Science Friday - Herd Immunity, Crossword Program. May 7, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Weighing COVID-19 Vaccinations For Teens Federal officials are reporting that the Food and Drug Administration is poised to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 12 to 15 by early next week—just as Canada became the first country to do so on Wednesday of this week. Pfizer has said they will seek out emergency authorization for even younger kids by the fall. But as most countries still lag far behind the United States in vaccine access for adults, public health officials are questioning the ethics of prioritizing American teens over adults from other countries. Science writer Maggie Koerth joins Ira with more on the accessibility of COVID-19 vaccines for children, new projections of rapid sea level rise under climate change, and other stories from the week. Is COVID-19 Herd Immunity Even Possible Anymore? Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve equated getting out of this mess with the concept of herd immunity—when a certain percentage of the population is immune to a disease, mostly through vaccination. With COVID-19, experts have said we need somewhere around 70 to 90% of the population to be immunized to meet this goal. Now that all adults in the U.S. are eligible for the vaccine, how far are we from that goal? And what is our trajectory? Some experts now say with variants and vaccine hesitancy, herd immunity may not be possible here in the U.S. Joining Ira to break down this and other coronavirus quandaries is Angela Rasmussen, research scientist at VIDO-InterVac, the University of Saskatchewan’s vaccine research institute in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. This Computer Won The 2021 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament In 2012, a computer program named Dr. Fill placed 141st out of some 660 entries in that year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, a competition for elite crossword puzzle solvers. This year, the algorithm beat the human competition, completing the final playoff puzzle in just 49 seconds.  The A.I. relies on a collection of different techniques to make sense of a puzzle. Sometimes, a simple fact is needed—who was the First Lady before Eleanor Roosevelt? (Lou Henry Hoover.) More often, however, crossword puzzle solutions rely not just on factual knowledge, but an ability to recognize themes that puzzle constructors have embedded in the crosswords, along with an understanding of puns, homonyms, and word play. (Think: Five letters, “dining table leaves”—SALAD!) The program makes a series of statistical calculations about likely answers, then tries to fit those possibilities into the puzzle squares.  This year, researchers from the Berkeley Natural Language Processing group added their expertise to Dr. Fill’s algorithms—a contribution that may have helped push Dr. Fill to its crowning victory.  But the program isn’t infallible. This year, it made three mistakes solving puzzles during the tournament, while some human solvers completed the puzzles perfectly. It can make these errors with any unique puzzle form it’s never seen before.  Matt Ginsberg, the computer programmer behind Dr. Fill, joins Ira to talk about the competition and the advances his program has made over the years.  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. A bit later in the hour answering evolving COVID-19 questions and a crossword puzzle-solving computer program that beats human competitors. But first, even as the U.S. approaches a third of adults fully vaccinated, COVID-19 cases continue to rise in other countries. We've talked about India, where health care systems are verging on collapse. But cases are also rising in Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, and elsewhere. To address the disparity of vaccine access between rich and poor nations, the Biden administration announced this week it would support waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines. This would allow countries to manufacture their own. Some like the U.S., Great Britain, and the European Union have objected in the past to waiving patent rights,

So negotiations remain ahead for the World Trade Organization. Later in the hour in our conversation with virologist Angela Rasmussen, we will talk more about why waiving the patent restrictions alone may not be enough. But first, Pfizer announced today it will seek full authorization from the FDA for their COVID-19 vaccine. And earlier this week, Pfizer announced that it would also seek emergency authorization for use of their vaccine and children 12 to 15 years old. Here to tell us more about that, plus other stories from the week is 538 senior science reporter Maggie Kerth. She joins us from Minneapolis. Hey, welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me here. You're welcome. You know, many parents and grandparents of

adolescents find this news very exciting. They would love to see that age range for Pfizer vaccine expanded, right? Yes, very much. I am a parent of a seven and five-year-old, and I am very exciting because it means we're getting a little bit closer to my kids getting something. So that means we should expect, then, if this is successful for this age group, that, of course, right down the line, we might go even younger. What is sort of happening in the news right now is we're in this kind of like weird news about news that hasn't happened yet thing going on, where a lot of outlets are reporting that the FDA is planning on giving Pfizer that EUA for the 12 to 15 age group soon, but we don't know exactly when that's going to happen.

It could be any day at this point. Some have said next week, others this week, others next month. But we do know that Pfizer has also said that they are going to be submitting for the EUA for the 2 to 11 age group as early as September. Wow, that's good news for a lot of people. But there are some public health experts who have suggested that younger kids should not be such a high priority because there are other countries still struggling to vaccinate their adults. I mean, are we going to an ethical debate here?

I think we're definitely in a weird ethical debate space. You know, kids are extremely low risk, but it's not no risk, and a vaccine would help protect them. It'll also help reduce transmission through the community, especially in that 10-plus age group that is a lot more susceptible to catching and transmitting the virus than younger kids are. But, you know, there is a finite supply of this stuff. I think it's a really difficult ethical space to try to figure out how you're going to get that stuff allocated. I don't know that there's like a good political way to like ask parents to give up shots that they would give to their children to across the ocean. It's a tough space to be in, I think. And it's one that the Kovacs program was sort of intended to avoid, but that didn't work out the way.

that we wanted it to. Yeah, it's a continuing, evolving problem that we have been watching, and we'll be continuing to discuss that. Let's move on to some worrying new climate change models that have come out recently, looking at ice melt and sea level rise, perhaps faster than we thought they would be? Yeah, so there's new modeling of the sea level rise under various climate change scenarios, and as you say, it is not very comforting. It is interesting, though, because we've got these two different studies that come to different conclusions about what's happening with the Antarctic ice sheet.

So this is like the largest mass of ice on planet Earth, and some three trillion tons of it has melted away since the early 1990s, largely as a result of rising temperatures in the air and in the water. A lot of scientists are worried that continued or accelerating melting of that ice sheet could mean big sea level rises around the water. world. So this week, two different teams published papers that used computer simulations to kind of look at what that might look like. Madeline Stone has a great story about this at National Geographic. And you had one group that was showing that if we overshoot the Paris Treaty and we hit this three degree Celsius climate warming scenario, which is actually pretty likely right now, that this one ice sheet alone, this Antarctic ice sheet could add six inches of sea level rise by 2100. That is really scary when you consider all the low-lying areas around the coastlines around the world. I guess even it doesn't really matter if all the projections align exactly with each other. The direction, right, is the most important issue here. Right, yeah.

So the other model was a little bit different, right? So this other model was predicting that 1.5 degrees of warming, which were basically locked into, could result in five inches of sea level rise by 2100, and a three degree increase would actually be twice that. That model isn't really predicting that melting to be coming from Antarctica. It's sort of seeing that there'd be more of a balance between increased snowfall and melting there. But the thing about this is that it's really about looking at probabilities, right? And so it's not about the specific numbers so much as it is the non-numerical message behind which in this case is that we are probably going to be stuck with some level of coastal flooding.

And it's only going to get worse the less we do to stop the temperature from rising. Yeah, yeah. Your next two stories are, well, things falling from space. How about we grouped them that way? A Chinese rocket that could fall back to Earth any time now? What the heck's happening there? Yeah, your stuff falling from space update. So there's good news and bad news to both of these things.

The good news is that this actual thing that is going to fall from space is probably going to be okay. We're talking about part of a Chinese Long March rocket that was used to put a piece of China's new space station into orbit last month. It's unmanned. And the country didn't make plans for retrieving it in a controlled way. So it's been just sort of circling in a temporary orbit with the idea that it was just going to fall back to Earth. And it's probably going to do that this weekend. There are ways that that could be bad. You know, the last time a rocket like this was allowed to break up on reentry, it ended up shedding

like long metal poles that damaged some buildings over the ivory coast. Most people sort of think that it's not really likely to cause major problems. Nobody knows exactly where it's going to land, but most of the earth is ocean, so there's a pretty good chance that it hits the water. And even if it doesn't, an astrophysicist told the guardian that it's not going to be like a house dropping onto you. It's more like the equivalent of a small plane crash scattered over 100 miles. It's not great, though. And scientists are actually kind of upset that China really made no plan here beyond like, well, it'll fall back to Earth. It's just better news than you might think.

Yeah, no Wizard of Oz moment here with the house cone crashing down on you. And the other thing falling from space is a hypothetical thing, a hypothetical asteroid, right? Yes. Yeah, NASA ran a kind of like a war game to see what we could do if an asteroid were ever headed straight for us. And they lost to the asteroid. They lost. In the game, the scientists had just six months to stop this hypothetical asteroid. And what they found was that that's not enough time to design and launch a rocket that can do anything to deflect or alter trajectory. So based on current technology, they figured out that they're going to need at least two years' notice and ideally five to do anything about an asteroid headed toward Earth, which is better, though, still, than you might

think, because the whole point of this exercise was building up disaster resilience. You know, it's produced this plan to build a rapid response rocket team. And that's in addition to other systems we already have in place. There's a program that's building rockets that can change the course of asteroids and a new satellite that's going to be launching in a few years to spot them well in advance. And those rockets are actually going to be doing a test run towards the end of the year. No, no kidding. Because, you know, one of the things we don't want to do is blow up the asteroid, right? We just sort of want to move it. Like, nudge, yeah.

And we'll move from falling to fall out. How's that for a segue? At Chernobyl, you know, when I saw this headline, I thought to myself, of course, we get to deal with this too now. Explain what's going on there. It's been, so it's been 35 years since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, but scientists are watching nuclear reactions wink to life again in some of these. melted piles of radioactive waste that are deep inside this abandoned power plant. Richard Stone at Science quoted an expert who sort of compared it to embers burning in the bottom of an old barbecue grill. And the problem is that all of this is stuff that ran out of the reactor core when it melted. It's uranium fuel rods, cladding, graphite control rods,

the sand they dumped on it. All of the stuff formed like a lava ooze that flowed into the basement rooms of the power plant and hardened. And these materials, Materials have given scientists trouble before. You know, the roof that the sarcophagus that they put over the power plant years and years ago tended to leak. And when water would get in, water can slow down particle movement enough that it becomes easier for them to hit and split the nucleus of atoms. So those would set off small reactions. The scientists would sort of have to go in and like treat them with a neutron and absorbing chemical. So this is something that's been going on for a long time.

but they thought they'd fixed it because they built this new shell in 2016 that stopped the leaks. But now the nuclear reactions are coming back. And the scientists are not sure why. Just that drying out that radioactive material seems to be causing the same kinds of reactions that making it wet did. They don't know what the mechanism is for that. And some of those new reactions are happening in spots that are completely inaccessible. So you can't just go in and dump the chemical on them. again. So the good news to this is that there is still some time to work on this. This is

slow moving. And the scientists think they have a couple of years to figure out what the problem is and fix it. That's good news. It is also nice to hear that what these researchers were telling Stone at science is that if the reactions did lead to an explosion, they believed it would be contained within that new shell that was built. And the downside, the main downside would be that the inside of that shell would just be filled with radioactive dust. Well, at least I hope people are not freaking out just hearing something about Chernobyl again. So that good news is a bit of reassurance for whatever that's worth. Thank you, Maggie. You are welcome. I'm happy to end on an upbeat, positive note.

One of these days, we'll have an all-good news roundup from you. How about that? Oh, that would be amazing. Yeah. Maggie Kerth, Senior Science Reporter for 538 in Minneapolis. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll discuss the latest COVID-19 quandaries. Can we reach herd immunity and how long do antibodies last in your body? Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've equated hope in getting out of this mess with the concept of herd immunity. Some people call it community immunity. That's when a certain percentage of the population is immune to a disease, mostly through vaccination. With COVID, experts have said we need somewhere around 70 to 90 percent of the population to be immunized to meet this goal. Now that all adults in the U.S. are eligible for the vaccine, where are we at? And has that 70 to 90 number changed? Some experts now say with variance and vaccine hesitancy, herd immunity may not be possible here in the U.S. Well, here with me to break down this and other recent COVID-Quandries is my guest, Dr. Angela Rasmussen,

research scientist at Vito InterVAC, the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine Research Institute in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me back, Ira. Welcome back. Angela, where do you fall on the herd immunity optimism scale? Do you also think that it's unattainable? So I think that some of that depends on what the herd immunity threshold actually is. And some of that also depends on other factors, such as how much transmission is actually occurring in the community. Now, one thing I think that people have been confused about with regard to the herd immunity threshold, which is that number that you just referred to, at which is, a virus would not be able to spread within a population because too many people are immune,

you know, that's an estimate based on transmission dynamics, based on susceptibility in the population. And for that reason, it's very difficult to nail down a specific number. But I think some of the confusion has been that people think we absolutely have to get to that number. And then once we get there, things will magically change and the pandemic will be over. But unfortunately, it's really not that simple. We can look at a country like, Israel, for example, that has now vaccinated about 60% of the adult population, and we can see that they've had long sustained reductions in transmission in the overall community. Now, 60% is nowhere near the herd immunity threshold, and there probably is some population immunity from people who were naturally

infected with COVID adding to that. But I think that an important point that we should all think about is that we might not have to hit the herd immunity threshold, which currently is calculated at somewhere above 80% of people immunized, to see sustained reductions in transmission like what Israel is seeing. Now, at the beginning of their vaccination campaign, they had a pretty restrictive lockdown, and that's not the only way to do it. But if you get transmission down enough

while boosting vaccination enough in the population, you can actually get to a place that is functionally like the herd immunity threshold before you actually get there, just because there's not very much virus in the community and you have a growing number of people who are immunized. So it's a really tough concept. I think it would be a lot easier for people if we could just say, hey, we're aiming for 80, 85%, 90% vaccinated. And of course, it's great to vaccinate as many people as we possibly can, but that's not necessarily the metric that we have to hit in order to start relaxing some of the restrictions and being able to return to quote unquote normal. But herd immunity is really not a

national concept. Herd immunity is really regional. And as you pointed out, some people call it community immunity for this reason. If you have overall 70% of people vaccinated, there still may be communities where there's a very low vaccination rate that's far under that in which you will have a lot of susceptible people. Interesting point. I know that right now, more than half of the U.S. adults have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, but some states have only been open to all adults for less than a month. Is it too early to really tell how many people will get vaccinated and how much to open? What's your view on that? So if you look at New York, for example, which has planned to fully reopen by May 19th, I do think that that is premature.

again, because of this herd immunity being a regional issue. And in some places in New York State, you're going to have people with very high levels of immunity who have been able to access vaccines more readily and who are very enthusiastic about getting it. But you will definitely have other communities, including within New York City, where people have not been able to access vaccines, even though the vaccination efforts are now open to all adults. So I think that it may be a bit premature.

What we would ideally like to have is people who are fully, you know, the majority of the population in any given state being fully vaccinated before deciding to completely reopen everything and potentially looking to make sure that all communities are hitting that 60 to 70% metric. I think that it's also not appreciated that in many communities, there are a number of people who want to be vaccinated but have not been able to access the vaccines. So we need to make that more accessible. And this would be people who are homebound, for example, people who may not have access to the internet or may not be comfortable using some of the often Byzantine online systems for

scheduling a vaccine appointment. I think if we can do a better job at making sure we're getting vaccines to those people who are being left behind by the current vaccination efforts will be on track to open. I think that it's very reasonable to expect that we could start to reopen this. So what are strategies, though, for getting to these people? What do you think would work? So it's going to be a combination. Certainly for the people and the communities that I just mentioned that can't access the vaccine, we need to do more in terms of bringing the vaccine to them. So we've done really well in terms of having mass vaccination sites, in terms of distributing vaccines in local neighborhood pharmacies and pharmacy chains like Walgreens and CVS. but that's not going to reach everybody. In some cases, we may need to do targeted vaccine pop-ups,

for example, in given neighborhoods. And in some cases, we might actually have to bring vaccines to people's homes, the places that they're living in order to make sure that they can access them. Not everybody has a car and can go to a drive-through mass vaccination site. In terms of people who are reluctant to take a vaccine, I think that that's a much tougher challenge because a lot of that is just going to involve personal conversations with people that they trust. So I think that for science communicators and scientists like myself, one really important thing is going to be to reach out to community leaders in all these different communities and make sure that people who are not public health people or scientists, but who are trusted members of the community, you know,

a community leader, a faith leader, things like that, family doctors, that they are able to to empower people with information and hopefully win some hearts and minds to the cause of getting vaccinated. You know, we have seen studies that show that what changes people's minds, well, they're the minds of their best friends and people they trust. And maybe some people are waiting to see, hey, you know, you get it first and let me see how you do, and then I'll get it. Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. And I think that, you know, people tend to confuse what's called vaccine hesitancy, which really is just that. It's people who are hesitant about the vaccines. They have questions about the vaccines. They may have some doubts about the vaccines. Those are

all completely reasonable, given that this has occurred in the context of a national prolonged emergency. And it's really important that those people have their questions taken seriously and answered by people that they trust. And that person that they trust is not always going to be a virologist, as much as I love to be everybody's trusted messenger. Since we last talked, you've moved to our wonderful neighbor to the north, and things are not going vaccination-wise as well as you would hope, has it? No, it really hasn't. And unfortunately, some of this is the fault, really, of my home country, the U.S. You know, the U.S. has purchased a lot of vaccine doses, and they haven't been as eager to share.

addition to that, Canada does not have currently domestic manufacturing capacity for vaccines at scale. But right now, Canada is really dependent on importing vaccines that are manufactured in the United States. And unfortunately, they just haven't gotten as many doses. Now, the good thing is that Canada's population is about a 10th of the size of the U.S. is so they won't need as many doses. And the doses have increased in recent weeks. They've also approved Moderna for use here, so that is going to be coming in shortly. There will be more options for Canadians, but it has been very slow, and currently vaccination is not open to all adult Canadians yet. I believe it's only 40 years and older. I want to ask about your vaccine experience because I hear that you

got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before its use was paused, just to be clear that the CDC and FDA recommended it be paused because of a very rare blood clot and some women who were the vaccine. I know a lot of people were nervous about this vaccine after it was paused. What's your experience with it? Yeah, absolutely. So I was really relieved to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine on April 5th because I knew that I was moving to Canada on April 20th. And if I had gotten the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, I don't know when I would have been able to access the second shot being in Canada. And because of the travel restrictions between Canada and the U.S., it would be very, very difficult for me to come back to the U.S. just to get my booster shot. So when I saw the opportunity to get an appointment

for Johnson and Johnson, I jumped on it since it's really one and done. Now that said, six days after my vaccine was when the news about the blood clots came out and the vaccine was paused. And I thought to myself, well, I'm under the age of 50. I'm a woman and I have had the vaccine within six to 13 days. So I'm right in that window where potentially if the side effect is going to happen to me, it could. But then I thought more about the relative risk. And even though we know now that these blood clots are quite rare and there are a very specific type of blood clotting abnormality, I have done other things in my life that have drastically increased my risk of blood clots. I took hormonal birth control pills for over 20 years, starting when I was a teenager.

you know, I've flown quite a bit, and I used to smoke. So all of those things really dramatically increase your risk of blood clots. And then finally, I know that getting COVID-19 would dramatically increase my risk of a blood clot, including a serious blood clot, like a DVT, pulmonary embolism or a stroke. And I overall doing that risk-benefit analysis am still profoundly relieved to have gotten the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. And given that that case trajectories are up in a lot of Canadian provinces, including Saskatchewan, where I live now, I'm very, very relieved to have the protection that that vaccine affords me. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Having heard you say this, I imagine that you are very much in favor of the CDC and the FDA

saying that this vaccine can be used again. Yes, I am. I also think though the pause was appropriate. I think that even though this was a very small, what's called safety signal, it was a total of seven cases, one during the clinical trial, the phase three clinical trial and six since the vaccine's been administered, that's a very low incidence. And even if it turns out to be a little bit higher, as we've seen with the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe, that's still a relatively low risk. So I think that the benefits of using this vaccine, especially considering the one-dose vaccine makes it easier to give it to people in some places. The lack of a strict cold chain requirement also makes it easier to get this vaccine to places that don't have ultra-cold freezers. This is a really important part of our vaccine program, including globally. So I think that it's really important that our regulatory systems and ASIP, the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, really took their time to look through all of

the data thoroughly. But given that they did, I think that what the data shows is that there are way more benefits to continuing to use this vaccine than there are drawbacks. Just a quick note that I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. VARients, our listeners, tell us, are still on a lot of people's minds. I want to play a question we got from listener Ken in Cleveland on our Science Friday Voxpop app. How well, if at all, do the current vaccinations protect us from the variations, especially the B-117? So all of the data so far suggests that all of the vaccines that are available currently

are very protective against B-1-1-7. And that's great news, because, as you know, there are several variants, and I know it can be tough to keep them all straight, given that their names aren't exactly really catchy. But the B-1-351 variant from South Africa, which does have some potential capabilities to evade immunity, some immunity. They're not completely, they don't render the vaccines useless at all.

That variant is also in the U.S. And conveniently, Johnson and Johnson did one of their phase three clinical trials in South Africa when that variant was circulated. widely, and that vaccine is still protective against the most critical outcome, so hospitalization and death. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine performs very well against B-1-17, pretty much just like it performs against all other SARS-Coronavirus 2 variants that are not variants of concern, but the ones that people are worried about like B-1351, which again may be able to evade some antibody responses, the vaccines still work against that. Johnson and Johnson,

Pfizer, Moderna, all of the vaccines that have been tested are still effective against all the known variants in terms of protecting against the most severe outcomes and in many cases protecting against disease altogether. I want to shift gears a bit and talk about antibodies because a new study in the journal BMC infectious diseases says that after 100 days, only 44% of COVID-19 patients still had antibodies. What do you think of that? Well, so this is one of the troubles with doing antibody studies like this. Just because you can no longer detect antibodies with the test that you're using doesn't mean that those people don't have some degree of long-term immunity. And there's a part of the immune system that's called the anamnestic response in which somebody who has been

infected or vaccinated with another pathogen previously will be re-exposed to that. And they may not have detectable antibodies, but they do have memory B and T cells in their immune system that will recognize that. And the amnestic response is when those memory B cells start making just a ton of antibodies. So they rapidly crank up antibody production really quickly. In many of those people who tested negative for antibodies after recovering within 100 days, they may well have memory immunity that is just more difficult to measure because they don't have a lot of antibodies actually circulating in their blood. That doesn't necessarily mean, though, that they've gone back to square one and they're completely susceptible. But this is an area of

ongoing study where we don't really know what the typical immune response looks like, especially over the long term for somebody who was infected with SARS coronavirus too. We do know that there's a pretty big range of different antibody responses that people can have. So I don't make too much out of that other than to say that if you had COVID before, you shouldn't rely on your natural immunity. You should get a vaccine because we know that vaccines reliably induce very high tithers of neutralizing antibodies and they can only boost whatever immune response you will have, you know, carried over in your immune memory from a natural infection. We have to take a break. And when we come back more of the latest COVID-19 news with Dr. Angela Rasmussen. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Iroflato. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about the latest COVID-19 questions with my guest, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, research scientist at Vito Intervac. That's at the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine Research Institute in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Do you get the impression from following the course of this disease and the immunity and the antibodies, that sooner or later we're going to need a booster shot? I think it's possible. The one thing that we didn't look at in the clinical trials is durability and how long the protection that the vaccines can for last. Right now, I think that the possibility of needing a booster is higher because of potential loss of durability over the long term, the same way that we will get an MMR shot

when we're, I think, two, and then we'll get another one when we're 10. We may need a booster like that. Right now, anyways, it doesn't look like we're going to need a booster specifically to address variance because, as I mentioned before, the vaccines do still work and are protective against all the known variants of concern. But that's a possibility, too, if new variants should emerge that are even more capable of evading vaccine-induced immunity. Right now, that's not the case. So I do think, though, that there's a good likelihood that we might need a booster in the coming years just to maintain those long-term protective immune responses. And what can we do for people who are immunocopimized and for whom the vaccine may not work? That's pretty simple. We can get vaccinated. And that really is

the benefit of herd immunity, community immunity, population immunity. If there are enough people vaccinated, then the virus can't spread within the population, and that indirectly protects people who can't take the vaccine. And it's not just immunocompromise people who aren't responding well to the vaccine or aren't developing immune responses because of it. There's also people who can't take vaccines for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have some kind of allergic condition. Maybe they don't have good vaccine reactions. There are many reasons why people may not medically be able to take a vaccine. So that's why it's even more important that people who can take vaccines do take vaccines. Let's talk about for a moment the grave shortages of vaccine among developing countries. What are your thoughts on how to overcome that?

So this is a really tough problem. And this has been unfortunately exacerbated by countries like the U.S. and Canada and the European Union, all of which have purchased a number of vaccine doses and really put their, own people first. And while this is somewhat understandable and it's also reflecting the political realities of each of those countries or groups of countries, it's not how we should be approaching global health going forward. We really should be doing these efforts from day one. We should be planning ways to distribute vaccines equitably among all the countries of the world because a pandemic by definition is a global crisis. So right now, the Kovacs initiative has purchased a number of vaccine

doses, basically for countries that are not able to purchase it for themselves. Those are primarily AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and the Novavax vaccine, which is currently finishing phase three clinical trials, because those three vaccines are easy to distribute in a number of different situations regardless of needing specialized infrastructure, such as ultra-cold freezers. I think that, you know, over time, unfortunately, many countries that are depending on covacs have started to see that since they're getting AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson, they're worried that they're getting, you know, sort of the B-plus vaccine instead of the A vaccine, that's the MRNA vaccines, both in terms of efficacy and in terms of their safety records. So that's something.

that we really do need to combat. We need to make it clear. And that's one of the reasons I've been so vocal about getting Johnson and Johnson as a privileged American who was able to effectively choose my vaccine. I want to really get the message out there that these vaccines are fantastic. And again, after doing the risk benefit calculation, you know, it didn't stop me from getting it. I would hope that these vaccines are distributed to the rest of the world. But this is something that I think needs to be priority number one after the emergency phase of this pandemic is over, and we all sit down to try to figure out how to not go through this again. What about relaxing the patents on these vaccines so that the countries themselves can make them? Well, it's not that simple, and I would say that,

first of all, before I say anything about this, I am not an expert on intellectual property or technology transfer, but I do think that it is a good idea to not only relax the patents on the the Trips waiver, which is a waiver of intellectual property rights that's been called for by India and South Africa is one mechanism for doing that. It's not the only mechanism for doing that, but we not only need to relax the patents, we also need to share the technology for manufacturing these vaccines, because it's not just about getting the ingredient list, it's about getting the actual recipe and being able to build the infrastructure to manufacture these things at scale. I think that that is often left out of this discussion because people say, well, why don't they just share the patent rights?

That wouldn't cost them that much other than profits potentially. But it isn't that simple. It really is about this larger tech transfer issue and building capacity in different countries that want to have these manufacturing capabilities. And I leave that to the experts to figure out the best way to do that. But in general, I do think that people should not be worrying about patent protections or intellectual property rights during a global crisis like this. If it can help get more people worldwide immunized faster, we should do that. Angela, as always, great talking with you. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Absolutely. Ira, any time. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, research scientist at Vito Interven.

the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine Research Institute in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. For the rest of the hour, an update on a story we first told you about back in 2014, a computer program called Dr. Phil that could solve Crossford puzzles. Last month, for the first time, the program unofficially beat human competition in the American Crossword Puzzle tournament, solving the playoff puzzle in just, get this, 49 seconds. Oh, joining me now is Matt Ginsberg, the computer programmer who developed Dr. Phil. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira.

I want to tell everybody that we have a video demo of how the program tackled some of this year's competition puzzles up there in our website, ScienceFriday.com slash crossword. Okay, first of all, describe the format of the competition for us. What do you have to do? You have to solve seven crosswords. And six of them are Saturday. One is Sunday morning. And then there's a championship puzzle for the people who did the best on Sunday afternoon.

It's timed. The puzzles vary in difficulty. The fifth puzzle is actually far and away the hardest. The first is the easiest, sort of give you a feeling of confidence going in. The sixth is easy so you don't feel so bad about what happened to you on the fifth puzzle. And the seventh on Sunday is, it's like a Sunday, puzzle, it's not overwhelmingly difficult. And people solve them

flawlessly in a few minutes. Wow. And how well did your program do in this recent tournament? Dr. Phil made three mistakes, but it was so much faster than the humans, typically solving the puzzles in less than a minute, that based on the scoring system in use, it came out a tiny bit ahead of the top human. Did it shock all the humans there? It was a virtual tournament this year, so it couldn't do anything. And when the tournament is live, Will Shorts, who runs it typically reports.

So when he starts Puzzle 2, he says, on Puzzle 1, Dr. Phil did thus and so. And when Dr. Phil does poorly, everybody applauds. And when Dr. Phil does well, everybody boos. But it's sort of good-natured competition between man and machine. Well, we actually reached out to Puzzle Master Will Shorts for his thoughts. And he said, when it comes to something new and never seen before, humans still have the advantage in figuring it out. Ooh, fighting words.

No, it's absolutely true. One of the puzzles this year was very clever. One of the clues, for example, was crazed, and the answer was mannequin. And the next clue over was deduce, and the answer was fur. And that makes no sense at all until you realize that if you say it, mannequin fur, you're actually saying manic for crazed and infer. for deduced. Dr. Phil didn't understand it at all. It managed to do pretty well in that puzzle. It made one mistake because it was solving the down clues, but it had no clue what was going on.

I think next year, I'm excited about next year. We're going to work very hard on Dr. Phil, and by we, I mean, me and the Berkeley Natural Language Group, who helped this year, we're going to work very hard on making Dr. Phil better. And I think the constructors are going to work very hard on making Dr. Phil worse. So we'll see next year who wins that little battle. Let's talk a bit about how it solves a puzzle. What are the steps it works through? So it doesn't solve the puzzle like we do. So when I solve a puzzle, when I try, I'm terrible. When I try and solve a puzzle, I say, oh, here's a clue. My level of clue is Scooby blank, three letters. So I say, oh, that's due, and I put it in. When Dr. Phil solves a puzzle,

it actually doesn't write anything in. It makes giant lists of every possible word in every possible slot and how good it feels about putting that word in that position. And then armed with those lists, it looks at all these combinations. Well, I can put this word here and that word there and how do I feel about the combination? And it's doing a ton of search over possible ways to fill in the puzzle. And it has algorithms that are designed to help it find the overall fill

that it feels the best about. And what the Berkeley guys did is they brought in work where it was more likely that if the program thought an answer was correct, it actually was correct. So that made it it much more likely when it was done with the puzzle that it actually had gotten all the right answers in all the various places. Puzzle constructors sometimes reuse clues. Does your program have a database of past answers that it tries? It does. It's very happy when it finds a clue that's been used before. Sometimes, so when I make a puzzle, for example, I like looking for clues that have been used before to clue a different word of that way, because then you're sort of, you know, you're throwing a little trick at the solver. And Dr. Phil knows about that. And it says, you know,

I've seen this clue before. So probably it's the same answer as before, but not for sure. But I'll be pretty happy if I can put that answer in. You know, to be successful, you need to know a lot of random facts, like who were the Academy Award winners in a certain year. Where is it getting its information? Is it doing live lookups of Wikipedia for some of the clues as it's solving the puzzle? It can. So one of the rules that Will Short and I agreed on was that Dr. Phil was not allowed to access the internet. So it can't do a Google search, for example. But it's a computer, right? So I do have a downloaded copy of Wikipedia that it can look in. One of the things Will it's done for crosswords is it's not nearly as fact-based as it used to be. So yeah, occasionally you do see,

you know, Eleanor's predecessor as First Lady, something along those lines. And there you would like to be able to look it up. But most of the crosswords these days are about common sense knowledge, put in interesting ways. And there, it's really a matter if having some understanding, you know, that crazed and manic mean the same thing. And there you have a the sororist, you have a dictionary, it's got all these resources that it uses to try and figure out what the various words mean. And again, this is where the Berkeley collaboration has been so great, because they're using a system that is not totally unlike, you know, when you talk to Siri, there's a system that's figuring out what you probably mean in generating a useful response.

And they're using a system similar at a high level to those other systems. It's designed specifically for crosswords, but it's using all the work on machine learning and natural language and so on. to help Dr. Phil understand a bit better what the right answer to any particular clue is likely to be. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. How well would Dr. Phil work against IBM's Watson? It's really different domains. Jeopardy really is about facts. When the answer comes up on the Jeopardy Board, it doesn't say 13th President of the United States seven letters.

When Dr. Phil gets a query, it knows exactly how long the answer. answer is, it makes enormous use of the crossing words to say, oh, seven letters and the second one is an eye. That's essential to what Dr. Phil is doing, and Watson has no capability like that at all. On the other hand, Dr. Phil is dealing with situations that are deliberately vague, deliberately confusing. There's a clue in crosswords, for example, you may see, and it's nice flower. And it's actually the river that goes through the French city of Nice. And you're supposed to parse that as niece flower. They would never do

that to you in jeopardy, whereas crossword constructors do it to the solvers all the time. So very, very different problem, hard for different reasons, easy for different reasons, and you've got two pieces of software that really are just good at what they do. I mean, Dr. Phil isn't going to do anything

other than soft crossword. It's not designed to do anything else. And Watson's forte is playing Jeopardy is playing Jeopardy. And they're, they feel like they're the same, but they're really quite different. Interesting. I know that crossword puzzle constructors are tricky,

and in more difficult puzzles, they can build in added layers of complexity like you're talking about, like having answers that all skip a certain letter, for instance, or having answers that read backwards. How well does Phil do with these types of challenges? It's terrible. So there was a puzzle at the tournament one year

where every clue was a spoonerism. Dr. Phil can't figure that out. It doesn't understand. It has no way to sort of get started. And if you've got these overarching themes, I made a puzzle once where every word was a hominem. But what you were supposed to enter into the grid wasn't the actual word.

It was the homonym of that word. Dr. Phil can't do that. It just doesn't understand that none of its sort of rules will help it. It does understand simple themes. So you might have a puzzle where, you know, the long entries add an E to a common phrase to get some wacky phrase. It'll understand about that. And it'll say, oh, look, the theme is add an E. But these overarching themes are too hard for it.

Because it doesn't really know what it's doing, right? It's just following rules to fill letters in in a grid. And when Will says, you know, something truly imaginative, humans have the edge, he is absolutely right. I'd like to thank my guest this hour, Matt Ginsberg, computer programmer. His program, Dr. Phil, unofficially won the most recent American Crossword Puzzle tournament. Thank you, Matt, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much. Matt is also author of the book, Factor Man.

Finally, on a personal note, congratulations to Bill Seamering, Susan Stamberg, and the other public radio pioneers celebrating the 50th anniversary of all things considered this week. I was privileged to work with them back in 1971 and still honored to count them as my friends. Well done, folks. You should all be proud. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Our senior producer, Alexa Lim, our contributing editor, John Dan Koski, BJ Leiteman composed our theme music.

Also on the SciFri Voxpop app, we want to know if you've had a conversation with your physician, with your doctor, about medical marijuana? Do you use marijuana to treat a medical issue like chronic pain or nausea? And is it something you talk about with your doctor? You want to hear about your experience. That's on the SciFri Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.