The Joe Walker Podcast - Of Viruses And Vaccines - Peter Doherty

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

Peter Doherty is an immunologist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine.Show notesSelected links •Follow Peter: Website | Twitter •'I'm 79, I won the Nobel Prize and I don't give a s---', AFR profile of Peter Doherty •Pandemics: What Everyone Needs To Know, by Peter Doherty •The (in)famous Imperial College paperTopics discussed •Has Peter always not given a shit? 7:32 •Peter's odd high school experience. 9:00 •How the media report on science. 12:30 •What is the difference between a virus and a bacterium? 15:08 •How does a new coronavirus come into existence? 17:47 •What is Peter's area of expertise and what does he know about pandemics? 22:57 •What has the coronavirus pandemic taught us about the usefulness of epidemiological models? 25:20 •The politicization of lockdowns. 35:57 •The origins of America and Australia's cultural differences. 47:33 •Social media and political polarisation. 57:05 •In weathering the pandemic relatively well, was Australia lucky or were the epidemiological models too pessimistic? 59:56 •Can we just lockdown the vulnerable segment of the population, rather than the whole population? 1:03:52 •Is Peter optimistic about keeping a lid on the virus until a vaccine arrives? 1:08:25 •What do governments need to learn from the pandemic to be better prepared for the next one? 1:16:00See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If you're a new listener to this show, it's doubly great to have you here. Welcome. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast to receive regular updates when we release episodes. We're going to be releasing them weekly going forward, something that I've been promising for a long time, but which we're now fully ready to deliver. So look forward to that. This episode is a delayed release. It was recorded on the 15th of June, but all of the content is still fresh. Our guest is Peter Doherty. Peter is an Australian. He was the Australian of the Year in 1997. He's a living treasure, and he won

the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1996. Peter's namesake, the Doherty Institute, has been heavily involved in providing research and advice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Peter and I discussed the pandemic, we discussed viruses and vaccines, and all sorts of other things. This conversation was recorded prior to the second wave and stage four lockdowns in Melbourne. But most of the things we discuss are evergreen in nature and generally applicable. I hope you learn a lot from this conversation. It was fundamentally a chat with a very great and a very smart man, Peter Doherty. So without much further ado, please enjoy this conversation with the great Peter Doherty. Peter Doherty, thank you so much for joining me. You're welcome. You've caused me to laugh out loud a couple of times in the past

several months. One was a profile that the Weekend Australian Financial Review wrote about you and the headline was a direct quote, I'm 79, I won the Nobel Prize and I don't give a shit. And the second occasion was when, mistaking Twitter for Google, you tweeted out Dan Murphy's opening hours. Yes. mistaking uh twitter for google you tweeted out dan murphy's opening hours yes yes i'm i'm um my my publishers got me onto twitter a few years back and i'm not sure whether i've ever quite forgiven them for it but it um it takes it's quite it can take quite a bit of time as you know if you you get sucked into it. So one has to constantly fight against it like any other, because it's kind of a conversation if you run it that way.

You know, some people use Twitter to berate other people. Others, I quite enjoy sort of getting back to people, especially if they disagree with me, because that's more interesting. But the financial review interview, it was one of these formats that run through that media organization where you'd normally just go to lunch with someone. And I'd already done that for the Melbourne Age and I think we had the cheapest lunch that anybody's ever had because we went to the sort of places that I go to, not the sort of places that the famous people I interview go to. And then the financial review got in touch. And you kind of feel it's a sort of chatty thing. But I was using language I wouldn't normally use if I'm talking to a reporter. But I relaxed too much.

I mean, your friendly reporter is a bit like your friendly stockbroker. Don't go too far. So then the Dan Murphy thing, that was just a mistake. I was on Outlook and doing a lot of stuff simultaneously. And instead of putting a Google search for what the opening hours are at Dan Murphy's, I put it into Twitter. And my wife, who was kind of looking at the Twitter feed, said, you've just made a complete fool of yourself. So I tried to respond in kind and sort of lighten the whole thing. And that worked.

And I now have 21,000 more followers than I had before I did that. And I'm not sure that's a good thing because you feel you have some responsibility to these people. So it's quite strange. When did you first realize that you'd stopped giving a shit about what other people think? Or were you always like that? Yeah, I've always been like that to a fair amount.

I've always sort of done my own thing, really. No, it's not in the sense of not giving a shit, not being considerate of other people's positions and so forth. But I've always gone my own road on things, which has led to a very unconventional career, really, and living in different countries because I ran out of countries after a while so and what why do you regard your career is unconventional well I started as a vet and then I went into veterinary research and then into medical research and I've lived in in Britain, Australia, obviously, Britain, the United States, back to Australia and then back to the United States. I mean, a research career is a different career, basically,

especially at the time I started out in it and kind of, you know, I meet a lot of people in the community who do this for a living, that's for sure. And I've on several occasions given up sort of full-time jobs for life and taken sort of much more tenuous positions because it was much more interesting. So I guess not that unconventional, but perhaps less conventional than the most. Tell me about Indo-Rupley High School and how there was never anyone in the grade above you while you were at school. Well, it was an odd set of circumstances. When I finished primary school,

I would have normally gone on to the state high school, which was the only academic government high school in Brisbane at that stage. The rest of them were private schools. The schools that were available were the State High, the Domestic High, which is obviously for girls, Commercial High and Industrial High. But they decided they were going to expand education, public education in Queensland. They realised they were falling badly behind. And so they started four new high schools, one of which was in Drapilly High School, and it was in the area where I lived.

And so I went to a school which was just a building, really, with a few rather good teachers, but no equipment, no older students, no sporting equipment, no clubs. So it was a pretty strange high school experience really because we were always the top grade, so to speak. So I kind of felt in a sense as I look back on it, I've missed out on a certain amount of socialisation you would have got through that high school experience that kind of forms you in some ways. So I'm not adequately socialized.

I think that's due to the fact that I went to this school. What does that lack of socialization look like in particular? Is it a lack of regard for authority and orthodoxy? I think I've always had this anti-authoritarian thing that runs fairly commonly in Australia and I'm very uncomfortable in totalitarian situations or authoritarian situations and very uncomfortable with authoritarians because I'm always deeply suspicious of their motivation and I find that a very unattractive type of personality, quite frankly. So I avoid these people and just do my own thing.

The one thing about science is if you're good enough at it, you can pretty much do your own thing. It's much more common in the US to do this. For instance, I've tended to avoid jobs that have a lot of administrative responsibility, though I've been offered them time and time again over the years, because I don't particularly want to do it. And actually, I often feel other people probably would do it better anyway. So I've stuck with the science for a very long time. I haven't been doing it for a while, but I've been writing books. I've been trying to

sort of put out some ideas into a more general context, because I think there's a remarkable lack of contact between society in general and science, which is really problematic at a very basic level in the sense that people aren't in contact with the basic scientific way of looking at the world through an evidence-based prism and thinking, for instance, in terms of probability and relative risk. I guess. As you know, a lot of the media really depends on finding an exception and making a big thing about an exception without actually asking the question, what is the risk equation in this, you know, particularly in medical areas.

Yeah, and it also seems, in a more fundamental way, the method of reporting on science that the media exemplifies, stands in complete contrast to the scientific method as it should be practiced and as Karl Popper defined it, of falsification, where a lot of what the media tends to do is find a particular piece of confirming evidence that can illustrate or demonstrate a narrative. Yes, and there are a number of reasons for it. Firstly, as you know, with the contraction of the conventional media,

among the first people to go have often been the science journalists, if they've had a science journalist. And of course, if it's a paper that's more or a media organisation that's more on the political right, they don't want to hear a clear scientific analysis for, say, climate change or something of that sort, because it's inconvenient to their world model, which is basically this kind of neoliberal everything for the rich idea that has been promoted by major media organisations in Australia that I find particularly detestable. But they're not being educated in science.

They don't know basically how to ask a scientific question or what it means. And the scientists themselves are often not particularly interested in doing this because they just want to do science and they can't be bothered with it. So what you've got is a situation where people just aren't in contact with what science is. They write and talk about it.

And there are a number of things to it, I think. You know, for instance, with the current situation, we've had this enormous economic hit and this this tremendous social hit through through COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. And yet you still get you can hear it in the say the TV news from, say, ABC of all places. And you can see it at times in stuff that's written that people don't really understand the difference between a virus and a bacterium. And they don't understand the difference between a drug and a vaccine. And these are so basic to basic health. You would think that those very simple concepts would be out there in the community, but they're not. And they're not even there in a lot of the commentariat which is truly depressing quite frankly what is the difference between a virus and a bacterium well a bacterium is an individual cell with its own metabolism its

own nucleus it can often grow outside the body it can grow in ponds or or and so forth so it's a it's an entity it's a life entity in itself. And it will often have a capacity to move around. Some of them are spirochetes. They move like little corkscrews. You can watch them move through fluid. It's very fascinating. The organism that causes syphilis and the organism that causes leptospirosis do that. Others, you can see them moving just like cells move. Cells move. They have myosin, as we do in our muscles, and they can move themselves along. Well, a virus is none of those things. It's simply a bit of nucleic acid packaged in some protein and fat to stop it so it can survive a bit in the outside environment. It can't move itself in any way, and it can't

replicate itself until it gets into a living in any way and it can't replicate itself until it gets into a living cell. And so it gets into our living cells and it replicates in our cells. And that's why we have broad spectrum antibiotics, because the bacterium has its own basic metabolism. It does its own thing. And so that bacteria do things a bit differently from the way we do. So you can make a drug which will target pathways that are common to many, many, many bacteria. That's why we don't have pandemics of bacterial infection at the moment, because we've got broad spectrum antibiotics. So if a new bacterium came in from outside, it's almost certain one of our broad spectrum antibiotics

would kill it. We worry about drug resistantresistant organisms like drug-resistant TB, but not about something coming in new from a bacterial source. But the viruses are totally different. You need very, very specific drugs, and we don't normally have them, and we've only made a few of them, really. That's how HIV is controlled, with very, very specific drugs for HIV. You have to take a cocktail of them and we don't have them for the coronavirus. We could have made them, but we didn't think ahead clearly enough. The vaccine we couldn't have made ahead because that's specific to the particular virus because you're targeting a very unique part of

the virus. But a lot of the drugs will target common pathways within a virus infection. So we've got drugs that work across all the influenza viruses, for instance, and we could have had drugs that worked across all the coronaviruses. And we have one drug that cross-reacts a bit that was developed for Ebola, which is a totally different sort of virus. But that's why we don't have an antibiotic or a broad-spectrum drug treatment for this virus. So this coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is a novel coronavirus. How does a new coronavirus come into existence? Well, they've been around forever.

They're in the environment. They're in other species. And so if you look at the coronaviruses, the very first coronavirus that was discovered is avian infectious bronchitis of chickens. That was discovered in the 1930s. There's a virus called mouse hepatitis virus that's a real problem for laboratory animal facilities. And there's one in pigs and there's one in cows, I think.

First human coronavirus was discovered, I've just been reviewing it actually, in the 1960s. It was discovered at a place called the Common Cold Unit on Salisbury Plain where they were trying to find a vaccine for the cold, the common cold. They gave up when they found there were at least 100 different viruses causing the common cold. And one of them was one of these coronaviruses.

And then they just got electromicroscopy working well for viruses. So you can magnify these things up. You can actually see them because they're really tiny. They're much, much smaller than bacteria. And most of them are. And they can see this sort of corona, this crown like spikes on it. So they named them the coronavirus. It was actually a June Almeida, a Scottish woman who was working in London who named them with David Tyrrell, who had isolated the virus. So they're out there. And then what we discovered when SARS came along in 2002,

that it was in fruit bats, it was in bats. And we'd known that biting bats could transmit rabies. That was about the only viruses we knew that bats transmitted for humans were viruses of the rabies type lineage. And those viruses were what we call lissa viruses. We knew that biting bats, blood-sucking bats could transmit that to cattle in Africa. And we knew that occasionally someone in Australia or England would get infected with one of these things from handling a bat. And in fact, we've got in Australia, we've got 300 licensed bat handlers who've all been vaccinated against rabies, even though we don't have any rabies in the country. But this virus is close enough to Lisa. The Lisa virus

is close enough to rabies. We think they're protected. So we found out that this coronavirus came out of bats. It took a while. It took about three months to work out where this virus was coming from. People thought it was influenza. It wasn't. They made some mistakes. A lot of people died in hospital because they thought it was like influenza, and it wasn't. And the reason they died was this virus. These people with this infection, the SARS, the original SARS, were infectious late when they were sick, whereas people who get influenza are usually infectious early. And by the time they get really sick, they're not very infectious. But this virus was very infectious at the time people were sick and doctors and nurses were dying. As soon as they isolated the virus, they understood how to handle it and they gowned up

and did everything you can see happening now with CO2. And they just practiced what we call barrier nursing. And they controlled it and got it out of the hospitals and about just died out, which is why we never went along with it, further along with it. Now, that virus was infectious between humans, but not nearly as infectious as this current one. And it never got, the only place it got out of East Asia was to Toronto. Someone went to Toronto and started a mini outbreak there. Otherwise, it stayed in East Asia and didn't get any further. Then there's another virus came out again in 2012 called MERS. And that virus came from bats again. It went to camels, we think, in the Middle East and then

transmitted to humans. It got from the Middle East across into East Asia, didn't come to Australia or the United States. It's still grumbling away. It kills a couple of hundred people a year. And people started to study these viruses and bats very intensively, particularly groups in China and with Americans and so forth working with them. And they found that there are enormous numbers of viruses maintained in bats. And it's due to the way their immune system works, we think. And there are a whole bunch of these coronaviruses. This is not the last of them. So next time we get a coronavirus pandemic, I think we'll be very, very prepared for it. And we'll have very good drugs at least. But there are other viruses,

Hendra virus, Nipah virus in bats, different types of viruses, The Ebola virus that we think comes from bats. And so, you know, they're really quite dangerous. We don't want to kill them off. They're very important for the ecology of the world, bats, but we do need to stay a bit away from them. And Peter, just tell me what particular academic background or lens you bring to the topic of pandemics. You wrote a book about a decade ago titled Pandemics, What Everyone Needs to Know. Yeah, yeah. There it is. There it is, yes.

Great little book. It's available as an e-book in Australia. Well, I trained as a veterinarian and, you know, I was just a young kid. You went to professional school straight out of high school. And as I said, from the high school experience, because there were no older kids and not much in the way of mentoring had developed, there were no sort of examples of kids who went before you. I was pretty naive and I probably should have gone into medicine, but I thought I didn't want to be around sick people and listening to them whining about themselves all their lives. So I had all the empathy of a

16-year-old boy of that era, which was zero. And so I went to the vet school thinking I'd kind of save the world by increasing food production. You wouldn't do that now. You'd go into botany and grow more plants. But I got very interested in infectious disease and infection and immunity. So I worked on infection and immunity in the veterinary world with a lot of animal diseases, both in Britain and Australia and then Britain and Scotland. And then I did spend some brief time in a basic medical research school called the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the National University where we made the discovery that led to the later Nobel Prize. And from then on, I was in basic biomedical research and had my career there.

So, you know, I've spent years interacting in the medical research community, mostly during my most active years in the United States, and then came back here towards the end of my career and got things going here. And three of the young people who worked with me after we came back to Australia, which was back in 2002, they're now running big programs, they're professors and so forth. So, you know, it's the way science works. It's kind of a lineage thing. But I've been working on infection and immunity at some level or other for 55 years. So I'm reasonably familiar with some of it.

What's the experience of this pandemic taught us about the usefulness of epidemiological models? I think that's part of the strategy. You know, we use models in all sorts of things. We use models in climate science. The problem is this. We've got enormous data sets, okay, because of modern technology and because of modern measurement systems. You know, if you think about, say, climate science 100 years ago, what did you have, a rain gauge and a thermometer

and an anemometer to measure wind speed and similar things to measure currents and so forth, the very simple mechanical devices, really. And now we've got enormous, the amount of data that comes inside of the climate scientists through satellites, through diver buoys that go to different depths of the ocean and take temperatures, the amount of data is just incredible, fantastic. So you need models. You can't handle this data by just looking at it. You've got to have analytical models. So it's the same

in the banking industry and it's the same in the gambling industry. They model different scenarios. So this concept of modeling is right across society. And in biomedical research, because of our new analytical tools and because of the combination of molecular technology on the part of the biological side and the combination of instrumentation, we can just get enormous data sets from a single cell. We can sample a single cell and get a massive amount of data. So you have to have what we call bioinformatics. So in epidemiology, which has always been more mathematical because it's concerned with spread of disease, the modeling is as central to that as anything

else. So what the epidemiologists do is they take what data they've got from somewhere and they build models around that and then try and predict what would happen in particular scenarios in a country like Australia. So initially they had to build their models around what was happening in, I think they used it, Europe. And now, of course, they model if you do this, you may do that. If this happens, that may happen. So they can present the politicians and the policymakers with different scenarios saying, you know, this is the possibility. This is where we have to be careful and so forth.

With a virus like this, which is we think has got a reproductive value of about two and a half, that is one person will infect two and a half other people on average, the virus can just ramp up very, very quickly. We hope with the easing of restrictions and having got the virus down so low, which is really fantastic, we've done fantastically well, and the government has done great, and people have done the right thing and been terrific. But we think that if we're hoping we can hand it to what we call spot fires, where you get an outbreak at a particular place. Did you follow the Cedar Meats outbreak? There was this outbreak at a meatworks, Cedar Meats. Very hard, very easy to transmit a virus under those conditions because they're working in the cold in a, say, boning room where they're all standing alongside each other

and that's an ideal place to spread virus and so they had this outbreak the public health people got onto it fast they did contact tracing they traced relatives they traced contacts and and it was handled very well but it we think we may have repeated instances like that. Now we've just got one where a doctor, a general practitioner, so far all we know that he's infected a lot of members of his family, I think. So we hope we can keep it to these sort of spot fire situations, but it could get out of control and you worry about it being really big gatherings, for instance. I think if we were going to see a lot of spike from the big demonstrations, the Black Lives

Matter demonstrations, I think we'd already be seeing them and we're not seeing an enormous spike from them that I know of. And most of the cases that are being reported are still return travellers in hotels. The main place that seems to be hanging on is Victoria. And both Sydney and Melbourne are big cities and never quite sure what's out there. What we've always been particularly concerned with is it getting established in remote communities and rural areas where people might not get onto it fast. So one of the big jobs that's been going on with the lockdown, what the lockdown let us do is get all the technology out there, get a lot more people doing tests.

At the outset of this, we were flat out there, get a lot more people doing tests. At the outset of this, we were flat out doing, in Victoria, so we were flat out doing a couple of hundred tests a day. And now you can do 50,000 a week quite readily. And the technology has been disseminated to some of the country areas as well. So we're hoping we can stay on top of it and that people will be very watchful. In general, though, the more people can still be careful about distancing and so forth and just be sensible about what they're doing, the better we're likely to come out of it. The way I'd thought about lockdowns, Peter, was in the absence of a vaccine, the only way to stop the virus is through non-pharmaceutical interventions. And the ideal non-pharmaceutical intervention

would be to quarantine the individuals who are already infected. But the problem is, how do we identify those individuals? And if we don't have the right testing and contact tracing capabilities in place yet, then we need to be locking down the whole population, which is a very, very blunt instrument, until we build up the capabilities that will essentially enable us, I guess you could say, to lock down individuals. Yeah. We're all wanting to avoid locking down again, of course, obviously because of the enormous economic damage it does. And it's a big factor and it's not just economic damage. We also all realise it's psychological damage as well.

So the sooner we can get back to a more normal life, obviously the better. There are three ways out of this. I mean, as you said, what we're hoping is that with much broader testing, we did some big blitzes in Victoria, where we tested enormous numbers of people just at random. And we've been allowing anybody who gets any respiratory symptoms can come in and be tested. For a while, the testing was much more restrictive. But now anyone who wants to come in, if they've got, say,

colds or flu, can be tested. And I think the numbers of positives coming through those was, you know, fairly recently was down around 0.2% or something. So there's very little out there if there's much at all. And so, but it could ramp up very fast. That's the trouble. So what are the tools then? Well, the basic protocol would be the contact testing.

And there are teams now organised within the various state departments that will do that. And the labs are organised to do the tests very quickly. Contact testing. And then anyone who's positive, of course, then you have to have them self-quarantine and get their immediate contacts to self-quarantine as well and keep monitoring them. And so that's what we're hoping to do, really testing intensively around limited outbreaks.

And with a bit of luck, we'll get away with that. But Australia can't really come out of isolation while it's raging in the west of the world until really we get a vaccine that works. And so we could have very limited international travel for even another year or so. That's quite possible. So there are three ways out of it. One is you just let the disease run, you get a lot of deaths, and then you'll get eventually to herd immunity. And that's essentially what's happening in Brazil,

parts of South America. It's what will inevitably happen in poorer countries, basically. But there's an enormous number of people out there who are not infected. I mean, if you look at the infection rates in even the more intensively infected areas, it's unusual it would be more than 10%. And we think that herd immunity from the modelers wouldn't cut in till about 60% are infected. Then you'd start to see a sharp drop in cases if it has the reproductive number we think. And then the other way, of course, is to increase herd immunity by vaccination.

And other possibilities are to use passive protection, prophylaxis of one sort, which could be like the HIV situation where you use drugs to protect people. You take them ahead of time. There's a thing called HIV prep where people who are at risk of catching HIV just take a pill with a couple of the anti-HIV drugs and then they won't get it. And you could do that and you may need to do that anyway for people who just don't make a good antibody response to a vaccine because their immune systems are shot either due to some genetics or some other condition or just to old age. Because old age, we don't make such good antibody responses.

So they're a drug. We could potentially use drugs, but we don't yet have those drugs. They're under development. I think we'll hear a lot more about them soon. But the drug companies have been keeping fairly quiet. Or we could use what's called monoclonal antibodies, where you can grow these things in vast quantities and you can manipulate them. So you'd maybe only need to inject them once or twice a year and provide what we call passive antibody protection. So they're the ways out of it, but anything other than a readily available, generally rolled out vaccine would be very expensive.

Yeah, no doubt. Even providing it cost is going to be very expensive. Yeah. Peter, I share your anti-authoritarian streak. streak i would describe myself as a small l liberal um but i'm a small l liberal because i'm a pragmatist and because i'm a i guess a utilitarian i think most of the time markets work pretty well and free societies work pretty well and delivering people what they want in order to be able to flourish and live full and happy and secure lives. So I don't, I'm not like naturally predisposed to lockdowns. No, no, it's not.

But at the time I sort of felt like they were necessary if done correctly. Yeah. I don't, I think it's, you know, it's obviously time that they're incrementally lifted, which is what is happening. We might even be able to keep going ahead with just lots of general mask wearing and maintaining the ban on large events

and our borders closed, as you said. But one of the things that struck me was how quickly politicized the issue became. And the dynamic I noticed noticed at least on Twitter, I'm not sure how representative of the general public that is, but was that people who for ideological reasons were naturally anti-lockdown kind of disliked the proposed solution. So then the tactic was to try and minimize or gloss over the problem of COVID-19 itself.

It's not as dangerous as everyone says. You know, herd immunity can work. Look at what Sweden's doing. Look at Singapore before Singapore lockdown. Did you notice that? What did you make of the political debate around lockdowns? Yeah, of course, and it's kind of the human condition really, isn't it? I mean, you've got this, the American,

the kind of American vision of individual liberty trumps everything, which is a fine vision in many ways, but unfortunately, if it means, you know, my view of capitalism, yeah, I think the only solution is entrepreneurialism and a capitalist model where you get, because that model taps the creativity in society. If you go to a government-controlled model, as China has, for instance, obviously they can do a lot of things,

but I think they miss out on a lot of the most creative type things, which is why you see the domination of companies like Microsoft and these various areas, Amazon and these things that are so powerful. But on the other hand, the problem with the sort of strictly libertarian view is that basically what's been happening is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And that's so you need a balance, I think, between regulation and government because the government is elected by the people. The people don't often value their government all that much. You don't

elect entrepreneurs. If you're in a big company, it's pretty much like a totalitarian state in many cases. So they're not democratic institutions and you're not living in a democratic environment when you're working in a company like that. Outside you may be, though many companies have been rather controlling to people's outside lives if you get the wrong messages back. So I think you need a balance, basically, between the public good and the entrepreneurial excitement.

And I think what's happening is that public good aspect has been too eroded and it continues to happen. And, you know, I'm kind of, I think most of us actually, I've had this conversation with Barry Jones, you know, he's a stalwart Labour man but, I mean, he's basically a small L Liberal too, quite frankly. But what's happened is the small L liberal component has pretty much gone from, say, the Australian Liberal Party.

It's increasingly dominated by the kind of thinking the IPA represents and more and more of the people are parachuted in from that. And then you've got other, the National Party is kind of, seems to be owned by the coal industry, as far as I can see, and there's no way they're democratic or innovative or entrepreneurial. They're just dumb. I mean, they dig stuff up and they sell it off. They do that well and they use high technology to do it, but it doesn't build a very exciting society to be relying on digging holes in the ground really so so we need to get some better balance in Australia and I'm not sure how we do it because you

know the quality of government is not that great in many cases but then you know Scott Morrison has done I would have thought was fairly on the right politically did the lockdown which is really interesting in all credit to it he did the right thing, I think. And a lot of the objection to it was really coming from hardline kind of neoliberal economics type perspectives and in the US because the social services there are just so appalling and they weren't willing to provide money to people because, I mean, Trump has used this to cut taxes again, try to do his utmost to cut taxes again, which is really extraordinary.

And so I actually believe in some things like progressive taxation, that people who earn a whole lot should be taxed at a higher level because you need to take care of the society at large. I also wonder whether a universal basic income actually wouldn't release a lot of creativity, quite frankly, because the people could forget about just the basics. They could be much more creative in what they do. So I think there's a good debate that really should be going on there, but it's very hard to have the debate, as you know. You can have it in a format like this. There's a lot of good debate going on there, but it's very hard to have the debate, as you know. You can have it in a format like this. There's a lot of good debate going on online, but it's not what percentage of older people particularly are involved in it. I think with younger people, there's going to be a big transition because of the use of online mechanisms and online discussion. But my generation,

particularly, a lot of people are really still stuck in the print era and in some pretty tired old ideas, quite frankly. Yeah, I fall to the left because, you know, I think we should be talking about nuclear power, quite frankly. I mean, I think a lot of this discussion of doing everything with renewables is probably not realistic, quite frankly. Yeah, I think we should definitely be open to that. Yeah, but we can't have the discussion.

Though I think the Libs have been trying to bring it into the thing, but they're not really doing anything. It's not just discussion. You need actual action. Yeah, I want to pick up on a couple of things you said. One was about striking the balance between individual liberty and the public good. I actually think that you could argue that there are, as far as the pandemic is concerned, certain obligations that even libertarians would agree with.

So, for example, mask wearing. Libertarians should, even especially libertarians, should agree with the silver rule that don't harm others in a way that you wouldn't want to be harmed yourself. And because the virus does represent, you know, a multiplicative systemic risk where my actions or my irresponsibility can harm other people in the community, even or perhaps especially libertarians should be wearing masks on libertarian grounds. Yeah, they should.

But I mean, we should also think of those terms. But you've seen what's happened in the United States, I mean people are being attacked for wearing masks and the hard right is saying you know, this sort of makes them you know, scaremongering

they're kind of a wuss or something and you know, Trump doesn't wear a mask and so it has become a politicised, quite frankly. And I think, you know, human beings, there's kind of a myth out there that a lot of people have sort of adopted this social Darwinism idea, which is actually not the way Darwinian evolution works anyway, but the idea that the strong individual is the absolute sine qua non of society. But, you know, basically human society is essentially tribal and they grew as the reason the human beings probably triumphed over Neanderthals and probably

human beings evolved is because they know how to work together. And so there's a sort of collectivist principle that has dominated a lot of human thought through the ages. And you still have this collectivist view in smaller communities. Often it's much stronger. You'll have it in countries like Ireland, which has always had a very collectivist kind of approach to things. And that's why, for instance, the US American Democratic Party was heavily controlled by

the Irish early on. And that's sort of the democratic idea of a more general view that we are all in some senses responsible for society. And what also happens, I think, in the kind of hard right situation. For instance, there's been data on the media saying, well, every homeless person in the street actually costs society about $13,000 a year. The reason for that is they need more medical care, they commit more crime, and there's just more and more involvement in just seeing they're not dead in the street, so to speak.

And if you actually provided some simple housing for them and you get them into a situation where people can talk to them, you actually save money. And I think that's true of a lot of levels. We get these very ideological ideas about things. I think pragmatism is essential. And I think the one thing I like about Scott Morrison, I think he's pragmatic. And he's not a great intellectual or anything, but he's a pragmatic guy. And I think, you know, we may see him do some things that only a political leader on the right can do.

And he'll be very powerful as he comes out of this. He's got a very, I think his stature is greatly enhanced. And so it would be good to see them trying to think a little bit more innovatively about how we organise our society and how we do things. And I think it's, we're kind of lazy, actually. Not everyone in Australia, but a lot of people are kind of complacent and lazy about things, more so than in the US, I think. There's more of a dynamism in American society than there is here.

You know, we're sort of focused on the footy. I mean, I don't give a rat's ass about the footy. I mean, I don't need to know that some inarticulate guy can kick a ball better than some other inarticulate guy. It doesn't interest me at all. I have zero interest. I wonder if that distinction between the entrepreneurial spirit in the United States and the more complacent culture in Australia can be explained by the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. Like from the get-go, the US had this very Protestant culture

of if we want to get something done and we need to build a new school or a new bridge, the local community will bind together and get it done. Whereas in Australia, we grew up after settlement as a nation with kind of two very domineering authorities, the British and then I guess to an extent because of all the immigration, the Catholic Church, and the solutions could be provided from the top down. There are various levels to it. I think one of the things is we thought for a very long time of ourselves in a sort of

imperial colonial way. I mean, we didn't even have Australian passports until 1947. We carried British passports until 1947. We carried British passports. I've just been reviewing this because I've written my first before the COVID-19 thing, and I'm just on the point of finishing the book and sending it to a publisher after my agent approved of it. But it's a book called Empire, War and Tennis. So it's not about science at all.

It's a bit about my family family tennis playing uncles who made their own tennis courts and then went off to world war ii and one was in all the fighting in kokoda and eastern new guinea and then borneo and the other one was in malaya and having a lovely time wrote a lot of letters back which we still have but then was captured, was on the Burma-Thai Railroad, survived that, but then died when a ship he was in was sunk. And I've been thinking about writing this kind of family story initially, and I was calling it War and Tennis, because, you know, the idea of peace as a template for tennis and war.

But, you know, because of who I am and and what i am i always have to go into depth on everything because that's what i do you know i go into i'm not interested in superficiality i want to understand why why things happened and what what the dynamics were so i went into uh i ended up writing a history of lawn tennis which starts in 1875 and then war i started to look at war beginning with the boer War and the Spanish American War, which had tremendous implications for us, actually. The Spanish American War meant that the Americans took over the Philippines and Guam. And of course, that was a major flash point for World War II, because the Japanese, after World War I, took over all the American, German colonies in the Pacific,

which were a lot of islands to the north and east of that. The attack on Pearl Harbor was organized from Truk, for instance, which was a big naval base for them. So there was this tension building up in the Pacific all through the 20s and 30s between the US and Japan. And so I'd never really understood any of that. So I read into all that. And then I thought, well, you know, this is basically all about empires. It's about the British trying to expand and protect their empire. It's about the Germans trying to expand their empire and then losing it.

And it's about the French maintaining their empire in Southeast Asia and the Dutch and the Japanese trying to get rid of them and establish their empire. So they were all imperialist notions. So one of the things was Australia thought of itself as an extension of Britain. We always thought of ourselves in this sort of colonialist way. We called it we were part of the empire, but we were basically thinking

of ourselves as colonialists. And that led, I think, to a sort of a respect for remote authority that was greater and a sort of lack of independence of thinking at times that was kind of negative. With the Catholic thing, of course, you know, in Australia, of independence of thinking at times that was kind of negative. With the Catholic thing, of course, you know, in Australia, it was a particularly horrible form of Catholicism that got established here. It was Irish Catholicism, and it was highly anti-intellectual.

And it's to some extent stayed like that, though you have intellectual groups like the Jesuits and so forth, but you still have that, well, I always thought of the Christian brothers, bullies, boys, if you like, you know, that sort of culture, the sort of ruggier, ragger thing. And you see it coming through in newspapers like The Australian, where a lot of the journalists have that background, extremely anti-intellectual kind of view of the world. And then, and so, of course, early on, we had this coalition between the socialists and the Catholics in the trade union movement, which broke apart when I was a kid. And then from the Protestant side, you had the Church of England type, which was just basically establishment thinking, very identified with Britain and very, and kind of pompous. It was very strong in Victoria, I think, a sort of a pompous self-satisfaction

and of the superiority of the upper middle class and so forth. And then you have Presbyterianism, which is what you say. It's Calvinism. It's sort of dynamic and business-oriented. So Presbyterianism is very powerful in South Korea. You think of them as an Asian country, but actually they're Presbyterians. That's why they're so tough. But then you have, I was brought up in Methodism, and Methodism was kind of an anti-alcohol movement

from the lower church of England, and it was totally impractical. I mean, they didn't think in terms of, they certainly weren't business-driven. They were social reform-driven, basically, but total hopeless at business. And so you had different themes in Protestantism that sort of led to different outcomes. I'd say that the predominant sort of thinking in the US that really, really took stronghold is kind of a Presbyterianism, kind of Calvinism, that now you see in the Pentecostals. God wants you to be rich,

Pentecostalism, which doesn't bear a lot of relationship to Christianity, as I understand. That's because I was brought up as a Methodist. So it's all very complicated. But I think what's happened in the US particularly, and here too, to some extent, is that people with a lot of money, I mean, media companies are no longer media companies, newspaper companies. They're no longer running a newspaper. They're running a media organisation. Or they're diversified into all sorts of different things. So a lot of the media has come actually to serve a limited range of business interests, particularly established business. So what's so damaging, I think, and what's so damaging to Australia is we have very powerful, old, established and rather dumb business

like the mining industry controlling and actually suppressing innovation and entrepreneurism. If it's not within their context and it threatens them, they will not foster it. And because they control so much of the media and because, you know, Murdoch and so forth, then you get a sort of a boring society. And I think that's part of the problem with Australia. You know, Trump is, President Trump is Rupert Murdoch's creation. He's the

creation of Fox Television News, which dominates in rural America. Do you have any ideas as to how to make Australia more dynamic? Yeah, I mean, it would be good if we could get more discussion going. I think it's going to change, and it's going to change because of social media and because people are getting their information online. Now, it's very hard to know how that's going to play off. So as the younger generations grow up, I think they're very angry with the way they're being treated, and justifiably so. Whether they're actually driving that in the right direction or direction, I don't know. I don't know why they won't turn out and vote, for instance. It's the same in the US. If you don't vote,

how can you change society? I mean, the only way you can either change it by being an entrepreneur and being aggressive and building your own thing, or you can change it through trying to work through politics. And you have to work through politics on some things. We can't address the issue of climate change without having major buy-in from the political sphere. It's just too big to address simply from a commercial, a divided commercial aspect. So that's the big issue, I think, is how we do change. I think it will change because the information that younger people are getting is not, they're not getting it from the Melbourne Age or the Australian or the ABC News or Channel 9 News, if there

is any news. I don't know. I never watch it. But so I think they're going to get their own information. But on the, as you know, part of the problem with that is that can lead to all sorts of nuttiness that can take hold. And there are dangers there as well. So the democratization of the commentary and information I think is extremely interesting.

But I don't think we understand how to use it positively yet. And a lot of people are using it very, very negatively. There will be Russian interference in the federal election in the U.S. There's no doubt about it. It'll happen again. But with or without Russian interference, social media has definitely, I think, I mean, I probably need to look at the data on this more, but I'm fairly sure that it's been driving a lot of the political polarization we're seeing. Oh, yeah. polarization we're seeing um oh yeah particularly in america because now where the media landscape is so fragmented people can self-select the views that they want to consume which inevitably are

going to be the views that already agree with their prior views um and so people form these echo chambers and lose the ability to converse with, associate with, meet people across the aisle. Yeah, and that's why I think things like Twitter are useful if you use it as a conversation. But the problem is you get channeled into a group of like-minded people. That's the way it works. And Facebook does the same. I don't do Facebook. But if you look at, for instance, if you looked at the – remember, I mean, Trump had that event where they cleared the protesters

outside the White House with tear gas and so forth so he could do a publicity walk down to the local church and hold up a Bible. Well, if you looked at the way that's handled on one segment of the media, they show the people being tear gassed and pushed aside, and then they show Trump sort of cynically walking down to the church. On the other side, though, you say the video and so forth is selected. So you say Trump is trying to get to the church, but these people are trying to stop him and they're clearing them out so that he can do this wonderful thing and speak to his Christian colleagues. And of course, you know, Trump's about as

Christian as Genghis Khan. I mean, he's all about Trump. So that, you know, it depends. And that's the vision that people in middle America see because they engage with Fox TV news. And then there's all this, I mean, Trump's deliberate campaign to discredit what is still a pretty strong, I think, liberal press in the United States, which is the New York Times and the Washington Post, for instance. And I would regard those as liberal newspapers, but they're badged as left.

So anything that's left of Rupert Murdoch and the big money people is left or fake. Now, this fake news, I think, has been appalling. And how we stop more figures like this emerging, I don't know, because he's a particularly toxic individual. Yeah. Coming back finally to the pandemic, Peter, the government's modelling at the beginning of the outbreak was quite pessimistic. And yet today in mid-June, there are a little over 100 COVID-19 deaths in Australia. So what happened? Were we lucky?

Were the epidemiological models wrong? Did they have bad assumptions? Did we just do a good job? Yeah, I think they were basing, as I recall, initially they were basing it on the Imperial College modeling. But, you know, basically the difference was, it's very simple, the difference was this, is that before, and they didn't realize this at the time, but before the United States and Europe reacted, the virus was already established in community and spreading in the community. And for about a month to six weeks, at least, in Europe and in the United States, and they

weren't reacting. Here the virus sequence was released on 9th of January. Our people quickly had a PCR test and we had our first case on the 25th of January. And then we reacted very, very quickly. So I think what happened was, though we might think we get a lot of tourists and people traveling through it's nothing like the numbers that travel through the United States or through Europe so we just didn't get that exposure early so it never really got established in the community in the way it did there so

looking at what was happening there you were dealing with that issue but that didn't really take hold here if If we'd gone another three weeks or four weeks without really reacting fairly vigorously, we would have been in the same boat. So I think shutting down in the way we did fairly early, and as you know, if you watched Scott Morrison, for a time, he really wasn't quite getting the idea. But he got it and I think did the right thing and stuck with it. So I think we were lucky in that we had, I think, one of their smartest politicians in the health portfolio, Greg Hunt. He seems to have a functioning brain and I think a man of reasonable integrity.

And so he reacted well and I think that helped a lot. I think if we'd had the wrong person in that portfolio, it could have been problematic. Did you have an opinion on the Imperial College London modelling, the famous model which forecast, I think, 500,000 deaths under a herd immunity scenario for the UK? Yeah, I've always been a bit dubious about modelling in general. Yeah, garbage in, garbage out. The problem is when science interfaces with economics and politics, it becomes really complicated because economics insofar as it is a science is really a social science. I mean, you can have data-driven analysis and all the rest of it, but it's really about human behavior. And, of course, once you get into human behavior, you're getting into all sorts of unpredictables. But, no, I think the fact that they did take up what the modelers were saying really protected people.

And, of course, that made a lot of people angry. For instance, is it Adam Crichton on The Australian got very upset about it and he's basically happy to let all the old people die off because it was their problem. What use are they anyway sort of thing. That was the message that came across. And there's a certain legitimacy to that argument in a way. Well, the best version of the argument is we can just encourage

a particular segment of the population to stay home and to socially distance, in this case elderly folks and people with preconditions and let everyone else go about their normal economic lives was that ever a realistic idea I just don't know enough about non-pharmaceutical interventions to know whether that's even been tried before or whether it would work well nothing we haven't really faced anything quite like it, but the East Asian countries did with SARS, I suppose. Can you just tell the old people to stay home and let everyone else go normally?

To some extent, that's what Sweden's done, I think. They didn't really... And Sweden is a very homogeneous, well-educated population. It's much more homogeneous than ours. Sweden is a very homogeneous, well-educated population. It's much more homogeneous than ours. And, you know, the Scandinavian model, there's a kind of collectivism to it. You know, basically people think we're all in the same boat. And that's always been a tradition.

It goes back to the Icelandic sagas pretty much. That's the way they work. Their parliaments work through sort of informal coalitions often of people with like cause and those coalitions change. I've often wondered whether we wouldn't work better politically along those lines than with the present rather rigid and polarised sort of politics, which I think can be very toxic at times because the other side can't possibly take up a good idea because it's their idea sort of thing, which I think is just dumb. And Germany a bit like that. So Sweden's had a fair number.

They've had the greatest number of deaths in Scandinavia. And the British tried to do it. That's what the British aimed to do, is keep their older people and vulnerable people safe and just let it go. And, you know, it spectacularly did not work in Britain. And a lot of people died in nursing homes and all the rest of it. And then they got driven really by popular opinion as much as anything else, I think, into locking down to some extent. They never locked down to the extent we did. And, of course, they've had a very large number of deaths.

So I think if we'd gone down that road, our population is a third of the UK and they've had 40,000 plus deaths. I think we would have had, you know, a month or so after this because we were a month or six weeks behind them, I think we would have had 10,000, 14,000 deaths quite easily if we'd gone down that road. Yeah. We might have done better but, you know, our real problem would be then if it really got into the rural areas and, of course, if it got into the indigenous communities, it would be catastrophic.

And in Brazil, it has, it's got up into the indigenous areas, and there'd be massive numbers of deaths there. Yeah. So, you know, it was kind of not very good alternatives, really. But and in general, I think one of the lessons that came through from the 1918-19 pandemic is Philadelphia, for instance, didn't shut down. And they had a lot of deaths. Midwestern cities like St. Louis, Kansas City, Missouri and stuff, I think, did shut down quite a bit. And they actually came out of it economically much better than Philadelphia did.

But the thing is, the economies are so different now. You know, our economy is so different from a 1918 economy. I mean, it just totally transformed basically manufacturing and agricultural and our economy is just so many weird aspects to it. You know, I look at the Australian economy and I think it's based on mining, it's based on agriculture, it's based on churning houses in the city and constantly increasing population growth, which is kind of a Ponzi scheme as far as I'm concerned, but still. Well, thanks, Ponzi schemes anyway, aren't they? That's the way.

This podcast has been very critical of all those things over the years. Yeah, and Philly, I think, famously had a big parade, which turned out to be a horrific super spreader event back in 1918. Yeah, I looked at that history way back, but I haven't looked at it for a long time. So it looks like we're in a good position where we've kind of pulled off the ideal where we're getting the best of both worlds. We've seriously capped the number of fatalities and the economy is reopening and that stands in very stark contrast to the rolling social, economic and political mess that is the United States, for instance. Are you optimistic about Australia's chances over the next year or two until a probable vaccine arrives? Yeah, I'm hoping a vaccine will arrive sooner

than later. I think it really depends on how people behave. I mean, I hope people can still remain conscious there's something dangerous out there. I mean, it's just possible we might get it stamped right down. I mean, with so few cases in Sydney, relatively few in Melbourne, I wonder a bit about opening up the borders too soon, because Perth and Western Australia and Queensland all seem pretty free at the moment. I think maybe they had a case in Queensland, but I wonder whether it might not be better to delay just a bit, but we'll see. I expect if we did get a big ramp up in Victoria and so forth, state premiers would decide to keep the barriers in place. But we'll just have to see how it goes.

I mean, it's all a big experiment, quite frankly. We don't know where it will go. And we're starting at a very low base, and as long as we're very, I think we are being very vigilant at the level of screening for upcoming cases and if we can keep it to little outbreaks, I think we'll be okay. something and uh and of course we worried about the black lives thing but the case numbers were still very low then i mean if it gets up to a higher level and then we have very big events you would be much more concerned i think so what should individuals do what should listeners of this podcast do what would you advise them i think just maintain the same um same sort of you know tend towards social distancing a bit, tend towards

being a bit thoughtful about what you're doing and why you're doing it. I think a lot of the danger is, you know, when people have a few drinks and they don't really think too clearly anymore. So clubs have been, in a couple of cases, where they've had second outbreaks. It's sort of started in the sort of club culture. In South Korea. Yeah. Younger people are not so severely affected anyway. You know, some die and some get very sick and are damaged by it, but most don't. And there's a fair number of people who get infected and don't

really know they're infected or they get something very mild and they're probably transmitting. So it's actually the danger, as for someone like me, I'm almost 80, the danger level goes up as the country opens up and I'm still, my sort of group will be very wise to just continue to be very, very careful, quite frankly, because there's nothing else out there. There's the other possibility, of course, is that the doctors just get a lot better at treating it. I mean, our death rates, if you look at our death rate, it's about 1.4% in the known cases. And I think that's probably a fairly accurate,

I think somewhere between 1% and 1.4% death rates are probably about right. Is that the case fatality rate or the infection fatality rate? Well, we call everything we detect as an infection a case, basically. So if we say we've got 7,000 people infected, their people, some of them are pretty asymptomatic that have been picked up by screening people off ships and so forth who didn't develop any disease, but they're positive. So our numbers of cases are the numbers of people

who are positive in one way or another. I think that mightn't be a bad reflection of what the actual case fatality rate is if you take case as just an infection, that it's maybe about 1%. And that's been bouncing around for a while. I mean, if you looked at the global figures and the number of people who've died and the number of people who reported those cases, you'd think it's 5%.

But it's nothing like that. It's much, much lower than that, maybe even much lower than 1%. But what we've lacked is a good antibody survey to pick up people who've been infected and got better. And whether we'll do that in Australia at the moment, I think the trouble is that our infection rate has been so low that an antibody survey would probably give us a lot of false positives. They'd be overrepresented. In the earlier days of the pandemic, when people were very pessimistic about the case fatality rate, that was based on the data out of China, which I think put it at about 4%. But it's been adjusted downwards since then. And that's largely because of the presence of asymptomatic carriers?

Yeah. I think that basically the 4% was based on people who were getting sick, really sick enough to come to the attention of the authorities. So there was a selection bias. There was a selection bias, yeah. There's a lot more milder infection than we thought at the beginning. And it could be that if you look at the American reports of numbers infected, I'm not sure about numbers died. I mean, you could probably double it, actually, I suspect,

because they haven't been doing a lot of testing. And, you know, they often force people to pay to be tested. But you've certainly got to have symptoms before you test in the US at the moment, which is disastrous from the public health point of view. So we're not charging anyone for being tested. And we're saying if you've got any concerns, come along and be tested because that's the stage we're at. We want to know if there's any case out there.

So if anyone's got the cold, so what people should do? What people should do is keep it in mind that there's an infectious virus out there and it's dangerous and assume it's still around. Maintain social distancing to the extent you can and just be careful. And if you do get symptoms of substantial sort of cold and flu-type symptoms, just go along and get checked. You'll probably be negative, but go along and get checked because if you get checked, then we'll pick up the cases

that are COVID and that'll be a reasonable indication, I think. And just be sensible. I think masks, I think if public transport and stuff gets crowded, it's probably not a bad idea to wear a mask. But if you're out walking and in the street or even certainly if you're out in the park or something wearing a mask, it's kind of ridiculous, quite frankly. I mean, the masks have their own issues and problems too. And I think one of the problems is to rely on them too much. But if you think you might have it, wear a mask because then you maybe to some extent stop transmitting it. Don't wear one of those N95 masks with the little valve on the front because that's just a one-way valve and you're just breathing straight out through it.

So I think you might have it and you want to get yourself tested and you're in with other people, wear a mask until you've got yourself tested and you know what the story is. Most of the colds and flu will just be the usual colds and flu. Finally, what should governments and nations be learning from the COVID-19 experience that can put us in better stead for the next pandemic I think one thing to learn is to keep your public health systems strong I mean you certainly it's fine to have a lot of tests done in private labs and so forth and one of the things that happened here, you know, the initial testing was done at

Vidderall, the Victorian Infectious Disease Reference Lab, which is the state virus diagnostic labs paid for out of state funds. And those organisations can go ahead and do that. I mean, that's part of their job to protect us. So you need to keep your public health system strong. Don't fire your public health doctors the way Campbell Newman did in Queensland, for instance. And they've done a lot in the United States. I mean, you know, Trump has totally demoralized the whole public sector, whole federal public sector in the United States in various ways.

And so keep that strong. And the other thing I think that needs to be done, and whether we do this through government or philanthropy or whatever, is working with international agencies. So some of the most, I mean, WHO, United Nations, has its great strengths, has its great weaknesses because it's part of the United Nations. But, you know, it's been a very, on the whole, been a very positive force in this and quite essential for collecting information about standardisation and practices and putting that out there. Though politically they've handled themselves, I think, very badly in it, quite frankly, in some of the announcements they've made. But then you've got organisations like CEPI,

started by Bill Gates, but it's been the organisation that has, for two years back, put in a lot of money for developing vaccine platforms, which are the platforms that are being used by a lot of the vaccine development, including the University of Queensland one. It's a CEPI funded program. Now, people who develop their vaccine through CEPI got funding. You can't patent it. And it has to be generally available throughout the world. So it may be if we use the University of Queensland vaccine, which to my mind looks the best vaccine out there at the moment, from what I've seen,

it's a protein-based vaccine. We could make it in Australia, we can make 100 million doses a year at Broadmeadows CSL plant. But a lot of that, some of that, they've done a negotiation with government. Some of that will be kept for Australia and for us to help with the Pacific Islands, because we do a lot of good stuff with the Pacific Islands. But the rest of it will be going globally. So that's been important. So I think these international organisations are really important if they can work with government, philanthropy and all the rest of it. And then the other thing is we should have a drug development program that's equivalent to CEPI for drug development for, I think, the known viruses that could possibly jump into us and cause another pandemic. With flu, we've got, you know, flu is

always the main pandemic threat and we've got antiviral drugs, we can make Flu, we've got. You know, flu is always the main pandemic threat, and we've got antiviral drugs. We can make vaccines. We're about as good as we can get. We're trying to improve those, but that's about as good as we can do. And it kills people too, of course, but it's the novel viruses we need to be prepared for and maybe put a bit of resources into actually being ready

in better ways than we were. Great. Some good practical suggestions there. But Peter, amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time. Well, you're welcome, John. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For show notes, transcripts, and links to everything discussed, you'll find those on my website, josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com. If you like what we're doing, the biggest thing you can do to help us out is to leave a rating and a review on iTunes. I know everyone asks,

but it genuinely helps. It helps us in the rankings and it helps us secure the hard to get guests. So I would deeply appreciate it if you left a rating and a review. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our very thirsty video editor is Alf Eddy. I'm Joe Walker. Thanks for listening. Until next week, ciao.