The Daily Signal - Medical Doctor Explains What We Know About New Coronavirus Strains

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

The medical community is reporting two new strains of the virus that causes COVID-19. The first variant of the novel coronavirus was discovered in the United Kingdom in the fall of 2020, and the second in South Africa not long after. Dr. Kevin Pham, a medical doctor and a visiting policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, joins the show to explain what we know about the variants of the coronavirus, and whether vaccines will prove effective against them.  We also read your letters to the editor and share a “good news story” about The Los Angeles Dream Center and its successful efforts to support its community during the pandemic through 1.5 million free meals, tutoring help for students, and housing assistance for the needy.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, January 11th. I'm Robert Louis. And I'm Virginia Allen. On today's show, I talk with Kevin Pham, a medical doctor and a visiting policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, about the new COVID strain and what the implications of the new strain could mean for the ongoing battle against the pandemic. We also read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that has now served 1.5 million meals to people in their community who are struggling during the pandemic. Before we get to today's show, Rob and I want to tell you about a great way to keep up with

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and commentary from leading conservatives like Ben Shapiro, Cal Thomas, and Dennis Prager. It's easy to sign up. Just visit daily signal.com and click on the connect button in the top right corner of the page. We'll start sending you the morning bell tomorrow. Now stay tuned for today's show coming up next. A new strain of COVID has been detected.

and here to help us break down what we need to know about this new strain of the virus is Kevin Pham, a medical doctor and a visiting policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Dr. Fam, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for me and back. So I'm going to begin first just by thanking you so much for all of your contribution over the past months. It has been awesome to have you on this show multiple times, to have you writing for the Daily Signal, and really just offering insights and opinions. as a medical professional about COVID-19, what's going on, what we need to know.

And obviously right now, as we're looking at this new strain, once again, thank you for being willing to come on the show and break this down. So if you could, just tell us a little bit about what we know about the new strain. And is this something that we should be concerned about? Yeah. So this is, we're talking about the new strain. There are actually two new strains. that we're sort of concerned about right now. One is, one was first detected in the UK, and that's sort of the one that's been making the news. That one's been identified back in October,

and then starting around November, December, it started to really spread. And there's another strain that was detected a little bit more recently. That one was originally, that one originated in South Africa. They have similar mutations, but they seem to have different characteristics. The thing about the UK strain is that it seems

to be a highly transmissible. Whatever mutation that it picked up has made it much more, has been able to infect much more people much more rapidly. And the South Africa strain, it's, has, has a similar, a similar mutation. It's in roughly the same spot. But for some reason, it doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to have picked up that extra infectiousness that the UK strain has. But they've both been around for a relatively short amount of time.

so we don't quite we haven't quite characterized it fully but these things these two things are of concern what what we have not seen yet is these different strains causing more severe disease manifestation so with regards to the UK stream it infects people a lot more quickly but it doesn't seem to be causing worse disease and so that's a that's a that's one thing that we can sort of breathe a little bit of relief about it hasn't caused worse disease and be and more infectious at the same time. Okay. So specifically with the UK strain that was discovered, you mentioned it's more contagious. Do we know how much more are any percentages being thrown out about that? Do we have a number that we're kind of confident in landing on? Not really. We haven't quite characterized how much more infectious this is with regards to the R not number, the reproduction rate, which is a measure of how many people a person will infect with the strain on average. I haven't seen the numbers for that, but it's popped up in, it's popped up pretty much throughout the entire world by this, by this, oh, I shouldn't say the entire world, but it's popped up in very many places since it's been discovered. So it does seem to be very infectious.

And people are blaming it for the, the sort of the current, the recurrent lockdown in the UK. I think that it's fair to say that the increased number of cases is likely the result of a more infectious strain. But being that it's not quite as deadly, I haven't been too impressed by this new variant. The media, of course, is trying to make a lot of hay about this. And it makes sense. You hear in the media that there's this new strain that's going around much faster. It is kind of scary, but as with all things, we should keep a sort of an objective perspective on this. It does seem to be transmitting a lot more quickly, but it does not cause, we have not seen it to cause more severe disease manifestation.

And probably the most important thing, the thing that's on everyone's minds is that we don't know that this thing is going to evade the vaccinations. So let's talk a little bit more about that. You bring up the vaccine. I think that's the biggest question on everyone's mind is, okay, there's a new strain. do we know if the vaccine will actually be effective in stopping this in its tracks? Yeah. The vaccine manufacturers, all the ones that have either been authorized or are about to be authorized, so that's Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. They've all said that they believe that their vaccines are going to be effective in protecting against these new variants. And of course,

that's from the manufacturer, so take that with a grain of salt. But virologically, ologically, it does make sense because the way a virus would evade a vaccine is if it changes its appearance, as outward appearance, enough that the antibodies that we produce don't recognize it anymore. So the way that this occurs, if you think of a virus as sort of a Rubik's Cube, then the antibodies would have to recognize one of the faces of the Rubik's Cube in this case. is the so-called spike protein, which you may have heard about. The spike protein is what gives the coronavirus the ability to bind to the receptors in the body and then invade the cells.

This has been the target, the vaccine target for all of, or for all these vaccines, that's been the target. So long as that spike protein remains relatively consistent, then the vaccines will continue to work. And with the coronaviruses, coronaviruses in general, they seem to be fairly stable as far as these spike proteins go. And that's one of the things that's been concerning about these two variants in particular is that they do have a mutation on the spike protein.

So as I was saying about the Rubik's Cube, if you imagine a virus is like a Rubik's Cube, if one of the faces stays the same, but all the other five faces continue to change, it doesn't really matter how much mutation goes on on the other five faces. As long as that sixth face remains fairly constant, then your immune system will recognize it and will be able to attack it. And what we're seeing with these new strains is that it would be as if you take the face of the sixth face and then change one of the colors of the Rubik's Cube. So it might not be completely or might not be as easily recognized by the immune system,

but they'll still recognize it enough that they'll probably still attack it. Now, the thing with developing an immune response is that when your body starts making antibodies, the antibodies themselves have mutations on them. And then so they'll be able to recognize not just the exact vaccine target, but they'll also be able to recognize mutations too. So the immune system will have mechanisms to detect variance and strains and mutations and stuff like that. So that being the case, it is very likely that these relatively minor mutations are still going to be detectable by the antibodies that are developed from these vaccines. Dr. Fam, thank you. That's really helpful.

to get that image of an aerubics cube and the colors on the sides, that's just a really great analysis for kind of breaking down how that works with the spike protein. So how long would it take then for medical professionals to determine, okay, yes, absolutely the current vaccine will be effective against either of these two new strains? that that really depends on how on how effective the vaccine is and how how much further this this virus will spread and I know that's I sort of use the

definition the term in the definition right there but the more effective the vaccine is the longer it will take for this for this virus's evasive abilities to to manifest so if it's you know if it's 50% effective against this virus virus, this new strain, then it'll take quite a bit of time for, you know, 50% of the people who are vaccinated to get this, to get this virus. So it's a little, it's, there's no, there's no good timeline to determine how well the vaccines will work against this virus. But what we, what we do know is that even if it's not perfectly protective against the virus strain,

it will likely be at least partially protective against severe disease manifestation. And we see that with influenza vaccines, people with, even if they get the vaccine completely wrong, then if they vaccinate for the wrong strain of influenza, the people who do get the vaccine tend to have less severe disease with influenza. And a quick note about influenza, the reason why we have to have a new vaccine for influenza every single year is because there are multiple strains of influenza floating around every every single year. And the influenza strains are very different from each other.

And the way that they vary is very different from the way the coronavirus mutates. So with the coronavirus, I use the image of one Rubik's Cube. With influenza, they have two different antigens that can constantly swap out. That's what, you know, in H1N1, that's what the H and the N are. Those are the two antigens that the immune system would use to fight. against. So and the influenza virus is able to take those two antigens, the ages and the ends, and just swap those out constantly. So there's all these different variations that it can present. So rather than having one Rubik's cube, the influenza virus has two Rubik's cube and is able to keep

changing all all six faces on those Rubik's cubes. That's why it's so hard for, for pharmaceutical manufacturers to create a vaccine for this. And there are, um, birds typically are the, the, the, the reservoir, reservoir for influenza. And so they're able to mutate in the bird populations before they jump to humans. And so because of that, it's really difficult to keep track of this thing. And we're not, we haven't been able to eradicate influenza because of this ability for influenza to mutate in animals before they get to humans. Sorry, that's a lot of information.

No, that's helpful, I think, to recognize. Because I do want to ask you, was the medical community, anticipating that there would be kind of this new strain or multiple new strains of COVID that would arise given the fact that we know, okay, yes, viruses mutate, but COVID is so different from something like, you know, the normal flu that we see every winter that, you know, we kind of all know mutates year to year. Right. The, yeah, as you mentioned, all viruses mutate and they will continue to mutate.

and the strains that become predominant are are chosen by natural selection. We think of, we sort of view viruses as this sort of, this like arch nemesis, this villain in our daily lives, which they kind of are. But these mutations aren't, they're not smart mutations. They happen randomly. And it just so happens that certain mutations increase the ability of viruses to infect people. and but then many more mutations cause the viruses to become completely inert and so that's why we'll only see the viruses that become more effective at spreading around and the mutations will continue to happen but the important thing is the mechanism by which it does happen and so what with increased transmissibility increased contagiousness infectiousness what probably happened was that there was a mutation that caused it to bind

better to the human receptors. But the human receptors tend to be fairly constant. So so long as these proteins are able to attach to the human receptors, and they have to look kind of similar. You know, if you're thinking lock and key mechanisms, then you can change the keys appearance so much before it stops working on the particular lock. And that's kind of one of the things that's constraining the coronavirus's

ability to evade immunity, they still have to attach to the ACE protein that's in humans. Okay. But I guess the medical community as a whole, do you feel like they've been kind of thrown for a loop? Or was this really expected of like, okay, we knew the other strains were going to come. And at the end of the day, most medical professionals are probably not too concerned about this because it was anticipated. It was certainly anticipated. A lot of medical professionals are probably concerned because one of the variants did come that became more infected. But no, we always knew that new variants would eventually emerge. This is what happens with all viruses. And do you know about how many cases we've seen in the U.S. of either of these two new strains? I don't know the exact number, but there were a couple of cases, I believe in Colorado, where, um, These new strains were identifying people with no history of travel.

And when that happens, when you have a community case that did not originate from elsewhere, then you know that that virus strain has established itself in the community. So are there any kind of new precautions that we should be taking for ourselves or our loved ones to protect, you know, for ourselves from these new strains? Or is it kind of still all the same of, okay, we need to. keep wearing masks and social distancing and all of those things. Yeah, it's all the same. They're still respiratory viruses and they transmit on our respirations. And being that these are more infectious, then it becomes more important to take these precautions.

But, you know, a lot of what we've done, a lot of what we tried to do, hasn't had a major impact. The non-pharmaceutical interventions hasn't had a real impact on the spread of these viruses. the early lockdowns seem to have done a lot to crimp the ability of the virus to stop spreading. But once, you know, after the original 15 days and the third days of 45 days total, after that happened, then people sort of burned out on these measures because they were very harsh measures. So what really is important now is just taking personal responsibility, taking a look at who is at risk in your own life and trying to maintain trying to maintain as much physical distance either from them or isolating yourself before you go see them.

Like for instance, I know we're past the holiday season, but before I traveled home, I isolated as best I can for at least two weeks before I went home to see my parents. These are the kind of precautions that we need to continue to take. And as I said before, it's not, the disease manifestation is not greater. It doesn't seem like it's more severe, but the fact that it spreads much more quickly than, it will be able to reach more people who are susceptible to severe disease, you know, the elderly people with preexisting conditions. So it just becomes that much more important to try to protect them as much as possible. And as far as testing goes, do the tests that we are broadly using right now to diagnose COVID,

will those work on the new strain? So in other words, if I start having COVID symptoms and I go get tested, but I actually have one of these new strains, will that test come back positive? Yeah, they should because the test, the PCR tests are a little bit different from the, from what you would expect from a vaccine. The PCR tests, which is what most people are doing, and even the antigen test should be able to detect these.

But what the test do is they detect certain, like certain more consistent segments of the viral genetic material. and so if so some of these have to remain fairly constant within the the virus's genome genetic sequence because if there's too much if there's too much mutation too much variation then either a you'd have a different different virus entirely or be the virus would just self-destruct like you can't have too many mutations in any kind of microorganism so the current test should continue to work Dr. Pham, before we let you go, can you just give us kind of, in your opinion, the worst case scenario and the best case scenario for the next few months as we tackle these new strains of the

virus? Sure. I'll start with the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that these variants or an emerging variant will end up becoming more virulent. That is, become they are more severe in disease and are more transmissible. You know, we're already having a very difficult time trying to contain the spread of this virus. Like all the things that we've done so far has not staunched the rise in cases that we've been seeing. And if there's enough variation that they're able to evade the vaccines to a significant degree, then you'll see massive transmission because it's more contagious.

more usage of health care resources because it's causing more severe disease and it's spreading without being stopped by the vaccine. That's going to be the worst case scenario. We're going to see a spike in both cases and deaths like we saw early spring of 2020. And it will be as if we as if we have a new pandemic. That is the absolute worst case scenario. It's also pretty unlikely because of the things I said. And also, when viruses become more virulent, they tend to be more constrained because a virus needs to spread through people who are healthy enough to walk around and talk to other people. If a virus kills people too quickly, then it's not going to have a chance to spread.

And that's sort of why Ebola didn't become this massive pandemic the way COVID has. is because Ebola was very deadly, but it killed people faster than the virus could spread. So that's the absolute worst-case scenario. The best case scenario of this is sort of that these mutations don't, or rather, the best case scenario is that these mutations don't prove to be quite as infectious as the impression that they've left. We've identified a lot of the strain in the UK. We've identified it throughout the world.

But viruses, because of the way international travel works these days, you're going on a plane in a different part of the world entirely. It's very easy for these viruses to get around. So there could be a false impression of how contagious this is. So the best case scenario is that this is just another mutation that's happened, another strain. There have been thousands of strains. that have been able to be isolated, most of them, most of them function just the same as your average COVID, your everyday COVID strain. So that's the best case scenario.

Well, Dr. Fam, we really, really appreciate your time today and just breaking down what we need to know. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, absolutely. I'm always happy to be on. Americans use firearms to defend themselves between 500,000 and 2 million times every year. But God forbid that my mother has ever faced with a social. scenario where she has to stop a threat to her life. But if she is, I hope politicians protected by professional armed security didn't strip her of the right to use the firearm she can handle most competently. To watch the rest of Heritage expert Amy Swearer's testimony on assault weapons before the House Judiciary Committee head to the Heritage Foundation YouTube channel.

There you'll find talks, events, and documentaries backed with the reputation of the nation's most broadly supported Public Policy Research Institute. Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday, we feature our favorites on this show. Virginia, who's up first? In response to Mike Howell's piece,

new radical rules for a new radical Congress, one reader writes, The New War on the Nuclear Family by the Left. No longer do we have mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, no longer men and women and boys and girls, all new gender language to appease the far left. The GOP must fight back against this. This is Marxism, pure and simple. And in response to Virginia's interview with Carol Swain about President Trump's 1776 commission, Rainier Scheidneck writes, Dear Daily Signal, thank you for publishing this truly enlightening interview in the Daily

signal. I knew of Dr. Swain's wonderful intellected knowledge of history and remarkable courage from her short videos on Prager You. My gratitude for her in these totally confused times is beyond my words. One other thought. Whenever I read or think of President Reagan's words, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. I also think of Benjamin Franklin's famous quote when asked, what did we get? He answered, a republic, if you can keep it. I hope we can keep it, but for the first time in my life, I was born in 1940. I am no longer sure we can. Your letter could be featured on next week's show,

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events. Virginia, you have a good news story to share with us today. Over to you. Thank you, Rob. Some of you may remember that in August, the Daily Signal reported on the work of the Los Angeles-based Dream Center. The Dream Center is a nonprofit that serves the poor and needy in and around L.A. And they've been working very hard to support their community during the COVID-19 pandemic. You know, it's no secret that Los Angeles has really been suffering under both rising COVID-19 cases and very strict lockdown orders. So the Dream Center, they have made it their mission during the pandemic to support their community through tutoring assistance for students who are conducting online learning and through meals for families who are just struggling to make it. Matthew Barnett, the co-founder of the nonprofit, recently announced on Twitter that the Dreaming, Center reached a very exciting milestone at the beginning of 2021. They have now served over

1.5 million, 1.5 million meals to those in need in their community during the pandemic. I recently spoke with Matthew Barnett about how the nonprofit achieved this amazing feat of generosity. In March, I just told our team, I said, I don't really know what the future the Dream Center is going to be like, because I feel like this pandemic is going to be, is going to be a long we're going to be in the situation here in Los Angeles. And I just told our team, I said, what do we have left? They said, we have enough food to feed people for one day. And I said, let's just go to the parking lot and tell everyone who needs food that we're just

going to be available to serve them. Didn't realize that it would turn into about 300 days of serving people, 1.5 million meals. And I never realized that it would turn into tens of thousands of diapers and a food mobilization that would become really the heartbeat of the whole city. 60 other churches come to get food from us on a daily basis. We have 200 men and women in our recovery program who live in our building for one year for free. So rather than going to prison, they're sentenced to the Dream Center for a one-year recovery

program. And so all these guys have got their food handler certification as a job skill that they've learned. So the crazy thing is all these meals are being cooked by guys in a rehab program that we're getting their lives back together. and they are having a time of their life. They feel like they're changing the world. So it's pretty cool for so many of the men and women

who have been taking from society are now the ones that are leading one of the great food revolutions. I don't know what to call it, but distribution in all the city of L.A. It's getting done by broken people, helping other people. Burnett also told me that the Dream Center has no plans of slowing down their efforts to serve their community and that they plan to remain committed to meeting the needs of the people of L.A.

2021 continues. The food's going to continue on. The education, obviously, is going to continue on. And now the third thing that we're entering into is the rent, the closures, the people losing their houses. A lot of them are single moms who are the first ones, sadly, to be fired at their jobs. And so we're opening up now. In matter of fact, in mid-February, we're going to be opening up a whole floor, hospital floor, for homeless families. We already have it.

We have 40 families that live with us who are going to be. being their lives back, we've lost everything. But we're opening up another floor. So we're going to double our capacity to take in more families who have lost everything and we have no place to go during this time. And so this is the biggest leap of all. But we're on the food line. We're seeing family saying, do you have a place for us to live?

Can we sleep in your, can you park our car in your parking lot, your church? I mean, it's just, it's a mad frenzy people just trying to survive. And so we've got to open up an entire floor. That's what we're going to do. And again, we don't have the resources, but we're going to try and we're going to go. and we're going to paint the floors, we're going to get everything done, and then we're just going to believe

that God will provide as a year goes on. So encouraging. We just love to hear those stories of how nonprofits and people in their community are really stepping up during these challenging times to help those in need. If you want to find out more about the Dream Center or how you can get involved and support their work,

you can visit www.dreamcenter.org. Virginia, thanks so much for sharing. We're going to leave it there for today, You can find the Daily Signal podcast on the Rurkishay Audio Network. All of our shows are available at daily signal.com slash podcasts. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. And be sure to listen every weekday by adding The Daily Signal podcast as part of your Alexa Flash briefing. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review into five-star rating.

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