Weird Medicine: The Podcast - EXTRA - Doctor from the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Speaks Out

Episode Date: March 15, 2020

Dr Arnold Hopland was a passenger on the Diamond Princess cruise ship when his wife tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Weeks later he is home and telling their story. PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) withings.com/steve (for the best fitness wearables on Earth!) Feals.com/fluid (lab grade CBD products!) TRIPP.COM offer code DRSTEVE (relax and get 20% off!) simplyherbals.net (While it lasts!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) tweakedaudio.com offer code “FLUID” (best CS anywhere) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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this is a special extra show. We will dispense with the plugs, although if you want to go to stuff.doctrsteve com and you know, do your Amazon shopping there, I won't argue with you. But this week

we have Dr. Arnold Hopland who is a local physician here, and he's been on the Today Show and a couple of things because he was on the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was in the news, which was the focus of the very early story of COVID-19, which is the disease caused by the virus called SARS C-O-V-2. I wanted to get this out there to you just as quickly as we possibly could, and here's the

interview with Dr. Arnold Hopland. You're listening to Weird Medicine. I have the pleasure of having Dr. Arnold Hoplin, who's our lives have crossed sort of peripherally in the past.

He's in general practice in East Tennessee and carries the distinction of being one of the folk that was on the Diamond Princess cruise ship when the COVID-19 or or outbreak started, just for baseline purposes.

SARS, COV2 is the virus that causes COVID-19. Dr. Hoplin, how did this start? You're on vacation and you're enjoying yourself. And the next thing you know, you're embroiled in sort of a catastrophe that resulted in you being on this ship for six weeks instead of, what, one week, two weeks, whatever. It was 12 days. Give us the Reader's Digest story of what happened. Well, we embarked on the cruise that was going to leave Yokohama, Japan, going on Kawasaki, and then Hong Kong, Vietnam, a couple of ports of Vietnam, back to Taiwan.

Very exotic cruise. And then back to Japan. Well, the cruise was completed in the normal manner of cruises, and we had our luggage in the hallway with tags on it, ready to leave the ship in Yokohama Harbor after the cruise was over. And the captain announced our disembarkment will be delayed 24 hours while the Japanese health authorities inspect the ship. Okay. So at this point, you don't know anything. going on. We had no message other than figured maybe they're going to go

and see if there were some cockroaches in the kitchen or something. Sure, of course. And so we spent that day wandering around the ship playing some card games and of course hanging out at the buffet a good part of the time. Of course. And after dinner

at the regular dinner hour, we went to our regular dinner seating and we were asked to go to our cabins. When we got in our cabins, the announcement was made. The ship has been placed under quarantine, and you must stay in your cabin for the next two weeks. However, we're going to open up the Wi-Fi for everyone, no charge. Okay.

And the ship phones can be used free of charge. And you call home and tell people you're not going to make it home. Okay. As soon as they made that announcement, I thought, we have a problem. Because this ship clearly is not designed as a quarantine facility. There's no way to have a red zone to keep some people secure a yellow zone for a suspicious contacts and a green zone for the safety. There was no possibility of separate.

Everybody was in one zone. So it was not going to be a quarantine. The Japanese said they did not have the capacity to handle so many. people who were about 4,4,400 people roughly on the boat. So my initial thought was they'll have a short delay, well, they prepare for some shore facilities for a quarantine. I assumed that the U.S. Embassy would immediately jump on the fact that we had almost 400 Americans on board, and we have 1,000 military beds right there in Tokyo.

Right. be no problem at all quarantining the Americans separately. So there was no problem, right? So I didn't. I thought, well, okay, there's going to be a little delay here. No, we'd get off the ship. Yeah. But meanwhile, of course, we had canceled our airline reservation on the 4th of February

and rebooked for the 5th. We called the airline again and said, it's going to be a couple more weeks. And they said, tell you what, whenever you find that you can leave, call us and we'll give you full credit. you can fly back. So very helpful immediately. Because the Wi-Fi was operational, I was able to email the embassy. And so I stepped through a couple of things on email to the embassy, never got a response of any kind, identified that we were on the ship and who we were.

And then we hunkered down for a couple of days, during which time I tried to use the ship phone about every 90 minutes for three days straight, day and night. Right. The phone that they said. About the third or fourth day after 4,200 people had gotten done talking to their friends and relatives. In the middle of the night, about three in the morning,

I dialed my son, I think it was Steve, who happened to be down in Florida at the moment. and I was about to hang the phone up with another busy signal, and I heard a ring. I thought, well, I got through. I was shocked at it. I told Steve, I said, Steve, you've got to activate my cell phone. I haven't got an international calling. He said, I'll get Dewey to do that, and the phone went dead.

Apparently, they were cutting the calls to 60 seconds or something. Okay. So we didn't have any conversation, but within an hour, my cell phone, was working. And I could call back to the U.S. At that point, it was still daytime, beginning late in the day by the time I realized that it had happened in late in the day here in Tennessee. We were 14 hours ahead of Tennessee in Tokyo. So I was already could tell you what was going to happen the next day when I called you. I think that's how that works. I'm not sure. I don't know. So as I talk about what happened, people often say, well, which day did this thing happen?

I said, well, where are you at? Right, right, right. And so I kind of got a fuzz about which day, because I was talking about being Wednesday once. The next person I'm talking to, it's Tuesday. Right. So it's hard to keep a real, you know, line-by-line sequence of what occurred. But after I made that first contact, I realized then they intended to keep us in quarantine on the boat. And all of the communication we got was through the ship's paper that they sent out every day saying that, you know, the U.S. CDC has recommended that U.S. citizens follow the dictates of the Japanese health authorities.

When it became apparent that they intended to leave us on the ship, I got through to my son, Kenny Hoplin, who's a little. also a physician, Elizabethan, and told him the situation, and he immediately saw the same problem I did. This can't possibly work. We need to get off that boat and get into a quarantine. And my suggestion is that we'd be treated exactly like those in Wuhan. By the third day, I think we were up to 70 or 80 people out of 4,000 infected. And it was clearly increasing every day. Okay. So I said, we need to be treated like the folk in Wuhan. We need a rescue flight, and then we need to go into quarantine.

And those people who are positive need to be treated appropriately, and those who are not need to be quarantined and sure that they're not carrying the virus. So when you say the ship wasn't appropriate for quarantine, for a lot of people, they think, just keep everybody on there and keep them offshore so that they're not, to them, that is quarantine. Tell us what you mean by this. This ship wasn't appropriate.

This wasn't the right way to quarantine people. Well, it seems technical, but it's not that you have to separate groups of people. People who are infected need to be separated from people who might be infected or close contacts. And they need to be separated from folk who clearly are not infected. Okay. And so in order to get that group, number one, is we had been on a. 12-day cruise

and an individual who had been on the ship it departed in Hong Kong and that was on day five, I think, and was found five or six days later to have the COVID-19 virus. So we had been exposed for the whole two weeks.

At that time, I didn't know the rate of infection. I have since talked about virologists to say that the average person infected will probably infect a minimum of four people, maybe as high as seven. That's almost hard to believe because smallpox is a factor of two. Measles, a factor two, and those are highly contagious diseases. And we talk about smallpox on this show all the time. And they have geometric, they have geometric exposure rates.

So quarantines in those cases are hard to control. This thing was dramatically more infected. Right. So having that period of time, it was clear that there were probably 40, 50, or maybe many more infected on the boat because the person who was on the boat had no idea that he was infected, and he had interacted in a normal way on a cruise. And in a cruise with entertainment, everybody's in a small theater, at the buffet, everybody's next to each other. And so there's a lot of close contact, much more so than any other setting I can think of. So I knew that there were a lot of infected people on the boat.

They weren't identified because the Japanese said they were not able to test. So my thought is we need to get off here. We need be separated and then properly tested in quarantine, as they did with the Wuhan evacuaries. Kenny immediately, oh, another thing about the quarantine, there are balcony cabins, and those balconies are stacked one above the other and right beside each other, and so there's a huge communication, even if people stay in their state rooms. The crew were restaurant and hotel workers, well-trained in cleaning, and well-training and well-training hospitality, but no medical training, whatever.

They didn't know how to properly put out a pair of gloves and not contaminate the gloves. And, in fact, the gloves they used were these plastic gloves that tear when you put them on so it wouldn't have battered anyway. And they didn't have any legitimate masks. They had the kind of masks that you use painters would use them when they mix and paint or something so they just don't get paint spray in their face. And it was the sort of thing that would be used in the cafeteria serving line. So the quarantine was going to be maintained by non-minton. personnel in a setting where they were in complete close contact with each other working elbow to elbow in the kitchen and then distributing the food throughout the ship as they had

never been planned to do and they never got food service for 3,000 passengers in the same day before and the first couple of days we got some pretty much thrown together food it was cold and in two three four hours late and and the ships uh um uh still and so forth, they were just very apologetic about their performance. And they brought it up quickly till we were getting gourmet meals three times a day. Biggest problem was Japanese don't drink coffee. And they had a choice of coffee, tea, or water in a buffet and restaurants. And so I had been drinking normally I would have three or four cups of coffee a day,

probably six or eight cups of coffee a day. on the third day with no coffee it dawned me i'm getting a dull headache and my wife said you're getting a caffeine withdrawal headache and and i right away i that had happened to me one time before when i was in a situation where i was cut off from coffee after drinking large amounts and i quit coffee for a long time because i thought anything that gives me withdrawal symptoms i'm not going to have any part of right since then i've studied coffee and it's the only stimulant i know that does almost no downside to it except for gastritis and disturbed sleep but it can help you to be very alert and problem solving as an engineer uh i i would tank up

with a couple of candy bars and a cup of coffee if i really had tough problem i was going to work on for six or eight hours sure uh i had interestingly enough purchased about four pounds of coffee in Vietnam. Vietnam is actually a coffee supplier. I wasn't aware of that. And I own a small coffee shop in Johnson City called Open Doors, run by Michael Marion. And he is an expert. He asked me to get some Vietnamese coffee for him. Because I bought the four pounds, that was a lot bigger. Most people bought a half a pound, a small little bag. They threw in a little device for cook for brewing single cups of coffee which amounted to be like a small tin cup with tiny holes in the bottom of it you put your coffee it and then you pour the boiling water which is normally used

for tea over it and you could brew a cup of coffee sure my wife reminded me of that and we dug around our luggage and sure enough there it was and so now I could make coffee it was very good coffee and my headache was instantly but the first first cup I had no idea how much coffee to put in this thing and so i thought it might take quite a bit and i made uh about 12 to 14 ounces of a thick syrup that would make uh expressa at uh at starbucks seem quite mild okay that was the cure for that believe me that was the cure of my headache and i didn't i didn't get shaky or tachycardia but uh yeah but it did the job and my wife takes and said that she would rather eat raw coffee grounds and drinking of that stuff.

So we solved the coffee problem. But that was a big deal. Yeah, sure. A lot of people didn't have that. There were some people who had a worse problem than me. They had an inside cabin. Mine had a porthole, so I had some light. Probably the safest place on the boat, actually,

because the cabins that had balconies were in communication with the cabins next to each other. There were almost no isolation. So I was isolated somewhat, except that 10 times. the day or there, the door was opened while one of the ship's crew brought me something or had to talk to me about something or another. So there was no quarantine in effect. Kenny was able to, that's my son that I called, was able to get a hold of Dr. Phil Roe, who is a personal friend, physician.

He's a congressman. And a congressman. The state of Tennessee. And here in the first district in Tennessee. So he got Phil, and Phil immediately saw the problem as I did and as Kenny did. I mean, it struck me that a fourth grader with any kind of training at all would have recognized it. And within a day, Dr. Kedlack was on the phone with Phil and I, and we talked briefly about the quarantine situation. I think at that time I told him we were in a petri dish just waiting to get infected and we needed a rescue.

Dr. Cadillac said, I'm going to text you a phone number and I'll text you the time and I want you to call into this number. We're going to have a conference call. I think it was five or six in the afternoon when he said that. At about 9 o'clock at night in Washington, this is the hard thing to believe. I've never seen anything in Washington move that quick. About 9 o'clock that night, there was a physician representative from every significant involved department, Homeland Security, NIH, CDC, of course, HHS, and, of course, Phil, and we introduced each other fairly rapidly. There were 10 physicians on board. after i described my concerns the lady in charge or from the cdc immediately tried to take charge of the call and say we know what we're doing we're the professionals we have ranged with the japanese authorities they are in charge right now and they're doing a great job everything's fine all these cases they're finding on the boat were infected prior to this quarantine and everything's

fine. Okay. And I asked her about six questions, all of which she answered with, I don't know or I suppose. There were nine doctors that recognized that every answer is inadequate. Oh, I think it was 12 hours, 14 hours later. I got a call from Dr. Kedlek and he said, if we send a rescue flight, do you think people will agree to get on and come back to the U.S. for a 14-day quarantine here in the U.S. And I said, number one, we have to agree to it. Number two, we will all be infected if we stay here. And so he, and I had already talked about that possibility with two or three people

because of the earlier phone call. And I was quite sure that people would want to get off that boat. I was not the only concerned person. it took about two days to get all the political handshakes done and actually get the aircraft on the ground to pick everyone up at I think around 6 o'clock at night we got a note in our mailbox and it says

no pardon me we got a email from the embassy no direct call ever was made to any individual with 400 Americans on the boat in the embassy didn't 900 people working in that embassy and they couldn't contact the people on that boat never did never did contact i never got a contact from the embassy that wasn't directed to a diamond passenger a diamond princess passenger wow and it would be boilerplate sure generic information almost no information but at any rate it said you must answer this email by 10 o'clock tomorrow morning if you want

to take the evacuation flight tomorrow night no notice that that was even there. And somebody called me and told me there was an email waiting for me or I wouldn't have even known that they had to be done. And, of course, I called everybody I knew on the ship and it got around the ship. And I think... Could they not make an announcement over the...

No, they did not. It didn't make an announcement over the PA there because it was just for the Americans. Oh, okay. And... Oh, I see. Anyhow. So I gave the information, you know, passport numbers and everything.

And they asked all kinds of things. They wanted your birthday. And then they wanted your age, like the... couldn't do math. It was a little absurdity. But I provided all the information in email and they said, give an email for each passenger that wants to go. So I did a separate email for myself and then another for my wife. I got no response on the one that I sent for my wife, which I did first. But when I sent mine in, I got an automated reply that says email received. And I thought, which email wasn't wasn't specified and so I reset my wife's thinking well I had you sent the most recent one no response to that at all so the communication with the embassy was pathetic we then packed our bags we each had two suitcases so we had four bags packed everything in them except a few things we put in a in a big purse to take on the airplane

we set the bags and oh the diamond princess did um at that point uh send a email around saying you have been scheduled to go on the evacuation flight and gave us luggage tags to put us on our luggage do you know what the date of this was I wish I could do this better but I would say it was about the 18th I'm looking at a press release it may be in the 20th I'm looking at the press release from the CDC from February 18th I think it might have been the 8th And the CDC on that, they opposed it so strongly that they said, we don't want our name on it. Yeah. They're saying to protect the health of the American public, all passengers and crew of the ship have been placed under travel restrictions,

preventing them from returning to the United States for at least 14 days after they've left the Diamond Princess. Okay. That was a later. That was a later one, yeah. But at any rate, so we put our suitcases in the hall. with the tags on, and they're going to load them on the buses and put them on the appropriate planes. The planes were going, some to Travis Air Force Base and some to Texas, forget which Texas location. And Jeannie and I put our coats on, put our masks on so we could walk down the hall.

They were asked to put a mask on any time we're outside of the room and waited for our turn to board the airplanes about 830 at night, something like that. We got a knock on the door and assumed that was our escort to take us out to the gangway. A gentleman who didn't speak English said, Regina Hopland, and my wife answered, that's me. And he said, you can't leave. You tested positive. Oh, my goodness. And, of course, she broke down in tears, which was unsettling. Was she symptomatic at that point?

Absolutely none. Okay. And the test had been done five days earlier. Okay. Wow. So I'd been living with an infected person for a minimum five days, but probably for, you know, two weeks. It doesn't matter. But my test was negative.

However, I was still living with an infected person for five days after my test. So who knows if I was negative at that point. And a matter of fact, who knows who that got on those airplanes was or was not infected? because 14 people I think that was the first results we got to the test was back the day we were leaving and 14 people that got on the buses to go to the airport were found

by the time they got the airport that they had positive tests then a most amazing activity occurred the buses sat on the tarmac for at least three hours maybe four hours in the middle of the night until about one in the morning maybe longer

and there were officials outside of the buses shouting in each other. And apparently there was a war going on as to whether or not the 14 people who were positive, they couldn't even find out where they were on the buses could be get on the airplanes. And finally they said, well, we're going to separate those out into an isolation portion of the airplanes. They've already been on a bus with all these people. Yeah, they've been sitting on the bus the whole time, et cetera. I'm going to, we have sound effects on it. So the interesting thing about that bus trip was my cousin was with us and my cousin and her husband were on the bus.

And they called me from the bus. And they said, we have ladies on this bus that are crying because they have to go to the bathroom. And when they ask what they can do, they're told to stay in their seats. And I said, if I was on that bus, I'd walk to the front of the bus and I'd pee on the door. And if they wanted to try to stay. stop me, I'd pee on them. I just am fed up with unthinking bureaucrats. And I guess that's, I learned that as a child, and I've sharpened that thought ever since. But so they had a hard time. They were loaded on to cargo planes that were poorly equipped. You know, we had right there within

20 miles of Tokyo, we probably had 30 planes that were. They would haul the whole crew, you know, C-5 cargo planes. But these were some charter aircraft, and they were very tight. So the flight backed the U.S., they didn't have any overhead bins, put their luggage in. They didn't have, the seats were very tightly packed, and there was no food on board for the 14-hour flight, all rather awkward. But they escaped. Yes. And it was a victory.

I assumed that they were going to turn around and come right back. And those people who were able to travel, I think there were two of the Americans at that point who were quite sick. And everyone else, most of them were all asymptomatic. And there were many, like myself, whose partner was found to be positive and chose to stay with their partner. Had I not chosen that, my wife didn't have a phone that was enabled for international calls. She didn't even know how to really use the cell phone. And so we immediately got her phone activated and practiced texting, FaceTime, loaded a translation program, and tried to get her prepared to be possibly isolated. Also a tracking program so I could find out where she was.

And so we spent the next 16 hours doing that. And meantime, we shut our cabin door, went back, went to sleep that night, and waited. And I thought, well, perhaps they're just going to leave us on the boat until we get the second flight here and take us off. I assumed that. What I didn't know is there was a war in Washington in which the CDC blocked the second flight to take the rest of Americans home. And that was a disaster. I think there should be some folk who lose their jobs because of this. because at that point there was no question about whether this was spreading on the ship.

There were now several hundred infected folk and grow every day it was a larger number. So your feeling is by delaying or not allowing those people to leave and get off the ship that they were just increasing this breeding ground inside. Oh, yeah. So eventually everybody in the ship would be infected. And, of course, I think three days after the rescue flight, in fact, the Japanese said, that's it, this didn't work. And they evacuated the ships to a really secure quarantine site. And I was assigned to a dormitory room in Waco, Japan, it's W-A-K-O.

and the CEO but and that was a legitimate quarantine from that day for the next you and your wife together no my wife went to

well she was taken to a hospital okay got it that was a problem she was taken off the ship to a terminal building and left there for about three or four hours while they're waiting for other folk to join her and then four folk

who had tested positive She said it was an ambulance. It was actually an Army vehicle. She was taken to the self-defense force central hospital in Tokyo. And they were led out of that vehicle and into a busy waiting room for an emergency room. And they sat there for two or three hours until they were admitted to the hospital. Come on. Come on.

I can't make this up. I think, well, are we sick or are we not? Are we going to affect people, or are we not, or whatever? Meanwhile, I had started a media blitz on agreeing to talk to anyone. There was a Wall Street Journal reporter. Obviously, you're here, so you'll talk to anyone. Oh, yeah. And I appreciate that.

No, it's not like that. But you're right. I now have a different agenda that I want to get to before I talk about it. But the intriguing part of that was she was then assigned a. room with four other folk who had tested positive, none of whom were sick, none of whom had symptoms. And she actually enjoyed that time. She was with, you know, three other ladies, although one of them couldn't speak Japanese or English.

She was an Israeli who spoke Yiddish. Nobody knew Yiddish there at all. So that poor lady was isolated. Boy, Gabbalt. And we were able to, we were able to have her get on my wife's phone. I put my cell phone on speaker. We were able to find the cabin where her husband was. And so I dialed that on the ship phone.

And I put my speaker against the mouthpiece on the ship phone. And she could talk to her husband. Wow. But he couldn't understand that she couldn't hear him. Oh, wow. Yeah. It was a rather, but they made noise for a long time. And finally, they were contented.

And so we did get some communication going. But it was a trial and error process. The boat was clearly, rampantly being infected by an extremely infectious agent, which was very mild in its symptoms. Right. The only reason... For most people. Yeah, for most people. The only reason that Jeannie wasn't even infected at all is they started off and they just tested people who were symptomatic, had bad cold.

And out of that, about 25% were coming up positive for the COVID virus. Well, then they started realizing that the people at real risk were the elderly and chronically ill. And so they tested people who were over 80 years of age, and I think they had gotten through them by day 12, and were now starting down the line. And I was 75, so I hit the next cutoff. So when they came to test me since Jeannie was 74, she wouldn't have been tested except that they were there anyway, so they tested us both. Otherwise, we would have been on that evacuation flight. But the process was flawed from the top to the bottom. A GP from a little town in East Tennessee on day one it was announced was appalled at the plan, thinking it might last for a day or two till they got a plan in place.

Instead, they were going to stick with it. And the CDC's plan was at that point, after 14 days on this ship, quote, quarantine, if we weren't all infected at that point, then we were going to be allowed to get on a commercial airliner and fly back to the U.S. And at that point, we might have to get a quarantine. Right. Now, no. I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure what that plan was, but it would have been a disaster. And that was what I described in my conversation with on the phone call.

I'm just looking at the numbers, says tests of most of the 3,711 people aboard the Diamond Prince has confirmed that 634 where 17% had the virus. 328 of them did not have symptoms at the time of their diagnosis. And of those with symptoms, the fatality ratio was 1.9%. of all infected that ratio was 0.91% of those 70 and older were most vulnerable with an overall fatality ratio of about 7.3%. Now, this is different than the numbers we keep hearing, you know, 3%, 6%, 15, or whatever. And what this takes into account, though, is all the people who are asymptomatic that tested positive. So that actually, when you take that denominator and inflate the denominator, actually the mortality rate drops. The virility, virility is less.

Right, right, right. And in this country as well, the virility is overstated because we have no idea how many people in this country are infected at this point. On the boat, we had no idea as well because the test was shown to have a lot of false negatives. For instance, my wife went to the hospital and her first test was negative and two others that I knew also who had tested positive had negative tests. she subsequently had positive tests. So the tests were flawed, and the CDC was correct at this level in rejecting the Japanese tests as final. But what they're flawed in was not containing it, getting us out of there. And at this point in time, we have vaccines that are available and are in clinical trials.

This is an absurdity in a pandemic. We don't have time for clinical trials. We need to put that vaccine to use, especially amongst medical personnel, so they can continue to treat people who are severely ill. But we've got the CDC or the, as this is the FDA, holding this thing up. Yeah, we reported very early on in this that they had sequenced the genetic sequence for the spike protein. and then it had turned around and synthesized the spike protein, which for people who are listening that aren't aware, I'll just digress for a second.

If you look an electron microscope of the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus, it's got these little spikes on the outside, and those spikes are the things that attach to these angiotensin receptors, and that's how the genetic material from the virus then, after the outer membrane merges with the cell membrane is injected into the cell, and then the cell just gets hijacked and starts making these billions of copies of the virus. Now, that spike protein is a great target for us to develop antibodies to, our bodies to develop antibodies to, and block that virus's ability to,

latch onto the cells. So once you've got those spike proteins, they're not infectious. They are COVID, you know, SARS, COV2 parts, but they're not in, you can't get the disease from them. That makes a perfect vaccine. And we had that week one or two. Immediately, yes. And actually, it's kind of like having a name tag.

And you tell your white cells, go after these guys with that name tag. Exactly right. Very easy. And there, I was aware of research being. done by Dr. Middleman, and he had a synthetic protein that would bind to the RDR-4 receptor in the white cells, and if you attach any particular biologic identity, it can become a vaccine. There you go.

A year and a half ago, he was approached by the military regarding the possible use for anthrax and smallpox. At that point, I got no more information about it. Now, I have a top secret security clearance, so if I wanted to dig into it, I possibly might have been able to. But I didn't attempt to. I just assumed that this has become a military project. Well, now with the COVID virus, I thought, we need to break that out. And so I contacted our top military advisor, which help I got from former Ambassador Hagerty, and again, Phil Roe, and, Dr.

Dr. Cadleck. These are some heroes in this story. And when I told him that I thought this was a military project, what could he do? He is the guy that coordinates the Japanese defense forces and the U.S. armed forces in a threat from North Korea. And he had direct access to the White House. Within an hour, I was talking to the group in the White House that was set up to study this under under vice president pence and uh and that that group dr middleman's group was able to present their data on uh quickly developing a vaccine the problem is that dr middellman had long ago run out of cash and he's his his research is stalled and uh and it takes a billion dollars to bring a drug to market and he had ten million dollars which he blew through like uh

like a kid in the candy store. And so we had potential vaccines on the market. We had an Israeli vaccine that had been developed for chicken viruses, which could easily be modified and used. They were talking about that early on as well. The Israelis said, hey, we've got stuff that's analogous to this, and we could maybe have something out here very, very quickly. So you're confirming that.

It's very easy to develop, very hard to get it. So it's available a lot of places in the world, but not in the United States, because we have a bureaucracy, which wants to be 100% certain in an uncertain world where there are fast-changing events. We talked about the FDA multiple times in times that's actually beneficial, for example, thalidomide. You and I are old enough to remember the FDA prevented thalidomide from hitting our shores, and so we didn't have. have the problems other countries had. So in those situations, the caution that the FDA shows is warranted, but in a situation like this, you're saying it's a hindrance. We could live with nervous people for a short time, but we can't live with dead people. Right. And so even now, there is a major hold-up, and I'm most interested because Dr. Phil Roe,

has been on this from the start, has announced his retirement from Congress. And I'm trying to put pressure on Phil to delay that for one more period to run again this fall so that he can use his expertise and his seniority and his contacts to address this COVID virus threat. And we need him there now. And if someone replaces him, it'll be a freshman congressman without those contacts and without his expertise. Sure. And so we're trying to push him into. Let me take this opportunity to put out a plug.

Go to row, roe. .house.gov. And when you do that, it says send me an email. And you can send Dr. Phil Rowe. an email saying, please don't retire. We need you to get us through this. And then you can resign. Get us through this.

Then you can resign. But don't we need you? Because having a seasoned physician, Dr. Rowe has been around for a long, long time, and he understands the problems. Having a seasoned physician in there and being replaced by, I don't know, the mayor of some small town in Tennessee, which is probably very capable people. but right now we need people with his voice in there. So R-O-E dot house.gov and sent him an email saying, hey, we heard you on the radio, you know, heard about you on the radio. Please don't leave.

Let's do that. All right? I'll tell you what. I'm a national audience. That is why I'm here today. My story is an interesting story with twists and turns. But finding blame isn't really the objective. The objective here is to fixing it.

go forward. And right now, we can't go forward after we have spent a year or two thinking about it. We need to move quickly and decisively. And I think generally that has been done outside of the bureaucracy. But it's taken folk with courage to take the bit in their teeth and just charge over top of them. And I see the FDA and the CDC is so deeply flawed. in their in their entrenchment, an inability to adapt to the fast-changing circumstances. It was almost like with no plan they were flying by the seat of their pants, and every time

they made a decision, they made the wrong one. I was very frustrated. So what can we do? What can people do who are listening to this right now? Let's talk about on a practical level and then more on a political level. Sure, sure. Well, the instructions that we're getting from everyone is social distancing because this virus is extremely infectious. That means you can catch it easily from someone.

You can catch it from droplets from a sneeze or a cough, but the sneeze or a cough droplets can settle on a surface. And apparently they can live for up to three days on a plastic or a metal surface. telephones are probably one of the great ones people put them right next to their face sure and then they put them right next to somebody else grabs their phone and puts it next to their face so telephones are probably a great fomite for spreading this infection and my listeners know what fomites are by the way fomites are anything that uh in which a bacteria or a contaminant is located and then you can pick it up by handling that material which is normally harmless handrails, doorknobs, telephones, dinnerware.

There are many things like that. And on the ship, you know, buffet line. That's not one giant, phomelma. That's what you do if you want to infect people. Sure. Yeah, our listeners, after 15 years of this show, are very sophisticated and understand fomites and droplet transmission and that kind of stuff. The difference between droplet transmission and airborne transmission.

So, you know, they're, we disguise this show, by the way. I know you've never listened to it, and that's probably a good thing or you wouldn't have come here. But we disguise this show as light comedy, but we give excellent, I think, medical information and teach critical thinking as well. Or teach isn't the right word, but advocate critical thinking. But anyway, so social distancing. So social distancing is critical. them. If you're going to get in contact with someone who's got the virus and you don't know who it is, a good way to do that would be to get into a large crowd so you've got a good

choice of people to get you infected. And so stay out of large crowds. I've been able to encourage our church, which has a fairly large congregation, to stop holding services, but to have their services live streamed. And a lot of churches are doing that same thing. In other churches, at least getting people to stop hugging and kissing each other in the hallways and even handshaking. I understand that a fist bump will transmit about 10% as much bacteria as a handshake. How about we just don't touch each other? You know, the whole handshake came from ancient Greece. I have no weapon.

That's right. I have no weapon. Let's shake hands. If we touch hands, then you can confirm I don't have a weapon. In 2020, we can throw that. one away. It is interesting, though, that this started in a place where people don't shake hands, but I do understand, I mean, you know, because I've always advocated the bow. Let's just bow to each other, or wave, or just say hello, and we don't have to do anything else, but it's so ingrained

in our culture to shake hands or to touch each other or to hug. You know, in Europe, they do the double cheek kiss. Stop it. Let's just stop that. But anyway, so yes. Interesting enough, as an ER physician, I would fire a doctor working for me if he didn't touch the patient. I know. And there's a reason for that. It was not because the patient was reassured. It was because the doctor then saw that patient as a person rather than as an illness or as a problem.

Yes. And it changes your attitude. And so touch is a very interesting thing. it ought to be kept between people who really wish to make a more intimate communication than just acknowledging each other. I like to say that all human communication, 90% of it is simply this. They talk about the weather. They talk about clothing and talk about sports.

They talk about most anything. But all it's communicating is, I acknowledge your presence. I mean you no harm. There's nothing else. You can do that with a nod in a direct eye contact. That's why in New York, when people pass on the street, they don't look at each other because they don't want to – what they really want to say is pay your cab fare or get out of my way in a hurry. And so they're not communicating the message, the common message between people who meet in a casual situation. I do have friends from the city that when they come here, they say, everyone's so friendly.

They're so friendly, but really what it is is we're just willing to look each other in the eye and acknowledge each other. That's what they're reacting to. Well, of course. And, you know, the interesting thing is I'd never been called, honey, by anyone but my wife until I got to Tennessee and waitresses and casual acquaintances and addressed me in that way. And I would blush a little, you know. I'm getting over that. I call everybody, honey, and sweetheart. If I have ever moved out of this area, I would be targeted as some sort of fossil.

Yeah, some kind of a dirty old man chasing the young ladies. Well, I think the key is here. What we need to do is, number one, the bureaucracy needs to drop business as usual. This is not business as usual. We're going to have an economic effect that's going to drastically impact our country. We need to address those issues, and I think they're being attempted to be addressed, whether it's going to be effective or not as hard to know. but folk that own stocks don't sell your stocks when they're down by George buy them now because when it comes back it'll come back so fast you'll not get on board if you've

for our listeners if you've ever heard of the roaring 20s that came after the pandemic of 1918 and you know the stock market every time we've had one of these the market takes a dip and then it always comes roaring back because fundamentally there's nothing wrong with the It's fear, but also there are people on certain levels being affected. I just gave a waitress at a local restaurant 100% tip because people are not going to the restaurant anymore and they are suffering. You know, she wasn't sure how she was going to pay her rent because she's not making the money and they're sending people home and those kinds of things.

And, you know, there will be those kinds of effects on people. It will get better. it's going to be difficult for a while. That is a really good point. I'm glad you mentioned that because, in fact, those of us who are capable of doing so right now, rather than trying to take advantage of the stock market and building an estate, which our heirs will fight over, we should perhaps be taking care of those folk around us who aren't as well situated to absorb this blow. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And my own experience was I grew up without money, and I thought everyone knew how to live without money. I find that I'm better at it than most. So you need to take care of the folk around you. There are folk who are going to suffer greatly, and they won't come back because they don't have resources to come back. And the example of tipping a waiter, waitress. more than you might normally do, I think, is a perfect example of how we should act. Yeah, agreed. So if you do find yourself sick, what do you recommend?

Right now, we don't have enough testing available to test. There are commercial tests now. It just came out. But they're still not widely available. And so the real key is that this. Last Corps says anyone can order the test right now. Any physician can order it or any provider. I'm just telling you what they're saying.

And that's what I hear as well, except that we're not able to do that. And we try. And the second thing is we need to protect our own employees because always, if you're going to help others, you first have to stay healthy yourself. And we have an obligation to our employees as well as our patients. And literally, if we don't make some quick progress on identifying how to safely handle this thing, we may have to shut down the largest blue care clinic in the, I think, in the whole state of Tennessee. Wow. And that's, and that just doesn't need to happen because it'll only happen because of slow regulator, or regulator interference.

So how do we then speed this process up? What do we need to do? What do we as people need to do to get the vaccines going, to get the tests going to sort of cut through some of this bureaucratic malarkey? Well, we really need to be safe. And the way to be safe is, number one, if you're reasonably healthy, I hate to say it, there is no smoker I know of this reasonably healthy. But aside from that, if you don't have chronic illness or elderly, the chance of getting sick. severely ill, is really quite small. In fact, very small.

Probably less than 1% if you have no risk factors. Yeah, it's very low. And so what you do is if you have any sign of cold symptoms, fevers, chills, be sure not to visit those folk who are at risk. And so the nursing homes right now are blocking visitors, and that's extremely important that they do that, I believe. avoiding crowds in which you might spread your infection to others should you be infected. But mostly is if you think you're infected rather than panic and worry, it's probably going to be a mild illness very much like the kind of winter colds. Many of those colds are coronaviruses, which are cousins to this virus. And so the key is stay home.

don't socialize so you don't spread the illness and call the physician to see if they can order a test for you but it's it's problematic of whether or not that will be available for a little while and and by all means don't put other people at risk and especially those vulnerable people that we we all have in our social list if you're going to present to the emergency room for example call them ahead and say hey, I'm coming, and I think this is what's going on. So if they can be ready out there with a mask to put on you, the people who should be wearing masks, the people are sick. Yes.

And that helps to prevent the spreading of droplets. We've also talked on this show and be interested in your take on it. For those people that can't stop touching their stupid faces with their fingers, a mask for them is actually quite a fact. Keeps their hands off their face. Yeah, they ought to put a ball cap on as well. Yeah, sure. And it can be any, for those people, can be any kind of mask, a surgical mask. You don't need to steal the N95 mask from the hospital. If you're one of those people can't keep your fingers out of your face, any kind of mask will do. A painter's mask, you can wrap a t-shirt around your face. That is precisely true, because to avoid infecting yourself, every time you touch a surface that someone else may have touched any time within the last three days.

You need to wash your hands. You need to not rinse your hands in cold water. You need to use soap and water and stand there and sing happy birthday four times, about 30 to 40 seconds worth at least. And hand sanitizer is the next best. It's not the best. It's the next best. Soap is the best. The soap and water and a reasonable scrub.

But if every time you touch a surface, someone else may have touched an last three days, my word, your hands will be. You won't have any fingerprints left. But wash your hands frequently. Keep my eye to your face. That's for your own safety. For the safety of the others, if you sneeze or cough, cough into your arm. A handkerchief isn't the best thing because you handle it with your hands again, and then you touch things with your hands.

But try not to leave potential germs around for other people to contact, especially in the form of a cough or a sneeze. which can settle on surfaces and stay viable. I understand that tests have shown this virus can be viable up to three days in a droplet form. I've seen under special circumstances nine days, but three is probably the most common on things like plastic and metal that doesn't reach a certain temperature. Cell phones are beauties. Computer keyboards are other beauties. If you're at a shared computer, you can't clean that computer.

So when you're done with the computer, don't rub your nose, wash your hands. Right. Very good. Anything else you've got to tell us before we close out for the day? All I can say is the folk in the Diamond Princess were assigned an impossible task by bureaucrats in the Japanese health ministry who were not physicians. Japanese physicians were appalled at it. when the when they evacuated the ship finally our CDC said we're going to make you take another 14 days of of quarantine from the day you left the ship my my quarantine was reset three times and and so they admitted that it was a failure late but still never really admitted that they just it's it's a frustration me that they didn't move quickly. They didn't see the facts in front of them. When they saw

the facts, they pretended that they weren't real. And I think we need to demand more of our public bureaucratic servants. So write your congressman and demand quicker action on these things? Would that be something you would recommend? And it has to be a knowledgeable congressman because most congressmen, unfortunately, even our president, was taking his marching orders from the CDC who stated, we are the experts, we know how to handle this, trust us. Whenever somebody says, trust me, trust me, trust me. By the time they said it the third time, I put my earplugs in and don't even listen to what they're saying because I know they don't know what they're talking about.

All right, my friend. Well, I'm glad you're back. I'm glad that you are safe. I'm glad your wife's okay. and thank you so much for coming in. I think this is going to be an ongoing issue, and I think the things that you've said today are going to be helpful to a lot of people.

So thank you so much. I appreciate that. Dr. Arnold Hoplin, general practice in East Tennessee, and going to be pretty much on a national, what's the word I'm looking for, scale. Platform or speaking for it. Thank you pretty soon.

You've got a book coming out as well. Yes. The intent of the book initially was I hoped I'd get out fast enough so it could be effect policy. Events are unfolding so rapidly by the time the book is published. It's going to be historical novel, not directly relevant. But it'll be interesting to see what happened. And as we evaluate what went wrong, we can maybe do some proactive planning. next time it may be a virus that is not only infectious but also highly lethal. Should that happen, it's a potential of a virus that is as infectious as this one and lethal could literally take out a third of the world's population in a period of three, four, five months.

And there's no time in three, four, five months to do double-blind studies about what we're going to do about it. You're going to have to do things rapidly. Well, maybe this is an opportunity for us to learn. There's still going to be tragedy with this virus. There will be. But maybe this is an opportunity for us to learn how to have a more rapid response to these things, so the future tragedy will be mitigated someone. You know, on another hopeful note, we've had a rather rank, a lot of rancor in our political discourse.

And there's nothing that can turn enemies into friends as much as having. having a common enemy. And if we can bind together to defeat this microscopic enemy, it might promote more positive relationships between people who have different worldviews and have a hard time accepting folk who don't see eye to eye to them on policies and procedures. Well, it's an equal opportunity infector. It doesn't look at which side of the aisle you're on. Well, I'll tell you what, I've enjoyed this conversation a great deal.

Yeah, thank you. And I hope that people are reassured by the fact that most people don't get very sick. And that is a very reassuring feature. It's very reassuring to me, given that I'm in the higher risk group at my age. You've got a few on me. No, I'm not actually in a high risk group, though, because, see, I'm only 21. I've had 54 years experience of being 21. His hair just turned white from the being on the diamond princess.

That's just bleached from the sun. I lay out in the sunlight. Well, thanks to everyone at Sirius XM, whose steadfast support of this show has sustained us over the years, particularly Lewis Johnson, Jim McClure, Sam Roberts, James Norton, Travis Teft, Troy Hinson, Paul O'Charski, and Roland Campos. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules and podcasts and other crap

and listen to our podcast at riotcast.com or wherever podcast. are found. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. And I'm also going to add, wash your hands. And we'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine.