The Daily - A Pandemic Update: The Variant and the Vaccine Rollout

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

As 2020 drew to a close, a concerning development in the pandemic came out of Britain — a new variant of the coronavirus had been discovered that is significantly more transmissible. It has since been discovered in a number of countries, including the United States.The emergence of the new variant has added a new level of urgency to the rollout of vaccines in the U.S., a process that has been slow so far.Today, an exploration of two key issues in the fight against the pandemic.Guests: Carl Zimmer, a science writer and author of the “Matter” column for The New York Times; Abby Goodnough, a national health care correspondent for The Times. For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.Background reading: The new variant of the coronavirus, discovered in December, appears to be more contagious than, and genetically distinct from, more established variants. Here is what we know about it.The first case of the variant in the U.S. was found in Colorado in December. Pfizer has said that its vaccine works against the key mutation.The distribution of the vaccine in the U.S. is taking longer than expected — holiday staffing and saving doses for nursing homes are contributing to delays. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The House is preparing an article of impeachment against President Trump as rioters are being arrested across the country for their role in last week's storming of the Capitol. But lost in that story is the reality that the coronavirus is at an all-time peak, with 300,000 Americans infected on a single day last week, and as the U.S. death rate surpassed 4,000 a day. Today, a two-part update on the pandemic with my colleagues, Carl Zimmer and Abby Goodenough.

It's Monday, January 11th. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining the latest coronavirus press conference. It seems that the spread is now being driven by the new variant of the virus. Cases in London and the southeast of England are skyrocketing. The new variant is out of control and we need to bring it under control. And it's been detected in at least 17 other countries. Unfortunately, we now know this UK variant is in Colorado, it's in California. A man in the state of New York has now tested positive for COVID-19 with that same UK variant. The UK strain could be a game changer.

Carl, where does the story of this British variant of the coronavirus start? The story starts around the beginning of December and actually in South Africa. There, scientists noticed that there's a variant of the coronavirus that is spreading around very quickly and it has them very worried. And so scientists in the United Kingdom take a look at those mutations in the virus and they say, hmm, I wonder if any of our viruses have any of those mutations. And lo and behold, they find one lineage of viruses that has some of these mutations and a bunch of others. And they get really worried about it because the more they

look at it, the more they realize this variant is spreading like crazy throughout England. And once they make that announcement, scientists in other countries say, hey, oh, what if we have that too? And so by the end of December in the United States, scientists are starting to find rare cases of this variant in states across the country, from California now all the way to New York. So it's been here for a while. We don't know how long, but our country has already been seeded with this variant. And what exactly is the mutation? What makes it different from the coronavirus that we have all come to know? Well, scientists right now only have some ideas.

Right now, there are actually experiments going on in laboratories testing out this variant to see what it is that makes it biologically special. So we don't know for sure, but there's an idea that when you breathe in these viruses, they are stickier. So the coronavirus is covered with these flower-like proteins called spike. And when it's floating around in your airway, these spike proteins can latch on to certain proteins on the surface of our own cells. And if they can get a tight grip, then they can basically pull themselves inside of our cells and there they can replicate. So if you want to be successful as a coronavirus, you want to have a good spike protein that gets you into the cells of your host.

Now, scientists suspect that maybe some of these mutations are giving it that improvement. In other words, the spike protein is grabbing on tighter onto our cells and giving that virus a better shot at making copies of itself. So just how much more effective is this mutated variant coronavirus at infecting people? Is it measurable?

It is measurable, and the difference is big. The way that epidemiologists talk about this is something called R-naught, or the reproductive number. And what that means basically is in a given situation, on average, how many people does an infected person infect? So if you have an R0 of one, that means each person who's infected on average just infects one more person. Okay. just infects one more person. Okay. Now, scientists in England took a look at how this new variant did during a November lockdown compared to the other variants. With the other variants, the lockdown was fairly effective. They estimate that the R0 was 0.95, so it's under one, which is good. But the new variant, under the same conditions, had an R0 of 1.45.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a lot higher. And that can make a big difference in terms of fueling an explosive growth in your outbreak, which unfortunately is exactly what is happening in the United Kingdom right now. And this new variant now has, in the past few months, essentially taken over the country. So doing a little bit of math here, 0.9 to 1.4, that's about a 50% increase, which is very significant. Yeah, it's about 50% better at getting from one person to another. Yeah, it's about 50% better at getting from one person to another.

And just how scary is that for those of us who don't think about R0s and the math of transmission? Wouldn't that seem to suggest that going about our lives the way we currently are, even with a mask on, having the kind of interactions that we are currently having, that might be 50% riskier. Yes, that's right. So given that, I'm curious how behaviors are now supposed to change. Does six feet apart change to 10 feet apart, 12 feet apart, or what? I think maybe six feet apart changes to just stay at home. Because anything you do that puts you at risk of an infection has now got a bigger risk. So if you go to the grocery store and maybe there was a 10% risk you had of breathing in a virus from an infected person in the line behind you, now that's a 15% risk. If you just repeat that over and over

and over again from person to person to person, you start to have a huge difference. And ordinary measures that we're taking that we think are really effective lockdown measures may not be enough. We may have to look for more drastic measures to slow this thing down. And Carl, drastic as in what? Well, for example, every American could be supplied with a high quality mask and then be required to wear it outside. Mm-hmm.

and then be required to wear it outside. We could have massive testing, for example, at-home tests that people take every single day. We could do these sorts of things and really be much more aggressive at stopping this virus. And we're going to need to be more aggressive because this virus is just better at getting around. Carl, in our conversations with colleagues, including Donald J. McNeil Jr.,

we have been told that mutations in the coronavirus tend to make it less dangerous over time, not more dangerous. Less lethal, not more lethal. Is that the case here? That does happen sometimes with some viruses. It doesn't happen with all of them, and it certainly doesn't happen right away. And in this case, there's no evidence that this variant is any safer to get. Now, what we also are finding is that it's not any more

dangerous if you get this than if you get another variant of COVID. You still have the same kind of risk of ending up in the hospital. The problem is that because this seems to be so contagious, it means that overall, a lot more people are going to go into the hospital. And it also means a lot more people are going to die. We're already seeing in the United Kingdom, hospitals are being overwhelmed with COVID patients, many of whom have this new variant. So this may not be some terrible, super killer variant, but it's one that we have to take incredibly seriously. So Carl, at this point, just how widespread is the British variant within the United States? We don't really know. We have found it in eight states. There have been 62 cases so far. But

we're not actually doing the kinds of tests that you need to do to really get a good look at what's going on. We're just sort of stumbling across the variant here and there. The United States is really basically flying blind. And why is that, Carl? Why are we not doing the testing required to tell us how widespread the variant is? That feels like something we all definitely want to know. It is something we want to know, and it's something we need to know. But the United States has not invested in the kind of organization we need to do it. We can look to the United Kingdom as an example of how to do it right. In March, they set up a whole program to actually collect viruses on a massive scale and actually look at all of their genetic material,

massive scale and actually look at all of their genetic material, looking at what are called genomes of hundreds of thousands of viruses. We're looking at a tiny, tiny fraction of that in a very disorganized fashion. Some states are doing a pretty good job. Some states haven't sequenced any genomes at all. It's disorganized. There is very little national leadership at this point. And this is what we're left with. So Carl, given all of that, especially this depressing news of just how blindly we are flying, I think this naturally brings us to vaccines. Are the vaccines that have been approved in both the United Kingdom and the United States so far, from Pfizer, from Moderna, are they as effective against this new variant of the virus as the original version of it? Well, to get a definitive answer to that, you have to do experiments.

And there has actually been one experiment so far that's been released, and it turns out that the vaccine made by Pfizer is definitely effective against one of the key mutations in this new variant, one that people have been really worried about. And it seems fine. Now, there are other mutations that scientists are going to have to look at as well before we can really feel like we're totally out of the woods. But I do think that we can be confident in these vaccines from what we know so far. And so what's really important is that we get this vaccine as quickly as possible into as many people as possible. Right.

This would seem to add extraordinary urgency to the rollout of the vaccine. Yeah. We've got to get people vaccinated. We have to still keep up these social distancing measures. We've got to get ahead of this thing because otherwise it's going to really do us a lot of damage. Well, Carl, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you.

We'll be right back. So, Abby, we just spoke to our colleague, Carl Zimmer, about the dangers of the British variant of the coronavirus and the pressure it is putting on everyone to vaccinate as quickly as possible. And you have been tracking vaccinations in the U.S. And I recall that the U.S. government said that it wanted to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of December, but that did not happen. It is well into January, and the U.S. has distributed about 22 million doses.

And of those 22 million doses. And of those 22 million doses, about 8 million have actually been injected into people's arms, so fewer than half of the doses. So how do you account for that really significant gap, that failure to meet these goals and what feels like a pretty sluggish start to U.S. vaccinations? Well, there's a million different reasons you could cite here, and every state has its own reasons, but there are some snowstorms, some bad weather, including a big snowstorm in the

Northeast that bogged things down. I've talked to a lot of people who have pointed to the holiday weeks really slowing things down. Staff was low. A lot of people were on vacation. That seems to be a big thing. And we'll find out in the next couple of weeks if, in fact, things speed up. And we can say, yes, the holidays were a big factor. You know, there's been some hesitancy and sometimes a lot of hesitancy among health care workers to get the vaccine, depending on where you are in the country. So medical workers themselves are reluctant, in some cases, to take the vaccine. Yes. Now, what I hear in talking to hospital people is generally doctors are taking the

vaccine and lots of nurses are taking the vaccine, super eager. But there's also a number of nurses who have not taken it and a number of support workers in hospitals also refusing it. Nursing home staff refusing it, sometimes in large numbers. The governor of Ohio said the other day that something like 60% of nursing home staff in his state who have been offered the vaccine so far have turned it down. So that kind of number really stops you and makes you wonder just how much this hesitancy is factoring into the sluggishness. But then we have other states like Massachusetts, where the governor said maybe 10% of nursing home staff have turned it down, which is perhaps more along the lines of what we'd expect.

So I think there's real variation depending on what part of the country we're in. Gotcha. So the main takeaway when we think about why this has been slow is that there are more reasons than we can really keep track of at this point in the process. There's a lot of reasons that are really hard to quantify. But one thing I'm noticing that's really interesting

is this question that's emerging about how the CDC guidelines are affecting the speed of the rollout in different states. Huh. So describe this question, this debate. So the CDC put out these guidelines last month on who should get vaccinated first. You probably heard about them.

It starts with healthcare workers and nursing home residents and the staff who works in the nursing homes. And they're not requirements. They're not hard and fast rules that the states have to follow. And so some people think following these guidelines really strictly is creating a bottleneck in the system, especially when for whatever reason, many reasons, you don't have enough healthcare workers or nursing home residents to vaccinate on a given day or in a

given week, and you get a lot of vaccines sitting around in the freezer. And, you know, the other camp says that those guidelines are there for a reason. When you do have a very limited amount of vaccine, they're really good advice on who needs it most. And also, when you start allowing multiple groups to have access to the vaccine at once, it just creates a lot of chaos. And I have to imagine that different states are choosing to handle these federal guidelines very differently. Right. It's up to each state how they distribute their supply of vaccine. And it's definitely all over the map. And probably the two states that have represented the extremes of these two arguments are New York and Florida.

Good Monday morning. And tell me about New York first. How is it handling these guidelines? These vaccines are a valuable commodity. Well, so initially, Governor Cuomo was sticking really strictly to the guidelines. You're going to have some people who don't want to receive the vaccine. I understand that. But you're going to have a lot of people who want the vaccine desperately. He talked about fining hospitals who gave shots to anyone who wasn't a frontline health care worker. If there is fraudulent vaccination, that is very serious. That provider will lose their license, period.

He was really using strong language to warn against anyone daring to flout the state rules. I don't care if you're a doctor, you're a nurse. It's a crime, in my opinion. And, you know, as a result, there were a lot of older people in New York who were really frustrated, really ruminating and anxious about when the vaccine was going to be available to them. Okay, so what is the situation in Florida, by contrast?

Okay, so what is the situation in Florida, by contrast? In Florida, Governor DeSantis decided he was going to do things a little differently. He is prioritizing healthcare workers and nursing home residents, but he's also putting in that immediate first group, senior citizens. Everybody over the age of 65 is now in the group that's allowed to get a vaccine as soon as it's available to them. Huh. And what is Governor DeSantis' explanation, his rationale for breaking with the CDC guidelines? Well, good morning. It's great to be in Palm Beach County. I want to thank the county mayor. So Governor DeSantis has talked about this a bit. And said just how important it is to reach the people who he calls the greatest generation. And we have a responsibility to stand by those folks who've done so much to make our state and country what it is today.

to make our state and country what it is today. And this is also his political base. Lots of people over 65 are Republicans in Florida. So that's a factor, but it's not the only factor. And how are Floridians responding to DeSantis' approach here? Well, there's huge, huge demand in Florida, as you might imagine, with the huge senior citizen population down there. And it's a big mess. Some people have heard about vaccination events and shown up and waited in huge long lines, even overnight, hoping they'll get a vaccine. Wow. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.

Others have, you know, spent hours, a whole day online trying to score an appointment through these very new registration sites for vaccination events. Again, some succeed, many do not. A lot of these sites are crashing from overuse in, you know, just the first few hours. So no matter how persistent and eager you are, there's still a good chance you're not going to get an appointment or a vaccination just yet. And that's super frustrating to people down there. So clearly we have a very significant division here in strategy, strict adherence to the CDC guidelines in New York, and a much looser, or I guess you could call it flexible, approach in Florida. And since we are talking here about the sluggish pace of the vaccine rollout in the United States, which is working better? Which is seeming more efficient?

Well, if you look at the data, and we know that the data lags and is not entirely accurate, but the data we have now from the CDC says these two states are basically tied in the amount of vaccine they have administered, the number of shots they've gotten into arms so far. And are either states' numbers considered impressive in the grand scheme of the 50 states or not? You know what?

I'm really cautious to say what's impressive and not at this point, given the extremely limited data we have. And we're still in such early days. But just after the holidays, neither Florida nor New York were doing an especially great job of giving out the doses they had. But what's interesting is last week, the Trump administration came out and started to suggest the Florida way was the way to go and that everyone else should follow their lead. We have U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams. He joins us now this morning. Dr. Adams, thank you for talking with us this morning.

We heard Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General, come out and say, you know what? If the demand isn't there in 1A, go to 1B and continue on down. And if the demand isn't there in one location, move those vaccines to another location. Go to the next priority group and continue on down the line to the next and the next. So your headline today really should be Surgeon General tells states and governors to move quickly to other priority groups.

Hmm. So how do you explain that? Because from what you just said, letting people jump the line, violating the CDC guidelines, that was not speeding things up. But here the federal government was saying you should break from the guidelines. Well, I think part of it is political, and there's just so much pent-up demand for this vaccine, so much anxiety and angst and anger about wanting it now that the administration's really feeling some pressure about that. In fact, Governor Cuomo in New York got pressured into a similar strategy

this past Friday after lots of people around the state had concluded he was being too slow. It was partly due to news coming out that at least some clinics were ending up throwing away unused vaccine because they were afraid to flout his rules and give it to people who weren't in the health care group. Right. And that's just about everyone's nightmare in this moment, vaccines being tossed out and not used. Right. Once the vials are open, there's only a pretty finite amount of time you can keep them around before you have to throw them away. So it's use it or lose it. And there's also just a lot of vaccines sitting in freezers still untapped. So, you know, there was this growing disbelief and upset about that fact. And people really leaned hard on Cuomo

to ease up on his restrictions. And he did just that. So at this point, Cuomo has gotten much closer to the Florida strategy. You know, Florida has opened it to everybody 65 and up. Cuomo is sticking for now to people 75 and older, and he's also opened it up to certain essential workers. But it's basically taking a page from the Florida playbook. So despite these original guidelines, which a lot of experts saw as important and worth adhering to, it sounds like lots of government officials, you know, federal officials, state officials, seem to be coming around to the idea that what's most needed in this moment is flexibility and just getting as many doses in as many arms as possible. Yes. And in fact, President-elect Biden is thinking about a whole different kind of flexibility right now. His team said Friday he's going to go to an approach of releasing all the vaccine supply the country has on hand once he gets into office,

rather than keeping half of it in reserve to make sure people get their booster doses. That, of course, comes with its own potential problems, such as, you know, potentially not having enough on hand for people to get that absolutely required second dose. But it's going to push more vaccine into the system more quickly. But Abby, what Biden is proposing, wouldn't that potentially just overburden an inefficient system

that is, as you have described here, already struggling to administer the doses it has. Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge risk, just from what we're seeing in a place like Florida so far, which cannot begin to keep up with the enormous demand. And I expect we're going to see the same thing in New York starting this week. We have to make sure the infrastructure is in place to accommodate all these people getting their vaccines en masse. And I don't think most of the states are there yet. And, you know, it's just begun. The fine

tuning is in process. So, Abby, I wonder what you think will get the United States back on track with its goal, which, as we said, has already been widely missed. 20 million doses in December, that didn't happen. Millions of doses sitting on shelves not being administered at this moment. This British variant of the coronavirus is moving invisibly without enough U.S. testing around the country. What's your sense of what's going to be necessary to really pick up the pace of vaccinations in the U.S.? Well, one good thing that's happening that's really promising is that the states forever were saying we're not getting any money from the federal government for planning and preparation for the vaccination campaign, the biggest vaccination campaign in our country's history by far.

Now, through the most recent stimulus package, they've gotten $8 billion for that purpose. It's the amount that they had asked for that they said was necessary. So that's one thing that is promising on the horizon. I think also states and hospitals and health departments are right now in the process of figuring out what is a good idea and what just is not working. They really are building the plane as they fly it.

We're going to get better at this, is what you're saying. We're absolutely going to get better at this. I think the next few weeks will be really important to watch. And if we still see as much lagging as we saw the last few weeks, that's going to suggest trouble moving forward. I'm hopeful that there's a real pickup in the next week or two or three and everybody gets a lot better at this quickly. quickly. Abby, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks so much. As of Sunday night, more than 22 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus.

Around 131,000 are hospitalized because of it. And more than 373,000 have died from it. We'll be right back. Thank you. Trump with inciting a violent mob that attacked the Capitol. The House will first pass a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and take power from the President, something Pence is not expected to do. The House will then turn to impeachment. But the number three Democrat in the House, Representative James Clyburn, said Democrats are considering holding off on immediately sending the impeachment charge to the Senate, which must hold a trial,

to prevent a trial from consuming the opening days of the Biden administration. Let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get this agenda off and running. And maybe we'll send the articles sometime after that. Over the weekend, two Republicans in the Senate called on Trump to resign. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who argued that there is not enough time for an impeachment.

In your view, what is the most appropriate way for Donald Trump to exit office? Well, I think the best way for our country, Chuck, is for the president to resign and go away as soon as possible. I acknowledge that may not be likely, but I think that would be best. And a major crackdown on President Trump's social media accounts based on his incitements has left him with few ways to communicate with his supporters online. The suspension of Trump's accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat

prompted many of his supporters to flock to Parler, a social network that has attracted millions of far-right conservatives and where many of the president's supporters had gathered before the storming of the Capitol. Then, over the weekend, both Apple and Google said they would remove Parler from their app stores. And Amazon said it would kick Parler off its web hosting service, essentially taking the platform offline unless it finds a new hosting service. Going into the Capitol building to do this, if it was organized on your site, what should happen on your site? In explaining their decision,

both Apple and Amazon cited an interview that Parler's CEO, John Mates, gave to my colleague, Kara Swisher, on her podcast Sway, an interview conducted during the attack. Look, if it was illegally organized and against the law and what they were doing, they would have gotten it taken down. But I don't feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform,

considering we're a neutral town square that just adheres to the law. So if people are organizing something, that's more of a problem. If people are upset, they feel disenfranchised. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploeg, Daniel Guimet, Rachel Quester, and Austin Mitchell. It was edited by Paige Cowett, MJ Davis-Lynn, and Larissa Anderson, and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.