The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Time To Put A Possible COVID-19 Vaccine In Context

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

An apology for last night's technical problem (my fault!); Vaccines in context; and this week's lesson in "learning from history".

and hello there Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily and I want to start this evening's podcast by apologizing for last night's podcast. Those of you who tuned into it early, right after it was dropped last night, some of you wrote to tell me that there was some kind of audio problem. I was thinking when I first read these notes that, oh, they're talking about the lawnmower. They're talking about the dog barking. No, that's not what they're talking about the lawnmower. They're talking about the dog barking. No, that's not what they were talking about. They didn't mind that.

What they minded was this click, click sound that was going on through the whole broadcast. It's a metronome. And for some reason in the platform I use to put together podcasts, there's always this metronome going, and you have to remember to click it off before you publish the podcast. And for the first hundred podcasts, I remembered. And we went through 400,000 downloads. And nobody ever had that problem.

Until last night. And it's my fault. Anyway, thanks to more than a few of you who sent me emails at the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com to tell me that there was this problem. So fortunately, this was only a couple of hours after it had dropped, I was able to get in and get it fixed and get the clicking sound out.

And so therefore, if you picked up the podcast later, you didn't have that problem. If you had it earlier and you just said, I can't take this anymore, it's available now. It's there. Okay. And it's actually, there's some good stuff in yesterday's podcast. You don't want to miss it. All right.

Enough about yesterday. Let's get into today. Two topics up for discussion here today. You know that for the last, I guess, five weeks, I've had kind of regular updates on the vaccine situation. And starting with our couple of programs on the University of Saskatchewan, one of, not the only, one of the Canadian universities that's involved in trying to come up with a vaccine. But throughout this whole process, we've kept you in touch with developments on the vaccine front.

And it's important to know that unlike any other time in history, any other time through the various pandemics of the last 100, 150 years, unlike all of those times, this time there's this worldwide effort. More than 100 different research laboratories and universities are working towards trying to come up with a vaccine that will cure this COVID-19 situation. But unlike all the other times, this enormous worldwide effort, there's worldwide cooperation.

There may be country-to-country issues, and we've seen those, but not between these research labs and the scientists and the university personnel who are working at this. They're not at each other's throats. They are helping each other, and they are talking to each other. And if I recall, there's at least one major conference call a week, if not more than one, between many of the more than 100 who are working on this, to exchange information,

to talk to each other about what they've achieved, where they're seeing some potential for success, where they're encountering problems. Those conversations are going on, on a worldwide level. And that's amazing. And we've been told all along that this is going to take a long time. That past vaccines have taken, even in situations where they've actually developed a vaccine,

because in many, they've never developed a vaccine. But in some of the past ones where they have developed vaccines, diseases that needed a vaccine, it's taken years. In some cases, 10, 15 years. And the assumption has always been on this one, it will take at least, if everything goes right, 12 to 18 months. Since the beginning, which would last December. So there's always been this kind of outside shot at, you know, late this year.

We told you more than a month ago. It could be as early as December or January. I think we were ahead of the curve on talking about that. Nevertheless, that's with everything breaking the right way. Well, in at least six cases of the different projects around the world trying to find a vaccine, and at least six of that more than 100, there are very encouraging initial signs. They've got through the animal stage, they're into the human testing stage, and that's complicated. It starts off with a small control group,

then it gets into a larger group, then it gets into a much larger group. But we've already heard some suggestions that, you know, this could happen as early as getting the go-ahead, the sign that this is all going to work by this fall. So you have this situation, you know, with labs around the world where there is this optimism, you know, it's cautious that there could be a vaccine later this year, early next year. And one of the interesting things that has been determined already by some of these researchers, according to a piece in the New York Times the other day,

yesterday's New York Times. This is interesting. Let me read you this line. The coronavirus, that's COVID-19, the coronavirus itself has turned out to be a clumsy prey, a stable pathogen, unlikely to mutate significantly and dodge a vaccine. It's an easier target, which is terrific news,

said Michael Farzan, a virologist at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Florida. So that's interesting, right? So you've got these different trials going on in, you know, there's one going on in Britain, there's one going on in China, there's one going on in the States. Dalhousie University in Halifax is involved at one of these medium-stage vaccine developments. I think they're coupled with an operation in China.

So those are all encouraging things. What you have to keep in mind, though, is there's a lot more to having a vaccine ready to go than just the, you know, chemical makeup. I don't know whether that's probably not the right word, but you know what I mean. More than just the liquid that they're going to inject into you. There's the whole kind of logistics of getting everything ready because you're going to need hundreds of millions of doses, probably a billion doses at least.

So how do you do that? In the States, they've appointed a military guy, General Gustav Perna, to lead the process of being ready for a vaccine. So there's a whole kind of different level going on of getting the logistics ready even before the vaccine is ready. And General Perna said, I need to have syringes. I need to have wipes. I need to have Band-Aids. I need to have syringes. I need to have wipes. I need to have Band-Aids.

I need to have the vaccine. Now, how am I going to distribute it? What is it going to be distributed in? What do I need to order now to make sure I have the distribution capability? The small bottles, the trucks. It's the little things, he says, like the syringes, the needles, the glass vials. All of that has to be thought about.

You don't want something that seems so simple to be the bottleneck in your vaccination program. So there's the vaccine, there's the logistics, and then there is, more than anything, the safety issue. That's one of the reasons vaccines have taken so long in the past, years before they're ready to be used in the general population, because they're checking the safety of it. I mean, think about this.

If you rush into a vaccine program this fall where you're going to vaccinate hundreds of millions or a billion people, you better be damn sure you know what's in that vial. You better be 110% confident in the safety of what you're going to inject into people around the world. Right? Now, they're convinced, they certainly fully understand that issue.

But it's one that I think we have to keep remembering as some excitement grows around this whole issue of a vaccine. I mean, we saw this week when the White House got all charged up and very Trumpian about the announcement on Monday. And then what happened? The market took off. The stock market went up. Monday, Tuesday.

Or not Monday. Yeah, I guess Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I'm not sure where it is today. You know, it was down early. And then it, you know, it kind of started to bounce back during the day. But anyway, it's kind of flat overall. So that's your vaccine update.

And basically what that update is, there's every reason to be encouraged about what's going on by the great scientists and researchers around the world. There's every reason to be encouraged about what's going on by the great scientists and researchers around the world. There's every reason to be excited about that. But there's also every reason to be realistic about when it is that just might be available. Now here's topic number two. A couple of days ago I wrote to my old friend,

the author and historian, Jack Granatstein. Jack and I have done many shows together. Beaches of Normandy in the Netherlands around the VE Day issues. Vimy Ridge. I think we were together there for the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge. But Jack is also an expert, obviously, on all things Canadian in terms of our history, not just the military ventures.

Anyway, I wrote to Jack the other day, I think it was last weekend, and I said, you know, I'm kind of puzzled because I'm trying to imagine when this is all over, how will Canadians look back at this? How will this period be taught in our schools? 20 years from now, what will people be saying about the great pandemic of 2020, 2021, however long it lasts? And I said to Jack, I said, the reason I'm asking that question a lot in the history books

about the 1918, 1919 pandemic where more than 50,000 Canadians died. 50,000 Canadians died in that pandemic. And we were only a country of eight or nine million

at that point. You know, we're looking at between 5 and 6,000 dead now. That number is obviously going to grow, but it's not going to grow a lot. And we're a country of 33, 35 million. Right? So that was a horrible time for Canada 100 years ago, but I don't see a lot. Sure, it's referenced, but I don't see a lot written about it.

It's not one of those kind of like significant markers about the first half of the last century. I said to Jack, why is that? And he answered, and he said, you're right, there's not a lot written about that. There are a lot of different reasons. One, we had just come out of the Great War, World War I, where we'd lost 60,000, 65,000 people, soldiers.

The country was trying to rebuild and recover after that. Internationally, there was the growth of fascism, which we know all led to which place. There was the stock market crash of the late 20s, the depression of the 30s, and people tended to kind of not forget about what had happened in the pandemic of 1919, 1920, but they kind of moved on from it. So I thought this would be worth reminding us of a couple of things about that time because it's remarkable the number of things that are similar

today as to what they were a hundred years ago. You know, in 1918, when this all started, Canada was a nation fully mobilized for war. The following year confronted the problems of returning to peacetime. I asked Jack to help me out on this. He pointed me to an article written by Mark Osborne Humphreys called In Death's Shadow The 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic and War

in Canada. As I said, you know, tens of thousands of people died between September of 1918 and June of 1919. Now, how did it spread? How did Canada sort of wind up with the flu, which at the time we called the Spanish flu, although it had nothing to do with Spain, nothing. The reason it got the name Spanish flu is because there was no censorship in Spain during that time in 1918

when other countries at war had censorship, including Canada. So while this sickness was ravaging through different parts of the world, when it hit Spain, the Spanish writers wrote about it. And that was how the world found out about it. And that's why they called it the Spanish flu. Where did it really start? Still unclear all these years later. One possible area was northern France and southern England,

and it was spread by the troops who caught the disease. The other is the American Midwest, where troops were training, and the other, the interior of China. Okay? Nobody knows for sure where it started, but those are the three most likely areas. And so as the Mark Osborne Humphreys article writes, wherever it began, the flu was first identified in the late winter of 1918 and then spread around the world over the next six months,

sickening many people but causing few deaths at first. During late July 1918, something about the virus changed, making it more infectious and deadlier. A final wave circled the globe again in the winter of 1919, reverberating into yet unscathed corners of society, affecting Australia and New Zealand well into 1920. Now this is interesting. This I did not know until I read this article that Jack Granatstein sent to me by Mark Osborne Humphreys. When the pandemic began in Canada, the two most senior levels of Canadian government, that's the provinces and the feds, had a very limited role in public health.

Didn't even have a ministry of health. Ottawa was primarily responsible for maintaining an antiquated maritime quarantine system to ensure diseases didn't come into the country, that's all. That's the extent of public health for Ottawa at that time. Most public health issues were instead managed at the municipal level, and that meant that the country was a patchwork of regulated, semi-regulated, and unregulated cities. Again, here I'm reading from the Mark Osborne Humphreys,

a piece that Jack sent me. Now, this didn't stop the disease. When it got into the Canadian Corps in France by mid-June, that's when it started to take off through the Canadian troops. Right? And listen to this.

What about in Canada itself? Before the troops came home, how did this disease first get moved through Canada? Two ways. On the East Coast, the deadly wave of flu reached Canada in the second half of September 1918 with American recruits on their way to Europe.

Also spread across the country with Canadian soldiers destined for Siberia. Now listen to these, see whether some of this sounds familiar to you with today's situation. So local officials at the municipal level, and slowly the provinces and the feds, who didn't have a health department at the time, but got involved in trying to limit the damage, instituted a number of restrictions. In eastern Canada, where the pandemic peaked first,

public health officials tried to limit the spread by banning public gatherings, closing schools and churches, and even prohibiting funerals. In Saskatchewan and Alberta, citizens were prohibited from spitting in the street. They were ordered to wear homemade masks. None of these measures had any effect on the disease,

and in many cities, public health officials were overwhelmed by large numbers of sick citizens flooding local hospitals and churches. Why didn't it have any effect? Because it hit too late, these changes, these restrictions. Now, we saw some staggering numbers today in the States from a couple of different studies that have been done, simply saying if they'd gone into physical distancing and staying at home and wearing masks a week earlier, just a week earlier

than had been, as was the case this year, they would have saved tens of thousands of lives. Two weeks earlier, instead of looking at death tolls now into the 90,000 range, they would have been looking at a death toll much, much, much smaller. So, go back 100 years. You see what happened when you weren't ready. And you moved slowly into trying to deal with the situation. Now, picking up just a couple more sentences from this article. Once again, I thank Jack for sending it along. The Great War and the 1918 influenza were dual crises that brought about significant changes in Canadian public health.

As the colonist in Victoria, BC, the newspaper noted, the mandatory call to service under the terms of the Military Service Act had revealed that Canadians were not as healthy as many had once assumed. As recruiters looked into every dark corner of the Dominion, they found a population that was malnourished, underdeveloped, and prone to sickness. Tuberculosis, venereal disease, and feeble-mindedness seemed to exist on a scale that even the most pessimistic of reformers had failed to imagine. It had all been a rude awakening. The experience of the 1918 pandemic and the need to care for returned soldiers led to the creation of a whole new federal department of health.

Not interesting. So when you hear about the department of health and the health minister and the way they're dealing with this situation now, none of that existed when this hit a hundred years ago. And as a result of it hitting, as a result of all those people dying in Canada, they created, among other things, the Department of Health and the beginning of a massive change in the way social programs operate in Canada,

social programs that didn't even exist before then. So what do we take from that experience to see what happens here in Canada moving forward? Well, we see some of the ways to deal with the situation haven't really changed that much. They didn't talk about physical distancing there. And that seems to be more than anything the biggest factor

in the slowing down of this disease this time. But on a more substantial level, in terms of how the country and how society is going to operate moving forward once this has been dealt with, those questions are still very much at play. What will happen to long-term care facilities? What will happen to retirement homes? What will happen to preparation? One of the recommendations at that time, 100 years ago, is you've got to have a much better situation with masks and the equipment to deal with people who fall ill to a pandemic.

But within 20 years, those recommendations had been forgotten. And the mind was taken up on other things, like the approaching Second World War. So, as we've said many times on this broadcast. You learn from history. And if you ignore history, you can be condemned to repeat it. Tomorrow, end of the week, end of week 10.

You know what that means? The weekend special, it means your thoughts, your questions, your comments sent to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. We still have a few big ideas that floated in in the last few days. We have some nice letters, but we could always use a few more. As we approach the end of week 10, I'll have some thoughts on this tomorrow. I've also got to kind of decide whether we're going to keep this as a daily podcast. I have some views on that. And, you know, if you have some, send them in.

Love to hear them. But for now, that's the Bridge Daily. And as always, I thank you for listening. We'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.