What A Day - V Is For Vaccine with Dr. Anthony Fauci

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

President Biden announced yesterday that the US will have enough doses to vaccinate all Americans by the end of July. We talk to Dr. Anthony Fauci about the vaccines on the way, what they’ll mean as we start to face new variants, and mask guidance in the meantime.And in headlines: House managers wrapped up their final arguments in Trump’s second impeachment trial, queer and trans Americans will be protected under the Fair Housing Act, and Jeep pulls Bruce Springsteen’s ad after reports of his November DUI.Show Links:Youtube.com/crookedmediaInstagram.com/whatadayFor a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

it's friday february 12th i'm akilah hughes and i'm gideon raznik and this is what a day where we are calling on cupid to control himself this year and just leave everyone alone yeah you're a baby just like go be a baby on a cloud you don't have to shoot at people yeah look we're not your parents we're not gonna tell you what to do, but we're going to make suggestions like this from time to time. Okay. Get it together. Okay. Quick little heads up before we get started. We are taking off on Monday for President's Day. We are going to be back in your feeds on Tuesday. Do not worry. But now onto today's show. It is a good one. We are talking to none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci about vaccines and variants, then some headlines. But first,

the latest. We're now on track to have enough supply for 300 million Americans by the end of July. It may not sound like the urgent progress we need, but let's be clear. When I took office just three weeks ago, this country did not have a plan. Yeah, he's not wrong, but hopefully we do get those vaccines and I can actually have a birthday party this year. But that was a messed up President Biden speaking yesterday at the National Institutes of Health, where he announced that the government has now purchased another 200 million doses of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. He said that the expectation is that those doses will be delivered by the end of July, at which point the United States would have enough to vaccinate every single eligible American. We did it.

As you heard a little bit in the clip there, Biden also spoke about the, quote, mess he had inherited from the previous administration. And the announcement came on the same day that Los Angeles said it would have to temporarily shut down several of its mass vaccination sites due to shortages. Yeah, so bumps in the road for now, but good news ahead. And while Biden was at the NIH, he also met with some of the leading scientists working on the front lines, which included Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is now Biden's chief medical advisor for COVID-19, and of course, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,

and someone we fondly refer to as Tony, the voice in the past. Earlier in the day, Dr. Fauci said that most of the general public could become eligible for vaccines as soon as April. And from there, it's going to take months to administer them. And then also earlier in the day, we got a chance to speak to him about the vaccines that are on the way, what they'll mean as we start to face new variants and mask guidance in the meantime. Here's that conversation. Dr. Fauci, thank you so much for being here. We are so excited to talk to you. My pleasure. Good to be with you.

Thank you so much. So I want to start with some questions about vaccines. It's obviously great news that we have them and that they have shown such high levels of effectiveness. But when do you think we'll know definitively whether the vaccines reduce or fully eliminate transmission? Well, that probably is going to take at least another few months and perhaps longer because the primary endpoints for both the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccine, and essentially for virtually all the other vaccines, is whether it prevents symptomatic disease. In other words, whether you get symptoms from it. And as you know, that the efficacy of that is really quite striking. It's about 94 to 95%. What you don't know, and you can't tell on first blush, is whether or not a person gets infected,

but because they're vaccinated, they get no symptoms, but they still have some level of virus in their nasopharynx. So there are two ways to definitively figure out whether or not that person can transmit. The first one is the easier one, and it isn't as definitive. And that is you go back and you take a look at people who are infected with no symptoms but have been vaccinated, and you compare them to people who are infected with no symptoms who have not been vaccinated. And if the people who are vaccinated have a remarkably lower level of virus in their nasopharynx, you can extrapolate and make a reasonable assumption that you've diminished the likelihood that they're going to

transmit. That's the indirect way. The direct way is to do that same thing, but to do it in cohort studies, such as in college dormitories, where there's a transmission from one to the other, you can sequence the virus and show that the transmissions that occurred came from the people who were not vaccinated versus from the people who were vaccinated. And that's the most definitive way to show that. So in a couple of months, we likely will know indirectly, but probably six months or so it'll take to know it definitely. Yeah, for sure. Well, because of variants, there's been a lot of talk about these vaccine booster shots. I'm not complaining. I will take as many shots as I need to take. But do you think vaccines are going to end up being a yearly thing

like the flu shot? Is that the new normal that we're kind of shooting for? Well, that's conceivable. We don't know that yet. I would not be surprised if for a period of time, we would have to give an occasional booster to get, one, a more complete protection in the global community, and number two, to get to the point where the level is so low that you don't really have much transmission, sort of what we did with smallpox, with polio, and with measles. But one of the things that I think leans towards the need to continue to have to vaccinate people is that if you don't get the global level of infection down, there will always be a threat of variants arising wherever, Africa, Asia, South America. And then even though you think you're protected in this country by importation of virus, someone comes into the country with a variant

that is not protected by the vaccine, then you got a problem. That would lead to what you're alluding to is the possibility it might sort of like be what we have to do with influenza. I hope that's not the case. And I believe that we can avoid it if we do a good job of getting the whole world vaccinated with effective vaccines. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there is that obvious importance to, you know, making sure it's not just the United States

or nations that have access to it. And we hear a lot about the variants that were first discovered in the UK, South Africa, and then to a lesser extent, Brazil. Are there any other variants that you're particularly concerned about? And how much are we in the dark about all of this right now? Well, I always take seriously any variant that has a functional component to it. You know, most of the mutations that occur, probably the overwhelming majority of mutations, really don't have any functional relevance. They don't impact whether a virus is more or less contagious, whether it's more or less virulent, whether you escape the protection of antibodies. But every once in a while, you do get a mutational,

a constellation of mutations. And it's usually not just one single mutation. I mean, we talk about mutants, but there are probably five, six, or seven or more mutant mutations that lead to that new lineage. The fact is that that particular approach of changes is going to elude protection intermittently. It's not going to be, as long as the virus replicates, it's going to mutate. So, you know, there's an interesting dictum in virology. The best way to prevent mutation is to stop replication. And when you're dealing with a transmissible virus, the best way to stop replication is to vaccinate as many people as you possibly can so that you don't give the virus the opportunity to mutate. And on the point of

using the vaccines against the variants, should we be surging vaccines to areas of the country with larger outbreaks or areas with more of the newer variants right now? Well, you know, what's gonna happen, I think this was part of your previous question about a booster type. If it looks like it's clear enough that there's enough penetrance of a virus

that isn't fully protected by the vaccine, such as the South African isolate. I think that the UK isolate, we're in pretty good shape when it comes to that. But if we get a dominant prevalence of the South African, it is conceivable that we may need, and we're already preparing for that, we want to stay a step ahead of the game, is to make a booster that expresses the spike protein of the new variant as opposed to the standard spike protein. So that may be six months or a year down the pike, you get people who are vaccinated, but you give them a boost, which is a boost expressing the variant that you're worried

about. I think that's conceivable. We haven't done it yet, but we're preparing for the eventuality of having to do that. Yeah. I mean, personally, I would like for this to not ever happen again. I don't know about you. So what do we actually need to put in place so it doesn't? Like, is it just an ongoing pandemic task force? Is it just rejoining the World Health Organization? Like, what steps do

you actually want to see taken? Well, all of those things that you mentioned are important. I mean, obviously, we want to be part of the global community. We want to have global surveillance. You know, there were attempts, partially successful some time ago, to get a global network, which is under the category of the global health security network, where you get communications between countries so that when you see a new emerging pathogen arrive, immediately you identify it, you communicate with the rest of the world, and you begin to develop as quickly as possible vaccines and therapeutics against it. You cannot prevent the emergence of a new

infection. That usually, almost always, not always, but almost always, is part of what we call the animal-human interface, where we encroach upon the environment, as we did with HIVAs and chimpanzees, as we did with wet markets having live animals. And that's how things happened in China. Ebola, when you have people going into bat caves and things like that. So if we can essentially pay more attention to not encroaching inappropriately on that animal-human interface, at the same time as we develop universal approaches, like a universal vaccine against a certain prototype or a universal antiviral against a certain prototype, we can respond much better.

Like I said, we're not going to prevent the emergence, but we want to prevent the emergence from becoming a pandemic. And that's where we can do something. I promise to leave the bats alone. where we can do something. Right. I promise to leave the bats alone. I won't do this. I'm good. Same here.

You have our pledge. I wanted to ask also one more quickly about the variants of concern here that are functionally more contagious. Most of them, to our knowledge, sprung up in the last few months or around a year into the pandemic. What does that tell you about the pace of mutations within this virus? And is it good news that it took around a year into the pandemic. What does that tell you about the pace of mutations within this virus? And is it good news that it took about a year for these to actually become

to a level where they were quite concerning? I'm not surprised it took that long because what probably happened, at least in South Africa, is that the standard wild-type virus infected people who were immunosuppressed, because there's a lot of HIV-infected people in South Africa, a substantial double-digit percentage of the population. And what happens is that the virus is not readily cleared from people who are profoundly immunosuppressed. And what happens is that if you don't clear the virus right away, the virus starts to do things to prevent itself from being cleared. And it's a selective pressure on the immune system, of the immune system, to get the virus to mutate.

That almost certainly happened to some degree in South Africa. So that's what we suspect went on in South Africa. And shifting gears quickly to some new guidance from the CDC. Recently, they were talking about the fit of a surgical mask, and they were even suggesting double masking. If it was difficult to get people to put on one mask, how do you suggest here conveying this to the public, getting people to wear two if they need to? Well, you know,

if you look carefully at the CDC's recommendation, they're saying very definitively everybody should wear a mask. One mask is important. However, and there's a however, if you want to get a better fit and dot every I and cross every T and prevent the virus from sneaking in, you might consider.

You notice they don't make it an absolute recommendation. Right. They urge you to consider double masking. So if this is a regular mask, the standard type, what happens is that under here, it's open and over here it might be. So what they say to do is to take a regular cloth mask. Not that the cloth mask is better than this mask, but if you put it on and go like that, you get a much better fit. So there aren't these open spaces here. So right now you have a double mask, but really what it's doing is that it's giving you a better seal. And that really is the essence

of their recent recommendations. Very tight. Well, we are coming up on Valentine's Day. So do you have any public health or relationship advice that you'd like to give to our listeners? You know, we like to ask you about something that you don't have to talk about all the time. So any advice would be great. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to come home with some candy or flowers and you want to give a big hug and a kiss to somebody, make sure it's somebody that's either part of your household or someone that you know very, very well is being very careful about not getting infected.

I mean, I think that even though there are situations where you'd like to gather, you know, we've just been through that with Thanksgiving, with Christmas and the New Year's, but we still are in a danger zone and we still need to maintain distance, wear a mask, avoid congregate settings, hopefully as the number of new infections go down. And if you look at the chart, it's really dramatically going down. I mean, just a month or so ago, we were getting 300,000 to 400,000 new infections a day. Yesterday was, I think, the first day in quite a long time that it was less than 100,000 per day. So we're going in the right direction. Now's not

the time to pull back. Now's the time to maintain a real intensity of public health adherence to public health measures. Yeah, that's right. Well, Dr. Fauci, thank you so much for taking all of our questions. We really appreciate it. We're big fans over here at WOD, so thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It was wonderful. I'm just, I'm still so starstruck. Well, we also have a video of the interview where you can see the big moment when Dr. Fauci met my new little puppy named Fauci. I know you've all been asking me about it on Twitter. So yes, it happened. Go to youtube.com slash crooked media to check it out. It's Friday WOD Squad and for

today's temp check, we're talking about ways to get the public excited about staying healthy. Mascots have been used around the world this past year to spread awareness about coronavirus and encourage people to get vaccinated. A recent Washington Post article rounded up some of the best ones. There's Coron, a pink cat with a face mask who's been spotted in Japan. COVID-kun, a puffy red COVID particle with sharp teeth from Thailand. And Joseph Droplet from Brazil. A white Casper looking guy who was first created to promote the polio vaccine. So I guess he's getting some work now.

Kitty, my question for you. What's your pitch for a pro vaccine anti-COVID mascot for the US? One word. It's gritty. Gritty. Yes, gritty. Gritty represents the true American energy. Chaotic.

It's a mess. He looks a little bit like the spike protein, just because, you know, all the orange hair is kind of flying in every direction. Oh, for sure. You get a Gritty masked up across the country, vaccinations are, they're going through the roof. I mean, I don't think you're wrong, but Gritty just strikes me as so reckless, you know, like not that Gritty wouldn't wear a mask. I believe that Gritty is responsible. I just think

that, you know, Gritty might be a little too close to people and stuff. He's just, he's a lot. Yeah. I think that we would have to, we'd have to have a sit down with Gritty and, you know, tell him the rules. But I think that his recklessness speaks to our recklessness as a nation. That's fair. And then there would be some sort of communal understanding there. Like, oh, even he's wearing the mask. Even he's encouraging the vaccinations

and stuff. I think that we get everybody on the same page pretty quickly. That's just like the first not super terrible thing that i think could represent the united states so why not you know i i'm you won me over if this was shark tank i would be like all right the sharks are in yeah we got a million dollars to get gritty masked up it's worth it i appreciate your early investment in this plan um and i won't forget it but same question for you

akilah who are you thinking here okay so i going to come up with my own mascot. But, you know, just after seeing your wonderful display and really believing in Riddhi's power, you know, I think that we could go with some property that isn't original. How about Osmosis Jones? Where has he been since that flu he had to fight? It been a long time he was our original public health warrior actually you know totally and i think like sorry go ahead no there's we learned a lot about you know the nasty inner workings of the human body via osmosis jones so he has a lot of information to a part totally and i think you know he's a really great mascot for kids when i was in high school when my biology teacher would be like super tired and didn't want to teach, he'd just be like, let's watch Osmosis Jones again.

And we were always like, yes, go on. So I think that it's something we can all get behind. We all have good memories of that movie. Why not? Yeah, there's the nostalgia factor. Who played Osmosis Jones? Was it Chris Rock? Am I wrong about this?

That's what i thought i'm gonna google it you know just just for posterity's sake yes who played osmosis jones a real thing that people will see in my googles it was chris rock there you go yeah also all-star cast bill murray chris rock lawrence fishburne brandy william shatner, Ron Howard, Kid Rock. Come on. Also chaotic, also very American. I think this is great. I think either or both of these options. Maybe there's like an in-person component with Gritty.

Maybe there's like a video you watch with Osmosis Jones. Totally. The options are limitless. You know, I think we've solved it. And just like that, we have checked our tips. They're very cool, like Osmosis Jones and Gritty. Stay safe and we'll be back after some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines.

House managers wrapped up their final arguments yesterday in Trump's second impeachment trial, arguing that the former president could be a threat in the future if he isn't convicted and barred from running for federal office. Democrats continue to share evidence that rioters were inspired by Trump when they stormed the Capitol on January 6th. New videos revealed rioters shouting, quote, fight for Trump during the attack. And in one video, a rioter was filmed telling an officer, quote, we're listening to Trump, your boss. Yikes. On top of all of that, there were court documents and interviews

where rioters defended their actions by citing Trump's directives. Managers also shared words from former White House officials who resigned after the event and preemptively shot down Trump's team's defense that his remarks are protected under the First Amendment. Trump's team is set to present their case today, and reportedly their portion could be pretty quick. Yeah, they're probably going to be like, uh, ignore everything you just saw, please. Well, for the first time ever, queer and trans Americans will be protected under the Fair Housing Act. Awesome. Yesterday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it'll be enforcing the FHA to ban discrimination against LGBTQ individuals. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that laws against discrimination on the basis of sex should extend to discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.

Then President Biden signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to implement that ruling. HUD is the first federal agency to act on this order. Queer and trans Americans experience disproportionate discrimination when trying to find housing. One study in 2017 found that trans and gender nonconforming people were less likely to be offered financial incentives to rent and more likely to be quoted a higher rental price than cis renters. Under the new doctrine, LGBTQ Americans will be able to file complaints with HUD if they've been discriminated against. Good. The fight for national unity suffered a major setback yesterday

after Bruce Springsteen's DUI led Jeep to pull their commercial where he told everyone to stop fighting and be more like a church in the middle of Kansas. For some context here, the Super Bowl ad featured Springsteen driving a Jeep towards a small Midwestern church while extolling the virtue of the middle, the place between, I guess, Americans who want people to be treated with dignity and Americans who think the walls of the Capitol should be made out of paper so it's easier to do fascism in

there. That's what it is. The ad was always bad, but it became a liability on Wednesday when the news broke that Springsteen was arrested for drunk driving in New Jersey last November. That was enough for Jeep to pull the commercial off of YouTube. Yesterday more details about the DUI charge emerged. The arresting officer's report says Springsteen took a Patron shot from a bottle before getting on his motorcycle and that during the arrest, he was visibly swaying back and forth. But then a different source

familiar with the case said Springsteen's blood alcohol content was 0.02, which is one quarter of the legal limit. We will have to wait and see how this all shakes out. And we trust that the hardworking journalists of New Jersey won't let their personal feelings about the boss get in the way of reporting the truth. Yeah, come on, guys. Keep it together. Turns out Trump wasn't just breathing hard for effect in the videos from last October. And his case of COVID-19 was actually more serious than he led the American people to believe. Guys, it's legal to say this now that he's retired. The 45th president is a liar. So according to new reports from the New York Times, officials thought Trump would have to be put on a ventilator and he was shown to have lung infiltrates, which are associated with acute cases of COVID. Trump's blood oxygen level also

reportedly dipped into the 80s, something that his physician, Dr. Sean Conley, refused to admit at the time. Anyway, Trump probably will want to dispute this story, and he has every right to. We invite him to make his voice heard on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Squarespace, Poshmark, Epson Printer, Customer Support Hub, or by leaning out the window and yelling, whatever he wants. Yeah, I've been refreshing Epson Printer, Customer Support Hub for weeks, and I have not gotten an answer from the former president. It's fine. Well, we'll figure it out soon. And those are the headlines.

One last thing before we go. There's a new episode of Rubicon, the first hundred days of the Biden presidency, out today. In it, Crooked editor-in-chief Brian Boitler speaks to Ruth Bingeot about accountability, how to get true justice for the Trump era, and what needs to be done to stop any future authoritarian wannabes. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, connect with us on Epson, Printer, Customer Support Hub. Please tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just restraining orders against Cupid like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes.

I'm Gideon Resnick. And have a happy Valentine's Day. Yeah, I hope that you get all the chocolate. And if somebody else doesn't give it to you, I hope you get it for yourself. I hope a Cupid delivers Moderna to your door. What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Sonia Tan is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our executive producers are Katie Long, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka. you