60 Minutes - 6/28/2020: Voting During the Pandemic, The Wild West of Testing, Probiotics

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

The pandemic has forced election officials to explore ways to keep the public safe at the polls and offer alternatives to in-person voting. A three-month investigation reveals federal officials failed to immediately stop the distribution of many COVID-19 antibody tests they knew were flawed, leading to inaccurate data about the spread of the virus. Those stories on this week's 60 Minutes. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. The Democrats are also trying to rig the election by sending out tens of millions of mail-in ballots using the China virus as the excuse for allowing people not to go to the polls. Why is President Trump so concerned about vote by mail? The president votes by mail.

The president votes absentee. That's different. And by the way, President Obama did it. President Bush did it. It's not uncommon. Exactly. It's not uncommon. We want to have a test that will tell us, you know, with some reliability, have we been infected? And ideally, can we go back into society and be safe? The truth is, we don't yet have that information. The test cannot provide that assurance.

I think a lot of people think if they get this antibody test and they test positive, that they are going to have a shield that allows them to go to the grocery store without their mask on. Is that what a positive antibody test means? I think we cannot safely say that to people yet. This is a snapshot of the microbiome. And then this is the trillions of bacteria there. They're represented by the different colors. The microbiome, the bacterial community in our gut, is a wonder. They help process the food that we consume, but they do a lot more than that.

They make vitamins. They're able to produce essential amino acids. They're able to talk to our immune system and help educate the immune system. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions.

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. On Tuesday, voters will cast ballots in three state primary elections. So far this election

year, voting during the pandemic has been an exercise in chaos, long lines, and aggravation. With no end to the scourge and no vaccine in sight, a recent Pew Research survey found 70% of Americans want to stay safe and mail in their ballots for the November general election. Voting absentee or by mail has been growing for decades. In 2016, almost a quarter of all votes was sent through the mail. But this year, high demand has strained the resources of red states and blue, and the practice has become embroiled in political controversy. Democrats want to expand access to mail-in voting. President Trump says it's prone to fraud and threatens his re-election. The controversy ignited this spring in Wisconsin, a critical battleground state President Trump won in 2016 by less than 1%. It might not look like it, but on this day, April 7th,

the state of Wisconsin was under a stay-at-home order because of the coronavirus. In Milwaukee, residents stood in lines for hours waiting to cast ballots for judges and the presidential primaries. Many wore masks. Some bore signs of frustration. The lines of frustration were preceded by weeks of intense political wrangling over how or whether to hold an election in a worsening pandemic. Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, originally called for the election to proceed. But in late March, as the number of COVID-19 cases climbed, he first proposed sending absentee ballots to all registered voters. Then the day before the election, issued an executive order postponing it.

There's not a sufficiently safe way to administer in-person voting tomorrow. Republicans fumed at the last-minute move. The political brawl ended up before the Wisconsin and the U.S. Supreme Courts. Just hours before the polls were to open, the courts handed each side a victory. The Republicans got the election reinstated. Democrats won approval to count late arriving absentee ballots postmarked by election day. Justin Clark, senior counsel for President Donald Trump's campaign, advised Wisconsin Republicans he blames Democratic Governor Tony Evers for the chaos and told us the Democrats are cynically using the pandemic to expand their voter base with mail-in absentee ballots. We have tons and tons of different ways for people to vote if they have a

fear of COVID-19. We have early vote that goes on for weeks ahead of an election in most places, but make no mistake, voting in person is far more secure and safer than voting by mail. Even in the time of pandemic? By safer, what I mean is that it's going to be a much more secure outcome. In-person voting should not have happened in the state of Wisconsin on April 7th. It was dangerous. It was reckless. Neil Albrecht is head of Milwaukee's election commission. He told us the coronavirus scared so many poll workers, half of them over age 60,

he could man only five polling places. He usually has 180. Americans take great pride in our democratic system. Did that system suffer on April 7th? It suffered greatly. A lot of people in the state of Wisconsin had to choose between their health or casting a ballot. I don't believe that is a good representation of democracy. The Wisconsin Health Department reported 71 people tested positive for COVID-19 after voting or working at the polls, but can't say definitively that was the cause. To avoid the virus, more Wisconsin voters cast absentee ballots in the primary than ever before.

So it's about an 800 percent request in absentee ballots. Did I hear you correctly? You had requests for eight times more absentee ballots than normal? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I can tell you, and I don't think this is unique to Wisconsin, states are not equipped for that type of surge. Earlier this month in Georgia, in addition to having brand new voting machines malfunction, so many voters never received their absentee ballots, they ended up snaking around polling places on election day. In Wisconsin and Georgia, the long lines were mostly in urban areas with large populations of Black and Latino voters. Sherilyn Ifill is president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She says ballot regulations have accelerated since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

When we talk about voters being targeted, everyone knows that the low-hanging fruit is going to be Black voters, Black and Latino voters. We are the ones who stood in the street and stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and risked our lives to be able to fully participate in the political process. And sometimes when we talk about voter suppression now, we cover it with this veneer of partisan conversation, which allows people to turn away from what is fundamentally a very, very ugly racial issue in our country. The Legal Defense Fund has gone to court in Texas, Louisiana, and South Carolina to challenge voting restrictions. Late Friday, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency request by Texas Democrats

to allow mail-in voting for all registered voters. The LDF had supported that case in lower court. Earlier in the week, the LDF had supported that case in lower court. Earlier in the week, the LDF won a ruling allowing Alabama voters to bypass photo ID and other requirements for absentee ballots in July runoff elections. What needs to be done to stop other Wisconsins from happening this fall? There's a whole regime of measures, some of which involve in-person voting and some of which involve absentee voting, that need to be in place in time for the November 2020 election. Mark Elias, the Democratic Party's lead attorney on voting rights,

has gone to court in Georgia and 17 other states to make sure they have sufficient in-person polling sites to remove or moderate restrictions to absentee voting, and to make sure ballots aren't rejected without giving voters a chance to appeal. The GOP says Elias is trying to strip away election safeguards and has amassed a $20 million war chest to fight the Democrats in court. They spend all of their time and energy and money opposing voting rights. Opposing voting rights. Oh, I don't think there's any question. Whatever

may have been going on under the surface in Republican circles and conservative circles in past election cycles, they are now not just whispering the quiet part out loud. Donald Trump is screaming the quiet part out loud. Donald Trump is screaming the quiet part out loud. The Democrats are also trying to rig the election by sending out tens of millions of mail-in ballots using the China virus as the excuse for allowing people not to go to the polls. This will be, in my opinion, the most corrupt election in the history of our country, and we cannot let this happen. If you're Donald Trump and your approval ratings are where they are and your ceiling for how many people will support you is as low as it is, you really only

have one choice, which is to decrease the number of people who vote. And I think that that explains what Donald Trump is tweeting about, about voting, why he is demonizing vote by mail. Why is President Trump so concerned about vote by mail? Vote by mail is less secure than voting in person. We have countless instances this year of ballots that were mailed to different places. I mean, how many times have you had a birthday card or a Christmas card that didn't make it to somebody? Add on top of that, trying to layer this in four months before an election, and you have a recipe for disaster. The president votes by mail. The president votes absentee. That's different. If you are absent, you're ill, you're out of state, you name it, there needs to be a mechanism whereby people

can get their vote cast. And by the way, President Obama did it. President Bush did it. It's not uncommon. Exactly. It's not uncommon. Absentee voting. Universal vote by mail is very different. It's a very different thing. Sounds like a distinction without much of a difference. The difference is the volume. The volume of live ballots being mailed out to people without the signature check, without the signature match, without the signing of the outer envelope. But the Federal Election Assistance Commission provided states with a roadmap for expanding vote-by-mail during the pandemic, everything from ballot design to signature verification software. But to be ready by November, the states have to ramp

up now. Congress appropriated $400 million to help the states. The nonpartisan Brennan Center at NYU calculated they'll need almost $4 billion. Oregon's vote-by-mail process already is up and running. The state pioneered the practice in 1998. Lifelong Republican Beverly Clarno is Oregon's Secretary of State and a proponent of vote by mail. President Trump has attacked vote by mail. He's called it dangerous. He says it's subject to massive fraud? What do you think when you hear that? Well, I think that try it, you might like it. Try it, you might like it? Yeah, try it, you might like it. Clarno says the Oregon system she oversees

is backed up with barcodes unique to each voter. She says it's more secure with drop boxes everywhere and produces some of the highest voter turnout rates in the country. Colorado, Hawaii, Utah, and Washington also have moved to vote-by-mail elections. A lot of people fear there's couldn't be fraud. In the 2016 election, we had about 20 cases of people voting in two different states. So we're just very certain that our system's very secure. Do you have any idea what percentage of the vote was fraudulent?

In 2016, if we had 2.8 million voters and only 22 people tried to vote in two states, that's not too bad. I'm not a mathematician, but that sounds like pretty good odds to me. So why do you think vote by mail has become so controversial? Well, it's not controversial in Oregon. I think that if you'd ask most Oregonians, they'd say, quite frankly, I like voting at my kitchen table. Most of the votes cast in this spring's elections were by mail or absentee. But Republicans in Iowa and Georgia are trying to prohibit election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. The legal defense fund's Sherrilyn Ifill says the country should be united

in ensuring everyone has the right to vote. So do you see this becoming a battle in the fall over just whose vote counts? If a lot of people vote absentee, absentee ballots are not all counted on election night. And so we're going to have to wait for those votes to be counted. We need to become grown-up citizens and we need to let the process play

itself out. I think it's a shame that it's going to be a battle, but it is going to be a battle. With the pandemic still bedeviling the country, election officials in most states expect the surge of absentee ballots to crest in November. Lawyers for both parties expect the lawsuits will intensify too. Does the result of the election hinge on these legal battles? The president views vote by mail as a threat to his election. I think he's right. I think he's dead right. If we inject chaos and confusion into the election and we don't have faith in the result, I think that's a political threat to the president. You know, the American voting system is quite fragile,

and it is not a system that is built to handle a lot of stresses. The pandemic puts a unique stress on the system. And then on top of all of that, you have the president of the United States every day, virtually, telling people that the voting system is not fair, the voting system is rigged, the voting system is not to be trusted. And that is an external stress that makes everything about the voting process harder. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling.

History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Wyatt Earp, the gunslinger who helped tame the American West once said, fast is fine, but accuracy is final. The same thing could be said about testing for

COVID-19. Back in March, the Food and Drug Administration took the unprecedented step of allowing COVID antibody tests to flood the market without review. The tests were billed as a critical tool to assess where the virus had spread and who might have immunity. But in the government's rush to get more people tested quickly, it may have missed the mark. Over the course of a three-month investigation, 60 Minutes has learned that federal officials knew many of the antibody tests were seriously flawed, but continued to allow them to be sold anyway. Now, as coronavirus surges in parts of the country, that government failure is complicating efforts to know the reach of the coronavirus. Laredo, Texas is a border town on the banks of the Rio Grande River, population 270,000.

It was founded in the 1700s as its own country. This spring, as it prepared to fight COVID, Laredo found itself alone on the frontier again. Everybody was looking for supplies. Everybody was having challenges. Robert Castaneda, a Laredo resident, owns two emergency clinics in town. He was desperately trying to find kits to test his patients for COVID-19. It was maddening, to be honest with you. You go through your normal chain of distributors. Then you start hitting the wall with them, and they tell you that, you know, we're out.

We talked to the local health department, and I spoke to the state health department. I even reached out to FEMA, talked to FDA. All your avenues of trying to get testing supplies were exhausted. He says he went to his congressman's office for guidance and remarkably, in the waiting room, met a stranger who offered to connect him to a broker with access to antibody tests. But you must have thought, sitting in that office, and the guy says to you, hey, I might be able to help you out. This is terrific luck.

I mean, yes, there was a silver lining to that meeting. Exactly right. And so tell me about the deal that was placed in front of you about buying this. There was a minimum buy and that minimum buy was 20,000 kits. So that off the bat was half a million dollars to bring them into the city. Was there a lot of guidance at that point at the state level or the federal level for procuring? No, actually there was none. In March, many communities were competing against each other and the federal government to find COVID tests.

The Trump administration was under fire. Anybody that needs a test gets a test. They're there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful. But that was not true. Because of missteps a month earlier at both the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, diagnostic tests, which can tell if a person is currently infected with the coronavirus, were in short supply. The promise of a new serology or antibody blood test that could

determine if a person had been exposed to COVID-19 and developed protective antibodies was being heralded as the next best thing, a game changer that could get Americans back to work. On March 16th, in an attempt to get those tests to the public, the FDA took an unusual step. It announced it would allow antibody tests into the U.S. market without FDA review or formal clearance. Almost immediately, more than 100 companies offering antibody tests flooded the market. They came from every corner of the world, and none of them were FDA tested. Back in Laredo, Robert Castaneda agreed to the broker's deal and bought 20,000 antibody tests from a Chinese manufacturer, Anhui Deep Blue. He agreed to

share them with the city of Laredo, where coronavirus cases were spiking. The number of people testing positive for the virus continues going up. Drive-through testing sites were ready to round Laredo. The Chinese test kits arrived on March 30th, with the fanfare usually reserved for a winning high school football team in Texas. We were elated, very happy because now we were going to be able to test. Dr. Hector Gonzalez was the director of health in Laredo for nearly two decades. The city wanted to start testing frontline responders as soon as possible. But first, Dr. Gonzalez, weeks away from his retirement, decided to test the accuracy of the antibody tests. It was supposed to be 95 percent. All the tests, especially serologies, have to be 95% or better.

But Dr. Gonzalez found the test results varied wildly. The test didn't work well if the person had been recently exposed to the virus. The small sample he tested was only 20% accurate. At any point, you're doing these tests, and you're getting back these lousy numbers that the tests don't work. Do you look at each other and go, are we crazy? Surely this thing had to work better than this. Yes.

We said, did we do this right? And went back through our steps, and we were confident that we did things correctly. What strikes me about this is that here you are in Laredo, Texas, and you figure it out, but there was no kind of test happening at a federal level. Shouldn't there have been? Absolutely, but FDA had never checked them. And we Deep Blue did not respond to our request for comment. But Laredo officials had reported the bad test to the feds, who came to town to start an investigation and seize all 20,000 tests. And you're out a half million dollars?

We are. That hurts. It does. It does. The one thing that makes it a little bit easier to swallow is the fact that we try to do something good for our community. Did you feel duped? Yes, but more disappointed because we had such high hopes to test. We were ready to do public drive-through testing, and now we couldn't.

We were on hold. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of other antibody tests that the FDA also never reviewed continue to be mailed to businesses, clinics, and hospitals, where they were used to test patients, first-line responders, and health care workers. Dr. Alex Marson is an immunology researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. We spoke with him remotely. I got a text message from a good friend of mine here in the Bay Area, and she showed me pictures of her testing herself on an antibody test that had showed up at her own house. That made me realize that the availability of tests

was actually preceding the availability of reliable information on the performance characteristics of these tests. So in early March, Dr. Marson and Dr. Patrick Hsu, an assistant professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, assembled a team of 50 scientists to do what the FDA had not, test the antibody tests. We had to gather tests from around the world. We had to set up a lab with rigorous safety standards and ethical standards. We carefully curated a set of blood from positive people who had tested viral positive and had been seen in San Francisco hospitals and negative blood samples that were

taken from well before the COVID-19 outbreak. So all of this was unfolding extremely rapidly. A month later, the team published preliminary results on antibody tests from a dozen different companies. Did you feel the tests delivered as advertised? We saw a range. Some were closer to what we hoped for, and others were farther off. Some were way off. The tests are much less accurate when used on a person who was recently exposed to the virus. 20 days after exposure, the tests get better, but none are perfect. All but one test delivered so-called false positives, meaning they mistakenly signaled antibodies in people who did not have them. We want to have a test that will tell us, you know, with some reliability,

have we been infected, and ideally, can we go back into society and be safe? The truth is, we don't yet have that information. The test cannot provide that assurance. Dr. Marson says anyone with a positive antibody test should have a second or third test to confirm it. And even then, the results should be viewed cautiously because scientists still don't know what antibody levels are required to give immunity or how long it lasts. I think a lot of people think if they get this antibody test and they test positive that they are going to have a shield that allows them to enter into the workforce, to go to the grocery store without their mask on.

Is that what a positive antibody test means? I think we cannot safely say that to people yet. We need more scientific data to tell people exactly the characteristics of what protection will look like, if at all. Others were also raising red flags about antibody tests. On March 26, problems with the test in Spain were made public. A week later, Britain tossed out $20 million worth of antibody tests because of false results. And days later, the World Health Organization issued more warnings about the tests.

But the White House continued to sell the idea of antibody tests. And support our efforts to get Americans back to work by showing us who might have developed the wonderful, beautiful immunity. And the FDA? It still did not change its open-door policy. We asked the FDA why. They said the decisions were made with a careful balancing of risks and benefits. Dr. Margaret Hamburg was the FDA commissioner for six years during the Obama administration. We know that a lot of the European countries were having problems with these antibody tests before we opened up the market. Should we have known that? I don't think that we took advantage of that to the degree that we could have and should have. We know on March 16th, the FDA kind of opened up the market for antibody testing without review.

Was that a mistake? I do think that was a mistake because it led to a marketplace that was full of antibody tests of very variable quality and certainly could not be trusted in terms of their accuracy. It took 50 days for the FDA to reverse its course on antibody tests. In May, the agency required developers to apply for emergency authorization and submit data to show their tests worked. But by then, it was too late. Fraudulent tests flooded the market. Hundreds and hundreds of tests taken by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Democratic Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois is investigating who directed

the FDA's hands-off approach. The FDA was not policing this market. They adopted what's called a self-validation and voluntary compliance system. What does that mean, self-validation? Well, basically they were asking companies to validate that their tests worked. And guess what? Every company said they did. Then, in late May, nearly three months after the wave of unregulated antibody tests came to the U.S., the FDA started pulling tests off the market, 50 so far, including the ANWI Deep Blue test that was sold to Laredo. Customs agents and Homeland Security investigators now have the difficult task

of trying to stop all the banned tests from entering the country. But the flawed antibody tests are still being used, and the bad data collected from them is guiding critical decisions about when to reopen communities. in terms of a policy which is basically an anything-goes, Wild West type of approach to regulating a health care market. We just haven't seen that. I'm sure they would say, we cut through the red tape. We had to get anything to the market as fast as we could. These are unprecedented times. What's wrong with that argument?

When you open the floodgates to virtually any product being sold by anybody, well, guess what? Shysters, scam artists, and people who are preying on unsuspecting consumers enter the fray. The burden of keeping all those outlaws at bay fell to communities like Laredo and Dr. Hector Gonzalez. If you had not taken that step, if you had not tested these, what could the impact have been to this community? Oh, devastating. We wouldn't have a true indicator of the level of infection. The public deserves for us to give them something that's valid. Now, Dr. John LePook. There is an invisible universe hidden inside your body.

It's called the gut microbiome, a vast array of trillions of intestinal bacteria, hundreds of different species. They help digest your food in exchange for a warm, safe place to live. And we are only now starting to discover the gut microbiome plays a much larger role in our lives than we ever imagined. Some of those bacteria found inside us are replicated in commercially manufactured mixtures called probiotics. You see them on grocery and pharmacy shelves, and they're recommended by your friends and often by doctors like me. But do probiotics actually do anything? To find out, first you need to know

about the gut microbiome. This is a snapshot of the microbiome. And then this is the trillions of bacteria there. They're represented by the different colors. Dr. Jeff Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis is recognized as the father of the microbiome. He has spent decades exploring the mysteries of the bacterial community in our gut. It's a collection of microbes that are able to coexist with us in ways that still are unclear. Why are they there in the first place?

They help process the food that we consume, but they do a lot more than that. They make vitamins. We think about vitamins as only being in food. They're able to produce essential amino acids. They're able to talk to our immune system and help educate the immune system. That's different than, I think, the way a lot of people think about the intestinal tract. It's sort of like a tube, and the food comes in and it goes out, and that's it. But you're saying there's much more of an interaction. We're coming to understand that much more clearly. And this capacity to process the food that we consume

is linked to our health as well as our disease states. Research suggests a healthy microbiome may reduce the risk of diseases like cancer and diabetes. And in a landmark experiment, Dr. Gordon and his team made a lean mouse fatter by giving it the bacteria of the fat mouse. Are you saying that part of the cause of obesity might be the types of bacteria that are in the gut, in the microbiome? I am saying that. And we see that individuals who are obese have a less diverse microbial community compared to individuals who are lean. Is there evidence that you could take the microbiome that's associated with a lean person, transfer it to somebody who's overweight, and it might somehow help them to become thinner? There's a lot of work going on right now trying to test that hypothesis. Right now, the microbiome is an area of hot

research. Doctors are already treating illness by manipulating gut bacteria. A potentially life-threatening infection of the colon called C. diff has been successfully treated by moving bacteria from the gut of a healthy person to the gut of somebody who's sick. And millions of people are trying to improve their microbiomes themselves using probiotics, so-called good bacteria. But here's the problem. There's a lot of conflict among scientists

about whether probiotics provide any benefit at all. Over the years, there have been so many studies of various probiotic things. Good for this, and then the next study says it's not good for this. And truly, it's chaos. Dr. Patricia Hibbard is an infectious disease specialist and a professor of medicine at Boston University. Dr. Hibbard has reviewed hundreds of studies

in the medical literature about probiotics. She has also done her own studies and told us there's not enough high-quality research to recommend off-the-shelf probiotics for the medical problems for which they're commonly used. The whole idea that maybe throwing in good bacteria that we would take by mouth, that hopefully would land in the right places in the GI tract

and work with the immune system. We just don't know how to do any of that. But right now there is a multi-billion dollar industry that's growing. Yes. And people are out there buying this stuff. Right. So is there convincing evidence that commercially available probiotics have been found to be beneficial for

reducing diarrhea from antibiotics? No. Treating irritable bowel syndrome? No. Decreasing allergies? No. But probiotics are suggested as a remedy for all those things and more. Your digestive system has billions of bacteria, but life can throw them off balance. Restoring that balance of bacteria in the gut microbiome is just one goal touted by makers of probiotics. A $50 billion global industry sold to us in capsules, popsicles, cereal, tea, and some yogurt. And we're told probiotics can even help your dog. What if you could give your pet the advantage of probiotics? Many physicians and patients believe probiotics are worth trying,

and many believe they work. One of those physicians is Dr. Dan Merenstein. He's a professor of family medicine at Georgetown University, and he's on the board of a nonprofit industry finance group that promotes probiotic science. Dr. Merenstein is doing a clinical trial backed by the National Institutes of Health testing a probiotic cocktail. He's trying to see if it can prevent diarrhea in children taking antibiotics, a remedy other researchers have tried with mixed results. I think the data's there.

I recommend probiotics, mainly for people who are antibiotics and for people with irritable bowel disease. I wonder what our viewers are thinking right now, right? They're hearing you saying, it definitely helps, probiotics, and others saying, there's no good evidence that it helps. Are they throwing a brick through the television screen just about now? They are, but they've been throwing a brick, you know, for the last 20 years when we tell them vitamin D, everyone needs vitamin D and everyone needs, you know, echinacea for colds or zinc for colds. I think it's difficult to be a consumer because things change so quickly.

And I think we need more probiotic research. One cause of confusion may be the placebo effect. Some people using probiotics may feel better because they expect to feel better. And figuring out what probiotics do inside the gut is complicated. One reason is that each person's microbiome is unique, so the same probiotic may have different effects on different people. That's exactly what Professors Iran Elinav and Iran Segal found at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science.

We wanted to directly assess what the probiotics were doing and how they interact with what's already inside in our gut. The researchers collected thousands of samples from a small group of adult volunteers who were given probiotics. We've actually looked across the entire gastrointestinal tract at places where nobody has looked before. The volunteers all underwent multiple endoscopies

and colonoscopies. So you're going down the swallowing tube, into the stomach, and into the first part of the small intestine, and then colonoscopy, you're coming from below. Exactly. And then we gave some of these volunteers a very large combination of probiotics that are out there in your supermarket. And half of the individuals were given what we call placebo, which is an empty pill.

So the results were actually very striking. So what we're seeing is that half the people take the probiotics, and the probiotics, as they go in, they just go out, and they don't populate the gut. Was that surprising to you? That was highly surprising to us. Most of us, or all of us, are under the assumption these probiotics would settle in, at least temporarily, in our gut and would do the good things that we expect them to do.

The researchers also studied a treatment commonly recommended by doctors, giving probiotics to help restore the balance of gut bacteria wiped out by antibiotics. We found that the probiotics actually delayed the restoration of the bacteria of those individuals to what they had before, as compared to individuals who took antibiotics and then did nothing. So here, a lot of us have been taking probiotics with antibiotics because we think maybe that'll help us get back to normal more quickly, and this is showing the opposite. Exactly.

Exactly. Elinav and Segal's findings contradict much of the conventional wisdom about probiotics. Other scientists are now building on their work. To be clear, we're not against the concept of probiotics in general. We actually think that probiotics may have huge benefits, but we need to be very cautious in generally prescribing these microbes without knowing enough what they do. But we were surprised to learn that probiotics are added to some baby food and even infant formula.

About a fifth of the top-selling infant formula in the United States contains probiotics, and the market is growing. Most parents don't realize how little work there is to support the use of probiotic in infants. And yet, it's being used. It's being used. Dr. Frank Greer is Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics Clinical Report on Probiotics. So when you add probiotics to infant formula at this early stage, what could happen?

I wish I could answer that question, but I think part of the answer to that is we don't really know how probiotics work. So if we don't know how they work and we're not sure what they do, why are we adding them to infant formula? That's a great question. Why are we giving them to infants? Is there any convincing evidence that adding probiotics to infant formula is good for the baby? My answer to that would be no. That answer was unexpected coming from Dr. Greer. You see, a baby formula trade group, the Infant Nutrition Council of America, recommended him to explain their point of view.

So then why are we seeing it in so many different products? Well, it's easy to put in there because it's not very tightly regulated. him to explain their point of view. So then why are we seeing it in so many different products? Well, it's easy to put in there because it's not very tightly regulated. The Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, does not classify probiotic capsules as drugs. That means they do not have to be proven safe and effective. When added to anything, including infant formula, probiotics only need to meet a lower standard, generally recognized as safe. In rare cases, probiotics have been linked to severe infections in critically ill patients and those with weakened immune systems. Otherwise, they appear to be safe. If you could give probiotics early in life and potentially help, couldn't those same probiotics down the line have unintended consequences and hurt? It's possible, but I can't attest that there's any harm whatsoever down the line.

There's no evidence that says they're harmful. But are there long-term studies? No, there are no long-term studies. Without those studies, there's no way of knowing if giving probiotics to infants has unintended long-term consequences. The Infant Formula Trade Group, which recommended we interview Dr. Greer, sent us this statement. In formula-fed babies, probiotics promote a balance of bacteria in a baby's gut and simulate the benefits provided by breast milk. Well, I think that's ultimately formula industry's goal.

It's their goal. That's their goal. This doesn't do it. You know, putting a single probiotic organism in an infant formula doesn't promote the balance they're talking about. Despite disagreement about how or whether today's probiotics work, every scientist we spoke with was hopeful about the possibility of improving health

by manipulating the microbiome. Last year, Dr. Gordon's team reported that a special supplemental mixture of nutrients containing chickpeas, soy, bananas, and peanuts can repair the damaged microbiome of malnourished infants. Think about this. The idea that a defective development of a microbiome could impair the development of bones of the immune system, perhaps even the central nervous system. How incredibly extraordinary that our collection of microbes is so impactful. That's inspirational. But the task ahead is complex. We want to be able to develop interventions that are safe in the short term and the long term. And we want to make sure that we have it right. Regular viewers may have noticed that in this time of pandemic and protest for racial justice,

60 Minutes has continued to broadcast new stories through June. We hope you have found them illuminating and thought-provoking. But now it's time to begin reporting for next season, our 53rd, and spend time with our families. As we do each summer, we have prepared updates of some of our favorite stories to broadcast these next few weeks. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.