 to think tech. We're doing global connections this morning with Roopmati Kandekar. She joins us from New York, New York, and we're talking about global connections in terms of the update on global COVID. Now, Roopmati, you're welcome to the show. That's nice to see you again. We saw you on February 1st in our Burning Issues program, and you spoke then about COVID, and we have some of the slides that you discussed, and I'd like to go through that and update that because it's incredible. So much has happened even since February 1st. So welcome to the show, Roopmati. Hello, Ajay. Thank you very much for having me, and it is always, always a pleasure to come on the show and discuss these important things with you. So thank you very much again. Okay, so tell us where you were on February 1st. We have some of the slides you used in the Super Show that day, and of course, people kind of look at the Super Show if they want by going to our website. There's a link to it at the very top of our website, and they can see what you and half a dozen others were talking about in terms of the Burning Issues facing our nation. Today, we're more global, and we're talking about the Burning Issue of COVID facing the world. But why don't you take us through what you were saying on February 1st, and then we can talk about how that's changed. On our February 1st show, Jay, when we spoke about democracy since the election, we spoke about our pandemic. We spoke about so many things which are divisive, but now we have something which has no discrimination when it strikes us. That's when we have to keep aside all our differences and work towards one common goal of being focused on ending our pandemic. That was what was my contribution to this show, and it was an amazing panel. And when they brought together so many issues, we understand that everything is interlinked and everything is intertwined. There can be no isolation in issues. We have to have a concerted effort, and that's when individual becomes community, community becomes nation, and when nation becomes a global village, that stage, and it trickles down and gives you an individual responsibility. That is what this pandemic is teaching us, that life is very basic. You can't fool around with basic life. Laws, everything, laws that the government makes, we have to follow them. Actions that the individual takes affects the government's ability to perform. So it's a symbiotic process that has taken place, and we have to understand each one's responsibility comes together if we are looking at towards the end of the pandemic. Yeah, well, now you wrote a book. Let's see the cover of the book. Tell us the scope of the book, and then we have some slides that you use. I'd like to go through them quickly. That's the book, Jin COVID-19 pandemic, where you explored this, I guess that was a global discussion in that book. I will talk about that some more today. But what else did you have on your slides on February 4th? Real quick now, what do we got? This is a map of what? No, this is the map of the world that we see, and it's the spread of the Delta variant that came in first, which struck the world was the Beta variant. Then we got the Delta variant, which spread very fast. The transmissibility was shocking because something detected in South Africa could easily be found across the world in a couple of days. But now we have something known as the Omicron variant. After the Omicron variant came in, it was supposed to be a mild variant where we could understand that it is not going to be so harmful. And we discussed it in our last program, J, that maybe we have a chance of replacing the harmful Delta variant with the mild, so to say, that's have not decreased at all. The death rate is still high, but in relative terms, we say that it's a mild variant. So the Omicron variant, which came in, which was the BA, BA1, then it had a sub variant, BA11. And now we have a BA2, that is the stealth variant. And the problem with this, according to a Danish study, is that it has already spread to 45 countries and it has got transmissibility 1.5 times more transmissible than Delta. So that is dangerous. I don't understand, and this has all happened in the past couple weeks, if not the past 10 days, is that you see all over the country, and for that matter, the CDC is saying, you can relax now. You don't have to have masks. We're taking off the mask mandate, the mask recommendation. We're going to let you have the liberty you've been craving. And so the people who were opposing it and protesting the mask mandate, and for that matter, the vaccine mandate, seem to have had their way with government, with many governments. And I don't know if that's all over the world. I think it is all over the world because, as you say, it's a global village. And if something happens in one country, another country might emulate that. So I'm interested in what is happening here. Why in the face of these variants, in the face of a huge number of people being sick and a huge number of people dying in this country and around the world? I mean, 900,000 plus in the United States is the size of a small city. What would happen if we lost a small city one day? It's more than the wars have taken from us. Just for comparison, the Vietnam War took 50,000 lives. This is 900,000 lives. And they who have died, they're not able to speak to us. They're not able to tell us about their experience. They're not able to give us advice. So the whole thing is, it's remarkable in the sense that it continues. And yet we don't seem to be facing it. There's a psychology point there, isn't there? Absolutely right. Absolutely right. See, to please fundamental rights of people, the government says, remove your mask, but that is COVID protocol. The ancient times when there was a pandemic, they did cover up. They did follow not going into crowded places with closed indoors. They didn't maintain distance. Life came to a standstill. Now, with this kind of population all over the world, 8 billion plus, they don't want to hurt the freedom, fundamentals of people. So they say, okay, remove your mask. We are the better government. And we love you. And you can be a democratic citizen. That doesn't work. You need authoritarian governments like who have been able to stop the spread of the pandemic. They're just asking. Just asking simple individuals to keep a mask on is not too much. And by doing that, you protect yourself by getting a booster. You not only protect yourself, you protect your loved ones, but that is being taken as an insult that is being taken as a restrictive. So that's not working. This pandemic requires overwhelming blanket protection. Why? Because, see, America has plenty of vaccines. There is no dirt of vaccines. But 94% of the population in poor countries is still unvaccinated. And this, exactly this, we have two variants which came from South Africa. So this unvaccinated population is the breeding ground for the next variant to come. We are lucky through this year, through a better part of this year, we got two mild variants. So we did not have much of a problem. But the next one may be more harmful. So this unvaccinated population somewhere in the world needs to be taken care of. And that's when, like you told me, we discussed about like with the University of Hawaii, which is still developing the Syvax vaccine. And it is slow progress in development of that due to lack of funds. They still need funds. That vaccine, Jay, is amazing just because of its USP that it has got a very long shelf life. It is going to stay on shelf for up to two years without a freezer. So when there was, this is very necessary in countries like Africa, where the lights go on and off, they do not have freezers, cryo transport, where they have to take these cold storage for these vaccines. So we have to look beyond our borders. We have to look towards getting things done for all the people to keep ourselves protected. You know, you say that if we have a lot of cases, then the probabilities for further mutations increase. And the probability for a deadly, even more deadly mutation increases with the increased cases. I have not heard of, and I really waiting for, a study that says, here's the probabilities. If you have X millions of cases in the world, you can expect a mutation in every X cases. And if you have a mutation every X cases, you can expect a bad mutation every X cases of that. This is a numerical thing that I think a statistician, a data scientist, could actually take existing data and figure this out. And if people knew just how risky it was not to contain, not to do masks and vaccines in developing countries, they might be more serious about this. They might be more motivated to take the steps to avoid the COVID, you know, in developing countries. Don't you think? Yes. Yes. See, Jay, the behavior of a virus is random. We don't know how the virus is going to react. And mutations are directly proportionate to the spread. So the more the spread of the disease, the more the possibility of a mutation. So when we have this transmissible B2 step omicron and omicron which is spreading all over, be sure there will be a mutation which will jump the immune system and which is being provided by the vaccines. So we are going to have quick talks. That is when we have to take booster shots. We still have such a large portion of people who refuse to take even the basic vaccines. What about the booster shots? They don't, it's about shocking your responsibility. On the booster shots, you were talking about that before the show began. And different vaccines have different effective life. Different vaccines require a booster at different times. Can you talk about that because it's not all the same? We have three vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. That is the Pfizer, the Johnson and Johnson and the Moderna. Correct? So if you have five months into the Pfizer and the Moderna, sorry, we're into the Pfizer and the Moderna, we need to take a booster shots, five months. And if we have two months after taking the Johnson and Johnson, we have to take a booster shot. Now, why is a booster shot important? Because it increases your body's immunity response by 30 to 40-fold to a new variant which comes in. So to make this pandemic an endemic, we need to make it have regular updates to vaccine shots. So that is only possible when we have cooperation. And like you said, Jay, a large portion of people denying the government actions or opposing the government actions or demanding that they don't follow COVID protocols is not going to help. Well, in a way, this is a failure of government, isn't it? Because the CDC, the FDA, they have lost their credibility. I mean, up till COVID, these agencies were highly credible. Everybody believed in them, trusted them. But now if you took a poll just among the public in this country, you would find, I think, that a lot of people no longer have that trust. And that opens the way for these anti-vaxxers. So I don't trust the government. They tell me it's safe, but I don't believe it's safe. They tell me there are no side effects. I don't believe them. And indeed, you can understand that because the government seems to be changing its view, offering different advice on a regular basis. I was saying before the show that if you made a scatter chart of all the advice we get from American regulatory health agencies, it's like it's different all the time, changing all the time without a good explanation. And of course, there's a lag in terms of public appreciation and acceptance of this. So what you have is the old information is replaced by the new information, but not everybody gets the new information. So now some people are operating on the old information. Some people are operating on the new information. Some people think the new information is the old information or vice versa. And so in general, what you have is public ignorance. You have people behind the curve on what's the latest advice, and you have inconsistent advice. That scatter chart, I think, would be shocking. And of course, it explains why, in my view, people have lost confidence in the statements made by these agencies. What do you think about that? Yes, that is so right and so precise, Jay, that the information coming from these agencies contradicts their previous information that they gave. So right now, when you see that the stealth variant jumps the PCR test, and you don't know the symptoms that are associated with it. Now the new symptoms that are there is dizziness and vertigo. So now if the agencies tell you that the new symptoms are dizz, you are going to say, how can that be? Now what are you going to tell? Everybody is in unknown territory right now. Because as we are confused, even the government is confused, we have to give them that benefit of doubt that they really don't know what they're doing. Now when we are going out of the house, we don't know whether to put on a mask or maybe let's just take a break and not wear the mask. So the government policy, you know, you have to give them a break because they have to manage so many more people than we have to. So and like I said in the book also that I've written, that it's not a natural virus. So its reactions are more random and more aggressive than we would have had with a natural virus. So we have, suppose a person is in fact, is already suffering from heart or some other organ ailment and you get these different variants which have 100% chance of re, what is that? You get it again? What is that? Relapse. Relapse or again if you are infected with the same thing. So it's going to complicate your internal issues further. So a person with a heart ailment will have different symptoms and different reactions to this variant than another person who has got a liver failure and maybe because he has the virus twice, he is going to react more, you know, the symptoms are going to be more acute. So he has to understand that that time what the government tells you, it is all fuzzy. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah and I want to talk about, you know, the boosters. So a lot of people I know, I mean I'm, you know, my community if you will, although I haven't seen physically a lot of people in my community in years now, I talk to them, see them on Zoom but I don't see them. You know, they're conservative. They don't go out that much. They're very careful about, you know, restaurants and crowds. They wear masks and of course they have not only the original vaccines but they have boosters. So the one booster that is out there that you can get but they talk about another booster. There have been a lot of people talking about why can't I go get another booster because my booster has essentially, you know, according to the, you know, the data you were speaking of, my booster has expired and I am not really protected anymore by my booster. I want to go out and get another booster. Why can't I just get the same booster again? Why can't I just keep on boosting myself over time and have the benefit of multiple boosters? But the CDC is not saying that. The CDC is, I don't understand it fully, but the CDC is saying, you know, you don't need a booster anymore. You don't have to get it. I said, what is that? It seems to me that you want to have those antibodies. You want to have the benefit of every booster, including new boosters, within a few months after the old booster. What's the story in that? Is that misinformation? Should we be trying to find it? No, that is absolutely correct. You know why? Because we are dealing with not the same virus. If we were dealing with the same virus, we would have had these boosters and we would have been fine. But right now they need to put up the boosters to the next mutation. So that becomes a problem because we have a completely new entity that we have to deal with. It is not only the previous one which we had, it is something out of the blue which has changed its clothes and it's going to attack in a different way. So we're taking a booster. Now, when we take a flu shot every November, every September, October, we are dealing with the same flu. But when you're taking a booster, we are not dealing with the same variant. First we have to deal with beta, delta, now Omicron, now Omicron still, maybe something different. So that booster which worked for delta is not going to work now. So that becomes a problem that the booster kind of boost your energy because it is really not working against the same enemy. Well, we got a hope that somebody comes up with something. What's interesting too and I'm sure you followed this is that, you know, we in the United States, we like Pfizer and Moderna, Johnson & Johnson I suppose is the third one. But there are others. There are others developed in India. There are others developed in China. Word has it that the Chinese one is not very effective. The one that they're working on right here at the University of Hawaii. And I'm sure there are others being developed elsewhere. There's more than one way to skin a cat. And at the end of the day, I wouldn't call it a competition. I'd call it a parallel track research all over the world going on. And some countries can get the ones they want. Other countries can't get the ones they want. So they compromise on another one. I mean, for example, the Chinese one is all over Latin America. Everybody knows it's not as good. But hey, when you don't have anything, you take that one. But what do you think is going to happen here? Is Pfizer going to continue to be the king of the hill? Is Moderna going to stay popular? Is Johnson & Johnson? I mean, and as you say, they have different characteristics, different levels of effectiveness. Where are we all going with this as we go down the road toward knockwood endemic? We have to have the entire world's population vaccinated before we step on to the next stone. So right now, whether it is Chinese or whether it's American or whether it's Indian or whether it's from European, everybody has to have the unvaccinated population of underdeveloped countries vaccinated. Now, we see how like if we take a state of Hawaii, the most safest state during COVID. But we depend on tourism when we want tourists to come in. Suppose a tourist is coming from an unvaccinated area, is going to pose a threat to the entire population, again, from point zero. So we have to make sure that everybody's vaccinated all over the world. Let's bring it to a milder form of mutation. Everybody has their shots. Everybody is more prepared to face the next mutation. And then we can go ahead. If we completely vaccinate America, it won't help because somebody from somewhere is going to come back inside and then again start. So right now we are in a limbo because we don't know exactly which mutation is going to come up, which boosters we are on boosters. People do not have the first shot still. So that is where the inequality lies because those are the breeding grounds for the next mutation. Yeah. Well, the other thing we need to talk about here in this discussion is how extraordinary how this anti-vax movement has grown. Even in the past few weeks, I placed it squarely on Trump. I believe he started this up and conflated this issue with all the other issues, taking completely irresponsible, even murderous positions during the time he was in office. And now after the time he was in office, it's so easy to find a link between a person who ascribes to Trump, an acolyte, call it, and the person who is anti-vax. It's in the same ballpark. It's the same political position. And it has been politicized around this country. There are virtually millions, tens of millions of people who refuse to take a vaccine because Trump doesn't want to take a vaccine even though he has taken a vaccine. I find that absolutely irrational. I find it to be madness. And then you find all the last few days that this psychological virus, this anti-vax virus, has spread to Canada, to Ottawa and beyond all through Canada, where people, for political reasons, it's not rational. You can't find any rationality there. Are refusing to take vaccines or refusing to wear masks of any kind in any way? I'm saying this is a violation of their liberties to have a mandate. So why is that so crazy in there? And they're stopping the economy by putting their trucks on the highways and doing other things to protest. So much so that the government of Ottawa has called that an emergency and it's still all over Canada. It's a psychological question. I know your book did not focus necessarily on psychological questions, but I wonder what your thoughts are on how this plays in terms of bringing the pandemic down. You see, Jay, it's the pleasure of defiance, isn't it? You get a sadistic pleasure in defiance, but your liberty ends where my liberty starts. So when you are refusing to take the vaccine, you are endangering the safety of the person next to you. Like we saw Novak Djokovic preferred to give up his try at the Australian Open, but he refused to take the vaccine. So this is irrational because somebody is telling you that medical studies, which are short-term, but they are proving that you're less prone to extreme conditions due to the virus if you take the vaccine. You recover better if you take the vaccine. Listen to the doctors, listen to the government. That will help you try to remove the mask. You try not to take the vaccine. Just shows act of futile defiance. There is no, there is no, what is that? I can just term it as sadistic pleasure, you know, they get it. And you feel you are the one, you know, you can do this, but that's not the case. You're endangering many people by single person not doing this. Now, one of the things that, one of the things I find very interesting coming up now, and there have been a number of articles about it, is the way that the pandemic has affected our lives. Now, we all know that a good percentage of my friends anyway, stay inside much as they can. A lot of people who work in offices and companies where they can afford to work at home are working at home. And so there's two factors there, and there have been a number of opinion pieces appearing in the national newspapers about this. There's two factors. One is that it changes the nature of the workplace. It changes the nature really of the economy. And any politician who tells you that the economy is, you know, just the same ready to come back, roaring back the same way it was is really lying to you because it has changed. This is our third year. And people change. I mean, if you're 30 years old, one tenth of your life has been invested in COVID. You're just not the same. Your world is not the same. But the second part of that, which is in an article this morning in the New York Times, is that it's a psychological challenge to go back. If you've been out for two years going on three, and you go back, you're intimidated by that. You're really not ready for it, especially if you were, you know, a quiet person to begin with, a shy person to begin with, you've enjoyed being away from the crowd. Now they tell you have to go back and work again. And you have issues, personal issues, psychological issues. And this isn't one person. This is millions of people. So you have what I want to call it. You have a national issue over A, what has happened to our economy? We haven't heard the whole story yet while we've been out. And the second is B, what is going to happen in the future because we're going to have trouble going back. What are your thoughts? Yes, this is so true. There is a fear of society which has set in such a way that you prefer the comfort of your zone. You don't want to really get out and be there and go get it. I can do it working from my space and I can do it. I'm more comfortable. I'm more safer in my little cubicle. So I don't want to. This has become psychologically, they have just imploded and they want to stay comfortable and safe. So it's a mental case issue or mental health issue. But it's justified in a way that if we go out and we see a person without masks walking towards us, we are going to see a virus walking towards us. So we are going to be fearful for our lives. Now, each person is a threat. If I touch something in the market, I'm going to feel it's the virus. Maybe I need to wash my hands. I need to sanitize my hands. So that OCD has set in that you don't want to associate yourself with the outside world and the economy which is working with your mind. Mind skill will work. But people working in construction, people working in places where they have to work outside, they have to continue, isn't it? They have to have no fear. So it's a divisive society in that manner also. Some people have to go out for the job. Some people can afford to stay inside for the job. Those who can afford to stay inside are not going to come out till it's an endemic. It's so true. You mentioned what happens you're walking down the street. You see somebody coming coming at you. The problem is I go to my office and somebody wants to have a meeting at a table. Mask or no mask, I don't know this person's background. I don't know whether this person just came from a high COVID area. I don't know whether this person is living in a family that said COVID. I can't really ask him. It's not politics to ask him. And yet so I internalize all that. And I just go paranoid on it. I like the person walking down the street. I say, well, there's a chance here that everyone in the room is a risk for me. And so certainly I'll wear a mask, but I'm still not protected. My conduct, my behavior is different. There's a paranoid level to it that I don't think I can escape. If I'm a thoughtful person, I'm going to be concerned about the way I spend my time during the day outside the house. Where are we going on this? We have some people who are willing to not wear masks and engage in violence to protest any mandate from masks or vaccines. You have political implications in the school boards and various legislative bodies around the country that people do not agree on violence and political divisiveness. It's happening over this issue. I blame Trump for it, but there it is. We have it. It's not going away. It's been with us now for so many years, three years already. And then I have my own reaction to the world around me. It's a different reaction. And then I multiply that by 330 million in this country and 7 billion around the world. And I say there are profound changes happening in our world. Jay, we have grown up in society. Think about the generation which is growing up in this closed world. They don't know what is a society, what is intermingling. They, the kids, they think about a mask, about standard. It's become their way of life. So if they are growing up in fear, it's a change. And when you say, when you have said that the world has changed, there is a magnum of truth in that, that the world has really, really changed. It's not going to be the same again. They're not going to be able to go and have people or be with people. Society, your absorption of the protocols is now mandatory and inculcated in us in such a way, because we have seen that this virus, the way it affects is death. That is what is brought this fear inside. When you see, when a child sees one, one, one member of the family pass away due to COVID, psychologically, it's going to hurt. That because this virus has bought about death, that's why it has profound impact on this world. If this virus would have affected one limb, or it would have bought pain in our body, or it would have bought just dizziness, fine, we would have accepted it. But because death is associated, finality is associated with this virus, that is the fear. And that's why our mental pressures are so acute. How do you reconcile the argument that people make that, okay, okay, we've had, millions of cases, but the percentage of people actually dies, it's 1%. Whatever it is, maybe more than that. But how do you reconcile that? Because to me, it's not just that they die, it's that they die needlessly. And the other thing is, like the victims of genocide, the Holocaust, the victims of war, they're not around to tell us what their experience was. They're not around to make us sad hearing how it was for them. The story is told by the survivors. And the story from the survivors is always different than the story from those who died. So what do you say when they say, well, it's not a small percentage. And therefore, it really can't affect our world as much as you say. What do you say to that? Yeah, it's a small percentage that dies. But a person affected with COVID, a part of their lung, when it was affected by the Delta variant, a part of their lung became inactive forever. So if you get affected by COVID again, one more part of the lung goes. That is making you weaker and weaker inside. So they do have long term implications. And this is such a medical situation that it has not been researched for a long time. So we can't pinpoint this is the case with finality. So it is always going to be maybe if or rather like it should, but nobody can say with finality, this is there, this is bad, and it can be. But the death associated with it is not a small number because we saw the grim photographs all over the world from Brazil to India. They were heartbreaking images and heartbreaking videos. We could see that there were mass graves. How can you deny mass graves just for one virus which originated in Wuhan? So it is a dangerous thing. You do need to take precautions. You can't make it so miniscule that it doesn't affect you. It can affect anybody, any moment, any time. Yeah, I've known a number of people who've had breakthrough cases after being fully vaccinated and boosted, and they had a terrible time. Some of them not, but a number of them that I know here in Hawaii had a terrible time. Well, I think the real casualty, your final thought about this, the real casualty goes beyond those who got sick and those who died. The real casualty is the global penetration, the global stress, the global change in our global society. Because when we look again, and I think the reporting will probably increase on this, there will probably be more stories in the newspaper about it, is that the world is changing. We don't know the full extent of the change yet, but it'd be really clear that this is not a good change. This is a change that shrinks our life, our expectancy, our perception, our ability to enjoy every day. It shrinks that. And so that is a ubiquitous pandemic, all of its own. Humanity ain't what it was. Your thoughts? Yeah, we have to just survive, survive, survive the mutations and adapt. So we have to just move through this phase. And that is possible only with a total 100% global cooperation chain. And fear is justified right now. It is absolutely justified because the economic and social implications of this virus are still to be explored. We need to look at how economy is affected by this virus and social implications and how we conveniently blame governments for it. So personal responsibility and keeping us safe is in our own personal hands, not to associate with people wearing our mask and getting our boosters is our only way out of this zombie-like situation. You heard it here on Think Tech. It's a zombie-like situation and probably going to get more zombie in the future. Thank you so much, Rubmani Kandekar, an expert in global COVID, wrote the book and who joins us from time to time here on Think Tech in various capacities and subjects to discuss these things. Thank you, Rubmani. Thank you so much. Aloha.