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[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing A global health crisis Fears of a pandemic Quarantine and hazmat suits It all feels like 2020, but the scientists say the outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola are being contained So have the lessons of COVID been learned? Do we know better how to stop the spread of these diseases without bringing the global economy to a halt? Or do we face a growing threat from wild animal origin viruses as we decimate the natural world?
[00:00:28] The Why Curve Well, do you know, there's one thing that we thought we'd all learned from COVID was that we were getting too close to animal habitats and living alongside them meant that there was a greater chance of us contracting viruses from them Yes, absolutely But we haven't changed, have we? Well, we can't, can we? I mean, you know, the world is expanding and whether it's, you know, in Central Africa, gradually the habitats being got rid of, really
[00:00:58] or, you know, whether it's these rats potentially in Argentina or a thing that sort of was what the hantavirus came from You can't avoid that in the bats, of course, that they think originally were the source of COVID But what do we do? How do we avoid it? Yeah Well, it does seem like, I mean, it feels like the hantavirus was a bit of a storm in a teacup, wasn't it? It was largely contained to a bunch of people on a boat and we all got very worried about it because we'd all been through COVID So I wonder whether there's just a bit of a sense of perspective here has been lost
[00:01:27] and really things aren't that bad I wonder if things are, because I've read people saying, actually, we are less prepared now for something like COVID than we were before COVID for whatever reasons, which we can investigate today Well, that's a bit of a worry Yeah Well, we will ask about that but I think you're right about the hantavirus being confined but that's because it happened to happen on a boat although people left that boat pretty early and were then found to be, to have the hantavirus Yeah And the alarm wasn't raised, I think, for quite a while
[00:01:56] So there are all sorts of issues like that but something more like Ebola, where you think, well, that can't travel, surely Yeah And yet, we know that it does Yeah, but people get so sick so quickly with it I mean, that's the, I mean, if you're a disease and you're wanting to wipe out mankind then you'd say, right, well, I'm going to lay low I'm going to infect people I'm not going to be symptomatic for quite a while but I'm going to be very infectious so people travel around and then I can infect loads of people and only then will people start to be ill
[00:02:25] and then they all start popping off which is a bit like COVID, wasn't it? You know, it was all Exactly, well, that was the problem People travelled, that was the fundamental issue And I mean, COVID was extremely infectious These other ones, you know, you have to It's more difficult to catch it but the effects are more devastating in lots of ways So I think we really don't know what's going to happen with viruses in the future We're getting more of them, perhaps, from animals We don't really understand them, necessarily But let's talk to someone who's studied
[00:02:54] Because we don't know now, but in half an hour we will all know so much about it Well, we will, we will because we're going to talk to Dr. Jeremy Rossman who's president of the Research Aid Networks He's also honorary senior lecturer in virology at the University of Kent So he joins us now So Jeremy, are we more prepared? I was just saying that we, you know the belief is that maybe we are not as prepared now as we were before COVID for something like COVID hitting us again Is that the case? Or I would have thought all the research that we did during COVID
[00:03:23] would mean we were much better prepared this time It's a very complicated answer because it's a little bit of both, actually In some ways we are in much better shape for a pandemic and especially for any sort of coronavirus pandemic But in a lot of ways we're actually in much worse shape And this sort of breaks down in terms of how prepared we are on a scientific standpoint
[00:03:51] in terms of a policy standpoint in terms of knowing the broad strokes of what we need to do either locally or internationally to manage a new pandemic That is in pretty good shape right now We've learned a lot We have a lot of instruments in place that would really help and facilitate this for the future Unfortunately, on a societal standpoint
[00:04:20] we are in a much worse place Why is that? What is it that society hasn't learned? I thought we all went through this It was a common experience So surely politicians and society is better prepared In some ways, yes But part of it is that this was such a traumatic experience for all of us And that has left scars And how we have managed the previous pandemic but also how we are currently
[00:04:49] managing politics globally right now is having very serious consequences So you're talking about the anti-vaxxers and people like that? Well, not even just the anti-vaxxers But if you look at the U.S. And of course, I'm talking to you from the U.S. right now So it's very hard to ignore this But from the U.S. There's been a systematic dismantling of so much public health infrastructure and especially so much international
[00:05:18] public health infrastructure that used to play a very strong role in international pandemic responses or even international outbreak responses You're talking about the members of the WHO World Health Organization, for example U.S. withdrew from that And it was the biggest funder And USAID And the cutbacks on USAID obviously as well Exactly But both of those And we have this outbreak of Ebola virus right now Normally the CDC would be sending teams out
[00:05:47] We would have NIH labs that would be up and running would be a very strong contributor to this international response Not saying the responses should be dependent on U.S. actions But this was a very strong area of technical and financial resources that are not flowing on an international response level So does that mean that Let's take Ebola as a good example
[00:06:16] I would imagine just early notification on things like this is important and then it's how you treat it But if you've got a combination of you don't know what's going on because you haven't got enough people on the ground and then you haven't got a way of treating it because there's just not enough resources from the world being put into it there's a danger that it's going to spread There absolutely is And there's often this discrepancy between what happens at a very local level and especially early on
[00:06:46] in any outbreak and the sort of international responses or what the international community might be posed or ready to do versus what's actually happening on the ground But something for example like the Hantavirus outbreak on a boat I mean it's a limited area there were some people who got off before it was identified in my understanding but I suppose that seems to be something that the international system worked pretty well with the WHO involved very early on
[00:07:15] once they knew it was happening and managing to isolate the people who might be at risk and make sure they didn't go further I mean that seemed to work didn't it? Absolutely In both cases for the Hantavirus outbreak and what we're seeing right now in the Ebola virus outbreak on an international level we're actually seeing a lot of examples of what we have learned which is very quick very robust responses that are occurring multilaterally and with pretty good cooperation
[00:07:45] between different countries so we're actually seeing really good responses there it doesn't mean that that's going to prevent the outbreak or prevent the sort of initial cases that we see but it is very effective in you know at least mitigating further spread as we're seeing with the Hantavirus outbreak we're probably going to see more cases but there has been a very strong international response that has been
[00:08:14] at least in a lot of ways successful and I guess tracking and tracing that was a big thing wasn't it at the start of COVID it was actually being able to track and trace who got it and where they were which is a bit curious isn't it in this day and age because you just ask Google they seem to know where everybody is at any point in time I'm sort of half joking but I mean the ability with technology to tell where people are you would have thought that would be comparatively easy I mean that's got to be and is going to get better or worse depending on your view on the privacy around all of that
[00:08:43] but that's got to help ultimately in the long term isn't it? This is a great example of things that have dramatically improved on a technology and sort of scientific standpoint is our capacity to you know manage so many of these technical aspects of outbreak and pandemic responses are very good again as you say sort of leaving aside the privacy side of that which is not insignificant but you know on a technical response
[00:09:13] to an infectious disease outbreak we're very good technically in a lot of ways you know as a great example with the Ebola virus outbreak that is going on you know we had sequence information for that and even for the Hanta virus we'd sequence information very quickly we knew that you know what species it was we knew that you know had the for instance the Hanta virus that it wasn't some new version of Hanta virus that we had never seen before we're able to do
[00:09:43] so much scientifically and technically much faster than we've been able to do before and that's a huge strength but we need to be able to integrate that with what people are experiencing sort of on the ground at the time isn't there also a kind almost a class or race division in this in some ways because with Ebola it's happened in a part of Africa which is immensely deprived extremely poor also involved in a very long running war and I think it's noticeable that this particular
[00:10:12] strain of Ebola as the WHO admitted there isn't really any treatment available for it or vaccine or anything of that kind because in a way I suppose it wasn't important because it happened to people a long way away rather than in a prosperous western environment unfortunately there's a whole category of diseases called neglected tropical diseases because they don't happen in countries like the UK or the US and often they don't get the same level
[00:10:42] of resources and investment to actually develop some of these therapeutics now for Ebola that is a little bit different because it is such an incredibly severe disease that there has been a lot of research over many years we do have some Ebola virus vaccines we do have some Ebola virus therapeutics unfortunately we don't for Bundabugio and the reason for that is not necessarily because there hasn't been
[00:11:11] an interest but Bundabugio has only caused two previous outbreaks before this one and so this was not thought to be as big of risk it is still in that category of diseases that would be incredibly important to have research into but compared to Zaire or Sudan Ebola virus this has caused far fewer cases and was seen
[00:11:40] as a lower risk but that's it's a great example you know what we think of as the known risks are not necessarily the risks that we are going to be facing in the future so is Ebola does it not spread to the west because it is just so severe so it's very clear very early on that people are very sick so they don't travel that was my understanding anyway historically as to why Ebola has been not able to spread too far because yeah because the symptoms become clear so quickly
[00:12:10] although Ebola can have you know 20 days of an incubation period where people have been exposed to the virus before they actually get symptoms and the very early phase of people starting to become sick with Ebola virus can look just like the flu so there there's this very dangerous period of time with Ebola virus where you can't actually be infected don't think that you have Ebola and be able to spread it I think one of the
[00:12:40] really virus epidemic where there were like over I think it was over 30,000 or almost 30,000 cases during that epidemic there still weren't many cases that had spread back to further countries there were people that had been repatriated but the cases didn't
[00:13:09] broadly spread and I think one of the big reasons for that is how the virus spreads this spreads through direct fluid contact so it doesn't spread in the air like COVID did that was a really primary reason why the virus spread so effectively and so widely but Jeremy if I mean worst case scenario it spread I believe one of the cases currently is in Uganda Uganda has a functioning air system people can fly from Kampala to Europe
[00:13:39] fairly easily for example or to the US and potentially someone who hasn't been aware that they have this disease and doesn't show symptoms getting on a plane and getting out of that area and potentially exchange of bodily fluids or whatever it is it then does begin to happen in the US or the UK or Europe are we ready to deal with something of that kind of that seriousness in some ways yes we are and in some ways absolutely no it's a very unhelpful answer I know
[00:14:09] but what this means is that we are very prepared for handling something like this I think the seriousness of Ebola in a lot of ways almost increases the sort of awareness and the attention to this I mean if somebody is experiencing a hemorrhagic fever in the UK the response is going to be very strong and very fast but the
[00:14:39] problem is that you know it's again how this happens at a local level and how long that takes to come into force because for instance if somebody that has early stage Ebola virus or maybe mild symptoms comes into the a local A&E or goes into their primary care physician are they actually going to be is that physician aware of their travel history
[00:15:08] is that physician aware of what's going on in terms of the Ebola virus outbreak going on in Africa so there's this local awareness and local preparedness that is so important for those very early stages and for catching those cases before they can really start to spread but once they start to spread then an Ebola virus epidemic while incredibly severe and incredibly tragic
[00:15:38] would almost be easier to control in say the UK than another airborne pandemic because of how it's spread so what if it's not travelling through the air but what if we did have another airborne disease then and it somehow the thing is we don't know where it's going to come from obviously because if we'd known COVID was coming we would have been prepared for it so we have another disease maybe it's similar I don't know some sort of
[00:16:08] maybe something that's resistant to drugs that we're almost having to start again in terms of dealing with it and it's airborne I mean first of all could we see something like that again in the next five or ten years and I wonder how we'd respond to that because if you tell people now that you've got to stay at home you're going to be in lockdown I'm not sure most of the population would go with that having been through it with COVID I completely agree and this is an incredibly concerning
[00:16:38] aspect so in terms of how likely something this is to happen to come up with any number is pure hand waving because we don't know something like this could happen again next year something like this could happen again in 20 years it's a matter of numbers it's not a matter of if there is going to be another pandemic there's going to be another respiratory airborne virus that is going to spread
[00:17:08] I wish I didn't have to say that but it's almost definite that that is going to happen now how we respond to that is the big question again technically we have really great tools we have really great resources we have the ability to make mRNA vaccines to new viruses in a very short span of time we know how well things like testing and tracing and
[00:17:38] isolation can be and as well as how effective things like masks can be for mitigating the spread of airborne viruses but how is the public going to respond to that how is the government going to be communicating that how is that going to be engaging local communities because that's the issue this comes down to trust I think that is one of the biggest things we are
[00:18:07] in the case of a new pandemic the government is asking the public to take certain actions and the public has to trust that those actions that first of all the government knows what they're talking about and that the scientists know what they're talking about but also that those actions are in their best interest and we have lost a lot of trust well I mean you're talking to us from the United States so I suspect it's going to be worse there than anywhere else in the
[00:18:37] western world in that there probably is less trust in science because you've got a man in charge who doesn't believe in science and I think the you know my sense is the anti-vax movement is greater there than anywhere else because being told to take the medicine wear a mask that's all an infringement on your civil liberties which you guys are very big on when you're not shooting each other yes that's a good
[00:19:07] answer but it is a concern isn't it and so it shows the influence of politics in all of this so if you had a change of president for example would you get a change of attitude and does that put that I think what I'm leading to is how much of the problems we're in right now is a consequence of the administration in the United States at the moment well because you've also got a secretary secretary of health department of health who absolutely doesn't believe in a lot of these things they're being the president I would love to say that
[00:19:36] if there was a political change in the US you know if the US immediately went and reinvested in the WHO spun back up many of these initiatives that have been closed over the past years really changed that attitude and the relationship between the government and public health that this would really change my answer and unfortunately I don't think that
[00:20:06] it would I think that that is a component it's making things worse but even in countries that don't have this exact same situation if we look towards the end of the COVID pandemic or even the middle of the COVID pandemic there was incredible strain between the public and many governments around the world this was not something that was specific to the US that's not something that is dependent upon this
[00:20:35] current administration in the US that doesn't help the matter yeah people just didn't like being locked up wherever they were yeah fair point of course of course nobody wants to be told that they have to stay inside nobody wants to be told that they have to wear masks nobody wants to have to get vaccines to you know just to be able to to go outside and to not know how well that vaccine is going to work or how long it's going to work and it's also there was also a huge economic
[00:21:05] downside to this which informs a lot of people there's a perhaps a prevailing view that in some ways the lockdown in certain countries the economic effect was worse than the medical effect that it went again so you know you pay too higher price in a way for keeping safe because of what it did to the economy which in turn disrupted society we know all kinds of terrible things that went on during lockdown that made actually the cure worse than the disease if one can put it that way there has
[00:21:34] been a lot of talk about that and unfortunately there is a it's all depending on how you actually look at that equation because what is the economic cost of lives lost what is the economic cost of illness but you can actually say okay here is the economic cost to me by staying home by isolating but you can't quantify the loss of what didn't happen to you
[00:22:04] so we are it's a very different difficult comparison to actually make and there's no doubt though that there was an economic cost cost there was a social cost there was an economic cost there was a health cost but how are people being told about this how are people being engaged in this I feel like all too often people were being almost
[00:22:34] sort of spectators in this there wasn't a engagement I've talked to a lot of different communities that had very different experiences in the pandemic where the community members were actually engaged in the responses had conversations about what was going on about why these actions were so important and the community members were actually engaged in going around talking to other people in the community to spread this local information
[00:23:03] but to also support each other because that's one of the big things there is this economic costs there is this social cost but the community members and in theory support each other through that but that is often not done. Yeah so it doesn't feel like some sort of government diktat which understandably is what people were concerned about weren't they they saw it as overreach which you know may or may not have been. What I'm concerned about through all of this is so it's because it sounds like we
[00:23:32] you know we're in a good state in terms of being able to trace where people are after we know there's an outbreak. We've made big developments in terms of how we can create the inoculations against these viruses as they emerge so we are better at dealing with it once it's struck us in a way except for you know the behavioural stuff that we've been talking about but the fact that we are still at the whim of nature we don't know where it's coming
[00:24:02] from what it's going to be what the cause of it is surely there can be research to help us understand what the likely causes are there can be there has been there is some research ongoing unfortunately this is also a great example of the US government closing some projects that were designed actually to predict and to get more information about where new disease emergence risks were
[00:24:32] however this is incredibly complicated there in a lot of ways we look at science right now as having this tremendous amount of information and awareness and so there's this perception that we should be able to stop this why you know you could look at the hantavirus outbreak or the Ebola virus outbreak and say why why is this even occurring at all why did this get beyond one person
[00:25:01] getting the illness but first of all those early local responses are incredibly difficult but second of all we don't have all the answers in science yet and we're actually we're a really long way from understanding where these viruses and even bacteria or parasites or fungus are in the environment how our interaction with the environment things like deforestation and climate change
[00:25:31] actually increases our exposure to these reservoirs and increases our risk there's so much that we don't know yet well that's really interesting Jeremy because you know we talk about these I think the same is zoonotic which means and viruses that come from often wild creatures which we haven't necessarily encountered before is that part of the real driver for this that as we destroy the environment as you say there are these reservoirs but we're also dealing with animals in a way we never have before
[00:26:01] and then almost the perfect storm because what we get from these quite remote places because of the improved communication system around the world can travel much more widely than they ever did before exactly there's probably a lot of other ways that this is these viruses are coming into the human population but for a very large amount these viruses bacteria are actually
[00:26:29] maintained in some animal reservoir out in the wild and normally there's very little human contact with this however climate change deforestation things like that we're having more and more contact we're having more and more exposure there's been research that has been showing this over the past few years that actually this is increasing the risk this is increasing that spillover into the human population so that
[00:26:59] risk is definitely increasing and then you have airfare you have a very mobile population in many areas of the world you also have the global communication because the information is spreading so fast but how are people getting that information there's frequently a loss of trusted news sources there's a loss of independent reporting people are getting a lot of information from social
[00:27:29] media you have this overlap of actual information and myths and rumors and fears and conspiracy theories that are all intermingled together so you have this interweaving of the spread of the virus and the spread of the information right but it's the human animal interface that we're talking about isn't it that's the origination of all of this so we're not seeing these diseases originating in Europe for example or the United
[00:27:58] States or the UK densely populated advanced nations it's developing nations where they're starting to have more contact with the edge of the natural world where they're sort of infiltrating these pockets of infected animals and that's why we want to stop happening I mean it would be nice if we were smart enough if we realised that is the case to try and stop that happening to try and say to these countries because presumably they're doing it and knocking down these forests for example for commercial reasons so that they can feed their
[00:28:28] families it'd be nice if we could say well don't do that let's find an alternative way for you to live so that we leave these infected animals alone and the rest of the world is safe it would be a great thing to be able to do and I think that yes were countries supporting other countries in this to say okay let's not have this clear cutting of these forests let's mitigate some of this
[00:28:57] impact of climate change then there's a real chance you could actually stem some of this spillover into the human population but to be able to do that to get you know the UK or the US or other governments to dedicate money to other countries first of all is a very difficult thing to happen right now in general even for risks that we do know
[00:29:26] about but for this to say that we are going to dedicate all this money to this other country so that they don't clear cut this for us so that we have a lower chance of a virus that we don't know about spilling over into the human population I think that that is a almost politically intenable that I can't see that unfortunately I can't see that happening
[00:29:55] even though it is a very simple solution that would probably be extraordinarily effective Jeremy we've been we've been talking a lot about about people getting misinformation about this but one of the things that hangs over from COVID is a suspicion amongst some quite genuine scientists as well quite a lot of them that this wasn't necessarily what happened with COVID necessarily entirely natural that there was some research going on into the development for whatever reason of this particular virus and it escaped now we don't know whether that's true we can't know I guess
[00:30:25] but is that part of the problem that some of these things are being used by governments in ways effectively that is there any truth to that is a very great and contentious question so is there truth to viruses being sort of weaponized by governments oh absolutely do we have evidence that that is something that is occurring right now and being used in the world
[00:30:55] no however there's extensive history of multiple countries in the world weaponizing making bioweapons this is not something that is new but this is also something that in theory isn't happening very widely we don't have any documented evidence of any of this ever causing epidemics pandemics or even outbreaks in the world but in terms of COVID
[00:31:23] itself I don't think that we have any evidence to say that this was a bioweapon or that this was engineered to cause a pandemic you can make the argument of saying well okay do we know for sure that it didn't accidentally leak out of a lab that was working on it or was the lab working on something similar we don't know we're probably never going to
[00:31:53] know because we don't have those actual records we don't have that information we can't say for sure is is it possible that there was a lab leak it is possible is it likely that there was a spillover from an animal reservoir from this virus and then adaptation humans absolutely we see that all the time well every movie i've ever watched on this where something escapes from the lab obviously it ends up with the zombie
[00:32:22] apocalypse and the living dead come and kill us all so hopefully we're not going to go down that road you do watch a lot of strange films every single zombie movie is exactly the same plot isn't it but is there is there a danger Jeremy that we do get to not that we have a zombie apocalypse but there's something that we just are not prepared for that you know could wipe basically if not the end of the human race wipe out half of us it could become so severe and the reason i'm asking that question is because i think there's this danger
[00:32:52] of complacency isn't there that we look at covid and we say well that was the worst it can get and look we sorted that out the science got us through we managed to fix it all and hence well we don't need to spend too much money on it now because you know all the good work's been done we don't need to worry about other nations because if we do get a disease coming from them then we'll fix it the same way we did with covid is there a worry that we might be underestimating the size of the risk because we sort of like normalize the
[00:33:20] risk and maybe that's fine because maybe sort of like something that is so severe is so unlikely but have we got our sense of proportion right on all of this i don't think so and i don't think that we know exactly what that risk is because covid was incredibly horrible but was it a given that covid would have as low of a fatality rate as it did not saying that it had a low fatality
[00:33:50] rate there were still an incredible amount of fatalities but there's no reason to assume that a airborne pandemic causing virus would have the same fatality rate that covid did i think that there's a real risk of something more severe that's not saying that that's going to happen but i think that there is a risk and i think as you say complacency is a real risk saying that oh well we made it through this we made it through previous pandemics
[00:34:20] we have all of this technological expertise and so even if there was something worse we could handle it and that might be true but i think having a cautious approach and especially in this inter-pandemic period of time because there's that at the end of the covid pandemic there was that feeling oh we need to be more prepared we need to there were things like the covid inquiry all of these fact
[00:34:49] finding and what are we going to do better next time experiences and that dramatically then drops okay so jeremy we got to the stage so i just wanted to interrupt you but to say we got to the stage where um we need really to know i guess as we conclude this discussion what is it that we're not doing that we should do if you had the ear of the who if you had the ear of the u.s uh the medical area what would you say they should do at this point that they're not doing
[00:35:19] work with and engage local communities in any sort of response and improve improve the science or just that's it just just be better with communities well the science is improving that it's not necessarily that that is something that we have to do dedicatedly for the pandemic and if we are sort of gearing our scientific work towards a new pandemic we're almost invariably gearing that towards the risks that we know
[00:35:48] I mean we we had stockpiles of antivirals to flu it didn't really help us when the pandemic was caused by COVID so I think that the science side is coming along the what we need is first of all that into I think it's in a big way we need that interaction between government and the people we need more trust we need more engagement we need better communication
[00:36:17] it's it's weird as a virologist and somebody that can really talk the details of how a virus works and what we can do to stop it to say that actually what we need to be focusing on is the people instead of the virus because in a lot of ways we got the virus we can figure out what to do about that but how we work with the people that is much more and you're talking about by the people you mean maybe on the ground in areas where this is which might be in Africa or
[00:36:47] wherever whenever you get wind of the news of some sort of outbreak make sure that you're there and able to work through exactly what it is you're dealing with because it seems like the speed of this is important in the early days and that was a problem with COVID wasn't it because I was I was traveling through Hong Kong airport in on the 2nd of January in 2020 and they were testing every passenger for the temperature on every flight and that was weeks before we started to learn about COVID so they knew something was going on but the
[00:37:17] communication on the world stage obviously wasn't there and so we went for weeks and weeks without really knowing what we were dealing with so that was a danger wasn't it there and we've got to make sure that doesn't happen again exactly I think in a lot of ways how we manage it technically we have so much that we've learned we have so many good mechanisms in place and we have a reasonably good idea of how
[00:37:46] to pivot on that as long as we sort of approach it very cautiously responding very strongly and very quickly and sort of you know with the awareness that this might be a new virus this might be a new pathogen it might be that we don't know everything about this pathogen and so having that awareness that we are still going to be learning a lot more during the process that is very good but yeah it's that
[00:38:16] it's also that how is that being communicated to people how are people being you know made aware helped to engage helped to take ownership of the response helped to actually trust that what's going on is going to help them okay well I mean Jeremy that's the theme I suppose of what we're talking about we are actually talking today because we're communicating at least the feeling is we need to learn things and we need to deal with the next time better so thank you very much for talking to us about that yeah thanks Jeremy
[00:38:46] thank you for having me on well something else that can do you immense harm something that works actually from rotting your brain first of all and then takes control of the rest of your body is watching too much reality TV or too much TV generally reality TV worse you think well I don't do you know what I have a confession to make right here right now I have watched married at first sight Australia oh and it's interesting everyone everyone in Britain watches married at first sight Australia I think it's because they feel like they feel more
[00:39:16] superior watching watching the people on the Australian one they're thinking who are these people but obviously they haven't seen the UK version because it's exactly the same they are you know just weird people who go onto these shows and I think but that's the thing isn't it are they weird beforehand or does it make them weird I think they're weird beforehand and I think it's bad I feel the reason why I sort of feel guilty is because you feel better than they are so some of them are very good looking people but yeah they may be good looking but just inside they are just
[00:39:46] weird basically so I don't know do we watch it because it makes us feel better I mean there's some reality TV which makes you feel a lot better you know there's yeah but it doesn't make the people who get involved with it feel better and that's really kind of why we're tacky because there's been these allegations about what happened with married at first sight here unproven as yet but it suggests that these things are not healthy perhaps for us watching it which you said not healthy perhaps for the people getting involved and I don't know are they healthy for TV or the TV makers
[00:40:16] some of it's good isn't it like you watch shows like The Piano or even Britain's best whatever it is almost like talent shows they're so memorable aren't they well Bake Off or something like that it's all quite good isn't it really you do feel better at the end of it is it though you're not destroying people on those shows are you whereas I think things like the wedding ones are well are they I mean I think what's happening even with something like Bake Off
[00:40:45] people are being observed and judged and that thing you said about superiority we feel superior to them we like to see people taken down in real time I don't often get a chance to do it so it's I know but I mean how bizarre we can talk a lot about this we're going to talk about it next week but how bizarre that people would go on to a show where they got married to a total stranger they're encouraged to live with them they're encouraged to sleep in the same bed as them and shock horror they have sex yes
[00:41:15] and they want it or they don't want it yeah and how do you draw the boundaries in such an unnatural situation but the whole thing is unnatural isn't it that's the point I mean this is all to me it feels a bit like you know watching people making fools of themselves as entertainment whether it's you know gladiators in ancient Rome or married at first sight here it feels to me it's the same kind of not very laudable human emotion that's being dragged in well here we are we are feeling superior now
[00:41:45] about the fact that we don't agree with these things so look bring along your sense of superiority next week when we deconstruct reality TV shows are they good or bad and what is the implications for society in general all of that next week on The Why? Curve join us for that which is not reality TV The Y Curve