Keen On COVID-19

5 ways that the pandemic has confirmed the future

Almost ten years ago, back in pre-history when KEEN ON was a Techcrunch TV show, I interviewed the eminent futurist physician and writer Eric Topol. Back then, Topol has just written a book about the creative destruction of medicine and we spoke about what he promised were the “limitless” opportunities for healthcare entrepreneurs.

Fast forward a tumultuous decade and Eric Topol remains a distinguished physician scientist with his pulse (so-to-speak) on our medical future. And when he once again appeared earlier this week on KEEN ON, he spelt out five ways in which COVID has accelerated the creative destruction of healthcare. COVID, then, for Topol, is confirmation of a future that was inevitable in our seemingly halcyon pre-pandemic age.

<iframe src="

" width="640" height="564" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>

1. COVID “SICKNESS” IS AS MUCH POLITICAL AS MEDICAL. In his defense of his old friend Anthony Fauci, Topol described as “sick” the vitriol directed at prominent healthcare experts like Fauci and Deborah Birx. Ironically, the major pathological legacy of COVID, Topol suggested, is likely to be the political and cultural vitriol spewed on networks like Twitter.

2. COVID MARKS THE END OF OUR SOCIAL MEDIA AGE. In spite of having over half a million Twitter followers, Topol underlined the inadequacy of social media as a platform for coherent discussion of complex issues like COVID. Thus his decision to become a writer-in-residence at Substack where he is publishing his Ground Truths newsletter.

3. COVID IS ACCELERATING THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF MEDICINE. Ten years ago, Topol spoke to me about “telemedicine” as if it was something out of a Neil Stephenson cyberpunk novel. COVID, as he told me last week, has made the virtual doctor as natural as the virtual office or the virtual meeting. And there will be no going back to the analog comforts of 20th century medicine or doctors. Thus his focus on AI as a way of rebuilding the credibility of healthcare in the 21st century.

4. COVID IS TRIGGERING A REVIVED FOCUS ON “HUMANISM”. Like other distinguished physicians such as Robert Pearl, Topol believes that contemporary healthcare has lost what he calls its “humanity”. And that, ironically, is the ultimate goal of AI - to provide us with the virtual doctors and services that will allow us to once again “personalize” healthcare.

5. HEALTHCARE WILL BE A MAJOR STAGE FOR THE WEB3 REVOLUTION. The one thing that remained constant, between my two conversations with Eric Topol over the last decade, is belief in the limitless opportunities for startup healthcare entrepreneurs. That’s true. But the start-up world of 2011 and 2021 are radically different. Ten years ago, the Web 2.0 upheaval of topdown platforms like Facebook was still raging. Today we are in the early stages of the Web3 revolution of cryptocurrencies and other so-called “DAOs” (decentralized autonomous organizations). Wall Street might be the first industry to be turned upside down by Web3 technologies like Bitcoin. But healthcare is equally vulnerable and, as Topol predicts, will be dramatically disrupted over the next decade.