 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech Tech Talks. It's actually tech of the antiquities. Today we're going to look at COVID and the pandemics of antiquity, a very interesting idea and program and history and pieces of classics. We're going to compare the pandemics of antiquity with each other and with modern-day COVID. With an archaeologist, professor of classics at UH Minoa, Robert Littman. Welcome to the show, Robert. You do look a little funny, but I think you're safer that way. That's right. Everybody, I am wearing a mask. Now, if you look at this mask, this is the mask that was worn in the 15th, 16th centuries to combat the plague. Now, it's no different from the mask that we wear today. Today we are a little more sophisticated and we wear the N95 mask. Now, this mask was worn mostly by the physicians when they went to treat people and their theory of disease was that the disease was caused by miasma, something in the air and that led to the four humors, the black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile being imbalanced. In fact, these masks worked a little bit during things like the bubonic plagues, but in the end, the rats and the fleas got you and it didn't really protect you. I remember reading in the, I guess it was in Barbara Tuckman's book, the calamitous 14th century about the bubonic plague and how it spent itself over a decade or two. It traveled all over Europe and then it was things were quiet, but 20 years later it came back and maybe in a more moderate form and actually when you look at that European history, maybe global history, you see that these things come back over a period of time and arguably they keep coming back till today, but if you look backward they had to be, you know, all the way back into antiquity and they have been with us as a species for thousands of years. Am I right? Yes, well we've had disease as long as we've had human history, we've had disease, but what happens with plague diseases and these pandemics is that you need a large enough population because, let me just give you an example, measles. We have measles rearing its head again, but measles is such an infectious disease that within a few weeks it'll go through a city that has a large population. For example in 1875 in Fiji, a ship docked at port with someone that had measles and no one had any immunity to measles there and within three weeks 75,000 out of 125,000 of the population died from measles. So the reason that we get these diseases that come back in waves is that the first go round the disease hits a very large percentage of the population that's susceptible. Well within, and there are some that never get the disease, but within 10, 15, 20 years you get another generation coming up who don't have the antibodies to the disease, so you get another wave. Now if you look, one of the great diseases in the West was the influenza epidemic of 1918 and that came again in waves over a period of six to eight years and it's still with us the 1918, but what's happened, it's influenza A. We've developed a general immunity to that strain, so now it's a mild cold rather than a deadly disease. So we all are concerned about COVID and it's coming back, it has mutated in a lot of different forms, but it will come back and we will have future outbreaks. Our children will see and future outbreaks, but they probably will not be nearly as severe as the population gets immune. So with something like the bubonic plague, once everyone realizes the big wave of it was in the 14th century in Europe, 1358, but it kept coming back for a hundred years. The same thing, the earlier outbreak that we'll look at of the bubonic plague in the time of Justinian in the 6th century AD came back for another several hundred years in different waves. Now can I have the first slide? Now one of the things that we see in this pandemic is that lessons from history, Santayana had said, the philosopher, that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Now the... Here's a picture of two people. On the right side is the ancient historian Thucydides. On the left is Boris Johnson. Now when the COVID broke out, Johnson was the Prime Minister in England and he was not very concerned about COVID. He poo-pooed it. He had parties, gatherings, social gatherings, even though they were forbidden in the country and of course that led to his resignation as Prime Minister. The irony is that Johnson, when he was at Oxford, studied classics like myself where I also studied at Oxford many years before Johnson and one of the authors that he read was Thucydides. Thucydides wrote an account of the plague of Athens and he described its symptoms and he says he was writing his description so that if the plague ever broke out again people would be able to recognize it and to learn about human behavior. Sadly Johnson did not learn did not learn from history. Now about a... When COVID was at its height in 2021, I gave a talk at Think Tank and looked at some of these and one of the things that I looked at, the lessons that we could get from history is that diseases mutate. I'll talk a little more about that later on and that you get more virulent strains and what I said then is what we've got to do is get out there and vaccinate as many people as possible before you get more virulent strains that attack the world and that's... While there were some many people at CDC, Centers for Disease Control and many leading scientists around the world trying to get as much vaccination as possible before we got these changes in symptoms, it was an uphill battle and they're developed in America this particularly this political divide particularly among the Republicans of anti-science and anti-vaccine. Not all Republicans, we've got the Robert Kennedy Jr. who joined this this bandwagon of anti-vaccines. These people who did not want to get pushed against vaccination paid absolutely no attention to history. If you look at one of the greatest scourges of human history, which I'll talk a little about that's been around since at least the time of the Athenian plague and which may in fact have been smallpox, that scourge is smallpox. One of the great human achievements in science was the elimination of smallpox. Around in the 1970s the last case of smallpox occurred in the world and if you look in the 20th century alone over 500 million people died of smallpox and how were we able to save this human populations? We did it through vaccination and it's interesting that the way the World Health Organization managed to do this was an interesting study in how diseases work. Diseases need susceptible hosts. They need fresh meat, fresh victims. There are many diseases that either confer complete immunity once you've got it like smallpox or others like COVID once you've got it, partial immunity. But with smallpox the World Health Organization kept trying to vaccinate the whole world but they couldn't do it because there were too many pockets of people they just couldn't get to. So in the 60s they changed their strategy a little and what they did was to wait until there was an outbreak of smallpox, get the general population vaccinated with smallpox for a smallpox vaccination. And you know clearly in America virtually everyone was vaccinated with smallpox. You couldn't travel outside the United States without a yellow vaccination card that you had to be snapped that you had your smallpox vaccination. So what they did in the World Health Organization is they waited till there was an outbreak in a particular place and then they went in and they vaccinated everyone in a 10-mile radius and then once they did that the the pathogen the disease had no place to go because everyone around the area was vaccinated and contained and that's how they finally eliminated through vaccination this scourge. Now if you look with the development of smallpox in 1900 with development of vaccines in 1900 the life expectancy in the west was 47 and in antiquity at the time of the Greeks and the Romans life expectancy was in the 30s like 20s and 30s and it went up from 1947 till today through several factors vaccination was a big factor childhood vaccinations to keep children from dying previously to our modern age half of all children died by the age of five now the so it's clear in human history you're going to have these diseases you're going to have the plague diseases you're going to have these diseases that are around that are endemic but that if we don't learn from history as Santiana said we're doomed to repeat it so if you don't want your children to die before they're five years old like they used to get them vaccinated. Could we have the second slide please okay now one of the things that we see that we learn from history of course is the whole issue of how diseases are spread here's a picture of a lady called Hilda Churchill she was born in 1911 and died of COVID at the age of 109 in 2020 or the the what she had the Spanish flu when she was a child and then ultimately died over a hundred years later of COVID and she commented that it was very similar to Spanish flu but on her day there were no planes and somehow it still managed to spread over the whole world now if you look at something like the Black Death that started perhaps on the Silk Road it took several years to spread from to spread from the Middle East to England and the but and we get the the word quarantine from the spread of the Black Death. Quaranta means 40 days and this was the amount of time that a ship was held in port before the sailors could get off because they figured within 40 days everyone was either cured or dead from the plague on board with these Spanish flu it spread all over the Spanish flu spread all over but with the COVID because we have airplanes it spread super fast so we had the first outbreaks in in early December by December 31st 2019 it had spread to almost the entire world within a month or so after that all these outlying all these outlying areas islands Polynesia it all got it okay can we have the the next slide okay now why do we look at the history of disease well if we look at how people react in the past how we deal with things in the past it helps us to understand what we do and how we deal with a new situation it's really interesting that and of course one of the things that looking at the history of these diseases helps is that it takes these diseases go over generations hundreds of years it helps us understand what's going to happen now we use laboratory rats to model these diseases laboratory rats have a life expectancy of about two years so they go through the generations very fast versus the human generations of 40 years so for example when we look at how syphilis is behaved in the human population it really hit about 1492 4 to 1495 it broke out and it was a horrendous disease it attenuated it got it spread rapidly it got milder and milder so when we look at these diseases in history we can start to understand how these plague diseases are going to behave and what we can do to to mitigate and combat them so we learn to the past from the past theoretically and how to deal with pandemics let me let me let me interrupt for a moment Robert and ask you about how how somebody studying this gets the data you know I guess it really revolves around the entire study of antiquity but how do you find for example that someone died of disease how do you find for example what that disease was like with symptoms can you can you in a dig can you get the DNA can you get a microscopic a genetic study of what was wrong with this individual is is there that kind of technology available okay now um last year uh a man called Svante Pabo won the Nobel Prize in medicine and Pabo what Pabo did was to sequence the DNA of the Neanderthal and in the last 20 years there's been an incredible development in in ancient DNA extracting DNA from skeletal remains there's a major one of my colleagues David Reich at Harvard has a big lab and he is rewriting all our understanding of early human history through this now one of my collaborators that I that I worked with is is an expert in extracting the DNA of of ancient DNA microbial DNA from from skeletal remains one of the things that he has managed to do is to extract the DNA of the Justinian plague this is the plague that struck the Empire of Justinian the the Byzantine Empire of Justinian around about 535-40 AD this bubonic plague outbreak spread throughout all over Europe all over Africa North Africa all over southern Europe it was of a similar magnitude of the destruction of the black death now what uh the uh the extraction of the DNA was able to show that it was bubonic plague not only was he able to show that it was bubonic plague he was able to show that it was a different variant than the one that occurred in the black death so what's happening now he and I um also collaborated on trying to extract the DNA of a mass burial in England from the second century AD in the second century AD there was a an enormous plague that hit the Roman Empire we label that the Antonine plague it was most likely smallpox and you know we do this identification from the ancient descriptions they the clinical symptoms now the problem with looking at clinical symptoms particularly when you're dealing with these ancient writers is they're not very accurate so um and there are many diseases that if someone who is not an expert describes them they look the same so for example smallpox has a rash it's a more postular rash uh typhus has a rash also but the rash of typhus is a very a very flat rash um and so the ancient descriptions let us at least figure out who got the disease where they got it when they got it gives us an idea of how many people died from the disease from these ancient sources but the actual identification of what the disease was uh is really only achieved through the DNA and that research is just developing so incredibly rapidly unfortunately um my colleague and I had to point our and myself when we extracted the DNA from the second century burial it was a mass burial and that's what let us think it was a plague burial uh we busted we couldn't there was the DNA was too degraded for us to identify the disease but what's going on with this DNA is really revolutionizing our understanding of how diseases work because we're realizing that many of these ancient plagues and these microorganisms were not very stable that they they were constantly changing with different variations different variants and that the and that one variant might be kill half the popular quarter of the population another variant may not kill many people at all so this we're really getting a for the first time in in human history and understanding of how how diseases change morph and adapt to human population so it's really changing the nature of of our understanding now you talk you talk about the diseases it sounds like from what you say Robert that most of this is viral rather than bacterial now there's a lot of bacterial stuff as well bacterial stuff bubonic plague you know there's a lot of a lot of viral bacterial plagues as well the what happens is we treat them today we treat them differently bacterial plagues we tend to treat with antibiotics viral we have now developed some antivirals like pax levid for covid but the most effective way of dealing with these viral plagues is vaccination so you know and the technology of course is moving unbelievably rapidly the true marvel of the covid vaccination is that in about a year from the outbreak of the disease the the vaccine was developed tested and distributed in a year now the previous to that the fastest vaccine out there was probably months vaccine for months and that took six years to develop so the change the change in the in science has been just enormous but of course one of the things that we need to do in all of this when we look at how disease moves through human populations is just keep paying attention to the the past and educate our population to the past I mean the idea of this anti-vaccine movement in America was just mind-boggling how after we've saved so much of of so many lives millions and millions and millions of lives through vaccination you had politicians getting out there saying oh don't vaccinate it's bad for you you know and this anti-vaccine now covid is not the last of these diseases that we're going to have and when the next one comes along which it will because that's what happens with human populations we absolutely need to be prepared if we can develop a vaccine to get out and vaccinate the population and if we don't do that we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past you know one thing strikes me from what you've said is that so we we go back in antiquity in the history of humanity and we find some genetic codes some some DNA of the of the antigen some have any of these diseases that we identified through the science you're talking about have they totally disappeared off the side never to be seen again yes there are there are some diseases that have totally disappeared but um or certainly or vary variations of them we get one uh there's one that uh a rinder pest that was uh among cattle that disappeared it was just so virulent that it killed off populations there was a in the 15th century in england there was a some sort of this outbreak of a type of plague that just disappeared so some of these do in fact disappear you know and you've mentioned also that seems like masks such as what you showed before but also the progeny of those masks who are reinvention of them you know have been a primary thing as as vaccinations but what if anything is there to learn or from the pandemics of antiquity and to put that in our kit bag to use other lessons that we have not used but we have learned from the past well one of the things that antiquities always did is real they realized even though they didn't understand how micron organisms worked they understood contagion that if you isolate and separate you're not going to catch the disease and uh one of the things we did learn that in by during covid those who did separate like in hawaii we had one of the lowest rates of of covid because we had a lot of quarantine a lot of separation we had the closing down of a lot of schools we learned we learned from the past set you isolate and you're going to survive you don't isolate and you're not going to survive and one thing that has happened in modern times which is a little chilling is that science has not only directed its effort to prevent and to cure but also to enhance these diseases make them weapons and that that's letting the genie out of the bottle that has never happened in antiquity or in history until now is that how does that change the calculus well not quite um the uh british troops used infected the american indians deliberately with smallpox they put smallpox soar spores on blankets and then gave the blankest the indians to infect them so and of course cortez never would have conquered mexico if he hadn't infected the aztecs with smallpox so you you do have uh germ warfare and even in um medieval times they would take uh animal carcasses and put them in wells to pollute the water uh but of course the weaponizing of uh of bacteriological warfare is always an issue but the problem with it is that these microorganisms are a lot smarter than we are they're gonna figure out uh how to survive you're not uh it's a dangerous game to play to try to use uh biological warfare the religions tried to do it with this lab in uh in russia and actually there was this lab accident and infected the people in the lab with anthrax and actually one of the people who worked in that lab ended up uh working at u h some years ago i don't think she's still there uh but it's it's it's not a very effective weapon because of the ability to uh to control it you can't stop infections from spreading even if you got a biological weapon that worked it's there once it passes through the human body it's going to mutate and change and you're going to get other variations this would happen with covid and that and that even if say you develop a vaccine and then use it on the enemy we've seen that our that our population a lot of people just don't want to get vaccinated so if we developed a weapon to use against the russians it would boomerang and hit us again and vice versa you know one one one thing that um that has come up when issued has come up and this goes to um the question of whether um whether a weaponized version of covid was developed in china uh is the alternative to that namely that it came from the wild it came from animals certain kinds of animals in the wild through the wet markets in china you know and uh and and people picked it up from that rather than a laboratory accident but seems to me that um the notion of what do they call it spilling when you when you spill from the animal the animal community to the human community depends on how close humanity is to the animal community and if you throw them closer and closer into the same geographical area you're going to enhance the possibility of spilling and we live at a time when that that exactly that has happened was that happening in antiquity too that's absolutely and now there are fewer it's gotten much better the reason it's gotten much better is we've killed most of the animals you know in europe what's left there you know foxes uh you know there's nothing left in europe in america there's nothing left you know a few wild cougars and buffalo and whatever but in africa there's a lot left so the best way you know to reduce the development of new diseases is kill all the monkeys i mean kill the chimpanzees and the monkeys these are close relatives this is where aids comes from uh if we kill if we get rid of these wild animals we'll be in a much better uh place uh of course you still had the swine flu from domesticated uh pigs that you know that develop well but don't we have an environmental side effects of getting rid of a species of course i mean you know uh but as africa gets more civilized as the wild gets pushed back and regulated like it does in the west there's going to be a less of a reservoir for developing these diseases because the animals are often a source of many of these diseases you know for this discussion you you've listed the plague of athens in 430 bce and the antinine antinine plague um what is it 165 to 180 ad and the justinian plague 500 and changed 540 ad but what about and the sippery you mentioned the sippery the sippery in plague in 1250 at 250 that's 250 ad yeah so you know it seems to me that the the way history has looked at this is that there are distinct plagues distinct phases distinct eruptions um but isn't it so from what you've said this is just a continuing process and you can identify a plague here and a plague there the fact is it's one continuous plague well yes that there are diseases as long as they'll be humans there are there will be these plagues and outbreaks but we have come such a far way because we have developed antibiotics against bacterial plagues we have developed vaccines against viral plagues and look if coveted hit 200 years ago it would have wiped out hundreds of millions of people instead of it still killed several million people but the effect of it would have been much much less so yes we're going to have more covids maybe not in my lifetime of your lifetime but probably in our children's lifetime maybe another 100 years it may be 50 years before we have something like this again but it will happen again but we are better every generation every year we are better and better equipped to dealing with the um to uh to human disease that's why when the antonine when the plague of Athens broke out even without the plague life expectancy in Athens was about 32 or 33 even with coveted our life expectancy is still in the west close to 80 uh so we've come a long way in human history in dealing uh in dealing with all of this but would you rule out the possibility that there will be a mutation that we can't you know we can't cure so quickly um and i'm adding to that the point that um the latest science is to try to get right down there into the genetic code for these viruses anyway maybe the bacteria also um and make it a sort of a dynamic vaccine that deals with whatever that uh you know that that antigen really is so that you you have like one size fits all kind of vaccine uh or is it possible that we will have a we will have another plague another pandemic that we can't we can't fix and we'll kill a lot of people anyway okay the there is there are several people um in Mount Sonnet hospital in New York working on a flu vaccine that will work for any type of flu and i think it's being tested at this point uh it um it is happening it will happen uh that we are going to get better and better with our vaccines could we get an organism that we can't deal with um i think given the stage of our ability to make vaccines i don't i think we're going to be i think it's highly unlikely that we'll be won't be able to develop something that works now there are some diseases that we have no cure for like Ebola but often those diseases if the fears as if a disease gets too fierce and too deadly it's not doesn't survive because it kills off people too quickly i mean Ebola kills off people really fast and they die before they have a chance to spread it and this doesn't have a very efficient means of spreading itself so and we've seen this the past in the history of disease if the disease is so virulent that it kills everything around it then it kills before it can spread now occasionally you get very very clever diseases like AIDS the the virus that that deals with with AIDS because it kills slowly and someone can carry it for years so it's a very very deadly now that's the sort of disease that is the greater long-term threat and i think uh i think we're too clever as a species i have no fear that we will win the battle against the against microbes going forward in the future and we're getting better and better at it well you're assuming that science will out but you know what we saw during the Trump years was a lot of people you know didn't believe in science and rejected and rejected vaccines not only for COVID but for other things and they're quite remarkable and i'll bet if we and this is really a question if we look back in history if we look back you know in the classical times we will not find political efforts to prevent people from using the science that was available at that time in order to cure the population oh well you'd be surprised we don't change there was the anti-science look the church the catholic church was very much anti-science and change they looked at disease these ancient disease these plague diseases as a punishment from god uh and that uh uh they resisted any attempt to treat them because accept the idea of the accept your fate it's a punishment from god now people we've gotten better educated and smarter but we're still full of the same fears and superstition that that we always have been so it's a constant battle to educate our population and even then education doesn't really work i mean i see it's a failure of us of we professors that we have people that we haven't educated uh who understand the importance of vaccination and modern medicine last question because i think we're running out of time a little um last question is um is the solution to this also in in government and in legislation and in making rules that require people to take vaccinations that punish people who don't take vaccinations oh absolutely yeah absolutely you know the thing is if someone doesn't want to be vaccinated i have no problem with that but don't let him come near me or my children or my grandchildren if you don't want to get protected then you should give up your right to socialize with people uh and i and it used to be you can't go to school without getting your vaccinations and now they've created these crazy quasi religious objections which are just supers just made up there's no religion uh that that's that speaks against vaccination and so if you want to participate in the society you have to be willing to get vaccinated otherwise stay out of public you don't want to be vaccinated go live on a farm somewhere and don't come near me you know i wanted to ask you your parting words maybe you've already given them but what would your parting advice be looking at this historically from classical times uh till now and and seeing how it all integrates and how it all connects uh what should what should the average citizen be thinking uh as and when this comes up again yeah when it comes up again our scientists are wonderful we'll be able to overcome all of these listen to our scientists don't listen to the politicians listen to the scientists and and listen to the professors of of classic classical history too yes and and what about one of those big masks can i get that where did you get that i need to get i got it in venez i was visiting venez last winter and uh they still they still sell them and i don't know it might i'll have to talk to my epidemiological friends to see if it'll work as well as an n95 mask you may be surprised with the answer that's right yeah thank you robert robert lippin dr robert lippin an archaeologist who has traveled all over north africa and the middle east to do digs and the professor here at u.h. minoa of classics thank you so much yeah you're very welcome aloha