Episode 80- What we should know about the Covid Vaccine, with Dr. James R. Baker, Jr., M.D.

Rich talks with Dr. James R. Baker, Jr.,  M.D.,  Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine at The University of Michigan, and Director of Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center about the development, efficacy and safety of the various new Covid-19 vaccines, and the implications of societal acceptance.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to Richard healthy's common bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally underserved children.

Speaker 2 0:23

Welcome to the common bridge. There's nothing more common today around the world than the COVID 19 virus. And today we have with us, a very distinguished gentlemen who understands viruses and more importantly, the treatment and the vaccines, the author of the very popular blog pandemic pondering. And we've put a link@richardhealthy.com. Welcome from Ann Arbor, Michigan Dr. Jim Baker, Dr. Baker. Welcome to the common bridge. It's a pleasure to be with you this morning. Rich, let me tell my audience just a little bit about your background and there will be a full biography. I Richard, healthy.com. Dr. Baker is the founding director of the Mary H wiser food allergy center and the Ruth Dow Doane professor at Michigan medicine. His academic accomplishments are varied and significant for over 20 years. Dr. Baker was the chief of the division of allergy and clinical immunology at the university of Michigan. Dr. Baker's research is in the area of immunology and host defense evolving into nanomaterials and their applications in therapeutics. Dr. Baker has published over 300 peer reviewed publications and listened to this. He's the inventor of more than 50 patents. He served on the boards of 17 companies and scientific organizations. He is a true scientist. He has served as a member of the council of advisors for the office of science and technology policy in both the Bush and Obama white houses. He's testified before the Congress on multiple occasions. His accolades include being the distinguished university innovator, and also the distinguished alumnus from the Loyola university stretch school of medicine in the commercial world. He has founded four companies and he has served as senior vice president and global head of the vaccine franchise at Merck. And for the past five years, he's the CEO and chief medical officer of the food allergy and education, the national food allergy foundation. His expertise is what everyone in America needs to hear today and around the world, the entire arc of therapeutic development from the research bench to commercial approval, Dr. Baker, we're so pleased that you could be with us today. And I have to imagine that your world is more than busy.

Speaker 3 3:10

Uh, these are wonderful times in many ways, you know, we've, we've had a very difficult nine months, but I can tell you that, uh, this is the beginning of the end

Speaker 2 3:22

Cheered by this. And, you know, beginning there, I watched a Dateline program this past week, the chief executives of Madonna and Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson were the guests. And the host posed the question is this medicines and pharmacologies finest.

Speaker 3 3:44

You know, I think, I think you can argue that it is, um, we took a process that normally would require 10 years and compressed it in the nine months in used every modern tool of biotechnology to accomplish it. Uh, we were able to, within weeks of finding the pandemic and finding the virus, identifying its entire genetic sequence, and from that identifying the proteins, that would be important for a vaccine. And we actually use the actual sequence of those proteins is the basis of the vaccine. So we literally cut five or 10 years of preclinical development down to two or three weeks.

Speaker 2 4:31

I believe that is just a phenomenal accomplishment and something that everyone in the country needs to be proud of. Dr. Baker, most of our listeners are not clinically savvy. Is there a lay definition of a vaccine?

Speaker 3 4:50

I think the best definition of a vaccine is that it's a material that induces an immune response to a specific thing. It's not just something that activates your entire immune system against everything it's very specific. So people have called vaccines and magic bullet in some ways they are, but they're a bullet that induces your body to respond to it immediately and specifically to prevent a single type of infection. Part of the reason I went into immunology was I was fascinated that the immune system is the only part of your body that you can really educate. You might be able to build up your muscles, but you can't really change their structure. Whereas with the immune system, you can totally alter it to respond to something new, something that hasn't been seen before. And then I thought was a remarkable capability and that

Speaker 2 5:51

Study and that practice and immunology has given us the polio vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, the whooping cough vaccine, and things that were deadly at one time that have been eradicated. Is, am I correct about that?

Speaker 3 6:07

Absolutely. I think quite honestly, everyone you can talk to in the medical field would say that they exceeds have had the greatest impact on public health, of any type of innovation in medicine. They not only prevent illness, but they prevent the long-term security of that illness as well. So they've really changed the life expectancy of people more than anything. We don't expect children to die anymore. You know, we truly believe that every child should have a long and fruitful life, two generations ago that wasn't like that people had more children because they knew that most of them wouldn't survive until adulthood. So this is the true change, not only in our society, but our expectations for people

Speaker 2 6:59

And we're living in this age of miracles. And perhaps we're on the threshold of another one. When I think about medication and vaccines, I think about two things effectiveness isn't going to work and safety. Is it going to do any harm? How does the research and testing process work to measure effectiveness and safety?

Speaker 3 7:26

Well, if it's a very difficult thing with vaccines, because you have to remember, you're giving a vaccine to someone who's totally healthy, not someone that has a bad illness. So what you're doing here is trying to prevent something, but you can't make a totally healthy person ill in the process. So if they act safety is usually the number one thing we worry about, and the way you test vaccines is very unique. You can't just give someone an infectious disease to see if the vaccine is safe. What you have to do is give the vaccine to thousands of people and then do a control group that doesn't get the vaccine and look at the rates of infection between those two groups. So in fact, you know, they said with, uh, COVID-19, they have a vaccine had to be at least 50% effective. Well, what does that mean? That means the rate of infection in the vaccinated group is 50% or half of what it is in the control group. So in fact, these are fairly high standards. Um, you can achieve that, but you have to do it without causing any illness. So in fact, these trials are usually very big for two reasons. Number one, you need a lot of people to be exposed to an infection, to make sure you can reduce rate of infection, but more importantly, you need thousands of people to make sure that what you're doing is safe and not going to cause any harm to people.

Speaker 2 9:05

Do the people in the test get exposed to the virus then to see if they contracted or are you measuring their auto immune responses?

Speaker 3 9:17

What you aren't measuring you measure immune responses, not autoimmune responses, but immune responses specifically to the material that you're injecting. But there's a moral issue here. You couldn't purposely expose people that diseases like polio or HIV to see if a vaccine works. It's just not morally appropriate. So what they do is take people in populations where, you know, they're going to be naturally exposed with disease and you give them the vaccine and then you measure whether that they become ill. And so it's really suppressing the natural exposure, suppressing the natural rate of infection as compared to, you know, trying to induce an infection and prevent that.

Speaker 2 10:10

How do these COVID 19 vaccines differ from flu vaccine?

Speaker 3 10:17

So it's a very interesting, uh, thing. Um, our flu vaccine is your traditional old style vaccine. If I could put it that way, we grow up the flu virus that's in literally circulating that year. And there's some sort of guests involved in that. Cause we have to grow this up well before the virus hits people in the middle of winter to make the vaccine. So what they do is a guess on which, uh, influenza virus is going to be there. They then put it into either cells to grow it or into eggs to grow it. They grow up the virus literally by having you infect the egg or the cell, and then they isolate the virus. So they're making the virus that people are, are getting infected too. And then they mix it with detergent or alcohol to inactivate it. So what you're getting with the flu vaccine is a whole flu virus with a mix of some other proteins from either the solid culture or the egg, and it's relatively purified, but it's a, gemisch, you know, it's a big mix of things, the government, um, particularly, uh BARDA and now operation warp speed decided that that was too much of a threshold to try and accomplish in terms of manufacturing. Uh, you know, you probably couldn't get up enough eggs to grow coronavirus if you needed to make a vaccine for billions of people. So what they proposed was that we would use the new tools of biotechnology. So in fact, once they had the gene sequence, they did two things. They either took their gene sequence and literally injected the RNA or the genetic material that codes for their protein directly into people. And that RNA, when it gets into people actually makes the viral protein itself. So this is incredibly pure. All you have is a gene sequence. That's injected, you make the protein yourself, and then you make an immune response to it. And it's only the single viral protein. Some people actually took that gene sequence. They put it in another virus that helper virus that they already get grown up and they injected that virus. And then the virus makes the protein. So that's a much more complicated process, but it's easier than trying to isolate and bake. Uh, you know, the COVID 19 virus SARS cov two because they have, that's difficult to grow and that's dangerous. So in fact, the whole idea here is that we give your body, the gene from the virus, it makes that single protein, and then you respond to that protein. So this is much cleaner and much more direct than the flu virus we usually make.

Speaker 2 13:23

What do we know about the clinical trials in terms of safety and effectiveness? I know there were results published and you know, we've all seen the headlines and they all seem real positive. Is there a layer behind the headline? Did it come out the way you expected it as an expert in the field, or did it exceed your expectations or perhaps not meet your expectations?

Speaker 3 13:47

Um, quite honestly, when they first announced us, I was a bit skeptical because we've never made human vaccines this way. You know, this was a leap of faith that we could take all these molecular techniques and put them together and get a vaccine. Not only that was safe. I thought that they'd probably be safe because they're so pure, but I didn't think they'd be effective. And in fact, it's remarkable. These are probably some of the most effective vaccines that have ever been created and taking a step back from that. It makes sense because we're giving people only the specific protein, they need to make an immune response to protect themselves. You know, we know what that protein is. We know that protein is important to the virus because it's the protein that allows the virus to stick on the, your cells and infect them. And if you make an immune response to that protein, you basically block the viral infection entirely. So it does sense, but going into this, we'd never done it before. It was a totally new approach. And, you know, even though I knew it would be much more purified than any vaccine we'd done before and much more rapid than development, I wasn't sure it worked, but in fact, just the opposite happened.

Speaker 2 15:11

And my understanding as a person, without a clinical background is that the antigens are very key. And we've heard about natural antigens from people that get infected with COVID versus maybe a boosted supply of antigens. If I'm defining that correctly from the vaccine and that one may be stronger or last longer, what can we tell the listeners of the common bridge about the antigens that fight this virus?

Speaker 3 15:46

So I think the first thing we want to talk about is, uh, what happens in the natural infection and normally with any type of infection, you know, the virus, if it is a virus gets into your body, it actually turns yourselves into viral thecal factories in makes the virus in your own cells. And then your immune system recognizes that something's wrong. It actually innately recognizes things that are unique to the virus that are different from you. And in this case, you know, the Corona virus is a single strand of RNA. And we actually have receptors in our body that recognize that as being different from our own RNA, it activates the immune system and you make a specific immune response to the virus. Now, one of the things that people have been arguing about, I think in appropriately is whether or not immunity to this viral infection keeps you from being reinfected. And then they act, you know, when we've looked at people, who've had this infection and we're doing a study about this, that at Michigan medicine, um, almost everyone who's infected, develops immunity, they develop antibodies. And these antibodies in the immune response are enough to stop the infection. Now people have argued that they go away over a short period of time. A lot of them that are technical problems with how they're assessing immunity in everyone we've seen, who have recovered successfully from this infection. They have protective immunity and they have protective immunity for as far out as we've checked so far. And that's about six months as you might imagine, the pandemics only been with us for that period of time. So I think the important thing to remember is that with the natural infection you do get, and that immunity appears to protect you from re-infection. There have only been two cases in the literature where they've hypothesized reinfection and both of them were technically flawed. So out of the billions of people that have been infected with this virus, we all to suggest even two people have reinfection shows that basically the immune system is very effective in preventing this. So that's the first hurdle we need to get over. If the natural infection doesn't cause protective immunity, we couldn't really expect that a vaccine once we knew that going to the vaccine was, was I think a very direct route. And what we saw was that even without giving some of the things that we normally have to do to activate the immune system, sometimes we give bacteria or other things to try and Jack up the immune system, but just by giving the RNA to these viruses, we're able to get a totally protective immune response. And, you know, the data is remarkable within 10 to 14 days of getting the first shot of these vaccines infection stuff. It's just the most remarkable curve I've ever seen because essentially the people in the control group just kept on getting infected. You know, they're in areas where the pandemic is basically everywhere, but the people who got the vaccine, even just the first dose stopped getting infected. Now, the second dose is really important because it's the one that sort of wax in the immune memory long-term. But you know, to look at this curve to see basically in the, the infection slop entirely in the vaccinated group is truly a remarkable thing.

Speaker 2 19:46

Does that mean if a person I'm going to ask two questions, actually, if a person has been infected and has produced their own antigens and we at this point, think they last at least six months because we can't start it any further. Do they need to get the vaccine? And then what do we know about the long haulers? The people that are symptomatic for months and months? I know there was some debate about whether that was a re-infection or just an effect of the disease itself.

Speaker 3 20:21

Um, first off, I think, I think you asked a very good question. Do people who have had the infection and have documented antibody to the virus, much like you get what the vaccine really need the vaccine. And we don't have an answer for that quite yet. I think for the most part, especially in the short term, they probably have protection and don't urgently need the vaccine. And I think we'll want to study the duration of immunity in those people. And if people, I would not deny the vaccine to anyone in that situation, but I'd want to watch them for side effects to see if the preexisting immunity is more problematic with the vaccine. But I think right now we don't have enough information to know that it may be there at some point in the future. We'll want to give these people one dose of the vaccine. That's a booster to make sure they have long-term immunity, but those are things that we don't really know yet. But it's a very important question. You know, it's interesting that they ask secretary of interior, ATSR on TV, this question the other night, and he didn't have an answer either. So we're waiting from the FDA and my guess is we're going to have to do a study going out long-term and people who already have immunity to see whether or not the vaccine is necessary or safe. The long haulers are a different group entirely. I think it's fairly conclusive that this is not because of an ongoing infection. When you look at these people, they're no longer shedding virus, you know, you can look for viral RNA in there and their heirs or their respiratory tract. You don't see it. There's no evidence that the virus is hunkered down and another part of the body. Um, so in fact, we don't think it's a chronic viral infection. Um, number one, the long haulers, aren't all the same. Some people have different symptoms, some have just fatigue, others have, uh, muscle aches. Some of them have memory or cognitive problems. And I think, I think what we've seen is after any type of severe trauma to the body, you see symptoms like this. I mean, you know, I think we've seen this with very bad flu infections. We've seen this with other types of bacterial infections or sepsis suddenly there's probably an overall, uh, toll that's taken on the body's physiology from having a severe infection like this and the debilitation that costs you can imagine if somebody has been lying in bed for weeks, that it will take a long time for them to recover their function, their muscle strength, all of those issues. The other thing that I think everyone is, is, uh, concerned about. Um, you know, I think, I think a lot of these people have some degree of post-traumatic stress. I mean, when you have an infection like this, that literally is a near death experience, it undermines your whole confidence in yourself and your wellbeing. So I think in those folks, you know, you also have to understand that there's a psychological, that needs to be treated as well. There may be issues about auto immunity that the infection causes, if it activates your immune system so much, you know, and certainly more than we'd expected to be activated with the vaccine and you get this incredible illness. It may cause inflammation that causes your organs to despond. You know, we've seen this with other types of illnesses, but, you know, we don't really know yet. The one thing I can tell you is that the long haulers do now have a chronic viral infection. And in fact, they do clear the infection, but possibly through part of their process, they also do things that cause their own body and organ systems that this font

Speaker 2 24:33

That makes a lot of sense. We had a Hunter Howard who was possibly patient zero on our show back some months ago. And it was fascinating to listen to him, talk about the rolling symptoms that he and other early patients experienced, including Don right down to the COVID toes. And I'm cheered to hear that research is looking into that long-term effect and a body blow from anything traumatic yet could affect you. Anybody that's had an illness or an injury knows that. So Dr. Baker, couple of questions on the effectiveness. If I get a vaccine and it works for me and I'm one of the 95% that it works for, well, I experienced no symptoms. And also if it means that the symptoms are blocked for me, does that mean I'm no longer a spreader? And I asked the question because on the state line program, they asked Dr. Fowchee that after the vaccination will we still need to wear mask. And he said, we would, because we could be experiencing some manner of infection that would make us dangerous to other people. So with the vaccination working, does that eliminate symptoms to the vaccinated person? And does it protect the people around that vaccinated person or to what extent does it protect them?

Speaker 3 26:00

I think part of this is what we don't yet know, and I don't think you can be definitive. So I think Dr. Fowchee whom I know very well is being very cautious here. The study so far have looked to see whether or not people develop symptomatic disease and the vaccines are remarkably effective at that. Not only does it prevent symptomatic disease in 95% of people, but it prevents severe disease disease that would put you in the hospital, basically a hundred percent. So in fact, there tells me that this immune response is really tamping down the virus. It doesn't allow the virus to go wild and replicate in people and cause bad illness. Now, does that mean that it totally sterilizes you? So you don't have any live virus in your body if you get exposed? Uh, or do you just clear it faster? Um, we don't know that, um, my guess is that there's probably some people that have low levels of virus in their respiratory tract. And obviously if they aren't having any symptoms, they won't know it. So I think the, the issue here is that while everyone's getting the vaccine, we need to be cautious because people who are totally naive might be susceptible. Even though this person has immunity, even though a person with the vaccine is making much, much less virus. If they have enough intimate contact that they can get, uh, an infectious, uh, amount of virus across to the other person, they may be able to infect them. But I think two things are going to be important to know number one, the amount of virus that anyone will make is likely to be much, much less. So the super spreader events that we've seen probably won't be happening, especially from people that have gotten the vaccine.

Speaker 2 28:09

Well, that's going to be a relief to the frat parties in Ann Arbor. That cause of some of these,

Speaker 3 28:17

We might want to tent, you know, temper those for other reasons as well. But yes, I think, I think, you know, if people act reasonably, this will be fine. The other thing which I think is really important, we have to reinforce everybody needs to get the vaccine because the only way you can be sure that you're going to be safe is that you get the vaccine, you can't rely on other people getting the vaccine to make you safe. And when everybody has gotten the vaccine, then no one's going to be at risk anymore. And we can get rid of the masks and we can get rid of all the social distancing recommendations entirely. They've said now that by the middle of the year, next year, you know, probably by may or June, there'll be enough vaccine to vaccinate everyone in the United States that children who are going back to school next fall, that we won't be trying to test them. We'll be vaccinating them to make sure they're safe, that our teachers will already have been vaccinated. So in fact, they have equation changes entirely when everybody gets a vaccine,

Speaker 2 29:31

Is there really a case for vaccinating children? I believe that to date, there's been 87 deaths under the age of 14 and all those are tragic. Isn't the body of research saying that children don't acquire this disease and don't transmit it though. And I'm not talking about young adults, I'm talking about 18. And

Speaker 3 29:55

First off I can tell you that the vaccine has been shown to be safe down to about 15 years of age. So in fact, there's no downside to giving the vaccine to a younger person and they're going to do trials in children to make sure it's totally safe. Before we start vaccinating children. The thing that you said was children don't get this disease. Well, they don't get a clinical disease in most cases. And, and you're correct that most of the children who have died at some type of other illness that, that predispose them to a great degree to COVID-19, but they do get infected and they serve as a source of infection and a Revent a reservoir of infection. So in fact, you know, it's interesting, you know, when, when polio was still around, very young children did not get paralytic polio. In fact, if you got polio at a very young age, you developed immunity to it and you didn't go on to develop paralytic polio. It was children in the 10 to 14, 15, 20 age group that developed paralytic polio, some fat, you know, the people that we vaccinate now, we vaccinate children at birth, uh, with the polio vaccine or right after birth with the polio vaccine. We do that to protect everyone in the population. And in fact, we protect those children too. We make sure they don't slip through the cracks. So in fact, vaccinating children, you know, is probably not the issue in terms of their own protection until they grow up. So if you allow children to grow up without the vaccine, it may be that if we have another wave of COVID 10 years from now, you know, these kids who were 10 now, we're at 20 they're at bigger risk. They get the infection at that time when they're either in school or starting work and that disrupts their lives. So in many cases, as long as the vaccine is safe and it looks like it's going to be totally safe, you're much better off getting it early in life, getting that protection baked in. So that later on, it's not a risk for you

Speaker 2 32:20

Believe in the science. And I believe in the compelling case for vaccination yet in the United States and in much of the Western countries, we have some very significant trust issues with our government, with our media sources, a lot of that justified, and we have cadre of people that are opposing being vaccinated. And you'll hear a lot of arguments. One would say, look, this is a virus that has a 99% plus survival rate. Most people only get mild symptoms. Why would I want to risk perhaps symptoms and reactions from a vaccine instead of just the risk of being infected. So what are you hearing about the opponents of vaccination and how do we go about educating that cadre and building that trust in the science?

Speaker 3 33:17

So I think this is a huge problem. I would agree with you, you know, I think certainly governments have made mistakes. I mean, you have to weigh that compared to the fact that they were able to produce these remarkable axions and nine months. But, you know, I think, I think, you know, certainly mistakes had been made on the other hand, I can say two things. Number one, the science and the technical review that's occurred at the FDA certainly is beyond reproach know, people have tried to get the FDA to shorten its review process. People try the FDA, tried to get the FDA to shorten the clinical trials. They would not do them. We have full scale clinical trials for all of these vaccines. And in fact, you know, the Pfizer vaccine, the first one out was 44,000 people. I mean, they have equivalent to any, any clinical trial for any vaccine that's ever been done. So there's been no short circuit in the development here. And in fact, as I said, these are the purest vaccines that we've ever produced. They're totally defined their main from chemicals, not from cells, not from animal hide, not from chicken eggs, they're synthesized from chemicals. So in fact, we know what's in these things better than anything we've seen and not surprisingly the side effect profile has been remarkably good as well, because we know exactly what's in the vaccine. We have a free society here, so people are free to do what they want. So in fact, you cannot force someone to get a vaccine. Um, you know, it's fascinating to me, I think a lot of the thrusts to get these vaccines will come from the private sector from companies that, that, you know, need to control their environment. They'll request that their employees get the vaccine. You know, it's interesting ticket charge is announced that, you know, you'll have to have a vaccine to go to one of their concerts because of the risk of spread. I think people need to understand that if these vaccines have been proven and 44,000 people that yeah, there there's no personal risk to them. Now, if they want to sign off on a disclosure that, that, you know, if they're willing to take the risk of being infected and by the way, maybe not put other people at risk by not allowing themselves to be hospitalized if they get sick or not working or not going out when they are ill and yeah, good luck to them. But in fact, if you're putting other people at risk, if you're putting healthcare workers at risk, if you're taking up a hospital bed and costing, you know, our healthcare system, millions of dollars to us, because you don't want to take a vaccine, I think that's a big issue. And I think people will have to take personal responsibility for that.

Speaker 2 36:31

I was going to ask about Asia that we're get a lot of information from Europe now about what their infection rates are. We've seen Sweden reverse course on their policies. We've seen the vaccine begin to be administered in the United Kingdom, but it's kind of quiet over there in Asia.

Speaker 3 36:51

Asia has taken a totally different tech. Asia not only has required physical quarantine. If you're found to be infected in a lot of Asian countries, you know, they come get you and lock in an all hotel room for two weeks. I mean, it's not a voluntary thing. And on top of it, they're giving people the vaccine, whether they want it or not, it's not a choice. So in fact, they've been more effective in controlling, you know, there are outbreaks because they use on the higher end hand in, in controlling them. It's interesting in Europe, we've had some incredible outbreaks in, in people talk about the outbreaks in the U S the per capita rate of infection is higher in most of Europe than it is in the U S on the other hand, I wrote the other day about Sweden going away from their current approach, which is basically letting young people get infected and protecting people at risk. Sweden had about 7,000 deaths so far, and almost all of them were in people over the age of 85. And part of that is because with Sweden's health care system, if you're over 85, you don't get, you know, a full court press like you do in the United States. So it was not surprising that people over 85 who had other health problems would die if you compare them to the us. For example, in the us Michigan, for example, is about the same population is we then we've hit 10,000 deaths so far. And in, in Michigan, we've had some of the most aggressive distancing mitigation approaches, and the governor has been very aggressive on that. So I think what this is telling us is that none of these approaches are perfect, and none of these approaches are really enough to change the equation. They may help keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed, but the only thing that's going to end this pandemic is the vaccine and making sure everybody gets vaccinated,

Speaker 2 39:04

And we are going to be having some guests on the program to talk about a post COVID world time would not allow us today to dive into all of the civil liberties issues relative to people's ability to freely move about attend events and so forth. Also the medical ethics by way of example, or person can choose to smoke or engage in dangerous activities. And yet our country and our healthcare system will take care of them. We do take care of people that get CLPD and emphysema and lung cancer, uh, despite what we know about smoking and, uh, HIV and shared needles and unprotected sex and so forth. And I think going down that path of not care for a person that doesn't get a vaccine is going to open up another set of medical ethics. And then of course touched on another one about centralized payment systems with no other alternative that care does get rationed and care gets rationed sometimes in a fairly brutal way. If a person reaches a certain age, then they, they just don't get care. But those are probably issues for another day, Dr. Baker, this has been incredibly informative. I so appreciate you being on the show. What did we not cover today that perhaps we should have discussed?

Speaker 3 40:29

Well, it's interesting, you know, I think going forward, there's going to be a fair amount of noise out there about the vaccines and about issues. You know, in fact, this morning I got up and great Britain is concerned that two people at reactions and that anyone who's had allergic reactions should be careful with these vaccines. We need to take all this with a grain of salt, 44,000 people in these trials got this vaccine without really any severe side effects. We had two people in, and I don't know what happened to them, but I'm an allergist. And I can tell you that allergic reactions to vaccines are not common. And they were concerned that two people at one site had a reaction. Well, the first thing I worry about is that they were given the vaccine appropriately. Once again, this was a government agency in great Britain that is, you know, push their own vaccine over the vaccine, even though it's only 60 to 70% effective. You know, I think we're going to have ongoing noise with all of this. And what we need to believe are the results in the trial. The vaccine was given appropriately, not only were there no severe adverse events, but everybody was protected, basically. So this is, this is the way to go, you know, think about long and hard. And, you know, if you have questions about the vaccine, ask your physician, but basically for almost everyone out there, get the vaccine. Well, I hear that message loud and clear. And just to reinforce that I had the dual dose, a shingles vaccine, and I had all the reactions and side effects from it and felt miserable for a day. But now I'm confident that I'm not going to get a shingles infection and it was worth the trade-off. And it sounds to me from your description today, that the amount of resource and expertise has been poured into this is perhaps the finest moment in medicine and the finest moment in pharmacology, Dr. Baker, any closing thoughts as we wrap up this edition of the common bridge, I really appreciate this opportunity because as you well know, there's a lot of noise out there. I haven't been happy with the media. They tend to over-exaggerate people who have illness. They tend to, over-exaggerate a lot of the conflict around these things. We need to start healing. We need to start getting the vaccine and moving forward. And, you know, I think, I think yesterday when the first humans got this vaccine outside of the clinical trial, was this sort of the beginning of the end for the COVID pandemic. We've been talking today with Dr. James Baker, and again, want to recommend his blog pandemic pondering.com. Dr. Baker is an expert in the field of immunology and vaccines. His full bio is on the website. Richard healthy.com. Hope everybody out there is staying safe. Please keep your social distance. Please keep your mask. Please wash up and please take good care of yourself and your family and your neighbors. This is rich. Helpy signing off today on the car.

Speaker 4 44:10

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