Real Coffee with Scott Adams - December 16, 2020


Episode 1221 Scott Adams： Using DNA to determine your COVID-19 Risk

Hosted by
Scott Adams
Guests
Razeeb Khan
Mentioned
COVID-19 Razeeb Khan
Episode 1219 Scott Adams： Forensic Audit of Voting Systems, Hypnosis to Change Sexual Identity, The Great Reset Episode 1222 Scott Adams： Toobin Holds His Post, Putin's Excellent Schemes, Vaccination Cognitive Dissonance

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

166.68

Word count

1,975

Sentence count

154


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Razeeb Khan, a spokesperson and geneticist associated with Traitwell, joins me to talk about DNA and its potential to predict who has a higher risk for COVID-19, a potentially fatal virus.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 All right. Today, we have a very special single topic, and I'm here with Razeeb Khan,
00:00:07.700 who is a spokesperson and geneticist associated with TraitWell, and we're going to talk about
00:00:13.380 DNA and its potential to find out who has maybe worse risk with COVID-19. How are you, Razeeb?
00:00:21.700 I mean, I don't have COVID-19, so.
00:00:23.640 Yeah, you're already ahead of the game right there. So tell me if somebody wanted to check
00:00:28.840 their DNA, and we'll talk about the science behind it and the privacy and all that, but just start out
00:00:35.300 with what would they do if they wanted to know today, what would somebody do to find out if their
00:00:40.720 DNA suggests a higher risk for COVID-19? Yeah. So, you know, basically within the last six months,
00:00:48.540 there's been a lot of research on COVID-19, and people have looked at populations of people who
00:00:54.820 have been hospitalized, not hospitalized, they're infected, not infected, and tried to figure out
00:01:01.340 what the susceptibilities were, and there was a bunch of genetic hits that came up in the literature,
00:01:05.960 genome-wide associations. Some of your listeners have probably heard about those.
00:01:09.880 There's one on chromosome three that basically, if you have the susceptibility allele, which basically
00:01:16.280 means, okay, you got a marker that says you're more susceptible, you're about two times as likely
00:01:20.480 to be having severe COVID, which means hospitalized, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's not just the
00:01:27.420 flu. Okay. Yeah. Now, help me with these statistics. Should I really care about doubling my risk? Because
00:01:35.280 you're doubling such a small number. Would I even know the difference? Depends on what your other risks
00:01:40.260 are, probably. Like, if you're, if you're, if you're 18, you're asking a very good question,
00:01:45.180 in terms of what are you talking about, Razeeb, right? If you are 72, let's say you can't retire
00:01:52.720 for some reason. So I'm, you know, obviously, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not making recommendations,
00:01:57.120 but life is about trade-offs. I feel like our discourse forgets that. Sometimes you need to
00:02:02.880 work. We need to have people in the supermarkets, you know, we need to have people driving trucks,
00:02:07.140 we need to have people doing various things. But there are certain risks that go with that. And the
00:02:12.320 risks are not the same for everybody. If you have type 2 diabetes, if you have a heart condition,
00:02:16.720 if you're immunocompromised, we can go down through the list. A lot of these are associated
00:02:20.940 with genetics, right? So right now, there's a website that people can go to and enter not only
00:02:27.540 their DNA, if they have that file, but also their comorbidities. What is it? What is the website and
00:02:34.140 who accesses it and how? Yeah, it's covidforecaster.com. It's associated with Traitwell. And so if you go to
00:02:41.360 at Traitwell on Twitter, T-R-A-I-T-W-E-E-L-L. Basically, what we're doing there is we're
00:02:49.080 taking the information from your DNA and the information that you're giving based on, you
00:02:54.100 know, I mean, you could lie about your weight, that's up to you. But, you know, there's been a
00:02:59.400 lot of information of the comorbidities. And so that affects your risk calculus as well as well as
00:03:05.300 your genetics. So, you know, let's be entirely frank. If I had to know about your risk on chromosome
00:03:11.400 three, that particular position, as opposed to whether you're an 85-year-old with heart disease,
00:03:17.200 obviously, I'm going to look for an 85-year-old with heart disease, right? So I don't want to
00:03:22.680 dismiss environment or the, quote, non-genetic aspect. So how accurate should we assume that
00:03:32.640 this is? I mean, it's impossible to know yet, right? Yeah, we're still getting information. So I would
00:03:37.920 say, let me speak to the genetics part, because the environmental part is, you know, environment's
00:03:43.340 environment and depends on your test population. So the genetic part, there was a paper that came out
00:03:48.220 in New England Journal of Medicine using Spanish and Italian data in the spring, and Spanish and
00:03:55.440 Italian hospitals in Spain, hospitals in Italy. They found 5 to 10% of people in Western Europe had
00:04:01.120 this risk locus, had this risk marker, right? And this is severely associated on the order of about
00:04:08.140 like two, you know, odds ratio of like, you know, a factor of two against your just general risk.
00:04:14.120 They replicated that, 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genomics company, they replicated
00:04:19.420 that result with a much larger American sample set. It's about the same number, like almost two,
00:04:25.880 right? And so if you're asking me personally, you know, one publication, even if it's peer-reviewed,
00:04:31.840 who knows? But the fact that they found it in another much larger population in the fall in
00:04:36.520 another country suggests to me that, yes, there are underlying genetic factors around that position,
00:04:41.920 and also a secondary effect, like a 25% chance increase risk on a chromosome 9. So, you know,
00:04:49.400 most of these characteristics have like all these little genetic effects. So for example, height or
00:04:54.240 intelligence. What we're here, what we're doing here is focusing on something that's kind of common,
00:04:59.760 so 5 to 10% is kind of common, and has a non-trivial effect.
00:05:04.520 Wow. Okay. And now the public has gotten this great lesson in science that non-scientists,
00:05:13.740 you know, hadn't had until COVID. And so we've trained the public that there's, you know,
00:05:19.340 the gold standard, you know, random controlled testing, and that can tell you something useful.
00:05:25.200 And if there are two of them, that's better. Where would you put this on the scale of 1 to 10,
00:05:30.700 where 10 is a randomized controlled, let's say, a reproducible study? So that's a 10. Where's your
00:05:38.740 reliability for this? Because this is a different kind of animal.
00:05:43.640 Yeah. You know, those are the gold standard. I put it like seven and a half because it's been in
00:05:48.760 large populations in different countries. And also, I mean, you know, this isn't like a casual
00:05:57.120 trait, like people really care, and they're tracking this in hospitals, right?
00:06:00.960 Right. So the odds are good that you're on to something. There's just always a caveat that,
00:06:07.160 you know, science changes, and what we know changes. So how do you deal with the privacy
00:06:14.660 element? I know enough about it that if I've taken a 23andMe or some genealogy kinds of sites where
00:06:22.520 you've already uploaded maybe your DNA, if you've done 23andMe, as I have, I can just download it
00:06:27.500 from my site. My app lets me do that. And then I can just upload it to your site. And I actually did
00:06:33.200 that. And it's, you know, minutes. I mean, there's no friction. There's no friction at all. Just
00:06:38.440 download and upload. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, obviously, everyone has to take that
00:06:44.120 seriously. You know, there's only, okay, let's be like, entirely frank, like, make reasonable,
00:06:50.160 rational calculations. I've talked to engineers. It seems like he's making a good faith effort at
00:06:55.760 that. And also, in terms of privacy, I mean, I think, honestly, the weakest position is not the
00:07:04.440 direct-to-consumer genomics companies. It's the hospitals. In terms of database breaks and stuff
00:07:11.160 like that, you know, this is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't know why hospitals don't get much
00:07:15.740 flack for this. Because a lot of these companies have had issues. But hospital databases are
00:07:24.360 notoriously creaky. So in terms of privacy, I think there are a lot of low-hanging fruit out
00:07:28.800 there. And I don't want to minimize it. But in the grand context, yeah.
00:07:32.400 But if you're comparing your risk of losing your DNA to, I don't know, the internet or something,
00:07:38.640 how controlled is the app? I mean, do you feel that you've got a good handle on that privacy-wise?
00:07:47.320 Yeah, I think so. You know, I think it's encrypted in a database that's, you know, not,
00:07:54.240 it's not like, I mean, SQL injections, all the standard things. You know, we did check for that.
00:08:00.500 Okay. Yeah, my thing on DNA and privacy is that I'm not going to try. I'm making my DNA. Anybody
00:08:08.500 wants my DNA, I'll make it public. I'll publish my whole DNA. But I don't recommend that for anybody
00:08:15.260 else. It's just a personal choice. I just don't think that should be a secret. Now, is it possible,
00:08:23.400 somebody asked me this question when they knew I was going to talk to you, could this sort of thing
00:08:28.100 be done in the future with a, maybe a little different technique to find out if somebody
00:08:32.880 would have a bad reaction to the vaccine? Yeah, but the data has to come in. So, you know,
00:08:39.340 unfortunately. Right. Not with any data that we have, but is there, the process could identify
00:08:46.840 that there's a DNA correlation? Yeah. Yeah. Would you suspect that there is? Yes. I'm going to be
00:08:55.800 honest. Like, most things that are biological have some heritable, you know? A lot of times,
00:09:03.260 we don't care. Let me tell you a story. I had a friend who died induction into the Marines from
00:09:11.680 the anthrax vaccine. This happens every year, but it's a risk that we take, right? Don't talk about it
00:09:18.760 very much. I know about it because friend, right? Probably, if I had to bet, he had some very rare
00:09:25.640 mutation that doesn't have any problem otherwise. Right. You can't predict that. No. So anybody who's
00:09:33.020 joining us now, there's already a site where you can put in your DNA and other comorbidities.
00:09:39.960 It's called covidforecaster.com. It's exactly like it sounds. Spell it the way it sounds. And
00:09:48.260 do you have any other warnings or caveats about using the system? My take, based on what I've seen,
00:09:58.800 is that I would add it to the many other risk management variables that you're weighing when
00:10:06.780 you're deciding everything from, you know, how much should I fight to be first in line to get
00:10:11.500 that vaccine to how much should I, you know, go crazy on social distancing versus, you know,
00:10:17.180 being a normal, responsible person. But I wouldn't say it's the, you would agree that you can't say
00:10:23.320 it's a hundred percent anything for any one person. It's just one more variable to add to a lot of
00:10:29.080 variables. Yeah. These sorts of things are updating and changing over time based on the information we
00:10:33.520 have, right? So you update your priors based on what you have. We know so much more in six months
00:10:39.360 in a good way and in a bad way about this sort of issue. So that's one thing I would say. It's
00:10:45.300 always an evolving thing. Your DNA doesn't change, but the information we have about it does.
00:10:49.960 So this is great. I just wanted to keep this short and tight, let everybody know that there's a way
00:10:56.720 they can upload their DNA. Now that does the company commit that it doesn't, it doesn't sell
00:11:02.400 the DNA. It doesn't release the DNA standard standard. So you'd have the same risk that you
00:11:08.960 have where it is, which is if it's already a 23 and me, it's already in somebody's database that this
00:11:15.700 is, this is the reason that I don't obsess about protecting my DNA. I just don't think it's the thing,
00:11:20.560 you know, in the same way that I don't think I would ever have privacy in digital communication.
00:11:27.720 I mean, I want it, but I have, but I live my life like it's not really a thing. So it's the
00:11:33.020 same standard I use. So it's covidforecaster.com. Razib Khan, thank you very much for sharing this with
00:11:40.960 us. And it's a one more tool. We'll add it, we'll add it to the good news that's coming out on COVID
00:11:46.040 because we got enough bad news. All right. And have a great day.