 this is Think Tech. More specifically, this is Community Matters. And we're going to talk about it, take a scientific look at all the press we're getting on the vaccines. Just exactly how optimistic should we be. And our chief scientist, Mike DeWerth, is here to help us understand what's going on. Hi, Mike. Hello, J. Good to be here. Yeah, good to have you here. You've done some research on this. You've come up with charts and graphs, as you always do. You take a clear scientific analysis of it. And I'm sure interested in how you feel about the vaccines and what's going on. And we're having a lot of press and pomp and circumstance today on the media. But exactly how optimistic should we be, Mike? In terms of the science, we should be very optimistic. I think we've got this thing lifted for this patient. Problem is the sociology. People are just much more difficult to deal with than the science. So last time we talked about six weeks ago, slide one shows the graph that we were looking at then about how fast the disease was growing. We were doubling about every 10 weeks. We were closing on 10 million cases. If you look at the next slide, you'll see where we are now. We're in a worse spot now. We blew past the 10 million. We're closing on a 20 million. We're going to hit 20 million in the United States sometime between Christmas and New Year's, unless people drastically change their behavior. And we hit 30 million around an operation day. It's quite sad. We're doubling every seven or eight weeks now instead of every 10 weeks. Lucky we live Hawaii because we're not on an exponential curve in Hawaii. We've got a steady rate of about 100 cases a day now, but that could change if people travel to the mainland for holidays and come back again. Well, just how good is the vaccine? I mean, they've been telling us it's 90, 95% good. And they've been telling us that we may have to take one or the other, depending on availability and logistics. Should I care about which one I'm taking? Well, right now, you have no choice. I mean, the only vaccine that's proven is approved as Pfizer's. And you got to stand in the queue with the first responders and the urgently vulnerable people before it gets to you. I'm probably about 150 minutes in the queue. So I'm going to keep masking and social distancing. Having said that, the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, which we haven't seen the data on yet because they're still applying for approval, they're very innovative. They're very new and they were able to come up with them in record time. The AstraZeneca vaccines are good one too, judging by the results, which I haven't seen the paper yet because they're still working on their approval, completely different technology. So we're going to have choices. The Pfizer one's a good one. So we review the principles of vaccines. So when I say there's rescue in sight, what a vaccine does is it helps your immune system recognize a threat. So if your immune system encounters a threaded thing before, it will mount a response and wipe out the threat. And it recognizes a threat by some called antigens, which are they're distinctive of the particular threat virus of bacterium or toxin. And the antibodies glom on the antigens and the tag them for destruction. Tag whatever the antigens are attached to for destruction. So the vaccine contains a substance designed to kick the start that immune response without actually seeing the pathogen. So yeah, we've been eradicated. What about this thing, mRNA? That's new technology. That's been fairly recent, hasn't it? And what is remarkable about it? Let's go to the next slide by talking about the types of vaccines. So the mRNA technology is new. So the very first vaccine was that smallpox. And what that was was that a virus related to smallpox called cowpox that just happened to present the same antigens on its surface as smallpox does. So you got infected cowpox, you were immune to smallpox. And Edward Jenner noticed that farmers and milkmaids back in England, they weren't getting the ravaging diseases of smallpox. And it was because of this infection. So we get the word vaccine from the Latin word for cow, vaca, because it's cowpox. So the nice thing about that virus was that you could make cowpox in cows. You could just infect your cattle herd and have tons of vaccine. And so we were able to wipe out smallpox sometime in the late 1950s. Now you could apply a similar principle by taking a virus that's dangerous, but breeding it in animals to a non-dangerous form that still destroys the antigens that will motivate your system. So measles is like that, the Saban polio vaccines like that. The danger for some of those vaccines is that the Saban vaccine can once in a while revert back to wild form and cause disease. So for this close to wiping out polio, we've wiped out one out of the three strains. So because of the danger of reversion, we've taken that strain, we've wiped out out of the vaccines worldwide. It's another one of my vaccines, it's two strains of polio. And those strains both have more mutations to get back to the wild state, so they're safer. I remember reading that in around the turn of the 19th century, namely around the year 1800, they had inoculations. They had some kind of primitive vaccines. What was that about? Well, now an inoculation is related to the use of a live virus. So the Chinese, as I understand, invented inoculation for smallpox. They found that if you inhaled smallpox or ingested it, you would get a systemic disease that would ravage your lungs and kill you impossibly. But if you took a little bit of smallpox and put a scratch on someone's skin and then covered up with a bandage, the scratch would blister and that person would be contagious for a while, but it would not get a whole body systemic infection. So once the smallpox blister on the scratch healed, they were immune. And so this saved US Army in Revolutionary War. Armies of Europe were ravaged by smallpox, but the US Army had learned to go and inoculate their soldiers. So you would have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks in your barracks while the inoculation took effect. But the doctor would go to the village, find someone whose smallpox was a mild case, ask them how much they wanted for samples of their smallpox. And he would just pop their blisters and take samples. Then he would take it to the barracks very carefully, of course, and inoculate the new recruits. And so that conferred immunity. That's of course dangerous because you've got to handle smallpox like it's a serious biohazard, which it is. So some modern vaccinations are safer than inoculation. Vaccinations, you don't use the actual virus the way inoculation did. So the thing about the mRNA, so all the vaccines we have so far, you either have to breed a virus that's similar, that presents antigens, or you have to do a mutation with a colorecoma, the DNA thing, where you add antigens to a harmless virus. Now the Novavax virus does that. It takes a cold virus that chimpanzees get and adds to it a gene that makes the spike protein for COVID-19, so that it presents to the immune system, the spike protein, so the immune system reacts to that, once recognized that. But it doesn't cause much of a illness in humans. It's a harmless virus in humans. So that's the dental virus. It's harmless in humans. That's the AstraZeneca, wonders of conventional technology. It's amazing to work in as quickly as it did. The new mRNA vaccine, so what messenger RNA does is your body's DNA is confined to the nucleus of the cell. It never leaves the nucleus. And when your body needs proteins or something made from the instructions of that DNA, the DNA unwraps a little bit. A piece of messenger RNA comes, wraps the instructions from the DNA, takes it out of the nucleus to cell factors called ribosomes. A ribosome is like little 3D printers that make whatever that are a messenger RNA to them as a RNA. If you instead of taking your own natural DNA, you take messenger RNA and inject it. And that messenger RNA has the instructions for the smallpox for the COVID-19 spike protein. It teaches your own ribosomes to make that spike protein. And your immune system recognizes this doesn't belong and it starts to amount of response to that spike protein. So you're turning your own cells into the factors for the messenger RNA and cutting out a whole bunch of work that would normally have to be done to make that spike protein antigen. So you're teaching your own body to prepare to make its own vaccine, essentially. Well, it really is. They came up with it and actually deployed it so quickly. But you know, what strikes me is that you have this, I guess it's a molecular process they have found and implemented. You could use it on other viruses, right? Absolutely. Other diseases. It's like creating a little machine in there that will do what you want. You tell it what to do, it'll do it. That's quite amazing. Yeah, the beauty of this thing is once you have sequenced the DNA of a pathogen and sequenced the DNA appropriate to the antigens that will let your immune system recognize it, you can now crank up a DNA factory that then can be used to make messenger RNA without having to pass it to a cow or an egg or some bioreactor. You can make massive quantities of this quickly. So now they were going slow with the messenger RNA technology until this crisis came along. So this COVID-19 sort of kicked the whole thing back into high gear. Here we are. We've got a new technology now that, as we'll see when we get to the numbers, is pretty safe and very effective. So why do you have to have two shots? What's that all about? So, well, again, I'll get a little bit ahead here, but the first shot does provoke an immune response. It's shown that within about two weeks of getting the first shot, your body has made enough, has enough immune response to start making you immune to COVID. They give you the second shot because they want to make sure that antibodies get up to at least where somebody who has gotten COVID and gotten through it has. So it's just sort of the second shot is a kicker to make sure that the antibody response is at full strength. But the first shot does confer some immunity. And that's one of the questions that they have to deal with when they roll out. What if people come for the first shot and then don't bother coming back for the second? How do we handle that case? Do we need to handle that case? Well, I don't know. They're going to do some follow-ups. They've only had two months to follow up on most of the patients in the trial. They're going to do more follow-up and see how one shot, I mean, the people that didn't come back to the second shot, try to find them and see how well they did. But we know the two shots are very effective. The other thing that you wonder about is what's with the low temperature? Why do you have to freeze it at, what is it, 79 minus 79 centigrade? It's pretty cold. Why? Well, messenger RNA in your cells only has to go from the nucleus to the ribosome. So it has to go very far. So nature didn't really design it to hang around long. It's a fragile entity. So to keep it from falling apart just in heat, you've got to make it very cold. And they also encapsulate it with chemicals that also protect it from the environment. So now having said that, dry ice isn't that cold. You can go down to the wharf and buy bags of dry ice or blocks of dry ice for your parties or for your Halloween steam, smoke machine, display or whatever. In the first world here, it's not a big deal. It's cold, but it's not outrageously cold with modern technology. So how do you get it that cold? How do you get it to minus 70? I mean, dry ice is probably by itself not going to do that. You need a dry ice. That's one of the provisions they have, that they're building boxes that you can add dry ice to to preserve the vaccine. It's going to take you a while to get to a site where you can put it in proper multi-stage refrigerator. And all our hospitals, most of our hospitals in Hawaii have this refrigeration capability and the ones that don't are working to get it. And the dry ice is you just go down to the wharf and buy it and put it in the box and that works. So we've heard a lot about how over this weekend, they were getting all the trucks ready at the Pfizer manufacturing facility and moving them to airplanes and flying them across the country. It's impressive. That reminds me of that retired or actually on the active duty general that the administration put in charge of the delivery system, the logistics general. But, but query, you know, is that going to work? I mean, I think right now people are watching it carefully. The media is watching it carefully. I will know the answer in a few days, of course, but is it going to work? I think it'll work. I mean, it's just a logistics problem. You know, Amazon's mastered this. So I would hope the U.S. Army could master it. It's whether people will show up for the vaccine. Okay, you know, let's talk about that. Let's talk about, you know, the sequences, priorities. And I'm a little confused on the who's setting the priorities. On the one hand, you hear the federal government, Trump, trying to set priorities. On the other hand, he's saying, no, the states will set priorities. And then you get sort of get this gestalt feeling. Well, the first thing is the health care providers. The second thing is that people who are vulnerable in care homes. The third thing is people who are essential workers and so forth. And you see it in the paper, but is that the law? Who decided that? And why, you know? Well, the CDC makes the recommendations, but the states can set their own priorities. And they may or may not follow the Center for Disease Control. But it makes sense to vaccinate the health care providers because they get exposed to hundreds of people every day who may be sick, may have this disease. It makes sense to vaccinate the very vulnerable populations in the nursing homes. You're seeing this through to me, they're off of the nursing home. So it makes sense to prioritize the vaccines. I would pass that. Who is next? Yeah. Well, you know, Trump was going to have his entire White House vaccinated. You know, that was the first news over the weekend that he was arranging to have his entire White House vaccinated. But then he backed that off and walked that back and said, no, I was only kidding. We're not going to take priority over the others that are on the CDC priority list. So the question, is there anything that would justify him jumping the list? Why do that? Isn't he a very essential person? I mean, theoretically? Well, he's already had the disease. So he's probably immune. What about all the people in the White House? Well, that's, so here's the issue. Well, here's what I understand. It's, you know, you can appear to be jumping the queue or you can appear to be set in a good example. So if you've got celebrities saying, hey, I will, but mostly if I got the vaccine, you should too. That's a good example for people who might otherwise be vaccine resistant or hesitant. On the other hand, it could also be, oh, the rich people get all the best healthcare first. You know, the rest of us have to stand in line. You got to balance those, balance those problems. You know, now somebody, somebody elderly who's a celebrity, I don't know, maybe Jim Carter, yeah, or some elderly celebrities could just say, hey, I'm near the top of the queue because I'm old and I'm going to roll my step and get this vaccine. That would help a lot. Well, part of this is to encourage the masses out there to take the vaccine. Reminded of a vaccine. It was measles, I think back when, and they got Elvis Presley to take it. And, you know, all of a sudden millions of people took it because it was Elvis. He was their hero. So if you get a celebrity hero person, that's going to encourage. So it's worth putting him at the top of the list to achieve that secondary effect. You know, I have a question over here, a question from a viewer. Should we be worried that richer countries will get access to the vaccines earlier than others? Won't vaccines not work unless, this is the second question. Let me ask the first one. Or should we be worried that richer countries will get it first? We should be worried that richer countries will get it first because it does that. The problem is, if everybody in the world isn't safe from this virus, nobody's really safe. If I have the vaccine, I'm safe, am I not? If I have the vaccine, why do I care about what happens in Northern India? Well, not everybody can be vaccinated. You know, the trials excluded people are immunocompromised, excluded people who are allergic to other vaccines. Those two groups already can't be vaccinated. No, but if I'm if I'm vaccinated, I don't, I don't care if the guy down the block is going to get sick or not. I don't care. If me and my family- Do you care if your doctor gets sick? Huh? You do care if your doctor gets sick. You do care if your family gets sick unless you're a complete loner with no family and no friend. I mean, you care if the firefighters that might have to say you're burning house gets sick. You care if the cops might have to say your life gets sick. You care, you care about these things, you know, whether you know it or not. You care about whether the grocery store clerk you go see every week for groceries dies of it. Hawaii, why do I care about somebody in Northern India? Well, I don't know. I mean, I care because I know we have a global interconnected economy. And here in Hawaii, we care because our economy depends on tourism. If people from the rest of the world don't come here, we continue to struggle and starve. So we need to get tourism back up as soon as we can here in Hawaii. And that means having all over the world vaccinated, safe, and ready to come, spend their money here. I'll take your point. Okay, next part of that question. Won't vaccines not work? This is part of the same answer, I think. Unless everyone gets vaccinated at the same time. In other words, if we have rolling vaccinations around the world, is that as good as if we got everybody vaccinated within a short period of time? Oh, it'd be better to get everybody vaccinated, but it's not necessary. We certainly don't see that with measles or polio. I mean, polio was wiped out in the United States well before it was wiped out in India. And that vaccination campaign still going on in Pakistan. Once you've achieved a certain percentage of a population in a country that's been vaccinated and therefore immune, you greatly reduce the chance that a disease will spread in that country. Right now we have sporadic outbreaks of measles in the United States because there's people who refuse to get the vaccine or refuse to let their kids be vaccinated. So once we'll get an outbreak, but it doesn't spread throughout the whole country because they're isolated pockets vulnerability. Yeah, so this is this is worth studying. It's worth getting data about this and studying it. Speaking of which, you have more charts and graphs. I have more questions. Why don't you do your charts and graphs before I do my questions? Okay, well, the next chart was just pointers to what says Pfizer COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. It just gives you this locations where you can find the FDA report as well as the peer review paper or the first page of the peer summary page of the peer review papers there. It'll summarize some of these things. The thing on this chart that's an interest is just how the ethnicities. The Pfizer vaccine was tested in the United States, Germany, South Africa, and Turkey are the primary sites. So the population tested was overwhelmingly white, but there was a significant amount of African people of African origin tested as well. And then a lot of the specs and then not as many Asians. I'd like to see more Asians in this data set. But that's, you know, that will come as they do more follow-on studies. And they've got to follow up with the vaccine. Everybody, they're supposed to follow up the people that are vaccinated out in the world and see how they're doing, you know, as months and years go on and make sure there aren't any long-term side effects. So the follow-up with that. The next page is on efficacy. If you look at all the groups lumped together, it's like almost 95% effective at preventing this disease, COVID-19. And there were a lot of people in the placebo group. There's, you know, almost, there was almost 19,000 cases in the vaccine group. There's 19,000 cases. There were nine cases of the disease in the vaccine group and 169 in the placebo group. I mean, this vaccine really knocked down their chances of getting the SARS, COVID-19 disease. People, young people, it was 95% effective. Old people was 94% effective. Women, 94% effective. Men, 95% effective. This is a very effective vaccine overall. Well, you're asking me to believe them though. If I have trust problems with the CDC or with the CDC resisting political influence, then maybe that data is more questionable. Maybe the conclusions and recommendation. For example, when Pfizer came out with it, they said, good news. This is 90% effective. And a couple of days later, who was it, Moderna came out and said, we're 94.5% effective. And then right after that, Pfizer came out, okay, well, in fact, we were kidding you, we are 95%. We're better than Moderna. And I'm saying, gee, that's an interesting switch of, you know, scientific opinion in a matter of three days. So how credible are these numbers? Should I believe these numbers? So I believe the people who are vetting and analyzing these numbers? Well, these numbers are credible. So this vaccine trials go through multiple stages, where they go through a small stage for safety than a larger stage, phase two, or a little bit more safety and efficacy than phase three, which is what we just fed through for real efficacy testing. So at the smaller stages, your statistics aren't as good, so the error bars are bigger and you don't want to quote too optimistically. But this vaccine, you know, 40,000 people almost, you know, in the trial, they've pretty well tested efficacy, at least in white people, black people, Hispanic people, they need better statistics in Asians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders. If you think there's a reason for those people to have different immune responses than African-Americans and white people. It's worth doing those studies, and they will, yeah. But those studies are after the vaccine is actually distributed out there, those studies. Go ahead. Both. Both. The trial is still going on. The formal clinical trial is still going on, and they're following up the people in that trial, and they're also having to follow the people who have gotten this emergency use authorization vaccine. Now, you don't have to trust just the company or just the Food and Drug Administration. The paper is being submitted to a scientific journal, New England Journal of Medicine, and it will be peer reviewed, and right now it's published already in advance of the peer review, but the peer reviewer is going to jump all over this and go through all these data with a fine tooth comb and find all the things that, you know, all the seams that there might be in it. You don't have to trust just one group. You know, there's many people who are ready to, you know, review these data to make sure they're good. And we'll see the same thing of the Moderna vaccine when they publish, and the AstraZeneca vaccine and all the vaccines when they are publishing their data. Many flaw in the methodology will be picked apart. So, there are two things we should touch upon before we go. Number one is the complacency phenomenon. I mean, the press has been pounding us with how effective these vaccines are, and surely some people will be profoundly affected by that, and they'll take chances now because they feel, you know, impervious because they could have, one of these days, maybe months later, they would have access to the vaccine. The other people, the other problem is the ones who, you know, the anti-vaxxers who feel that it's a violation of their constitutional rights to take a vaccine. They don't care if they infect other people for one reason or another, including religious reasons. They don't plan to take the vaccine and they don't want to have their children take the vaccine, and if God strikes them with the virus, that'll be that, you know, except the fate of that event. So, both of those things work against the successful deployment of the vaccines. How is that going to work out? Do you have any thoughts on it? Well, we managed to get polio eradicated in the United States. We managed to get smallpox eradicated in the United States, and I, you know, when people, so what will help is when schools require the vaccine, right now you already have to have a bunch of vaccines to go to school. Military requires you to be vaccinated. You've got to have your shots to join the army. You know, with government service requires you to be vaccinated and your employer or your employer's insurer can require you to be vaccinated. So those things, but those are sort of coercive things. What will really help is this positive pressure. All your friends are getting it. All your family are getting it. All your neighbors are getting something like that. All these celebrities are getting the vaccine. Everybody's doing it. You should do it too. Appealing to the common good fortune doesn't always work out. Right. But, you know, some things will work out. And for example, if I'm an employer and employee number A gets the vaccine, employee number B doesn't. And the employer does nothing about that. You know, employee number C, who would like to get the vaccine, hasn't gotten it yet. Now he gets sick. He sues the employer for not failing to protect him. And he says that the duty of care that the employer has to every employee is to require that person to, you know, if he's going to work next to, you know, our plaintiff, the duty of care requires the employer to make sure that everybody in the place has the vaccine. I think that's a case that will happen. And that just the prospect of that case makes it clear that every right thinking employer in the country is going to require it. And if you want to take a chance, fine, but on your own time, you're out, and we're not going to hire you or we're going to fire you. And then there'll be questions about termination. It's a tough, tough choice. I mean, I didn't have to go through a test, whether I had the polio vaccine to get a job or whether I had ever had tuberculosis to get a job. I didn't have to. But with this kind of thing, you can see that happening. You can see employers starting to require it. You can see airlines, especially requiring their employees to get the vaccine. Anybody in the place where you see a lot of people facing customers all day long could require that. One interesting thing that I saw was that somebody, I don't know who it is, a drug company. I'm not sure it's the government, but somebody is inventing a shot record card. In the military, that's what you have, I think in schools too. You have a shot record card, which demonstrates in evidences that you had this shot, that shot, and so forth. Well, I think that's going to become de rigueur all over the country. And if you can't present a shot record card showing you had the vaccine, you know, you're not going to have a lot of privileges. Yeah, well, yeah, that could happen. I mean, when I was a kid, my dad was an Air Force. We traveled to Libya. We had to show our vaccination cards, and we had all our immunizations when we went there and when we came back. And I didn't see that. I don't think my parents saw those owners. Now, when I was a kid, the measles vaccine was new. And I got measles, measles in Libya. And my ears still ring from that infection. Luckily, I didn't get any more serious side effects, a little bit of deafness. But people don't realize how important vaccines are now. We're so lucky in the United States to have all these vaccines already. So, you know, the big question is those people who are anti-vaxxers and those people who are anti-mask and social distancing, they're going to be really on the other side of public health. They're going to be, you know, it struck me, it struck me funny, for example, that all these shipments that went out with the vaccines yesterday and today had heavy security. Why heavy security? Why heavy security? Because I think there are people out there who would like to sabotage them. Or at least there you go. With a lot of money. Yeah, they are worth, you know, I mean, they're only getting sold for like $20 a dose, but you know, the box is a thousand doses. So, yeah. And you can see where some of these people, I mean, there are side effects with every vaccine. I mean, most of the side effects of this disease is your arm will be sore for a couple days. And you might feel crappy for a couple days. You might have a headache. You might have some muscle aches, some maybe fever, maybe chills. You're going to, the most common side effects are that you have these kinds of chills, muscle aches, not serious. And it's only a couple days. And then you're immune to disease that could kill you. There have been a couple of cases in Britain where somebody would have an allergic reaction, a severe allergic reaction to other vaccines was also allergic to this one. So that's why they're excluding people who had severe allergic reactions. I don't think that was the actual vaccine, but to the polyethylene glycol use as a preservative and polyethylene glycol is everything. It's in toothpaste. It's in some soft drinks. It's in a lot of like shampoos and commercial products. It's got a whole bunch of industrial uses. It's also used as a preservative in some kinds of medications, in particular this Pfizer vaccine. Now, so people will glom on to these rare problems or to the common annoyance. I don't want to feel crappy, but it's like, okay, your choice. And clearly, some people like pregnant women, they excluded pregnant women from the trials. So they can't vaccinate pregnant women right now because they don't know. Now, 23 women did get pregnant accidentally during the trial between the first and second dose. They're going to follow them and see how things go. So far, there's no problems in the vaccine arm. They've had some problems in the placebo arm, which of course are unrelated to the vaccine. So it's... Well, what are the chances, Mike, that this will serve as a kind of trial, aside from the scientific trials, phase three, phase whatever, that the actual use, distribution of the vaccines will be a trial by watching and following up. And every single person who takes the vaccine, they'll be calling him, how you're feeling and trying to figure out what happened. And then that means to me that they'll have an opportunity to fix any problems with it. Am I right about this? Exactly. They're required to follow up. Now, they may not track you down and ask you how it's going, but if you come back and say, I got this vaccine and I feel like I got this problem, that problem, the other problem, they have to follow up. Go to your doctor and say, I feel crappy ever since I had this vaccine. They have to follow up and they're required to follow up. So this is still going to be a trial that the data will be used to really track down the long-term effects of this vaccine, both positive and negative. And they want to track it down because in the trial, they only had two months of immunity data. There won't be any waning of immunity after two months. They really would like this immunity to last a year or more. So they're going to keep following people. Yeah, nobody knows how long the immunity will last. Yeah, I mean, so far there's no sign after two months of it tapering off. And the group that had two doses of the vaccine, which is a good sign because it was only going to last six months, you think you start to see some sort of tapering off after two months. But yeah, they've got to follow up. Yeah. So would you take it if it was available to you right now, Mike? Absolutely. I'm a caregiver for a dementia patient. I can't risk her getting it. So I would go get the disease. I mean, I get the vaccine and then take her into her vaccine. That's what I would do. I'd make sure that I'm not going to be a carrier of the disease that I would do everything I can to make sure that she didn't get the disease. So it's going to be so much about this, how it unfolds, you know, about what we learn in the process and who is asking for what and who should get what and when and how the effects are. It's really the most interesting public health question we've ever had. Yeah. And it's going to be more like it. You know, this vaccine evolved from an animal. I mean, it's a virus evolved from an animal virus. Smallpox originally started out as horsepox and mutated to become a human infectious disease. So this is not the first time it's happened. It's not going to be the last time it's happened. No. But it's the most sophisticated time it's happened. We are so lucky to live in a time when it's even conceivable to develop a vaccine in a year. By the time this is over, if we're just patient hang on, this is going to be a year and a half, almost two years of agony in the United States. You know, if we just social distance where I'm asked, don't give each other the virus until we can all get vaccinated, then the 1918 pandemic will be the worst one we had. I mean, I'm not a mystic that our citizens would do that, but I can hope. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody should just avoid traveling. And in a sense, what's in Chinese just get you to one of their flight attendants. Don't use the labs on the airplane that you're your flight attendant on. Now, where diapers, anything. Don't use the lab. It's like, what? It's because the labs volatilize the virus particles. Yes. Oh, we're going to learn so much. And you and I are going to discuss it all. Thank you, Mike. It's great to talk to you about this, to push the frontier on where it's going. They say wear your mask, wash your hands, don't travel. Got it. Mike DeWard, our chief scientist. Thank you so much for joining us today.