started working at the National Institutes of Health. And because I had worked in eradication programs, I'd worked in vaccination programs, disease surveillance. When I got to Congo, I was a program officer, actually, at NIH, working on a project related to malaria and pregnancy and pregnant women in Kinshasa. I sat down with the director of the National Laboratory, trying to understand the lay of the land.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said Kinshasa, Zaire?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  In Kinshasa, yep. Jean-Jacques Muyenbe, who's also been in the news quite a bit. He is the, the Congolese doctor who really was the first person to discover Ebola in 1976, had been leading the, the work at the National.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you all know each other as you must, right? Otherwise, you can't communicate anything, right?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that was the first person I sat down with. I mean, he, he was really wonderful. And he started telling me about this problem of monkeypox and that there seemed to be a lot of cases. But at the time, nobody was interested in analyzing these samples. It just, monkeypox wasn't on the radar. Everybody was busy with other things. And so I actually took my per diem and helped send those samples that had been sitting at the National Lab to a collaborating lab in Germany, who analyzed and found out that there was a lot of monkeypox in there. The supposition was is there might be some smallpox, might, I'm sorry, some chickenpox. Some monkeypox, but probably not all that much. We were very surprised at how much monkeypox was there. And so that was really the beginning of this project. We demonstrated that there was

• 6:48Speaker 01

  a lot of monkeypox there. And then we started an entire research program together to be able to really do intensified disease surveillance and show that there was a lot more there.

• 6:58Chuck Nice?

  So you keep saying monkeypox.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 7:00Chuck Nice?

  As a layperson.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm distracted by that, too.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you just keep saying monkeypox. And I just want to know, first of all, I mean, I know I've done a bunch of reading because it's all crazy now. Wow, you know, everybody freaking out. And I know that it's, you know, a zoonosis virus. We know that. I hear these terms, clades. I hear this term, West African Basin, Congo Basin. What is all of this? What is all that?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so monkeypox. Monkeypox is a zoonotic disease, meaning it starts in animals, and it resides in animals, but can cross over into humans. Monkeypox has traditionally been circulating in animals in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's a misnomer. Monkeypox is a misnomer. Monkeypox is called monkeypox because it was first discovered in a monkey colony, a research colony in Denmark in 1958. So they called it monkeypox. But it really turns out this is a rodentpox. So it's mostly.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a Denmarkpox.

• 8:08Chuck Nice?

  It is what's rotten.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the state of Denmark. Okay. I see what you did there, Chuck.

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right. So, sorry, I, we interrupted you.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we did.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please repeat that with Denmark.

• 8:19Chuck Nice?

  So it's really a rodentpox, okay?

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go on.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  It's really a rodentpox. And it resides, we think that the reservoir species are squirrels, pouch rats, other rodent species. It probably actually infects a lot of different rodent species. But that's, so monkeys can get it from rodents, just like humans can.

• 8:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  So.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  And now, so wait a minute, let's look at this chain of transference here. Monkeys get it from the rodents. Does it then mutate in the monkeys and then they give it to us? Or do they just pass it along to us?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Monkeys can be incidental hosts. It's, you know, in DRC, most often, the cases of monkeypox

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Democratic Republic of Congo.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  In the Democratic Republic of Congo, uh, uh, most of the cases are associated with squirrels, uh, other, other rodent species. Sometimes people will pick up a monkey that may have a rash on it.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Um, may have been infected and they'll get it from, from eating a monkey. But really monkeys, you know, primates, humans, non-human primates, we're all incidental hosts. This is real virus that, that starts in rodent.

• 9:34Chuck Nice?

  By the way, you're scaring the crap out of me right now. Okay. Go ahead, Leo.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, maybe because I'm a city person, but you just said, oh, if you pick up a monkey and they have a rash, they could be, I'm saying, I'm never picking up a monkey.

• 9:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is not a thing that I ever think of doing.

• 9:51Chuck Nice?

  And piggybacking on that, what Neil just said, I'm thinking, you know, monkeypox. Okay, here's the deal. I don't hang out with monkeys. I'm good. Okay. Like, I'm never, I'm not gonna run into any monkeys, okay, here in New York City, so I'm okay. But now that you say it's a rodent pox, you're talking about rodents and squirrels, okay, now I'm scared, because we got a lot of those.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:16Chuck Nice?

  So.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Well, yes, we do. And that's gonna bring me, I mean, we're, we're, you're already, you're already ahead of the story, but let me tell you, that is exactly some of the things that I'm worried about. So here's what we know.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What she just, what she just told you, Chuck, is let her finish the damn story.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me translate the professor's comment.

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  I'm motivated by fear here. I'm sorry.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, go.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  So here's the deal. I'll try and make this, this quick. So the, the, the situation is this. Is that monkeypox has been spreading for a very long time. We didn't know monkeypox was out there because it looks just like smallpox, which is a cousin of monkeypox. And when we eradicated monkeypox or smallpox from the planet, we stopped vaccinating against pox viruses. And as a result, we started to see some, some chinks in our herd immunity armor.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  And so what happened was is over time, as people were no longer vaccinated, people, when they came in contact with a rodent or a monkey, they would get infected.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This would be people below a certain age, right?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Well, it started out that what we really thought of this was this is a childhood disease. So in principle, it was children that were in contact with with animals. And actually, the very first case of monkeypox in a human was discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1970 in a nine-month-old child who had not been vaccinated. And this was when they were at the end of smallpox eradication, they were looking for every single case of a pux-like illness and making sure that it wasn't a case of smallpox. That's part of the certification process for eradicating.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Extinct, yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And so that's how they discovered it was monkeypox. Once they eradicated monkeypox in hu- or smallpox in humans from the planet, what they did was they they decided it's really important to understand what's going on with monkeypox here. Is this going to be important? Is this something that's going to fill the ecologic niche? We don't know. So they started a program in DRC to monitor it. And really, the vast majority of the work that we, you know, is the basis of understanding monkeypox.

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in the middle.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Is from 1981 to 1986 in DRC. And it was really mostly children because you think about it, if everybody was vaccinated and they only stopped vaccinating in 82, it was really only young children that had any susceptibility to this virus. And that's why there's so little known. So when I got to DRC in in 2002, you know, there were all these suspected cases of monkeypox and and a lot of rumors of cases increasing, and it made sense because we no longer had immunity. So we started this project in DRC, Professor Moiambe and I together. And we started doing intensified disease surveillance and we ended up having a real

• 13:05Speaker 01

  understanding that there was a huge increase in monkeypox since the 1980s, since immunization stopped. So we wrote a paper, it was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and showed this this 20-fold rise in the incidence of monkeypox since the end of smallpox vaccination campaigns. And that should have been a big warning to everybody because that just showed that, listen, as immunity goes down and exposure goes up, you're going to see cases go up.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me go back a little bit. If we all know, many people know that the immunity that some milkmaids had to smallpox came from their exposure to cowpox.

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  Cowpox.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you saying that the people most susceptible today to monkeypox are people young enough to have not gotten a smallpox vaccine? Because does a smallpox vaccine protect you against monkeypox in today's world?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Neil, that is exactly what I'm saying.

• 14:25Chuck Nice?

  So how old do you have to be to have a smallpox vaccine?

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got a scar. I got my smallpox. How about you Chuck?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Chuck, how old are you?

• 14:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't know. Seventy-five? What's that do?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  You're too young.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you've got a scar on your skull? I got one.

• 14:39Chuck Nice?

  No, I don't. I don't have a-

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Chuck, were you born here in the United States?

• 14:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Okay, well then, then you, you wouldn't have been vaccinated. Vaccination in the United States stopped in seventy-one.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, how does it spread?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  So, so wait a minute. Just another point here, that it is, smallpox vaccination probably does provide some protective immunity, but we don't really know how much in this particular outbreak. And because there are all these different modes of transmission that aren't the standard modes of transmission that we've been studying all these years, we just don't know for sure. So Chuck, you don't, you don't have to feel that jealous of Neil. You guys can both be jealous of me. I've been vaccinated. I was vaccinated in two thousand and four, so sooner than both of you, just because I work on monkeypox.

• 15:33Chuck Nice?

  You got the industrial strength, super concentrated.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I did.

• 15:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, MPXV, like, solution.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is, this is on the skin, so can we presume it doesn't ever go airborne?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Well, I always say we should be humble about what we know and what we don't know about this virus. What we know about this virus is really, as I mentioned before, really concentrated in those early studies in the 1980s in villages, in remote rural villages in Congo. And that is a very different context. And so you can imagine that the studies that we have, we have some animal model studies, we have a little bit of knowledge from what happened in the 2000s. There was a small outbreak in the United States in 2003, 47 cases from imported gambian rats that were put into a facility next to prairie dogs. So

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why would anyone import a rat?

• 16:24Chuck Nice?

  What is going on? Rats and monkeys and what is going on?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Don't shoot the messenger here.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  So

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just thinking of the sewer rats in New York. Look, this is our place.

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  Tell me about it.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Import African rats into the sewers?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  The exotic pet trade, that's a whole different

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's another, another. Oh, my gosh. How do we stop this?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's a really good question. So as we're talking about these, so the way that we stop it is we have to get in front of it. How do we get in front of it? We have to have really good disease surveillance. We have to really have good situational awareness. We have to have great testing. Testing has to be widely available to everyone that even suspects that they've been, that they have potentially been exposed.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You left out the most obvious answer. Stop touching each other.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  I'm all for that one. I'm for that one.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Well, on these Zoom calls make it much easier.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. I know. Until Zoom figures out a way to transmit a virus through the computer, you know, the Zoom call is the great protector of us all.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. But the truth is, is it's going to be through a variety. So got to have really good situational awareness. That's testing, good clinical definitions. The clinicians know what to look for. Then we all have really good vaccines. Now, there are a couple of vaccines that are out there. There's the Genios vaccine, which is this vaccine. It's a two-dose vaccine, and that's what's being distributed right now, but it's a really short supply. So we just don't have enough of it. And we don't really know how effective it's going to be, in particular in this scenario.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So every day is a new set of data for you?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Every day is a new set of data, and there are a lot of knowledge gaps, a lot of things we have to understand. We have to be humble about what we know. We have a good base to start from, but there's a lot more we need to know. And you know, you've been in academia, it's really, it takes a lot of time to be able to get studies up and running, to be able to understand what's happening. I mean, it's not just that today, there's a new virus and you can turn around and start it. You have to write protocols, you have to get funding, you have to get ethics approval, you have to then have the logistics of rolling these things out. So it does take a lot of time to get this done. And this is the fact, we just don't have the funding and the infrastructure in place to be able to do what we need to do.

• 18:57Chuck Nice?

  How transmissible is this? How can I get it? Actually, how can I not get it? That's the real question.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  That's a really excellent question. It, you know, it transmits through various routes. It's not as transmissible as something like SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. It, it transmits most efficiently from person to person, skin to skin contact, sustained contact, very close contact, but it can also transmit through what we call fomites, contaminated objects. So sheets, towels, clothing, contaminated objects. And, and so it's probably much more contagious, the closer you are, the more virus you're in contact with. And so when you're in contact with the, with the lesions that it causes,

• 19:48Speaker 01

  direct contact, that is probably the most efficient route for transmission. And that sexual transmission is, is perfect example of that.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember reading about the milk maids, they were very specific about it. They would have to have an open sore while they were milking a cow with cowpox.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so if my skin is intact, how does someone else's monkeypox get into my skin?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Well, might not. I mean, the skin can be a good barrier. It just, it really depends because you can have.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have thick skin. I'm a thick-skinned person. Okay.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  You could have, you might not know how thin your skin actually is until you test it. So that's one way. I mean, you could also get it through respiratory secretions. You could be breathing it in, inhaling it. But there are a variety of different ways to get it.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Respiratory secretion, that would be like a sneeze or a cough.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Right, right. So bigger respiratory droplets that you might expel when coughing or sneezing.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beyond skin lesions, how might monkeypox also show up on your body?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Monkeypox also, it infects, you'll have lesions in the oropharynx. It can be down your throat. It causes what's called a cytokine storm, which is similar. SARS-CoV-2 also does that. So you could see, you're going to have a massive inflammatory response. There were just two cases of individuals in Spain that died from inflammation, from brain inflammation, from encephalitis.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Triggered by the monkeypox?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Triggered by monkeypox. So this can be a very serious disease. Futility rates are low relative to other things. And in particular, this West African clade, not the Congo Basin clade, so the West African clade is what's circulating, and that tends to be milder. But there have been a few deaths. And of course, the more cases that we see, the more likely that is. And of course, when it gets into people who might have a suppressed immune system, it could be a lot worse.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can it cause blindness?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  It can. It can. And we've seen many instances of that in DRC, where we have a fair number of cases that it can, in fact, cause blindness. If the virus gets into your eye, it can... Um, really do some damage. So, you know, and, and a reminder too, it isn't even just about these very acute, um, problems that, that we have really learned in the last several years, how important it is, um, how, how viruses can create a lot of long-term consequences. It isn't just about the acute infection today, which is substantial and painful and scary and, um, and, uh, can be very distressing. But, you know, we've, we've learned a lot

• 23:04Speaker 01

  about what viruses can do, uh, and, and causing long-term consequences. I think that once we get more vaccine into the system and have better surveillance and better testing, that we will, we will have this under much better control. And I do not anticipate that this will end up being something like SARS-CoV-2, where you see, uh, you know, that, that everybody's going to, to have to be taking precautions all the time. That's a very different kind of virus, spreads very differently.

• 23:37Chuck Nice?

  I know we're, I know we're getting out of time, but this is a philosophical question because, uh, it, in America, we tend to think of infectious disease as something that we need to protect ourselves from. But the more and more it looks like the world is closing in on us. So do we need to change our thinking? Like, it is an investment for us to fight disease outside of this country so that we can protect ourselves inside the country?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Chuck, absolutely. I mean, I, I say this all the time, an infection anywhere is potentially an infection everywhere. And we really do need to take that to heart because you, you live in a global community.

• 24:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  And, and what happens elsewhere eventually can affect you yourself at home. Uh, and, and so that's why we, we need to be doing better. We could have averted this situation with monkeypox. If we had invested in helping countries like DRC be able to understand what was happening and get in front of it. But we failed to do so, and now we are paying the price. And this falls under, I also say this quite a bit, it's much easier to stay out of trouble than it is to get out of trouble. And now we are in get out of trouble mode once again, when we had the writing on the wall for a very long time.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, all I can say is you and your fellow epidemiologists, especially those who are specifically

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Focused on on legislation that affects public health. Um, I don't know where we'd be without you. I mean, maybe we'd all still be in the caves dying of everything else that we look at. These woodcuts and paintings of, you know, the Black Plague and all of this. So I, I, I, I don't think you guys are, are hero worshiped as much as you should be. And let me add to that, that Chuck, I don't know if you noticed. The candor with which Anne spoke of what they don't yet know.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's how you know she's a real academic.

• 25:38Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what happens is, Anne, what's wrong with you? You spent your life and you still don't know? I did two hours of research and I know way more than you on the internet. And I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have a podcast and I'm gonna tell everyone what I do know. And you should listen to me. This is what's going on.

• 25:53Chuck Nice?

  How come you don't know stuff when I was on TikTok and I just learned everything about it?

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. So, so Anne, my last question to you, because this is a shared space in our two Venn diagrams. Um, what do you do about misinformation and rampant, or people taking what they think is information and politically weaponizing it, socially, culturally weaponizing it? What do you do as a public health professional?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  As a public health professional, I try to go on podcasts, for example.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What an idea.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Great audiences here.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good. Why did we think of that? Why didn't we think of that?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  No, but, but it's really true. What things that you have to do or you have to get out there in front of it. And you have to be vocal and you have to get in to as many different places as you possibly can. And you don't always want to just talk to the people who are agreeing with you. You want to talk to everybody and you have to be willing to listen to everybody too, because it's reasonable to have questions. It's reasonable to, to, to question, to question things, including questioning scientists. But sometimes you end up with, with, with social media today, the, the speed with which disinformation gets out there, um, it's, it's very hard to combat. It's very hard to get in front of.

• 27:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like the quote from Mark Twain. Um, uh, in the early morning, uh, uh, you know, when you wake up, a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put on its pants.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm maybe misquoting it a little bit, but that's pretty much what he said. Anyhow, and this has been, I don't want to say delightful because you're telling us about infectious diseases, but it's been highly enlightening and informative. And as monkeypox continues to develop, either to go back in the can or escape even more, can we get you back on to get an update?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'll be happy to come on anytime.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Delighted. Okay. Thank you very much for being on StarTalk. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. And where do we find you on social media?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  You can find me on Twitter at Aremoin.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Aremoin is R-I-M-O-I-N.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  You bet. And also on Instagram at Anne Rimoin.

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Excellent. We'll look for you there. Keep us enlightened, keep us informed, keep us smart. And we've already been doing a great job at that. All right. This has been StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.