Consider This from NPR - Masks May Protect Those Wearing Them; Vaccines To Enter Large-Scale Trials

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci tells NPR he's glad the President is promoting masks, and hopes more frequent White House briefings will be a source of clear and concise public health messaging. Experimental coronavirus vaccines are headed for large-scale tests on tens of thousands of people. Multiple companies are preparing to begin those tests, a major hurdle in vaccine development. We know masks keep us from infecting others with the virus. Now, scientists believe they can also help protect the people wearing them.And NPR's Nurith Aizenmann reports that face coverings are one of the surest ways for cities and states to avoid returning to full lockdown measures and could potentially save 40,000 American lives. Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Many people say it is patriotic to wear a face mask. That is what the president tweeted on Monday with a photo of himself in a mask. I was very pleased to see the president wearing a mask and tweeting about masks. The vice president does that consistently. So I think we've turned the corner. We're on the road of a consistent message. Dr. Anthony Fauci told NPR today that's how you need to do it. Give clear and consistent public health messages. He said daily briefings from the president, which restarted this week, could be a way to do that. If we do this and we do it right, it will be very informative

for the American public. And I hope that that's what we see. The decision has been made that they will resume. Let's just see how it goes. Coming up, how different vaccine trials are going and why scientists now think masks actually protect the people wearing them, too. This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Tuesday, July 21st. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Integrative Therapeutics, creator of Physician's Elemental Diet, a medical food developed by clinicians for the dietary management of IBS, IBD, and SIBO under the supervision of a physician. Two of the leading experimental vaccines are looking pretty good. One vaccine that's being studied by researchers in China has been tested on more than 500 people.

Their immune response was promising, and they had no major side effects. A second vaccine, in an even bigger study, on more than 1,000 people, was tested by scientists at the University of Oxford. The vaccine safety, as we had hoped, looked fine. Usual vaccine side effects, but nothing serious. Adrian Hill is the principal investigator of that study. And perhaps more importantly, the immune responses that we're measuring in the people vaccinated

look rather encouraging. So now that Oxford study is expanding. Researchers are testing the vaccine on 10,000 people in the UK, and they're planning a study of 30,000 people in the U.K. And they're planning a study of 30,000 people in the U.S. A study that large is a really important phase in all this. It's how scientists prove that the vaccine isn't just safe, but it works well in lots of different people. More companies are headed in that direction. This is obviously the area of greatest concern to our constituents right now, one of the

areas. At a House hearing today, major drug manufacturers laid out their best case vaccine timelines. Up to 100 million doses of commercial scale vaccine product in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses of our vaccine in 2021. That's John Young from Pfizer. Reps from other companies made similar predictions about the soonest they could produce a vaccine, like Moderna. We would hope in the fall or towards the end of the year. Johnson & Johnson. By the end of March. And Merck. 2021 at the earliest. Thank you. Thanks to all of our witnesses. I really appreciate that you're now... Even if the companies can produce a vaccine by those dates, they still need final approval from the government on safety and effectiveness. And here's also what's interesting. Not all of these vaccines work the same way. Vaccine specialist Naur Barzev at Johns Hopkins says that's good.

You never know what pitfalls lie ahead. It's a bit of a hurdle, that race, you know, to clear lots of hurdles. And so often it's good that there are many candidates because we know that not all of them are going to end up at the finish line. When a vaccine does cross that finish line, there'll be decisions about who gets it first, like health care workers and other people at high risk, older people, people with conditions that make them vulnerable. And even then, vaccines will only be ready because the companies will start mass producing them before it's clear they work. What we're hearing from the companies who have been given a lot of money by the federal government to do this is to start making doses before you know that the trial works. That will save weeks and weeks of development, Anthony Fauci told PBS recently.

And his prediction is the same as it's been for months. We could get a signal of safety and efficacy by as we get into the late fall and the early winter. And if we do, then by the beginning of 2021, we could have a vaccine. While all this is happening, there is another vaccine that could be really important this year. It already exists, and it's cheap and easy to get. The flu shot. Public health officials are desperately hoping that more Americans will get one this year. That could keep more people from getting sick, which is important,

because hospitals that are already treating lots of COVID patients can't handle more sick people. The problem, though, with both vaccines could be getting people to take them. The percentage of Americans who got a flu shot last year was just 45%. My mask protects you and your mask protects me. That is what we know. While a mask might not protect you from catching the virus, it does help prevent each of us from spreading it to others. Now, though, there's new and growing evidence that actually a face covering might stop enough virus to keep the person wearing it from getting seriously ill.

It really is that the less virus that you get in, the less sick you're likely to be. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said masks appear to cut down on the total amount of viral particles that the person wearing the mask takes in. And you're likely to get what's called an asymptomatic infection or not have any symptoms at all. That could mean fewer people who get really sick and fewer people who end up dying. So it really looks like any country that has adopted universal mask wearing, and many, many countries have, even as they open up and they're seeing each other more and there's more cases, it has led to much, much fewer deaths or severe

illness. This thing about masks limiting the number of viral particles is just one more data point in the argument for masks and how important they are at slowing the virus down. NPR's Noreet Eisenman has more on what scientists are still learning. For months, scientists have been poring over data from across the globe, China, Japan, Germany, the U.S., to compare what's happened in places where most people use masks versus places where most do not. Ali Mokdad is on a research team that's tried to make sense of all these studies.

He's with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. You take every study that has been published on the protective effect of masks and then you reanalyze all the data. And they came up with a bottom line estimate. If 95% of people wear cotton masks when they're interacting with other people, it reduces transmission by 30%. In other words, each infected person

will go on to infect 30% fewer people. In fact, says Mukdad, The mask could be even more powerful. Because that's assuming everyone is just wearing cloth masks, not surgical masks or N95s, which are even more effective. Then Mukdad and his colleagues ran a simulation. Based on the pandemic's current trajectory through the U.S., they forecast that by November 1st, about 85,000 more people will die from COVID-19.

But if 95% of Americans start wearing cloth masks? We find that 40,000 of these mortalities could be avoided between now and November 1st. And there's more. Based on the U.S. experience this past spring, Mukdad's team have come up with an estimate for how bad it would need to get for U.S. officials to return to full-on lockdown. Texas is just a month away. But if everyone there started wearing masks right now, they just might avoid it. Ashish Jha of Harvard largely agrees. Look, we've never tried to use masks as our primary strategy when outbreaks are this bad.

But I do believe that if we want to avoid a complete lockdown, we've got to at least give it a shot. Jha, who directs the university's Global Health Institute, helped build a tool for counties and states to determine when the virus is spreading fast enough that the only way to get a handle on it is to revert, to stay at home mode. And yet, he says, If you look at the hottest of the hot spots in America, the Arizona, Texas, Florida, South Carolina, I think there may be a window. Of course, this would require a major change in Americans' behavior. Some estimates suggest only 40% currently wear masks nationwide. Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at University of Florida, says this is one of many reasons she's wary of focusing

too heavily on masks. It's the idea that if we just did this one thing perfectly, that we would be fine. But I think the real solution is going to be doing a lot of things okay. Narit Eisenman, NPR News. Additional reporting in this episode from our colleagues at All Things Considered and from NPR's Richard Harris. For more news, download the NPR One app or tune into your local public radio station. Supporting that station makes this podcast possible. We'll be back with more tomorrow.

I'm Kelly McEvers. Don't miss the national conversation with me, Jen White, every weekday on NPR's 1A. News, views, and insight for the relentlessly curious. A space for those willing to share what they know and ready to hear the other side of the story. Subscribe to 1A Now and leave a review.