Episode 1221 Scott Adams: Using DNA to determine your COVID-19 Risk
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Content:
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Conversation with Razib Khan, Traitwell spokesperson and geneticist, on the topic of determining your COVID-19 risk based on your DNA. Will this be the new big tool?
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All right, today we have a very special single topic, and I'm here with Razeeb Khan, who is a spokesperson and geneticist associated with Traitwell.
And we're going to talk about DNA and its potential to find out who has maybe worse risk with COVID-19.
How are you, Razeeb?
I mean, I don't have COVID-19, so...
Yeah, you're already ahead of the game right there.
So tell me, if somebody wanted to check their DNA, and we'll talk about the science behind it and the privacy and all that, but just start out with, what would they do if they wanted to know today?
What would somebody do to find out if their DNA suggests a higher risk for COVID-19?
Yeah, so basically, within the last six months, there's been a lot of research on COVID-19.
And people have looked at populations of people who have been hospitalized, not hospitalized, they're infected, not infected, and tried to figure out what the susceptibilities were.
And there was a bunch of genetic hits that came up in the literature.
Genome-wide associations, some of your listeners have probably heard about those.
There's one on chromosome 3.
Yeah.
okay, you got a marker that says you're more susceptible, you're about two times as likely to be having severe COVID, which means hospitalized, you know, it's not just the flu, okay?
Yeah. - Now help me with these statistics.
Should I really care about doubling my risk because you're doubling such a small number?
Would I even know the difference?
Depends on what your other risks are probably.
Like if you're 18, you're asking a very good question in terms of what are you talking about, Razeeb, right?
If you are 72, let's say you can't retire for some reason.
So I'm Obviously, I'm not a medical doctor.
I'm not making recommendations, but life is about trade-offs.
I feel like our discourse forgets that.
Sometimes you need to work.
We need to have people in the supermarkets.
We need to have people driving trucks.
We need to have people doing various things.
But there are certain risks that go with that, and the risks are not the same for everybody.
If you have type 2 diabetes, if you have a heart condition, if you're immunocompromised, we can go down through the list.
Absolutely. A lot of these are associated with genetics, right?
So right now, there's a website that people can go to and enter not only their DNA, if they have that file, but also their comorbidities.
What is the website and who accesses it and how?
Yeah, it's covidforecaster.com.
It's associated with Traitwell.
And so if you go to at Traitwell on Twitter, T-R-A-I-T-W-E. Basically, what we're doing there is we're taking the information from your DNA and the information that you're giving based on, you know, I mean, you could lie about your weight.
That's up to you. But, you know, there's been a lot of information of the comorbidities, and so that affects your risk calculus as well, as well as your genetics.
So, you know, Let's be entirely frank.
If I had to know about your risk on chromosome 3, that particular position, as opposed to whether you're an 85-year-old with heart disease, obviously, I'm going to look for an 85-year-old with heart disease, right?
So I don't want to dismiss environment or the non-genetic aspect.
So how...
How accurate should we assume that this is?
It's impossible to know yet, right?
Yeah, we're still getting information. So I would say, let me speak to the genetics part, because the environmental part is, you know, environment's environment, and depends on your test population.
So the genetic part, there was a paper that came out in New England Journal- of medicine using Spanish and Italian data in the spring, and Spanish and Italian hospitals in Spain, hospitals in Italy.
They found five to ten percent of people in Western Europe had this risk locus, had this risk marker, right?
And this is severely associated on the order of about like two, you know, odds ratio of like, you know, a factor of two against your just general risk.
They replicated that, 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genomics company, they replicated that result with a much larger American sample set.
It's about the same number, like almost two, right?
And so if you're asking me personally, you know, one publication, even if it's peer-reviewed, who knows?
But the fact that they found it in another much larger population in the fall in another country...
Suggest to me that yes, there are underlying genetic factors around that position and also a secondary effect, like a 25% chance increase risk on a chromosome 9.
So, you know, most of these characteristics have like all these little genetic effects.
So for example, height or intelligence.
What we're doing here is focusing on something that's kind of common.
So 5 to 10% is kind of common and has a non-trivial effect.
Okay, and Now, the public has gotten this great lesson in science that non-scientists, you know, hadn't had until COVID. And so we've trained the public that there's, you know, the gold standard, you know, random controlled testing, and that can tell you something useful.
And if there are two of them, that's better.
Where would you put this on the scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is a randomized controlled test?
Let's say a reproducible study.
So that's a 10. Where's your reliability for this?
Because this is a different kind of animal.
Yeah, you know, those are the gold standard.
I put it like 7.5 because it's been in large populations in different countries.
And also, I mean, you know, this isn't like a casual trait.
Like people really care and they're tracking this in hospitals, right?
Yeah. Right. So the odds are good that you're on to something.
There's just always a caveat that, you know, science changes and what we know changes.
So how do you deal with The privacy element.
I know enough about it that if I've taken a 23andMe or some genealogy kinds of sites where you've already uploaded maybe your DNA, if you've done 23andMe as I have, I can just download it from my site.
My app lets me do that.
And then I can just upload it to your site.
And I actually did that.
It's, you know, minutes.
I mean, there's no friction.
There's no friction at all. Just download and upload.
Yeah, obviously everyone has to take that seriously.
Let's be entirely frank.
Make reasonable, rational calculations.
I've talked to engineers. It seems like you're making a good-faith effort at that.
And also in terms of privacy, I think, honestly, the weakest position It's not the direct-to-consumer genomics companies.
It's the hospitals. In terms of database breaks and stuff like that, this is just a pet peeve of mine.
I don't know why hospitals don't get much flack for this, because a lot of these companies have had issues, but hospital databases are notoriously creaky.
So in terms of privacy, I think there are a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and I don't want to minimize it, but in the grand context...
But if you're comparing your risk of losing your DNA to the internet or something, how controlled is the app?
Do you feel that you've got a good handle on that privacy-wise?
Yeah, I think so.
You know, I think it's encrypted in a database that's, you know, not, it's not like, I mean, SQL injections, all the standard things, you know, we did check for that.
Okay. You know, my thing on DNA and privacy is that I'm not going to try.
I'm making my DNA. Anybody who wants my DNA, I'll make it public.
I'll publish my old DNA. But I don't recommend that for anybody else.
It's just a personal choice.
I just don't think that should be a secret.
Now, is it possible?
Somebody asked me this question when they knew I was going to talk to you.
Could this sort of thing be done in the future with maybe a little different technique to find out if somebody would have a bad reaction to the vaccine?
Yeah, but the data has to come in, unfortunately.
Right, not with any data that we have, but the process could identify that there's a DNA correlation?
Would you suspect that there is?
Yes. To be honest, most things that are biological have some heritable, you know?
A lot of times we don't care. Let me tell you a story.
I had a friend who died induction into the Marines from the anthrax vaccine.
This happens every year, but it's a risk that we take, right?
Don't talk about it very much.
I know about it because friend, right?
Probably, if I had to bet, he had some very rare mutation that doesn't have any problem otherwise.
Right. You can't predict that.
So anybody who's joining us now, there's already a site where you can put in your DNA and other comorbidities.
It's called covidforecaster.com.
It's exactly like it sounds.
Spell it the way it sounds. And Do you have any other warnings or caveats about using the system?
My take, based on what I've seen, is that I would add it to the many other risk management variables that you're weighing when you're deciding everything from how much should I fight to be first in line to get that vaccine to how much should I go crazy on social distancing versus being a normal,
responsible person. But you would agree that you can't say it's 100% anything for any one person.
It's just one more variable to add to a lot of variables.
Yeah, these sorts of things are updating and changing over time based on the information we have, right?
So you update your priors based on what you have.
We know so much more in six months, in a good way and in a bad way, about this sort of issue.
So that's one thing I would say.
It's always an evolving thing. Your DNA doesn't change, but the information we have about it does.
So this is great.
I just wanted to keep this short and tight, let everybody know that there's a way they can upload their DNA. Now, does the company commit that it doesn't sell the DNA, it doesn't release the DNA? Standard.
Standard. So you'd have the same risk that you have Where it is, which is, if it's already at 23andMe, it's already in somebody's database.
This is the reason that I don't obsess about protecting my DNA. I just don't think it's a thing.
In the same way that I don't think I would ever have privacy in digital communication.
I mean, I want it.
But I live my life like it's not really a thing.
So it's the same standard I use.
So it's covidforecaster.com.
Razib Khan, thank you very much for sharing this with us.
And it's one more tool.
We'll add it to the good news that's coming out on COVID because we've got enough bad news.
