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Speaker 1: Now onto the show. Welcome to Prognosis. It's day twenty
Speaker 1: two since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today, how
Speaker 1: long will it take to develop up the vaccine? But first,
Speaker 1: today's news, a new intelligence report suggests China has concealed
Speaker 1: the extent of its coronavirus outbreak. Three US officials told
Speaker 1: Bloomberg about a classified report the intelligence community sent to
Speaker 1: the White House saying China underreported both its total cases
Speaker 1: and deaths. The officials asked not to be identified because
Speaker 1: the report is secret and did not describe its contents
Speaker 1: in detail. But they said the thrust of the report
Speaker 1: is that China's public reporting on cases and deaths is
Speaker 1: intentionally incomplete. In the US, which now has the largest
Speaker 1: public reported outbreak in the world, estimate show as many
Speaker 1: as two hundred and forty thousand Americans could die from
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen, and that's with mitigation efforts in place. Based
Speaker 1: on these projections, US President Donald Trump took a newly
Speaker 1: sober tone in a Tuesday briefing. I want every American
Speaker 1: to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.
Speaker 1: We're going to go through a very tough two weeks
Speaker 1: and then, hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I
Speaker 1: think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied
Speaker 1: it so hard, you're gonna start seeing some real light
Speaker 1: at the end of the tunnel. But this is going
Speaker 1: to be a very painful, very very painful two weeks.
Speaker 1: For weeks, Trump had downplayed the threat of the virus,
Speaker 1: frequently telling reporters that it would simply go away. But
Speaker 1: at the Tuesday briefing, Deborah Burke's, the top public health
Speaker 1: official coordinating the Coronavirus Task Force, cited an estimate that
Speaker 1: US deaths would be between one and two hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: even with the most stringent mitigation measures in place. Mitigation
Speaker 1: measures like isolating people in their communities have started to
Speaker 1: show signs of working in some countries. Lockdown steps in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands seem to be having an effect. The number
Speaker 1: of fatalities and hospital admissions in the country is increasingly
Speaker 1: slower than would be expected without such measures at a
Speaker 1: Dutch research institute. Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun holding
Speaker 1: meetings remotely from his residence outside Moscow after being exposed
Speaker 1: to a doctor who is later diagnosed with coronavirus, said
Speaker 1: a Kremlin spokesman. The Kremlin says that Putin is regularly
Speaker 1: tested and is fine. Now for today's main story, why
Speaker 1: does a vaccine take so long? Scientists around the world
Speaker 1: are racing to develop a vaccine for COVID nineteen, but
Speaker 1: experts have said it could take a year to eight
Speaker 1: months for one to hit the market, and some think
Speaker 1: even eighteen months is conservative. The process for testing and
Speaker 1: approving of vaccine is long and complicated. That can be
Speaker 1: frustrating when the coronavirus is taking more and more lives
Speaker 1: every day. But cutting corners to push a vaccine through
Speaker 1: faster can lead to devastating consequences. We know that because
Speaker 1: it's happened before. Jason Gale has more on what it
Speaker 1: takes to develop a working vaccine and just how close
Speaker 1: we are to finding one for the virus. Today we
Speaker 1: met with the big great pharmaceutical companies and they're really
Speaker 1: working hard and they're working smart, and we had some
Speaker 1: We had a great meeting today with a lot of
Speaker 1: the great companies, and they can have vaccines, I think
Speaker 1: relatively soon, and they're gonna have something that makes you better,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna actually take place, we think even sooner.
Speaker 1: So it's a lot of good things are happening. But
Speaker 1: we have strong quarters. And you could be forgiven for
Speaker 1: thinking we already have a vaccine for the coronavirus, and
Speaker 1: actually that's sort of true. There are several, but there
Speaker 1: are only in the experimental stages. Healthy adults were immunized
Speaker 1: with an investigational vaccine in Seattle in mid March. These
Speaker 1: volunteers are due for a second shot in the upper
Speaker 1: arm in a week or so. It's part of clinical
Speaker 1: research funded by the National Institutes of Health that will
Speaker 1: continue for twelve months, which means it will take more
Speaker 1: than a year to fully evaluate the safety and efficacy
Speaker 1: of the vaccine candidate. And there's a good reason for
Speaker 1: not cutting any corners. No one knows exactly how serious
Speaker 1: this threat could be. Nevertheless, we cannot afford jadaka chance
Speaker 1: with the health of our nation. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: a late winter outbreak of swine flu at a military
Speaker 1: base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, led to fears of
Speaker 1: a devastating pandemic. President Gerald Ford announced him mass vaccination plan. First,
Speaker 1: I am asking the Congress to appropriate a hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty five million dollars for the production of sufficient vaccine
Speaker 1: to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States.
Speaker 1: Congress passed a liability act that basically indemnified the United
Speaker 1: States government for the safety of the vaccine. A first
Speaker 1: shot was withdrawn over safety concerns, leaving a second. By
Speaker 1: the end of the year, forty million out of some
Speaker 1: two hundred million Americans got the JAB. The problem was
Speaker 1: no pandemic appeared, but that second vaccine well. One of
Speaker 1: those who did roll up hers leave was Judy Roberts.
Speaker 1: She was perfectly healthy and active woman when in November
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy six. She took her shot. Two weeks later,
Speaker 1: she says she began to feel a numbness starting up
Speaker 1: her legs. I talked about at that time. I said,
Speaker 1: I've been under the knees by Friday. Is it keeps
Speaker 1: up by the following week? How was totally fair aline.
Speaker 1: It was linked to an immune dysfunction, a disease called
Speaker 1: Giame Bret syndrome. He's Laurie Garrett pullit Surprisemann, science writer
Speaker 1: who covered the story. And so a fair percentage of
Speaker 1: the recipients I mean when I say a fair percentage,
Speaker 1: less than one, but more than the zero that would
Speaker 1: be the norm, came down with giambre, which causes paralysis.
Speaker 1: And you know, it kind of stunned the nation. And
Speaker 1: because there was this giant pot of gold, meaning the
Speaker 1: indemnification that Congress had done, lawyers came out of the
Speaker 1: woodwork from everywhere. And the lawsuits persisted in federal courts
Speaker 1: for well over a decade. And that was a real mess.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, governments and vaccine makers are a lot
Speaker 1: more cautious. In fact, it wasn't unusual for a vaccine
Speaker 1: to take ten years to develop newer technology has helped
Speaker 1: beat up the process, but the real breakthrough came in
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen. The World Health Organization was able
Speaker 1: to coordinate clinical trials to test the safety of an
Speaker 1: experimental vaccine for a bowler a parallel study gauge the
Speaker 1: optimal dose needed for immunity. It demonstrated a new way
Speaker 1: of truncating early clinical research into just a few months,
Speaker 1: and that meant doctors could begin testing the evowl of
Speaker 1: vaccine and large numbers of people in West Africa just
Speaker 1: six months after the first person was given the shot.
Speaker 1: The brains behind that expedited research and development plan is
Speaker 1: Dr Murray Paul Kenney. She's a veteran vaccinologist who was
Speaker 1: an Assistant Director General at the who. You don't want
Speaker 1: to to confront people with a preparation which is not
Speaker 1: protecting them against the disease. So at months six we
Speaker 1: were able to start the phase three clinical trials in
Speaker 1: several thousand people to test whether easifficacious and the face
Speaker 1: turned out was successful. So it took about a year
Speaker 1: for scientists to determine that the candidate a bowl of
Speaker 1: vaccine worked. The vaccine is made by Merken Company. It
Speaker 1: was subsequently registered and it's played a huge role in
Speaker 1: containing a more recent bowler outbreak in the Congo and
Speaker 1: Murray Paul's process for fast tracking research during outbreaks informed
Speaker 1: a blueprint that research teams around the world are using
Speaker 1: now for testing not just COVID nineteen vaccines, but also
Speaker 1: drug treatments and diagnostics. Already, two candidate vaccines for COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen are being studied in humans. Besides the one that
Speaker 1: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Maderna
Speaker 1: are developing, there's a trial and a way of a
Speaker 1: vaccine in China. In addition, the WHO accounts fifty two
Speaker 1: other experimental immunizations in preclinical study. Here's Murray Paul again,
Speaker 1: and when they start king to try, they will need
Speaker 1: most likely a year to be sure that this vaccine
Speaker 1: work and to be able to start choosing people. Murray
Speaker 1: Paul retired from the w h O in two thousand
Speaker 1: and seventeen, and it's back working as a director of
Speaker 1: research for in the French National Health Research Organization. She's
Speaker 1: also on a pandemic committee advising French President Emmanuel Macron.
Speaker 1: She says the time it will take to develop a
Speaker 1: vaccine for the coronavirus. Means we need to do as
Speaker 1: much as we can now to slow its spread and
Speaker 1: to find drug treatments. But what if there was already
Speaker 1: a safe and inexpensive vaccine on the market to blunt
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Well maybe there is. Vacillus kalmic gerin or
Speaker 1: BCG is the name of the tuberculosis vaccine that's been
Speaker 1: around for a century. It's safe, it's inexpensive, and we
Speaker 1: give it to one and thirty million newborns a year,
Speaker 1: mostly in countries with the lung diseases still a major
Speaker 1: health problem. But the shot isn't us to use to
Speaker 1: prevent TB. It has some off target benefits, and it's
Speaker 1: a common immunotherapy for early stage bladder cancer. It also
Speaker 1: seeks to train the body's first line immune defense to
Speaker 1: better fight infections. Scientists are seeing if it can be
Speaker 1: effectively repurposed to fight COVID nineteen, studying with healthcare workers.
Speaker 1: As you know, it's probably going to take many months
Speaker 1: before a specific vaccine for COVID nineteen is developed, and
Speaker 1: in the meantime, we need to think of every possible
Speaker 1: way that we can protect healthcare workers, who of course
Speaker 1: are very high risk and it's going to be particular
Speaker 1: need to reduce the amount of time that our healthcare
Speaker 1: workers are absent. This is Professor Nigel Curtis. He's had
Speaker 1: of infectious diseases research at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute
Speaker 1: in Melbourne. He's also head of the Infectious Diseases unit
Speaker 1: at the city's Royal Children's Hospital. Staff they're volunteered to
Speaker 1: get the BCG vaccine this week in a randomized controlled
Speaker 1: try involving four thousand healthcare workers. Even people who got
Speaker 1: the shot as an infant are eligible to participate. That's
Speaker 1: because any beneficial off target effects of the vaccine are
Speaker 1: probably lost with time. Miragel says, we will follow our
Speaker 1: participants for the following six months or how the long
Speaker 1: coronavirus lasts in Australia, and we will compare those who
Speaker 1: didn't didn't get the BCG vaccine to see where the
Speaker 1: first of all, they actually developed symptoms of COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: and if they do, how severe those symptoms are, and
Speaker 1: that will enable us to see whether the vaccine and
Speaker 1: both reduces the number of people who have become affected
Speaker 1: by the virus and whether it can reduce the impact
Speaker 1: of that so particularly not only how un well they are,
Speaker 1: but how long that means they have to be off work,
Speaker 1: which of course is the very important thing for healthcare workers.
Speaker 1: Similar researches underway in the Netherlands, and other testing sites
Speaker 1: are planned in Australia and possibly the US. The Studies
Speaker 1: Data Monitoring Committee will review the results after three months
Speaker 1: to look for any signs at the approach is working.
Speaker 1: Nigel says he's optimistic, but there are no guarantees. The
Speaker 1: only way to find out is by doing a clinical trial.
Speaker 1: That's it for the Prognosis Daily Edition. For more on
Speaker 1: the coronavirus crisis from one bureaus around the world, visit
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus. If you appreciate the podcast,
Speaker 1: please take a moment to us and leave us a
Speaker 1: review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more listeners
Speaker 1: find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted
Speaker 1: by me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by me
Speaker 1: tophor foreheas, Jordan Gaspoure, and Magnus Hendrickson. Reporting by Jason Gale.
Speaker 1: Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi
Speaker 1: and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.