Science Friday - Two Climate Change Bills, COVID Vaccine Boosters. Sept 24, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Ice-Hunting Lunar Rover Robot Gets A Landing Site This week, NASA announced that it had selected a destination for a planned robotic lunar rover called VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover. The mission is planned for launch in 2023, and will rove about the Moon’s south pole, mapping the location and concentration of water ice deposits. The plan is for a commercial spaceflight mission to deliver the rover to a spot near the western edge of the Nobile Crater at the Moon’s south pole. Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins Ira to talk about the mission and other stories from the week in technology and science—including tiny airborne micro-machines, an upcoming voyage for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the discovery of ancient kids’ handprints that could be the world’s oldest-known art.   Congress Is Considering Two Climate Change Bills. What’s In Them? President Biden has made many promises about slowing climate change. During his campaign, he pledged to bring the United States’ energy sector to zero carbon emissions by 2035. On Earth Day this year, he pledged to reduce total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, and by 100% by 2050. But the key policy changes that will help the country get there remain pending as the relevant bills continue to make their way through Congress. The first is an infrastructure bill that would pledge billions toward cleaner transit and resiliency projects in disaster-stricken communities. But that measure is tied intricately with the fate of a second, $3.5 trillion budget bill that would direct billions of dollars to incentivize coal and natural gas-burning utilities to switch over to renewable energy. If both are to pass without substantial changes, they rely on consensus among the narrow majorities of Democrats in the Senate and the House—neither of which is guaranteed. New York Times reporter Coral Davenport walks through what’s in the bills, and why so much is still up in the air even after a summer of climate-driven disasters.   Behind The Booster Battle Update 9/24/2021: This week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky overruled the recommendations of an advisory panel and authorized a third dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for the elderly and certain “high risk” individuals, mirroring an earlier FDA decision. In late August, President Biden had said that COVID-19 vaccine booster shots might soon be on the horizon for many Americans. In late August, President Biden said that COVID-19 vaccine booster shots might soon be on the horizon for many Americans. But last Friday, an FDA advisory committee voted to recommend booster doses only for people over age 65—and this Wednesday, the FDA authorized Pfizer boosters for use in the elderly and “high risk” individuals. In the republished article (which you can read on sciencefriday.com) from September 16, written before the FDA review, Kaiser Health News’ Arthur Allen and Sarah Jane Tribble examine the backstory behind the debate over boosters, and how leaders from the NIH got out in front of FDA and CDC recommendations. 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 Plato. A bit later in the hour, Congress has two big bills that might, just might, tackle climate change this year. And the debate over COVID vaccine boosters, the shifting landscape over who's ready for a booster shot. But first, this week, a planned moon rover got an official destination not to Mars, but to the Moon's South Pole. Sophie Bushwick is here to fill us in on that story. And other science headlines. from the week. She's technology editor for Scientific American based in New York. Welcome back. Thank you. So NASA has announced that they're volatiles investigating polar exploration rover or Viper is that when it goes to the moon, it's going to be landing near the South Pole by the Nobile crater. And it is not set to launch until 2023, but when it does, it is going to be NASA's first ever robotic moon rover. So there have been moon buggies on the moon before, which have wheels, but were trued by astronauts. This is that's his first uncrewed moon rover. That is really cool. How is it going to get there? What's the time frame? Give us all that.

The idea is that in 2023, Viper is going to launch with help from two commercial space companies. It has a lander, which is built by astrobotic. And the rocket that is going to take it, to the moon is a SpaceX rocket. Wow, so this is going to be a private venture. This is not any government doing this thing. Well, NASA is the one that's in charge of the rover itself, but the way it's going to get to the moon is going to be a commercial venture. That's right.

How cool is that? And give us an itinerary. What's it supposed to do? How long will it explore? There is evidence that there is water ice on the moon. The question is, how easy is it for us to extract it? Is there enough there to support a human presence on the moon? So Viper's job is to look into that.

So it's going to be roving around an area that's about 36 square miles, and it's going to be drilling into the ground up to a meter down to look for samples of water ice and how easy it is to extract. And it's even going to explore these areas that are permanently shadowed, never are touched by the sun, which are some of the coldest areas in the entire solar system. And it's going to do this for about 100 days. Oh, yeah, but we know what the track record. Some of these rovers are, you know, look at the Mars rover

is supposed to be for, what, a few months, and now you're in decades. Absolutely. There's the possibility that Viper will complete its mission and then say, hey, give me something else to do, and that NASA will find other uses for it. Yeah, I'm sure somebody will find the use for it. Let's talk about elsewhere in space a little bit closer to home. The James Webb Telescope is finally on the move? Yes, it is scheduled.

to leave Earth on December 18th this year at long last. And this is going to be a major new telescope that's going to look even further at greater distances than other telescopes because it can look into the infrared spectrum. And that means it's also going to be looking further back in time than other telescopes have been. And this is not going to be launched from the United States, is it? No, it's launching from French Guinea. reason for that? Well, this is being launched with help from the ESA. So the site is an ESA launch site, but in order for it to get there, it has to do this kind of treacherous journey. It's going to get placed in a special container that is nicknamed Superstars, which is an acronym for the

Super Space Telescope Transporter for Air, Road, and Sea. They must pay people to come up with these names, I think. Astronomers love their acronyms. I mean, we were just talking but the Viper rover. I think that they put a lot of creativity into this stuff. But the idea is that this is a very delicate instrument, and so its travel case is going to help protect it from humidity and vibrations and changes in temperature it's going to experience as it goes by sea to its launch site. Let's talk about other flying observation news.

You have a story about microchips with wings. This sounds like a Michael Crichton novel. These are adorable. So our writer Nick Ogasso covered these, like they are what you say they are. They are microchips with little wings attached, but the wings are designed not like the wings of birds, but like the wings of tree seeds. So like if you've ever seen one of those propeller-like seeds from a maple flutter to the ground, it doesn't fall as quickly as, you know, it would if it were compact.

The wings let it drift down gently. And the idea is that these microchips, as they drift through the air, will be able to gather data about pollution or about if there's any contaminants in an area. And the researchers design them so that after they land, you can dump a bunch of them out of a plane, for example. And then after they land, they break down, they biodegrade and kind of melt into goo and then wash away. So you're talking about a great number of these. That's right. These are really tiny. The smallest ones are something like half of a milk. millimeter. And at that size, the researchers designed them to be manufactured in bulk. So they're actually can be like manufactured as these flat objects, which lets the researchers make more in a single

batch. And then they're attached to the stretchy material that is stretched out and then placed on the flyer. And then it tightens up and relaxes and pulls the flyer into this 3D seed-like shape. And the idea is you take a bunch of these at once and throw them into the air and that they can cover a great area. Yeah, so like you say, they're not power. They just sort of gyrate, gyrotate it on their way down to the ground like the maple tree. We used to call them polynoses when we put them on our noses back in the day. Exactly like that. Elsewhere in technology news, there's been a lot of attention this week on Facebook. The Wall Street Journal had a big series based on leaked documents from Facebook. That's right. Facebook has been conducting research

internally that it hasn't been sharing with the general public. And the Wall Street Journal reported a story based partially on information from researchers inside Facebook who shared this information with reporters about some of the things that Facebook has found about its own platform, including the fact that Instagram can increase anxiety and depression among teenage girls. the fact that Facebook has a cohort of special users who aren't subject to the same moderation rules as the rest of us because some of them have big audiences or they are just prominent political figures and so they can get away with saying things on Facebook that the average user doesn't get to do and a lot of this information is revealing that Facebook is aware

of many of the problems with its platform it just isn't necessarily sharing these problems or taking action to fix them. There are researchers who are attempting to conduct independent research on Facebook and how misinformation spreads on the platform and how it can be targeted at people with ads. But just last month, some of the researchers who study this were kicked off the platform for gathering the data that they used to do their research. So Facebook is really unwilling to face outside scrutiny. And when it does study what's going on, it's unwilling to share that information with the public. More bad news for Facebook.

Recently, there was a big data breach from T-Mobile. I mean, a lot of users' personal data was leaked. Is there anything that can be done here? So the T-Mobile leak tens of millions of American social security numbers, home addresses, even driver's license numbers were all exposed to hackers. And this is only the latest major data breach that we've seen. So some people have said, we're basically asking people to take personal responsibility for the fact that other companies have made their social security numbers vulnerable. And other people are saying, well, we shouldn't be putting this on individual consumers.

The organizations that use social security number as a proof of identity should just be using a different method. And specifically, they can keep using social security numbers, but they should be using multifactor authentication. So maybe require the Social Security number, but also require another piece of information that lets the person prove they are who they say they are. So you're talking about like when my email sends me a text to my phone to make sure I'm me, that's what multi-factor authentication is. That's correct. The idea is that you don't want to ask for two pieces of information necessarily, because

if I, let's say I'm calling a customer hotline and they say, okay, to prove you are who you say you are, give me your home address and your social security number, for example. If they do that, a hacker who has gotten access to my social security number often also has access to my home address. So what that organization that's asking for proof of identity needs to do instead is to reach out to me, like you said, by sending a text to my phone, something that will be much harder for a hacker to get a hold of, or by requiring some other form of authentication that relies on something I own, like a device. Some other methods include some people have these USB keys that maybe you can't log

into an account on a computer until you both enter a password and you're using a machine with this USB key plugged in, which proves that you are who you say you are. Yeah, because I have on my phone, I have an app called an Authenticator, right? Yes. And the Authenticator generates all these little numbers that you then put back into the response, and that makes sure that it's you holding the phone and you're the right person. Yeah, that's a great example, a very common example of multi-factor authentication. And I think a lot of us find this kind of inconvenient, but ultimately it's much better to go through a little bit of inconvenience than to make it super easy for hackers to get into our personal accounts.

Interesting. Yeah. Finally, there was news this week about some ancient footprints found in New Mexico that could push back the date for humans in North America. but you have a story about prints somewhere else, some ancient muddy handprints. Tell us about that. So researchers have discovered the remains of five hand and footprints on the Tibetan plateau, and they dated them to see when these came from, and they date back about 200,000 years to the Ice Age. And when they measured the size,

they think these came from kids, from a 7-year-old and a 12-year-old. Oh, that's cool, isn't that? That's really cool. It's especially cool because they don't think that this was just kids wandering by and accidentally leaving these traces. They think they were deliberately pressing their hands and feet into this muddy material that later hardened and was preserved in limestone. So it just kind of proves that kids have always loved making prints of their hands and feet all over everything.

So that's like what my kid does on the wall, right? In the house with 30 hand prints. These are this money prints on the side of a cave or a wall someplace. Yeah, maybe you should be saving your kids handprints because they are technically a form of art. I mean, some of the oldest evidence we have of human species making art comes from handprints on cave walls or in this case in mud. Thank you, Sophie, Sophie, as always, have a great weekend. You too. Sophie Bushwick is Technology Editor for Scientific American based in New York.

We're going to take a break. and when we come back, will Congress say yes to the country's first major climate change legislation? We will talk about it. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. President Biden ran for office with big goals for combating and adapting to climate change in the U.S. Now, those promises have bills attached to them, and I, you know, I mean congressional bills. First, a massive infrastructure bill that passed the Senate with a bipartisan vote this August.

In that, money for public transportation, electric car charging networks, and resilient measures to help communities already hit hard by flooding, fire, and other consequences of climate change. Second, an even bigger budget bill that is yet to receive a vote. And in that one, Biden hopes to spend billions of dollars to speed up the transition to renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption, fund more research into climate change, and even help farmers reduce their carbon footprints. Together, the two bills would help reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 30% in the next decade and get the president close to his goal of reducing electricity sector emissions by 80% by 2030.

But, as you might expect, this is Washington. There's politics to consider and some of the biggest provisions hang in the balance, as lawmakers be hold into different groups of constituents jockey for victories. With me is Carl Davenport, Energy and Environmental Policy Reporter for the New York Times. Welcome, Carl. Hi, it's great to be with you, Ira. Did I get anywhere close to summing that up correctly? Absolutely. The numbers are all right.

I mean, if you were to actually put together the impact of these two pieces of legislation combined, it would be far in a way, the largest thing that the U.S. has ever done. to combat climate change. And it would profoundly reduce U.S. carbon emissions. And those emissions would start to go down and we would see a difference in less than a decade. Let's talk about climate resiliency money. What do we mean by that? That is mostly money, the infrastructure bill. That's the one that you talked about, the trillion dollar infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last month and is at the moment still expected to go up for a House vote, possibly to go to President Biden's desk as soon as next week. That bill includes $47 billion for what you said. It's

called climate resiliency. This is the first time the federal government has ever spent money on something with that label. That money acknowledges that we are going to have to rebuild our infrastructure in a way that accounts for stronger flooding, stronger storms, greater heat waves, rising sea levels, the impacts of climate change. So that means we're going to have to build roads and bridges, build our infrastructure in a way that accounts for stronger storms and much higher surges of water when those storms. What we just saw the devastation and the deadly impacts of the flooding from Hurricane Ida in the New York City area. The idea would be to use some of this $47 billion to rebuild a lot of that infrastructure, rebuild subways, rebuild buildings, rebuild coastal areas in a way that acknowledge more of that is on the way.

So that's a really big deal. Again, the federal government has never said, let's take climate studies into account and rebuild our infrastructure in a way that makes us prepared and resilient for it. Yeah, that would be a new idea and a new direction. Let's talk about the budget bill because there are huge investments in there for transition to renewable energy. what are some of the carrots, what are some of the sticks? So the way I like to think about these two bills is the infrastructure bill,

which right now is about a third smaller, contains this idea, a lot of money to help us prepare for the climate change that's coming. It doesn't contain very much at all to help us keep climate change from getting worse. It just says climate change is coming. That's baked in. We've got to get ready for it. The budget bill, the reconciliation bill, goes much further. It says, how can we spend?

federal money to keep climate change from getting profoundly worse. And that means what can we do to reduce the cause of climate change? That's fossil fuel emissions. And the central piece of that bill, the climate piece of that bill, is a program called the Clean Electricity Payment Program. It's $150 billion, and it is specifically aimed at the electric power sector. Why? Electricity generation is the second largest cause of CO2 of fossil fuel emissions in the U.S. Number one causes is cars. What this bill would do as written right now, not necessarily going to stay the same, is it would take this $150 billion and it would pay electric power providers to shut down their coal and gas fired power plants, their fossil fuel fired power plants and switch to zero carbon claims sources of electricity, such as wind, solar, and nuclear power. If companies wanted to get this money from the federal government, they could switch. over 4% of their electric generation per year. So each year, another 4%, another 4% shut down, you know, 4% of your polluting generation, replace it with clean generation. So that's the carrot.

You know, that's something companies would be excited to get that. And companies that did not do that, they would pay a fine. That's the stick. If you don't do it or if you do less than 4% then you have to pay a penalty. The structure of that has been analyzed as has, has, has having the potential to basically totally transform the electric power sector in the next eight or nine years to get us to probably 80% clean sources of electricity in the U.S. by 2030. That's a profound change, and it really would go very far to lowering the U.S. carbon emissions. And there's one more thing that's super important about this. It wouldn't just lower carbon emissions in the electricity sector. A lot of the legislation is also about promoting the use of electric vehicles.

They might not be burning gasoline, but if the electricity is coming from dirty sources, those cars are still dirty. But if the electricity has been turned over and is coming from cleaner sources, that means you've also had the follow-on effect of cleaning up emissions from vehicles as well. So that's why analysts see this as if this provision passes, if it stays in, as having a very profound impact on U.S. fossil fossil fuel emissions and very fast as well. Of course, I would imagine there's going to be some pushback from the coal industry and the states where coal is big still. There's a lot of pushback. The electric utilities certainly like the idea of a way that they can get money from the government.

They don't like the penalty. Analysts say if you take away that penalty, it's a subsidy. It's a clean energy subsidy. but it won't have the power, that transformative power. The natural gas industry is lobbying to get paid from switching to coal, which is the most heavily polluting source of fossil fuel emissions, to natural gas, which is still a polluter, but only about half as polluting as coal. So they're saying, hey, we're not 100% clean, but we're a lot cleaner than coal.

So you could, you know, how about you get paid to switch to us? That would still lead to reductions in emissions, but not nearly as dramatically as envisioned by the president or at the rate that scientists say needs to happen to prevent a lot of the worst climate catastrophes. Let's go back to the cars because you mentioned how important they are to a clean energy future. Can these bills help clean up other kinds of transportation?

I'm thinking about public transit, shipping, other kinds of stuff. There is a lot of money in both of these bills aimed at transit. The bipartisan bill would include about $7 billion for building electric vehicle charging stations. It would include about $5 billion to help provide electric and low-emission school buses. It would include broadly about $39 billion to modernize public transit systems, including replacing heavily polluting diesel buses with zero or low-carbon electric buses. There's money in there in the reconciliation bill, the budget bill. There's provisions for tax credits for consumers to buy electric vehicles. Both of the provisions are loaded with proposals and provisions designed to build out,

or almost non-existent electric vehicle charging infrastructure to make it easier and cheaper for consumers to buy electric vehicles. It also has tax credits, manufacturing credits, for automations. to help them build and sell the kinds of electric vehicles that consumers would want to buy. So all of those, I would say, are designed to supplement, support, and accelerate this sort of central clean electricity program. That's kind of the biggest piece. And then all this other spending on charging stations, tax credits, helping companies make

this transition, building out more of the electric grid to support more wind and solar and renewable electricity, all of that is a very important part of supplementing and making this transition happen. You know, as someone who installed solar panels on my house this year to take advantage of a big federal solar tax credit, I'm wondering if they've left that in the bill because it's set to expire. Are those kinds of things for consumers still left in the bill? They are. So another thing in the budget bill would be extensions of tax credits, again, for manufacturing and for electric utilities that sell solar. So both if you're a company,

you can get tax credits for selling solar electricity to your consumers. And there are tax credits, more tax credits for consumers. So a lot of the budget bill is just extensions of these tax credits, keeping them alive. Are people saying, even though this is like an historic clean energy bill, are people saying, well, you know, it's still not enough?

I mean, yeah. The problem is, is just that, you know, the world has waited too long. So the math doesn't add up. And you know this, Ira, if you look at the amount of CO2 that's in the atmosphere right now and the amount of heat-trapping CO2 that's going up right now, the rate of it, we've already heated up 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. And the sort of tipping point is that scientists tell us is 1.5 degrees Celsius. and there's basically no way to not go past that.

The planet needs to be prepared to go past that and to accept and deal with a lot of the catastrophic impact to that. We will see more record devastating heatwaves, floods, wildfires, and storm surges. And so what the scientists are saying is if you don't want it to get a lot worse, you have to act very quickly. this bill gets really good reviews from analysts who say this could really just change the trajectory of the U.S. and start making those numbers go down. And the other thing, of course, is the rest of the world has to act as well.

But, you know, the U.S. is the biggest historic emitter. And for it to actually enact something that would measurably ratchet down those emissions. So, like, the line starts going down fast to say, hey, other emitters, you know, we can. can, we've done this. Again, not clear. Don't know if it's going to happen. Talking with Carl Davenport, Climate and Energy Policy Reporter at the New York Times on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is, as you say, a huge bill. It comes with a huge price tag. $3.5 trillion. And of that, at least for now, $150 billion is devoted to the Clean Energy Program. Will it make enough of an impact, do you think, to bring consumers along?

Will they say, hey, this is something good that we think we should help? For example, one of the things that the president has been talking about is, you know, we've seen with all of these storms, we have the hurricanes, the fires, the flooding. Look, it's an infrastructure. We need to really build the infrastructure. And here is your opportunity to do that. That is certainly how this pair of packages is envisioned by President Biden and by a lot of the Democratic leadership. You know, one reason they say they believe that they have the political capital to push such massive pieces of legislation and such massive spending is they do believe that public opinion is with them.

They do believe that this moment after this summer in particular, when the United States has experienced record, devastating and deadly. weather events in almost all corners of the country. You know, wildfires in the West, deadly flooding in the east, heat waves and droughts that devastated crops and agriculture and livestock across the north and south. The political reckoning is that this is sort of a moment where this is unavoidable and people are looking and they're saying, people are dying. I know someone who died of extreme weather. When it is so real and so personal and hits people's lives, and livelihoods. That's the pitch. But there's the pushback, isn't there? I mean, we've gone through all the numbers and the

line items. This is politics playing out there. There are key players here, are there not? What needs to happen to get these bills to pass and what might make them fall apart? You know, one of the biggest players in this space is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The centrist Democrat in the Senate whose up or down vote could make or break, certainly the budget bill. He supported the... infrastructure bill. He was a co-author of it. But right now, he is saying he wants all kinds of changes in the reconciliation bill. Senator Mansion, in addition to being the pivotal central up or down vote, is also chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. And that means that under the Senate rules,

he has the legislative authority to actually write this climate provision. Senator Mansion comes from West Virginia, the nation's number two producer of coal and number seven producer of natural gas. He is the Senate's number one recipient of campaign contributions from the coal oil and gas industry. He personally profits from coal. He owns stock in a coal brokerage company that he founded and turned over to his son. His son began running it when he entered politics. But last year, he made over $400,000 in dividends from that coal brokerage stock. So he's, personally invested in the fates of these industries that could be killed by this climate legislation. And he is the one who holds the pen to write the bill. At this moment, the expectation is that if this

legislation goes forward, Senator Mansion is going to try to find a way to write this bill that will be the most friendly to coal, natural gas, and electric utilities as possible. That said, I've also talked a lot of analysts who said if the basic structure of the legislation stays the same, and he writes it in a way that is really weak and really watered down and really slows the pace and contains big giveaways to coal and gas, but the basic structure of rewarding the companies for going clean and making them pay for staying dirty, if that stays, it could still be the biggest climate change bill that has ever passed Congress for the reason that Congress has never passed a meaningful climate change bill. The emissions reduction impact of it could be a lot less,

and it could be the U.S.'s' first climate change law. That would be new and different and would make a difference. Let me play devil's advocate on the devil's side here. Of course, it could also evaporate if they sit on these bills in Congress so long that they go through the midterm elections, which is a year from now. And that might change the whole face of the House and the Senate, majority that the Democrats have. This is why President Biden and House progressives have put so much capital in pushing these things through to get to the president's desk this year. You're absolutely right. I don't even think it's the midterms. If these things don't get done this year, you know, I think there's no question that Republicans will clearly take a majority in one,

if not both Senate chambers after 2022. And yeah, that's it for this legislation if that happens. Yeah, well, the clock is ticking. Thank you for taking tap to be with us today. Thank you for having me. I hope I wasn't too much of a downer. No, no, no. Sometimes the truth is a little bit of tough medicine to swallow.

Carl Davenport, Energy and Environmental Policy Reporter for the New York Times. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, who gets a third vaccine shot and when? and why it's not a straightforward question. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. This week, the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Wollenski, overruled a recommendation by an advisory panel and said health care workers or others who might be exposed in their jobs, as well as those over 65 and over, can get Pfizer boosters. That mirrors the FDA's approval earlier this week. Israel has always

already been administering third doses to much of its population. And here in the U.S., some people are seeking out an additional shot on their own flying totally under the official radar. So why is this policy so confusing and who is in charge? Joining me now to help sort through those questions and other booster conundrums is Sarah Jane Tribble, senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, and Arthur Allen, an editor there, an author of the book Vaccine, the controversial story of medicine's greatest lifesaver. They recently published an article delving into the booster backstory, and you can find that at ScienceFriety.com slash boosters. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. Nice to have you both. Sarah Jane, how unusual is it for the CDC

director to overrule an advisory panel? It's very unusual. It was not expected, but I think that the director, Wollenski, wanted to go along with what the FDA had said, earlier in the week, and also to kind of back up the plan that President Biden laid out in August. Arthur, isn't it sort of nebulous? We don't really know who these at-risk individuals are or the whole universe of them? Well, we don't know exactly who they all are, but we can think of some obvious groups who would have been very upset if they couldn't be qualified for a booster, and that includes health care workers and teachers. And, you know, whether they're really at highest risk. I mean, during the CDC advisory committee meeting yesterday, there were people who

said, well, it turns out that most of the health care workers who've gotten COVID have gotten it at home and brought it to work. But it really doesn't matter. I mean, we have to remember that, you know, this is not really just a purely scientific decision. I don't think you would say that it contravenes science, but it, the science is complicated and difficult to sort out. And there are political elements here. And one of them is that, you know, you have two-thirds of the country is vaccinated and has had it with the pandemic and had it with the non-vaccinated people and they want to get whatever protection is available. Yeah, one of the concerns for the advisory committee yesterday when they were discussing this was the idea that approving the booster would not enable more

Americans who haven't been vaccinated at all. It wouldn't encourage them to go get that initial vaccination. They talked quite a bit about that. And Arthur, how soon do we, think that the Moderna vaccine will be approved because we're talking only the Pfizer dose now? Well, I think they've submitted their data to the FDA and sought a booster dose. So it's up to the FDA. And, you know, we don't know exactly, but I think it's going to be soon. I think it's going to be within the next couple weeks at the latest, maybe sooner, maybe in the next few days. I don't know. And Sarah, these Pfizer doses, are they the same ones that people have? already been given, or is it a new formulation? No, it's the same one. You would go back and just get a third

shot at the Pfizer dose. There was an interesting statistic presented during the meeting yesterday, and this idea that there is about 70% of the vaccinations given the U.S. are giving it pharmacies, like your CVS or your Walgreens. And already more than 2.3 million people Americans have received an additional dose, according to the data on the CDC website this morning. I know people who are doing that now who are 65 and older and even people under 65 and just walking in and getting a shot, the third one. Yeah. Yeah, I did a story on the idea that Pfizer was pushing boosters. And earlier this summer, Pfizer's CEO, Albert Berla, came out and said that there was waning efficacy.

And at the same time, as people were hearing about this, I interviewed somebody, her name was Angie Melton. and she had decided that she would go get an extra shot. She had Johnson & Johnson. She wanted to go get a shot of one of the MRNA vaccines because she was fearful about passing on the coronavirus to her child who is not qualified for a shot. He's too young. Arthur, what's going on when you get a booster?

What is it doing to your immune system? Well, the first shot or the shots that you get, you know, stimulate these immune cells to either to make antibodies are to recognize the virus and kill cells that are infected with it. And over time, you know, the antibodies that you get in that first series start to wane, I guess, which means they fall apart. Even as they're fading, however, these cells that were stimulated by the vaccine to begin with, you know, they apparently don't die off as quickly, assuming you have a healthy immune system, and they're sort of lying in your blood or bone marrow or lymph nodes. And with the boosts,

They kind of get this jolt into, you know, multiplying and cranking out more antibodies. And in some cases, even sort of diversifying or, you know, mutating in a way that gives them sort of more versatility to attack the virus should you be infected. Do we know enough about boosters from previous vaccines? Why do some vaccines need boosters and some don't? Yeah, I mean, I think generally boosters are common with vaccines. In the old-timey days, as you might say, you know, there were these weakened live virus vaccines, like the smallpox vaccine and the measles vaccine, which is still a very effective vaccine. And these were viruses that had been weakened.

And so they acted like viruses. They infect you, although they don't make you sick, usually. And they seem to stimulate a more kind of varied response by your immune system because it recognizes them as the real thing. and evolutionarily, it's kind of trained to do that and to be ready the next time. But live virus vaccines in some cases cause more side effects. And more recently, of course, we've moved to these very sophisticated ways of producing vaccines that create a more targeted response to the pathogen, to COVID in this case.

So they create a more targeted response to the pathogen, but one that's not as broad. So you need two or three shots usually to get the full effect. So we talked to Dr. Fauci about this, and here's what he said. Well, and in my mind, and it's purely my instinct as an immunologist and an infectious disease person, that the proper regimen is ultimately going to be a three-shot regimen where you get a prime, a boost, you let the mature, the immune system mature for several months, be that five or six or seven or whatever, and then you come in with the boost. So that's the thing that seems to escape people when they start talking.

about boost. Because people think that by getting a booster that we've admitted that the vaccine isn't working, right? We have to have a booster. Do they understand that's part of the system? I don't think most people do. And I mean, I think most of us just really didn't think about it. But that's, you know, if you know the history of vaccines, you know, that's definitely,

it's a common thing. Sarah, you found that NIH had this in their mind for a while, right? Yeah, the NIH itself has been talking about boosters since January, at least January. And not only have they been talking about it, but they've been working with scientists around the world, forming a group called the Save Group. That group is 60 to 70 epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, and others from around the globe, including agencies here in the U.S., the FDA and CDC have members, and Barta, they're all part of that, but also from Israel, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. where these folks meet once a week and they have subgroups to track the variants that are coming

out with coronavirus and then to collect samples and then do tests with mice and animal testing. And so the reporting that we did really uncovered this idea that the NIH has been on top of this all along. One of the folks I talked with Dr. Bob Cedar, he is one of the principal investigators there and has been active with the Moderna vaccine team. he had done some testing, and I'll let him explain it. Back in March, we had, you know, kind of projected this already. And so we had animals that we had vaccinated with the Medina vaccine back in the fall

for the express purpose of looking at immune responses over a long period of time. Yeah, so they were looking at animal models way back. understanding they would need to do this later off. Yeah, I mean, they were looking at model animals back in the fall, and they knew and anticipated that they would need to look not only at the short-term effects of the vaccines, but the long-term effects. And when he said that to us, I sort of paused and thought to myself, of course. You know, we've had vaccines around for ages,

and of course the scientists are worried about the long-term efficacy, the long-term strength of these vaccines. And, of course, these brilliant scientists who have spent their whole lives, studying vaccines and working as public servants, were already thinking ahead of what the general public would think. So once he said that, I was sort of like, yeah, they had set animals on the shelf, so to speak, to look at the long-term effects of whether the vaccines would work or not. And in looking at that, they would be asking, well, do we need to boost? Because we've had to boost other vaccines in the past. And when you think about it, that way, it's sort of like,

huh, they've, there's no surprises here for them. And indeed, what they feel, what they feel, found with their animal models was really good response with the antibodies once they did boost. So how did the president sort of get out ahead of the regulatory committees on this? Did he listen to the NIH and then here come the FDA and CDC and he's sort of trapped now? Well, the president has this group, you know, the COVID-19 task force that he's put together. And so Biden's announcement in August came after talking with that White House COVID-19 task force. That includes, you know, Jeff Zines is the leader of that. He kind of organizes it. It includes Dr. Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former FDA Commissioner David Kessler and current FDA and CDC leaders.

So that group of folks, they've been talking for months about the data that they're seeing coming in, the research. They talk to the NIH. They talk to the companies. They're looking at every aspect of the research. And notably, Dr. Fauci told us that he meets with Biden on a weekly basis. And we confirm that Fauci and others in those top White House meetings heard from the NIH scientists as well in their own meetings about the research on boosters. And so when you take that all together and you think this group of leaders that Biden has appointed as a task force, he's listening to them. And these leaders were convinced that they wanted to go out ahead of the Delta variant.

After, you know, they heard from the NIH, they heard from the corporations, they were watching Israel. And they made their call and hoped for the approval process to sort of keep up. Arthur, so what's the calculation that these advisory committees are making here? Where is the balance? They must be walking a line somewhere here. I think that sort of in the face of, you know, public skepticism or leariness of getting another shot and the fact that, you know, all these vaccines could clearly do a lot of good and poor countries,

they don't want to be in the position of recommending vaccines unless they really think they're necessary. and especially if they cause additional serious side effects like myocarditis, which has been, you know, reported mainly in sort of younger men after the second MRNA vaccine, whether Pfizer-Moderna. And so, I mean, I think it's really unlikely that we're going to see any of these events once boosters start being given out. But we don't have that much data yet. And even the data from Israel, you know, the younger people were the last to get the boosters. so we haven't seen a huge amount of data from them as to whether the levels of myocarditis might be higher theoretically. And so, you know, these committees are weighing risks and benefits for the public, and the research isn't really totally there yet that satisfies our knowledge of either,

even though, you know, as Sarah Jane was pointing out, like with the woman she talked to, I mean, on a personal level, you know, it's pretty easy to see people deciding, yeah, at this time, I'd like to have some more protection. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And so the president and the NIH already sort of throwing their weight behind this. Does this make it look like a political decision by Dr. Fauci here? It really does feel like that. Whether the NIH and the president like it or not,

it does feel like a political decision because it's becoming from sort of these top officials as opposed to the agencies themselves. But let's say also, I don't want to minimize the influence of the pharmaceutical companies here. Even before Biden's announcement, you heard Pfizer's Albert Berla coming out much earlier this summer about talking about the waning immunity and beginning to push for boosters. And then of course we've talked about Israel and what they saw there. Fauci, he told us that in his mind, the sooner you get the boosters out, the better if you want to prevent people from getting sick in general. But he also really drove home the point that he wanted the decision to not be, I mean, the decision just isn't one guy or one group. It needs to be done

sort of the American way. Let's make sure we do it with the official process. And the official process is the FDA with their ver-pack and all the things that you do. And if they say, we don't think there's enough data to do a booster, then so be it. It'll be that way. It'll be that I think that would be a mistake, to be honest with you. But nonetheless, you know, we want to do it by the proper procedure. So it sounds like he thinks, you know, let's go by the book, even though I think you may be making a mistake and not bringing the boosters out fast enough. Yeah.

You could see at the FDA meeting that there was this fairly open breach between the head of the biologics division at FDA and the. and the person who's directly under him, Marion Gruba, who is in charge of vaccines, she obviously was more conservative and cautious than he was. He was going for full approval of boosters for everyone, which was, I assume, you know, Pfizer must have a thought that he was going to have the final word.

So let's try to wrap this up and talk about where we go from here. What should we be expecting in the weeks ahead? Would it be fair to say that people over 65 and maybe under 65 will be going out and getting boosters on their own? Without doubt. I think that you're already seeing people going out and get boosters on their own. I think that they trust the idea that the companies have said that the boosters are needed because of weighing efficacy and they trust the idea that Fauci has said boosters are needed. I think they'll be going out and getting them on their own.

And what about the official position? Will we be expecting that to keep shifting? I mean, I think, you know, this week, Johnson & Johnson reported that the booster shot has, you know, the potential to give people really excellent protection. Mederan is expected to release similar data soon. And then, you know, there's all this pharma industry pressure to get third doses. And I'm kind of wondering whether these committees are going to meet again for each of these vaccines or are they going to, is it possible that they might meet again, you know, to reconsider broadening their vaccines? recommendation in terms of who should get vaccinated. I mean, it really depends, obviously, on the data that we're seeing from the ground and from hospitals. I think they're going to be very responsive to that.

Well, that's a good place to end, folks. Thank you for really an enlightening discussion. Thank you, Ira. Thank you, Ira. You're welcome. Sarah Jane Tribal, senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News. Arthur Allen is an editor at KHN and also author of the book, Vaccine, the controversial story of medicine's greatest lifesavers. And you can read their article on the booster story. It's at Science Friday.com slash boosters. One last thing. Our book club kicks off next week. This fall, we're reading Rising Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. We'll be talking about wetlands, floodplains, and the communities fighting back against sea level rise. This is a very relevant discussion these days. So join us for live discussions, scientist interviews, and more. Information, of course,

is up on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash book club. Charles Breakfast is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor and Kathleen Davis. John Dan Kosky is our news director. B.J. Liderman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Or ask your smart speakers now anywhere in the house to play Science Friday. We'll see you next week. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.