Science Friday - Fauci On Vaccines and Variants, Mummy Mystery, Texas Power Grid Failure. Feb 19, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Fauci Says Majority Of U.S. Adults Likely To Be Vaccinated By Late Summer We’re about a month shy of a big anniversary: one year since the World Health Organization officially labeled COVID-19 a pandemic. Since then, a lot has changed—and a lot has not. We have more information than ever about COVID-19, but there are still a lot of unknowns about the illness. While about 40 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of a vaccine, it’s unclear when we can expect to return to a sense of normalcy. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joins Ira to shed some light on the latest news about variants and vaccines—and the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. He predicts vaccines are likely to be open to all adults starting in May or June. “By the time you get everyone vaccinated who could be vaccinated, that’s going to take several months,” Fauci says. “So it won’t be until the end of the summer.” Fauci and Ira also discuss when it’s ok for families to get together without a laundry list of precautions, as well as his legacy from decades at the NIH.   Uncovering An Ancient Mummy Mystery Ever since the discovery of King Seqenenre-Taa-II’s mummy in Egypt in the mid-1800s, it was clear that the king had met an untimely demise. His hands were clenched in a claw-like gesture, and the pharaoh’s head bore several fatal wounds. But the exact nature of his death was lost to time: Had he died in some sort of palace intrigue? Or was he executed? Writing in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, radiologist Sahar Saleem and her collaborators argue that a CT scan of the mummy supports the theory that the king died during conflict with the Hyksos, an Asian group that invaded and controlled northern Egypt. The researchers say that the wounds and other signs on the body suggest the king was captured, bound, and executed by multiple assailants. SciFri’s Charles Bergquist spoke with Saleem about her research, and how it fills in clues about the ancient mystery. Why Did The Texas Power Grid Fail? More than 500,000 Texans were still without power Thursday as another round of snow and ice moved through the state, three days after a historic wave of cold and snow that prompted the state power regulator to initiate rolling blackouts in an effort to prevent a larger, months-long outage. But as Texans remain without power in freezing temperatures, the side-effects of infrastructure failure are their own disaster: people freezing in their homes, risking carbon monoxide poisoning, or struggling to get food and water. Why was the electric grid so damaged by winter weather? The MIT Technology Review’s Amy Nordrum explains the fragility of Texas’ power grid, and how a lack of winterized infrastructure has ripple effects for the whole state. Plus, she talks about the successful landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, new smells in the toolbox against invasive bark beetles, and more recent science stories.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, Dr. Anthony Fauci answers your questions about the pandemic and what the future might still hold. But first, the state of Texas has been in crisis this week after an historic cold snap and series of ice storms knocked power plants offline and isolated residents and unheeded homes. Millions were without electricity for days. Outages have affected everything, from hospitals to water treatment, facilities and dozens have died. How could this have happened? Here to talk about the Texas Power Grid and other stories, Amy Nordrum, commissioning editor for the MIT Technology Review. Welcome back, Amy. Thank you, Ira. The stories coming out of Texas have been so hard to hear.

Can you fill us in on why this electric grid was so hard hit by the winter storm this year? It has been an incredible story this week, and the first thing to know is that Texas does operate its own electric grid, which isn't subject to federal regulations and connects to the rest of the U.S. in only a few places. The rest of the U.S. is much more interconnected and is able to import and export power across state lines much more easily. These ice storms also happened at a time when some of the facilities in Texas that are usually generating power were already scheduled to be offline due to their normal winter maintenance. And that created more of a problem when other plants began to fail. Many coal and

gas facilities. A few nuclear plants and wind turbines also went offline. There was so much demand for power from people trying to turn up their thermostats and deal with these cold temperatures. And then many fewer facilities online to generate it caused a major problem. What about this concern that the grid could go down completely if it got too stressed? We saw people who regulate the grid saying that. Yeah, Irkot, the state's electricity distributor. That was the main problem that they were up against all week, a lot of the blackouts that you saw in the outages, they were actually created by Urquot. They were intended to keep the grid up as best they could just to maintain the reliability of the grid, even though some people didn't have power during those times. The idea was to keep

the whole grid still up and operating because a catastrophic scenario would be if the entire grid went offline and then it would take weeks or potentially months to bring the grid back online. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, but hopefully this is a wake-up call to power regulators and power facilities that, you know, investing in the winterization and investing in insulating their facilities for future winter storms like this is a major priority going forward. Yeah, so they'll have to change the way they do things and prepare themselves for this happening again. Absolutely.

I mean, it's happened before. It will happen again. It's hard to tell exactly when. But, you know, these facilities, it's not that they can't operate in cold temperatures. They do operate in much colder temperatures in many parts of the U.S. and many parts of the world. It's just that the facilities in Texas weren't winterized or insulated to handle such low temperatures as they typically would be. And winterizing these means not leaving pipes or gauges exposed to the air, just putting them inside of a building and particularly, you know,

invested in doing that for the state's natural gas plants where about half the state's electricity generation comes from. Is there any forecast when people in Texas will be able to stop worrying about the power grid? Do they just need it to get warm enough this week? Well, yesterday there was power restored for millions of Texans, which was wonderful news. There are still some without power. And there are many still under boil advisories. There's now concerns about burst pipes that had happened during the past week that may be contaminating water. So this isn't a super quick recovery.

But temperatures are supposed to rise this weekend into next week and hopefully stay that way for the near-term future. So hopefully the worst of this is over. Let's go from something that's worse to much better. and I'm talking about NASA's Perseverance rover making a spectacular landing on Mars yesterday. Here's Dr. Swati Mohan in Mission Control yesterday as the rover safely reached the surface of Mars. Touch on a sound confirmed. Perseverish safely on the surface of Mars. Ready to begin seeking the sand of past life. Yeah, that was some spectacular landing, wasn't it, Amy?

Yes, it really was. So Perseverance landed safely in its intended location, Jezro Crater, yesterday afternoon. And really exciting to see it's the fifth rover we've had there. And it's got some really cool stuff on it, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, even the systems that it used to touch down were, several of them were new, which is always kind of a stressful thing, testing several new things at once. So it used the advanced kind of visual camera system that took images and analyzed them in real time

to kind of spot hazards and find its way to an ideal landing spot. And now that it's there, it will be doing a number of experiments on the surface of Mars, one called Moxie that will test whether it's possible to convert the carbon dioxide and Mars's atmosphere into oxygen, which could be useful for future Martian colonies. And then another one that I'm excited about, a tiny helicopter called ingenuity that's going to try to do the first kind of self-powered flight on another planet. And what makes radio guys like me excited, it does have a microphone on it, although I'm not sure who's going to say testing one, two, three before they actually try it out. Yeah, we could have the first

audio clip from Mars, which is super cool. You'd be able to potentially hear if everything went well, what the descent itself sounded like, what the landings sounded like, and maybe even, you know, what the surface of Mars sounds like, the winds and the atmosphere there. Yeah. How soon does it start collecting data? I would imagine it's already setting itself up to do that. Yeah, it is. I know that now NASA is going to be doing several weeks of testing on the rover just to make sure that everything is an order and that the systems are working properly. And then it will really begin to explore the crater in earnest in a couple of weeks or certainly by this summer. Let's move from the red planet to a planet that may or may not exist. We've been talking about this for years on this show.

You've got an update on the debate over whether there's a planet nine in the solar system. That's right. Yes. Back in 2016, researchers at Caltech had said they thought there might be a ninth planet orbiting far out there in our solar system. And their theory was based on an observation of these far-off objects called extreme trans-Neptonian objects, or E-T-NOs. And they detected six of these objects that seemed to be orbiting in a peculiar way. They had these elongated orbits around the sun instead of a circle. And they appeared to all be kind of clustered in one direction, which led them to think that there was a giant planet out there whose gravitational pole had made all these smaller objects kind of line up in that fashion. But last week, a team from the University of Michigan

posted a pre-print paper that challenged this theory, saying it could have just been a product of where astronomers had been looking at that time. So for their new study, they looked at 14 other objects like this that weren't included in the original analysis, and they say they didn't find any evidence of flustering, and that it couldn't just be a random distribution of ET&O throughout throughout space. And since these ET&Os have these long orbits, you know, it's really only possible to detect them when they're close to Earth. So if you look at any particular time, you might see a few that happen to be clustered or look like they're clustered in one direction. But if you look again later, you'd see, you know, a lot more and they might be in a different area. So this evidence does

seem to kind of challenge the planet nine theorists. And it's still a small sample size. This new one just had 14 of these objects. The original had six. So there might be still, you know, many more out there that we could detect every time and give us a better picture. The next story is about artificial intelligence tools used in hiring and other kinds of assessments. We have talked about the very legitimate concerns about racial, gender, and other bias these algorithms can embody. And this story looks at one of the most commonly proposed solutions for bias. Tell us more about that.

Yes, as you said, AI bias, it's a well-known problem in AI, you know, automated systems producing biased results when the data that they're trained on is biased in any number of ways. And the solution that's often proposed is AI audits. And there's actually a rule being debated right now in New York City that would make these kinds of audits mandatory for companies using AI. So an audit would kind of interrogate or examine the algorithm, used in an AI tool, and determine whether or not it's fair, whether or not it's biased. And so reporter Hilkas-shellman looked into these audits for us to see, you know, what they could really achieve. And in her report, she found that they're really not well-defined, and they're often much more limited in scope

than the average person might think. While they're a good step, they're certainly worth doing. They're not a final fix. They can't say with certainty that there's not the chance of or risk of bias in any AI tool. So what we need is some standardization is what you're saying. Yeah, you know, there's many AI auditing firms right now just kind of doing their own thing, operating AI audits independently with no real common definition of what that means or how it examines fairness or what it tests for. And so that would be a good step is kind of standardizing this across the industry and across firms that are working on this. And it might also be helpful to have a third party involved, whether it's a government regulator or somebody who isn't involved

with the company, isn't paid for by the company like many of these AI auditors are to just avoid any conflict of interest. And we end today with the Beatles, the insect kind. and learning more about how they smell. Wow. Tell us about that. Yeah, so in this case, bark beetles. These are a huge problem throughout the West. They're native to the U.S., but their populations have exploded as temperatures have increased and they've killed millions of spruce trees in Colorado and California and Alaska. And they're also a big problem in Sweden and Asia. So researchers at Lund University have been trying to figure out how these beetles find their way around and what might be done to stop them, basically. And they knew that.

these beetles rely on smell because they have tiny eyes and really bad eyesight. So they've done some work to figure out like what smells the beetles are attracted to. And they used the genetic technique to examine the antenna of these beetles and found that each beetle has 73 different olfactory receptors on its antenna. And so then they took a panel of different smells and pheromones and tested them across the receptors to find which ones they responded to. And on their first go, they found a number of pheromones that come from beetles themselves that the receptors responded to. so it does seem like the beetles are able to detect and move toward other beetles, find their friends.

And they're continuing this work for the rest of the receptors. They're starting to find evidence that the beetles can also respond to like pheromones that come from competitor species and also potentially compounds in the spruce trees themselves, which might be how they navigate to trees. So they plan to continue this work until they've kind of figured out what all the receptors respond to and, you know, what all smells are involved. And they're linked up with another team working on a kind of biosensor that would be able to use some of these pheromones to maybe detect where beetles are present in trees.

When it's not yet obvious, just from looking at the tree that it's infested with beetles and perhaps do some early treatment or remove that tree if it seems like it's a lost cause. Do you think if you find what pheromones the beetles are attracted to, you could lure them away from the tree using that smell? That's another possibility. There's lots of different ways that this information might be used for or against the beetles. Another technique would be to create a kind of synthetic pheromone that mimics the smell of other beetles that gets their first and kind of blocks their ability to detect and find their way to another tree or to another beetle.

That's certainly a possibility. Yeah, maybe you can find something the beetles hate to smell, and then you could spray that on the tree and they won't go there. All kinds of stuff. Once you get to know what they like to smell or don't like to smell, thank you, Amy. Thanks, Ira. Always interesting stuff. Amy Nordrum, commissioning editor for the MIT Technology,

review. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll be talking to Dr. Anthony Fauci about the view from a new administration and his hopes as we close in on our one-year anniversary of COVID-19's global pandemic designations. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're about a month shy of a big anniversary. The one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization labeling COVID-19 a pandemic. It was a nerve-wracking time. A lot has changed and a lot has not. The good news, we have more information than ever about COVID-19

and vaccinations are happening all over the world. But there are still a lot of unknowns about the illness and when we can get back to normal. One thing that has stayed the same, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is still a trusted source of COVID-19 information, and he's also my guest this week. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Nice to have you back. Thank you for joining us this hour. My pleasure, Ira. A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Ben Hurley of Mount Sinai about the virus, and for a few questions, he admitted he had no answers, and I told him I was going to create something called the Fauci Rule. When you don't know the answer to a question, don't make it up, just invoke the Fauci. rule, which is named after your statement when President Biden took office, that you would tell us if you don't know an answer to a question. And I hope that using your name is okay with you.

It's fine, Ira. Go ahead. It's not good to guess when you're dealing with public health measures. Yeah. And don't you feel it's very important for scientists when communicating with the public to say they don't have all the answers? Yeah, I mean, that's critical. I think people feel because they are representing science and science is knowledge, that when they're asked a question that somehow or other, they have to give an answer. And one of the things that I've guided myself by is that, you know, if you really don't know, just say you don't know. Do you feel the level of progress in fighting COVID-19 over the last few months is now where you want it to be? Well, you know, certainly vaccines have been such an extraordinary success story over and

and above what we really anticipated. We were hopeful that we could quickly get a vaccine, proven to be safe and highly efficacious, and get it into the arms of people in a relatively short period of time. But what has been accomplished is really unprecedented and extraordinary. The sequence of the virus only being made public on January 10th in a phase one trial having occurred about 65 days later, a phase three trial on July 27th, and then vaccine literally in the arms of people by December. That would have been something you and I, if we were having a conversation the way we used to years and years ago, we would have thought that this would be completely beyond the realm of reality, but it's happened. And what it is, it's an extraordinary

testimony to the exquisite scientific advances that have been. made not only in vaccine platform technology, but also in structure-based vaccine design to get the spike protein in the right confirmation to be maximally immunogenic. All those things are a real testimony to science. How long do you think it will be before vaccinations will be available to everyone? I saw last week you said April and now I heard you say this week maybe closer to May or June. Is it a moving target? No, actually, in some respects it is. And the reason I kind of modified the statement, because I was hoping that when Jay and Jay,

Johnson and Johnson vaccine came online, they have promised to have 100 million doses. And I was hoping we would get a substantial chunk of that in April. But that's not going to happen. It likely will get few doses this month, maybe less than 20 next month, And then only after that will we start getting increased numbers. So that's the reason why I modified my statement saying I would have liked it to have been April where everyone can start getting vaccinated, even if we start in April, which now I don't think we will, by the time you get everyone vaccinated who could be vaccinated, that's going to

take several months. So it won't be until the end of the summer before that happens. Does the federal government have any way to boost the number of vaccinations available? Or is it purely up to the drug companies about how many they can make? Well, the government contracts, as we did with Moderna and Pfizer and J&J and Novavax and and AstraZeneca, what the government can do theoretically if the vaccines are not being made quickly enough, is to invoke the Defense Production Act, the DPA, which means that they could literally take over a factory or a company and say, you've got to start making this vaccine.

The only problem with that, Ira, is that the process of making an MRI vaccine is so complicated and so exquisitely sensitive that by the time you marshaled another company or another group to do that, we will already be into the realm of the spring and summer where we have the 600 million doses that we contracted for. Let's talk about the variants that everybody has been talking about, like this listener Young in California. I would like to ask Dr. Fauci about the strategy of our government and the scientific community with regard to the emerging virus variants, especially those which significantly changed the shape of the spike, and thus reduced the efficacy of the existing vaccines.

What is the strategy for fighting these variants? Well, the first thing you have to do, and we're doing this now, much more vigorously than we were before, is to intensify our genomic sequencing, namely sequence surveillance, so we can see what is going on in the community, What mutants are evolving? Let's take a couple of examples that would answer the person's question.

So one of the ones that is dominating now in the U.K., and modelists predicts since it's already here in the United States that by the end of March, it could be the dominant strain that's circulating, and that's the B117 strain, again, that originates. likely in the UK, that one, although it spreads more readily and is more transmissible, and recent data indicate that it could even be a higher degree of pathogenesis, the fact is that our vaccines do very well against it. It doesn't evade the protection of the vaccine, nor does it influence the capabilities of the monoclonal antibodies. In contrast, the South African variant, the 351, that is different because that diminishes considerably the efficacy of certain of the monoclonal antibodies. And it also diminishes the efficacy of the vaccine. It diminishes it by multiple foe, but it doesn't take it below the threshold of efficacy. So the vaccines that we're

using now still are effective, not as much against mild disease. but quite effective against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death. So what we're doing about it besides surveillance is that we're taking the first steps towards the possibility of having to upgrade the vaccine by making a booster shot that is reflecting and coding for the spike protein that represents the mutant as opposed to the wild type virus. So it's surveillance. It's the use of our own vaccine, and it's the development of variants of the original vaccine. When you say a booster shot, does that mean for everyone who got the first two shots,

they would go back for a booster shot later? That is conceivable. I don't believe we need to do that now, but we're preparing for the possibility that we might. If it turns out that the variance totally dominate and the current vaccines don't work. Let's say a new variant that's worse than 117, that's worse than 351, then you might want to make a multivalent vaccine that is good against the wild type, but also against the mutants, so that you can essentially, when you start to de novo vaccinate someone, you vaccinate them right from the get-go. with the mutant vaccine. And when do you make that decision? And who makes that decision to make the modified version? Well, I mean, we have a very strong relationship of a public-private partnership

with each of the six companies that the federal government has made a major investment in. You know, we had Operation Warp Speed from the last administration that was responsible for putting to together the plans to get these five or six vaccines developed and put into clinical trial. The equivalent of that is a leadership group that makes those decisions. So it's a core group of public-private partnership that makes that decision. Our listeners, a lot of them have questions about vaccines for children. Here's one from Dean and Tucson. Where do we stand on inoculating children? Seems if we really want to open schools, everybody in inside the building should be vaccinated, children, teachers, custodians, etc.

Well, ultimately, you obviously want to vaccinate all children, similar to vaccinating children for the common childhood diseases as well as influenza. So let's get that straight. We definitely want to do that. However, since children are vulnerable and generally don't have informed consent for themselves, that you want to make sure the vaccine is both safe and effective in a normal adult population before you start vaccinating children. We've already proven that's the case. So what has started now from a number of companies, particularly Pfizer, is to do an age de-escalation study. In other words, taking children from 12 to 9, then 9 to 6, and then further down, to show that the vaccine in a phase 1 and 2A trial is both safe and induces the kind of response

that you would predict would be protective because it correlates with the response in those individuals who've gone through the efficacy trial. So you don't have to do a 30,000 person trial for every age group of a children. You could do it in a much smaller group of 1,000, 2,000, just to show safety and to show immunogenicity. That's going on right now. Likely, Ira, it won't be until the end of the summer, the early fall, where we do get to that point. Yeah. Our listeners alluded to schools reopening in person. And that is a big priority for the Biden administration, is it not? Very much so. But to get the schools open, it isn't a sine qua non. You don't have to have all the teachers vaccinated and all the children vaccinated. Depending upon the degree of circulating

virus in the community, you can get the kids back to school as long as you practice certain well-defined public health measures that are very clearly delineated in the recent, published CDC guidelines for getting children back to school K to 12. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Is there a special or one of the vaccines that you feel is going to be more effective in kids than the others? No, we don't know that yet, Ira, because we haven't tested them in children. Right now, the ones that we have an EUA for are the Moderna and the Pfizer product, the

MRNA. Very soon, likely by February 26th, the data from the J&J will have been fully evaluated by the FDA and their advisory committee will meet and hopefully we'll see about getting an EUA for that product also. So many questions from our listeners about kids. Listener Kerry on Facebook wants to know if there's any data so far about adverse reactions and children during these vaccine trials, and more specifically, if any epigenetic predispositions, cause complications? The answer is no and no. First of all, we are not aware of any epigenetic conditions that are issues with this type of a vaccine. The only experience now is that one of the companies that started off at 16 are now down to 12-year-olds. So we do have some experience,

with 12-year-old, but not yet with the 12 to 9 and 9 to 6. Where are we at in terms of treatments? We've talked about vaccines. Now, what about treatments for COVID-19? Anything new being tried out? Well, there have been a number of studies, some of them, placebo-randomized controlled trials, that have shown efficacy, particularly in late disease. For example, glucocorticoids dexamethazone, was shown.

in a randomized placebo control trial in hospitalized patients on ventilators or requiring high flow oxygen, that it diminishes significantly the 28-day mortality. Then there are others such as monoclonal antibodies, mostly by the company Lilly and Regeneron, which show efficacy, particularly if given very early in the course of infection to prevent you from requiring to be hospitalized. Then there are a number of other studies, convalescent plasma, hyperimmune globulent. The thing that we really need, Ira, that would be really a boon to all of this, would be a direct acting antiviral agents similar to what we developed for HIV, the antiretrovirals, that so effectively were able to block virus replication, and the same type of thing we developed

for hepatitis C, in which we were able to cure hepatitis C with direct acting antiviral agents. There are a number of companies working on that. We are very interesting in pursuing those types of studies. We got an interesting question from Ethan in Middlebury, Indiana. Most of the population has made efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19. How do you see this affecting other transmissible diseases, both currently and longer term? Well, that's a great question, and we also have some really good information on that. During our summer, when we were getting hit really badly, and we still are getting hit very badly with COVID-19, our colleagues in Australia who were going through their winter, which would have been their flu season,

contacted me and said, Tony, you're not going to believe it, but we are virtually seeing no influenza. This is the first time in all of our years of experience when there were so few cases, you could barely count them. I mean, just virtually none. They were suspicious that because of the public health measures, the masking, the washing of hands, the avoiding congregate settings, the keeping physical distance might be preventing them from getting flu, para flu, respiratory syncytrial virus. Sure enough, in our winter, which we are now well into our winter in February, we're seeing the same thing. We're seeing hardly any influenza and hardly any of the other respiratory infections that we always see spike in the winter,

which tells you that that's public health measures of washing your hands, physical distance, masking, those types of things really work. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll continue our conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci about COVID-19, vaccines, and a new normal. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're continuing our conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci about COVID-19, vaccines, and returning

to a new normal. So many people out there have been separated from their families and their friends for almost a whole year now, as you know. And now that more people are getting vaccinated, there is a glimmer of hope out there. At what point do you think it's okay for two people to see each other in person and share a meal and a hug, for example? Should both parties be vaccinated? Is one party vaccinated enough? What's the ruling on that? Well, I like the last part of your question, Ira, because there is no ruling yet. But what will happen is that we, as we get more and more people vaccinated, that we'll have to, if we don't have hard data, make some common sense type

recommendations. For example, if you have three members of a family, a husband, a wife, and a child who lives in a different city, prior to getting vaccinated, if you're, you wanted to see your daughter or your son who would come into town, they would have to quarantine themselves for a certain period of time, likely get tested, wear a mask when you're with them, and only then feel comfortable. Well, right now, if all three of those people are doubly vaccinated, common sense tells you that the relative risk is really, really low when all three are doubly vaccinated. So people are going to start realizing that the relative risk is low and will likely be able to say, you know, come on down, travel, come into the house, you don't have to

quarantine, you don't have to wear a mask, and I'm going to give you a big hug. I think that's going to happen. But I don't think there'll be a formal recommendation of that until we get a very large proportion of the population vaccinated. And you're saying that's for when you're coming to the house, give somebody a hug. But if you've been vaccinated and you're still out in the public, doesn't that still mean because there could be virus still in your nose, you could still spread it? Absolutely. So what I'm saying is that there are things you can do in your own pod, in your own family unit. Then that changes when you talk about how you act in society when the vast majority of people are not vaccinated, and you might have virus in your nasal pharynx because you got infected,

and the vaccine didn't protect you against getting infected, but it did protect you against getting ill that you could conceivably spread it to somebody else, which is the reason why when you're outside of your own private family pod, that you've got to act a little bit differently than you do in your own closed circles. Okay, so I guess the $64 question is, what is the metric for knowing when we can all return to normal? How will we know that? You know, I don't think you're going to definitively know it, but you can get a pretty good guess. When you get the overwhelming majority of the population, and I would say 70 to 85 percent of the population vaccinated, and the level of infections per day in the community are so low that they're not even close to being considered a threat.

right now, even though the numbers of infections are going precipitously downward, we still have, you know, 60, 70,000 infections a day. We were up to 300 to 400,000 a day just a few weeks ago. When you get that level of viral in the community very low, then you could start thinking of returning as a society to some form of normality. Let's talk about the possibility of creating a single vaccine for all coronaviruses. Carl Zimmer, writing in the New York Times, talks about past efforts to develop a universal vaccine that were stymied by loss of government funding. He writes, quote, Dr. Matthew Mamoli, a virologist at National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Your Place,

looks back at those decisions as an enormous blunder. It's a failure of our system of science, he said. Funders tend to chase after shiny objects. Let me ask you, in hindsight, were there missed opportunities here? No, I think maybe Matt got a little carried away there. The fact is that we have made major investments in the development of universal flu vaccine, and we're making major investments now in a universal SARS-CoV-2 and then ultimately coronavirus vaccines in general. We definitely are committed to that and we have for a very long time. I first began talking with you about disease way back in the early 1980s when HIV AIDS was quickly emerging. Do you think we will have an AIDS vaccine any time soon?

And wouldn't it be a fitting way coming full circle for a way for you to retire finally? You're trying to get rid of me, Ira. Never. Never. So, you know, vaccines, as we've discussed on your show, more than once, Ira, vaccines for HIV are really problematic for the simple reason that the body does not like to make an immune response against HIV that is an adequate response to clear the virus and maintain essentially protection for life.

Until we figure out a way to get a vaccine to do better than natural. infection in inducing the kind of response that would be protective, we're not going to have an effective HIV vaccine. Do I think that's impossible? No. I think we've just got to use all of our scientific tools of structure-based vaccine design of putting that envelope trimer in the right confirmation to trigger broadly neutralizing antibodies. I believe that when that occurs, we'll get a vaccine for HIV. Listener Arianna on Facebook wants to know, what possible medical and scientific breakthroughs do you think we'll see from all this research focused on COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines? I think it's going to open up a whole new avenue of approach to vaccines. You know, you might recall, I do certainly, that when we put an investment in the mRNA vaccines, that was a lot of concern, if not criticism, that why are you making investment in vaccines?

that have never resulted in a marketable vaccine before when we have such a serious problem. Well, as it turns out, it's been a roaring success. And we're already starting to see people trying to apply the lessons and the technologies, not only of the platform technology of MRNA, but also of the structure-based vaccine design the same way as Barney Graham showed that the stabilization of the pre-fusion spike protein was very much more immunogenic than the post-fusion confirmation. One last question for you, because when I look at all the conversations we've been having about vaccines, now MRI, spike proteins, immunity, all of it, people are getting an education in biology that they never got in school before. We're talking about stuff that never would have,

you know, been a topic of discussion. Do you ever feel that way that we're having a having a giant class here? Very much so, Ira. And that's the beauty of what's going on right now, is that science is evolving so rapidly. And we're seeing the fruits of fundamental basic science. And you're able to just show and demonstrate these biological mechanisms that are responsible for real world results.

I mean, I think the development of a highly efficacious vaccine by a new platform together with structure-based vaccine design of the immunogen is just exactly what you say. It's a lesson in biology. Thank you, Dr. Fauci. Always good to be with you, Ira. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland,

and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For the rest of the hour, a trip to ancient Egypt. And a mystery. Picture the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh. What do you see? The sarcophagus, right? And then inside the remains themselves, carefully wrapped with the arms,

peacefully crossed over the chest in preparation for the afterlife. But in Egypt's Royal Gallery of Mammies, there's one mummy that stands out. And now there's new research into why. Here with that is Cy-Frize Charles Berkwist. Hi, Charles. Hey, Ira.

So what's so different about this mummy? Well, if you go to this museum gallery, the remains of Siknenra the Second, also called Siknenra the Brave, aren't arranged as neatly as the others. His hands are raised in sort of like claws, and his head is covered with wounds. Like from an attack? The thought is the wounds are definitely signs of some kind of foul play. Back in the 1960s, scientists took x-rays of the mummy, and there's evidence of multiple cuts and blows to the head. So what do they think really did happen? here. The question's still open on exactly what might have happened to this king over 3,000 years ago.

Was he killed in some kind of palace intrigue? Was he executed? Well, was he? Well, it's a good question. Sahar Saleem is a radiologist in the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University. She recently took a new look at the remains using a CT scanner to hunt for new evidence into this mystery. I had a chance to talk with her about what she found. Put this king into context for us, where does he fit in the Egyptian lineage? Zechlan Ra Thal second known as the brave. He ruled Egypt in the 17th dynasty about 200 years before Tutankhamun. And this was the time during the occupation of a group of Asian shepherds known as the Hixos.

They ruled Egypt actually for a century, and they took a city in the north called Awaris to be their capital. The Egyptians, though maintained power over the south, yet all Egypt had to pay tributes to the Hixus. So this is how powerful they were those invaders. And there's a story that I was reading that the immediate cause of, of the conflict between the king and the Hixos was hippopotamuses making too much noise? At the time of Sarkthan Ra, the Hickus king, his name was an apophis, and he actually sent a very bad language message to Sikhtan Ra, mentioning that the hippopotamus and the sacred lake making noise, annoying them, and he demanded they should be killed.

Where the hippopotamuses were, to the king, apophis, there were about 600 kilometers. So there is no way that they were annoying them. We don't have the full message because the end of the papyrus was ruined, but the part that we have, it ended that Saqtan Ra, he called his advisors. And this is sort of an indication that he's preparing for war. Zakhlana was actually well prepared to fight and to expel Hux. And I do believe that he just took this letter of Apophis as an excuse to start the war. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with radiologist Sahar Salim about what happened to Egypt's ancient king, Siknenra II. What was it that made you want to study his remains? He was on the top of the list for the families that we want to study because we don't have any clues related to the history and whether he really fought Hixus or not, how he died. And so we want to know what is his story. So through the CT imaging, you were able to get a much better picture of the condition of the remains and the wounds that were on them.

What did you find? Yeah, we found severe head injuries. And we have weapons related to the Hick's weapons. So I matched the Huxus weapons, different Hickus weapons, with the injuries I found in the CT scan in Sattnera. So this will give us an idea that he died in a combat and not, for example, in his palace, in a conspiracy as other theories claimed. But there is something else. There were no other injuries in the body. Only the injuries were focused on the head.

If somebody is attacking the face, the natural reflex will be, this person will try to defend his face by his arm. So usually the forearm will have sort of injuries or fractures. but this did not happen. With the deformity of the hands and with the absence of the fractures, we came to the conclusion that the king's hands were tied together, so he was bound and likely his hands were tied behind his back.

This all would give the circumstances of his death in a battle, and probably that he was captured before being executed by several attackers using several weapons. So is there something more to learn here beyond just this question of how the king was killed? Something important about Siklin Ra that we didn't know in history that he was a renowned warrior. Other were known to be warriors. For example, Rameses II, T'Htmos the third. And despite of that, we couldn't find any injuries in their mummies, those reputable warriors, to indicate that they have been in the front line of a battle.

But for Siknan Ra, although the history mentioned, nothing about him being a warrior. It is very clear that he was in the front line of the battlefield with his soldiers. Science and modern science can help rewriting stories and help giving credit to real heroes that even the history mention nothing about them. But now it's about time to.

to give credit to sick and wrath that he really deserves it. Thank you so much for taking time to talk about this with me. You too. Thank you. Dr. Sahar Saleem is a professor of radiology in the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University. And you can see pictures of some of her research and a link to the paper on our website at sciencefriaday.com slash mummy mystery. For Science Friday, I'm Charles Berkwist. And that's about it for this hour.

Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather and Kathleen Davis, senior producer Alexa Lim, contributing producer John Dan Koski. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of this program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And while your podcast hunting, our nerdy-wordy podcast Science Diction is back for a new season, all about mind control. The latest episode is about the word lunacy, and you can catch that wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy your weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.