Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one seven
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story
Speaker 1: scientists are hunting for ways to treat the virus, but
Speaker 1: our best defense against infection might lie in our own bodies.
Speaker 1: But first, here's what happened in virus news today. In
Speaker 1: the US, prospects for a COVID nineteen relief bill before
Speaker 1: the November election are dwindling fast. How Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Speaker 1: welcomed representatives back today, but that's unlikely to give fresh
Speaker 1: impetus to the discussions. Republicans and Democrats both are testing
Speaker 1: a risky strategy that the public and voters will blame
Speaker 1: the other side for failing to deliver help to millions
Speaker 1: of households and companies. Among the unlikely events that could
Speaker 1: now break the deadlock, President Donald Trump changing tech amid
Speaker 1: alarm about poll numbers, a sudden reversal of economic indicators
Speaker 1: that have recently trended upward, and Pelosi or Senate Majority
Speaker 1: Leader Mitch McConnell facing a revolt by their own vulnerable
Speaker 1: moderate members. Israel's cabinet voted to impose a second nationwide
Speaker 1: lockdown starting Friday amid a raging coronavirus outbreak. The move
Speaker 1: defies business leaders who warn of economic strangulation, as well
Speaker 1: as the powerful ultra Orthodox Jewish community. Ministers voted Sunday
Speaker 1: to strictly limit movement, gatherings and economic activity for at
Speaker 1: least three weeks, which coincides with a major Jewish holiday season.
Speaker 1: Finally finds our Chief executive officer Albert Borla said it's
Speaker 1: likely the US will deploy a COVID nineteen vaccine to
Speaker 1: the public before the end of the year. Borla said
Speaker 1: the company is prepared for that scenario, even though health
Speaker 1: authorities have more cautious expectations. Borla said Sunday on CBSS
Speaker 1: Face the Nation that he's quote quite comfortable that the
Speaker 1: vaccine the company is developing in partnership with bio n
Speaker 1: Tech is safe. He said it could be available to
Speaker 1: Americans before one depending on whether the US Food and
Speaker 1: Drug Administration approves it. And now for today's main story,
Speaker 1: even after a vaccine is developed, the coronavirus is likely
Speaker 1: to remain with US for years. That means researchers must
Speaker 1: pursue efforts to find a cure for those who still
Speaker 1: fall sick. Viruses are tricky to fight, and prevention with
Speaker 1: vaccines has been far more successful than treatment with drugs.
Speaker 1: In fact, modern medicine has come up with a true
Speaker 1: cure for only one viral infection. For many serious infections,
Speaker 1: the best approaches are a cocktail of drugs that throws
Speaker 1: speed bumps in front of the infection. I spoke with
Speaker 1: Michelle Fake Cortez who reports that the best solution for
Speaker 1: fighting viruses is often letting our own bodies attack them.
Speaker 1: Viruses have been getting human sick for millennia, really, and
Speaker 1: even with the advances of modern medicine, viruses are clearly
Speaker 1: still causing millions of deaths each year. So what makes
Speaker 1: viruses so hard to defeat? A virus is a very
Speaker 1: unique thing, and it is not a living organism. It
Speaker 1: has to be inside a cell in order to survive
Speaker 1: and thrive and reproduce. You can actually kill a virus
Speaker 1: very easily if it's outside of a cell. In fact,
Speaker 1: it can't even survive outside of a cell. And if
Speaker 1: you can get anything onto it, like disinfectant, like sunlight,
Speaker 1: like almost anything, it can't exist without being inside of
Speaker 1: a cell. So in order to kill a virus, or
Speaker 1: destroy a virus, or slow down a virus, you have
Speaker 1: to actually be operating inside a cell. And when you're
Speaker 1: talking about something like coronavirus, that virus has gotten into
Speaker 1: very important cells that we all need in order to
Speaker 1: survive ourselves, so trying to slow it down is tricky.
Speaker 1: It's not just ronavirus. We actually only have medicine that
Speaker 1: can cure a virus for one condition, and that's hepatitis C.
Speaker 1: It took an awfully long time to come up with
Speaker 1: that medicine and we just haven't had that much time
Speaker 1: when it comes to coronavirus now. In terms of what
Speaker 1: our bodies are able to do naturally, I mean, how
Speaker 1: do our immune systems, without the help of a vaccine
Speaker 1: or other drugs, how does it naturally try to fight
Speaker 1: off a virus. The human immune system is an amazing thing.
Speaker 1: It produces millions upon millions of what are essentially infection
Speaker 1: fighting drugs. Every day, one of the millions of antibodies
Speaker 1: that we have out there launches onto a foreign invader,
Speaker 1: which is called an antigen, and once it identifies that
Speaker 1: the immune system is like all in, it sends everybody
Speaker 1: to that spot and starts reproducing and multiplying and creating
Speaker 1: more and more antibodies to shut down whatever that attacker is.
Speaker 1: Once that's happened, everything recedes, but not to the level
Speaker 1: that it was before, because now the body is aware
Speaker 1: that that threat is out there, so those antigens keep
Speaker 1: circulating and patrolling so that if they see that virus again,
Speaker 1: it can just go straight into attack mode. That's why
Speaker 1: we don't have to worry about infections over and over again.
Speaker 1: That's how our body primes itself to keep us healthy,
Speaker 1: and it does that naturally. It's one of the amazing
Speaker 1: things that our body knows how to breathe, It knows
Speaker 1: how to regulate our blood sugar and our insulin levels,
Speaker 1: and it keeps us healthy for us trying to do
Speaker 1: that outside of the body. We are getting better at it,
Speaker 1: but it's still not anywhere near as efficient. And so
Speaker 1: let's talk about those tools that we use to fight viruses.
Speaker 1: So how do drugs or vaccines mimic what our immune
Speaker 1: system is already doing with antibodies? That is solutely what
Speaker 1: research is built on across almost every plane that we're
Speaker 1: talking about. When you talk about convalescent plasma for example.
Speaker 1: That is literally just trying to take those antibodies out
Speaker 1: of someone who's already fought the infection and put it
Speaker 1: into someone new. But there are more efficient ways to
Speaker 1: do that. There are researchers who have been able to
Speaker 1: actually create monoclonal antibodies. That means they're building those antibodies
Speaker 1: outside of the body, directly targeted for the antigen that's
Speaker 1: of interest in this case, the one that causes coronavirus.
Speaker 1: Those monoclonal antibodies can be infused into the patient and
Speaker 1: go directly to killing that antigen, to directly killing that
Speaker 1: that attacker. Now, what a vaccine does is it tries
Speaker 1: to build on that underlying process of how the immune
Speaker 1: system works. It introduces just a tiny piece of that
Speaker 1: virus to give the heads up to the immune system
Speaker 1: that hey, this guy could be coming and it could
Speaker 1: cause problems for you, so you should ratchet up your
Speaker 1: production of antibodies against this target. So it's just a shortcut.
Speaker 1: Not only that, because it's only a piece of the virus,
Speaker 1: or an inactivated part of the virus, you get the
Speaker 1: benefit without having had the harm. Why are we often
Speaker 1: talking about a combination of drugs versus a single vaccine.
Speaker 1: When we're talking about drugs or therapeutics for a virus, coronavirus,
Speaker 1: or any other virus, as we discussed, we can't go
Speaker 1: in there and just blow them up, because then we
Speaker 1: would be blowing up the human cells. So what they do,
Speaker 1: what these medicines do, is they look for weaknesses in
Speaker 1: the virus, and generally that's around the replication, how the
Speaker 1: virus causes itself to multiply. In order to do that,
Speaker 1: you can attack it in more than one different way,
Speaker 1: and as you're hitting it from all these various sides,
Speaker 1: you have a better result. Not only that, viruses are
Speaker 1: very good at mutating, so if you're hitting it from
Speaker 1: just one direction, it's just going to move. So hitting
Speaker 1: it with more than one approach generally leads to a
Speaker 1: better effect. There's often also a lot of discussion about
Speaker 1: the role of a vaccine in creating herd immunity, and
Speaker 1: that's more of a population discussion, and I was wondering
Speaker 1: if you might just touch on that, how a vaccine
Speaker 1: can play a role in not just helping to fight
Speaker 1: off a virus within an individual, but also within a population.
Speaker 1: The way that we stop an outbreak is by creating
Speaker 1: immunity to that virus, so that the virus as it's
Speaker 1: going from one person to the next literally can't catch
Speaker 1: on to the next person and as a result dies out.
Speaker 1: That's what happens with herd immunity, and that is the
Speaker 1: goal of vaccination. Think about it. The IRUs gets into
Speaker 1: your body, it repopulates, repopulates, repopulates, and then goes to
Speaker 1: the next person and does the same thing. They're taking
Speaker 1: over everyone's body as it moves to the next person.
Speaker 1: If you have been infected and now your immune system
Speaker 1: is protecting you, you are no longer a host. It
Speaker 1: can't take hold in your body and get to the
Speaker 1: next person. That's the same way that the vaccine works,
Speaker 1: and so if you vaccinate enough people, the vaccine won't
Speaker 1: be able to continue on and it will essentially die
Speaker 1: where where it lives. If you think about it. With measles,
Speaker 1: we do still have measles, and we have outbreaks, but
Speaker 1: they don't generally last. That's because there's enough people in
Speaker 1: the world who have been vaccinated against measles. So you
Speaker 1: might get into a small pocket of people who haven't
Speaker 1: gotten vaccinated, and then you'll see an outbreak there, but
Speaker 1: before it can get to broader population, it starts running
Speaker 1: into these fire breaks essentially, and it dies out. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've had coronavirus in various forms for hundreds, if not
Speaker 1: thousands of years. Why don't we have a vaccine already?
Speaker 1: I suppose it's the simple question. It's a great question,
Speaker 1: and it's a complicated question. We do have a lot
Speaker 1: of coronavirus is out there, but generally they're pretty benign.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna have a common cold, which is what
Speaker 1: most coronaviruses cause, that's something that the body can handle
Speaker 1: pretty efficiently. So how much time or researcher is going
Speaker 1: to spend trying to cure something that your body cures
Speaker 1: almost all the time with pretty minimal damage when they
Speaker 1: could be working on something more significant. How much money
Speaker 1: are people willing to spend if they have a shot
Speaker 1: at maybe recovering from a cold one day faster. The
Speaker 1: other thing is is that there are thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of viruses, so you don't know exactly the one that
Speaker 1: you have, So you don't even know if there was
Speaker 1: a treatment, if it was going to work against that one,
Speaker 1: or if it would mutate if you if it was
Speaker 1: faced with some kind of of a therapeutic. But there
Speaker 1: have been other coronaviruses that were really significant, most specifically
Speaker 1: STARS and MERS. Those are the two new outbreaks that
Speaker 1: occurred within the last twenty years, and they did cause
Speaker 1: some pretty major devastation. They were very deadly. The thing
Speaker 1: is is that they did burn out pretty quickly. When
Speaker 1: it comes to STARS and MERS is still spreading in
Speaker 1: the Middle East. Now, had we continued the work that
Speaker 1: we started when those two diseases emerged, then we might
Speaker 1: be further along when it comes to this coronavirus. And
Speaker 1: this is not something that is going to stop. Just
Speaker 1: like we had STARS in two thousand and three, just
Speaker 1: like we had MERRS subsequent to that. Just like we
Speaker 1: have this new coronavirus, there will be another one coming.
Speaker 1: So we are hoping that the money and the effort
Speaker 1: and the attention put on this coronavirus will can tinue
Speaker 1: once we're past this, so that we're better equipped for
Speaker 1: the next outbreak. That was Michelle Fake Wortez and that's
Speaker 1: it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak
Speaker 1: from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com, slash Coronavirus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more
Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is
Speaker 1: produced by Toph for foreheads Jordan Gaspore, Magnus Hendrickson and
Speaker 1: me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Michelle
Speaker 1: fake Cortez. Original music by Leo Sedrin. Our editors are
Speaker 1: Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head
Speaker 1: of podcasts. Thanks to listening m