 Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. And guess what? It's Thursday morning at 9 a.m. We have Mike, the word out chief scientist. We're going to talk today about the role of immunity response in COVID. Very important. We understand this. We all have to understand what's going on. That's the thing about living in the 21st century. Good morning, Mike. Good morning, Jay. Good to talk to you. Well, you looked, you looked up a little bit about immunity response and you're going to tell us about it. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we ran some basic, developed some basic simulations, a very oversimplified, not really COVID-19 predictive, but just illustrate some of the principles of the different scenarios for how immune response might go. So the first slide, I'm going to kind of lay out the basics of what the ideal is for herd immunity. So if you go to the next slide. What you're going to see, what you're seeing is the black area is pixels that there's cells or people that are not immune or still vulnerable. The green areas, people that have gotten sick and become immune and the yellow or the people that have died. This simulation is really simple, simple rules. So you got about a 30% chance that if a cell touches a cell, it's infected. It becomes infected too. So if you touch a whole bunch of cells that are infected, you have a very high chance of becoming infected. What you see at the end of the simulation here is about 88% of the people have been infected in this cells that have been infected in the simulation. About 2% of them have died because that's the parameter I set, 2% death rate. What's interesting is the large number of voyage where there's people that have not been exposed to the virus or cells that have not been exposed to the pathogen aren't immune, but they aren't sick either. They've been protected by herd immunity. So this community being isolated, not having any external inputs of virus has achieved herd immunity. Does that mean that they were never exposed to it? Right. They have some proxies. Right. Just sheer random luck in this case. So it's not that the cells that are in the larger black regions are having a special property that protected them. They just got lucky that that group of cells was not infected. But the infection went around them and created a barrier around them so that no one virus could come in from the outside from the rest of the community. And so they lucked out. They're still vulnerable, but they're not going to, they're not sick. They're not going to get sick as long as this community stays isolated. So on the next slide, I show a what if, what if you could slow it down? What if you could actually, so in the first slide, every cell out of 30% chance of being infected, if it touched an infected cell in this slide, I've dumped that down to 25%, a much lower, a lower chance of being infected. And under these conditions, the disease doesn't reach the entire community. It fizzles out. So it still reaches like half, more than half the community, but it's fizzled out before it reached the entire community. So masking, social distancing, hand washing, all those things just shows what the effect might be. It'll limit the spread of the virus in your community and save a bunch of infected possibilities. And what you're saying is this is the end of it. That with this process you just described, it never goes further. Not unless you have some external inputs. So on the next slide, we'll show what happens if you have external inputs. This slide is the same as before, except now every 10 weeks or so, an external source comes in and provides another seed. And so you can see more than one green area growing. And so instead of being self-limiting, this is continually being reseeded with new infection. And it's going to go on for a while because what's going to happen is you'll see black voids where there's no infection yet, where people have not been infected. So the infected people, their diet become immune. Immunity is permanent in this simulation. And as you bring in people from outside who are infected occasionally, you'll start to see those voids fill in, which means that nobody is really, really safe if you have these external sources of infection. And this is what they tried in Sweden. They tried kind of isolating the old age homes and trying to get the infection to go around them. But then they had these random incidents where somebody would get in every once in a while and a lot of old people died in the nursing homes. So it's just, it's a really hard game to play. And we can let this go on a while because you'll see that all these black areas start to fill in, but that's the basic principle. The blue curve, the lower left, the big initial, first big spike is what you would get if you, from the initial infection, there's a huge spike. And then it dies down very long times without any new clusters. Then there's sporadic clusters of new infections showing up. And that's what the herd immunity has provided you with a way to control your spikes of infection after your initial big, big spike. But then you still have these sporadic reinfections from outside, but you can actually predict, you know what their size is going to be. You don't know exactly where they're going to happen, but you know about how big those clusters are going to be and you can plan for them. And they stay on the low side, right? Am I right? They're not going to jump up the way the original, the original chart jumped up. Right, right. They won't jump up there on chart because most of the people in most of the cells in this pandemic simulation have acquired immunity, permanent immunity from having been sickened by the virus or they're dead. So in this case, there's about one and a half percent end up dead, but it keeps going. It keeps going as the, as the boy had spilled in, more cells will die and more cells will become immune. And so now this doesn't account for the fact that some cells might have a higher susceptibility to death. Some cells might be low. This is really simple simulation. It's illustrate general principles. So far, Mike, it would appear that this one is closer to the reality. Yeah, it's closer to the reality. So, yeah. So the point is that you're, you can try to protect certain communities in certain subsets and you might get lucky and not be initially infected. They will then subsequently be still at risk from external sources, you know, somebody going to the mainland and bringing the virus back or some tourists coming in, something, you know, there's a random receding. And that's the way society suffered before there were vaccines. You would have a YB, you know, you have a wave of infection and then it would die down. Then there'd be somebody else coming in with a dizzy, the wave of infection and it would just continue like that. And then eventually protecting the whole community. So now the fourth slide shows what happens if. The immunity isn't permanent. So here in the case, the immunity wanes after about 20 weeks. So you see the green cells turning, turning green as they get infected. Blue is contagious. Yellow is dead. Black is susceptible. Green is immune. The immunity doesn't last. So this thing just keeps going on and on and on spreading around the community. And there's some external, you know, seedings going on here as well, just as in the previous simulation, but you end up with, you know, five to 20% immune depending on where you are in the cycle. And it just goes in waves. I mean the blue curve at the lower left shows how the new case is a huge spike. Just like, you know, the first couple of years of the normal infection where everybody gets permanently immune, then it dies down. And there's another, after a couple of years, there's another huge spike, then it dies down. And it's sort of unpredictable. Well, it's predictable in a general sense, but these spikes don't get smaller in area. They may get low. They may not at the same height, but they'll have fatter wits or. And so you'll end up in reinfecting about the same number of people. Everybody's going to be susceptible, except for the people who died. Of course, this reminds me of this series I've been watching on Amazon. About the black death, the black clay. In the sixth century in the 14th century and some extent in the 19th century here in Hawaii. And it follows the same kind of pattern. Of course they didn't have any medicine for it. It follows the same kind of pattern where it, you know, you do develop a kind of herd immunity, but it comes back every, you know, five or 10 years and other outbursts here or outbursts there. And it keeps going like for centuries, it keeps going. And I guess the, you know, that is, that is troubling in the sense that we don't know if we can achieve immunity by way of a vaccine that will last indefinitely. But we could have vaccine or no, we could have this kind of repetition going forward. Yeah, that's the problem with the lubonic plague was a bacterium for which we don't have vaccines. Very few bacteria can actually vaccinate against. So you don't acquire permanent immunity after infection with your cinephestis, you know, the plague bacterium. And so you can have this receding, you're also susceptible again. You can get plagued more than once. And every time the reaper gets bite at you, you know, you could die. And that's it. If your immunity doesn't last, and we're hoping that the T cells may provide that memory, the memory T cells might provide memory, make last immunity. But if the antibody responses indication, the immunity of the coronavirus may not last, and you'll end up being susceptible for a long time and having to continually protect the community, either through vaccines, if there's a vaccine that lasts more than six months, that's great. If it lasts forever, that's the ideal. We don't know yet how long the vaccine immunity will last. Well, when it stops lasting, it's probably graduated, right? It doesn't stop on a certain day. And then you don't have it, you know, so that perhaps the immunity is going to decline. And therefore you still have some limited resistance to the disease as it declines. But I guess if you had no vaccine, and if you had no antibodies, no immunity, whatever, A, you could get it again. And B, this is my question, is when it gets a second time, is it the same or is it worse? Well, my understanding from what I've read is that it can be worse because you've already gotten some damage to your lungs and possibly to your heart. So your body has been weakened by the first bout with this coronavirus. Statistically speaking, you know, some people may completely recover with no lasting effects and be just as strong, but some people will have lasting damage. And then the second time around, infection is more likely to kill them. So that's, yeah, that's the thing about this disease. You don't want to go through multiple bouts. You don't want to go through one bout at all if you can avoid it. So we might end up having to have a vaccine where every year you have to get re-vaccinated and be like the seasonal flu, you know, every year, like a seasonal coronavirus vaccine. You know, what's a little troubling if you make the comparison to the Pestis bacteria back in the plague. I mean, we don't have plague anymore because we have antibiotics, you know. Right, antibiotics kill the plague. But in the day, it created an opportunistic opportunity for other antigens and other diseases. So you would have a raging plague. And then as people weakened, then you'd have another disease come on top of that. So you had a cocktail of antigens working on you. It was hard to survive that. Yeah, it's got a seasonal flu that might weaken you. And then the coronavirus comes along, takes advantage of your weakened state to infect you. And it's coronavirus more, far more likely to kill you. It's the start of COVID-19 virus. Yeah. And there's a hypothesis that some other coronaviruses that cause common colds might provide cross immunity, but their cross immunity is probably going to be no more long lasting than to this COVID-19 itself. So you can't really rely on giving everybody the common cold to protect you. Even if that hypothesis proves out that the common cold can provide some common cross immunity. There's so many unknowns yet, that need to be really tested thoroughly. But that's the thing that really bothers me. If I can take a short digression here. Unknowns, this is 21st century. We've been to the moon. We have solved the most incredible problems. We have come out on information technology you wouldn't believe. And yet these fundamental things affecting life and death of the species, we don't know. We don't know how it works. We spent more videos and around these things have been around forever. I mean, it's like viruses live within us for the last two, 300,000 years in the development of the species. And they're going to be with us for a long time. And it's almost like we really can't do anything about it. Ultimately. Well, no, we wiped out smallpox. And we're wiping out polio. If we can get the Taliban to let the vaccinators into Pakistan and Afghanistan. Surround the verge of wiping out certain viral diseases. And we just about wiped out Guinea worm, which isn't a virus, but it's a disease that caused a lot of misery in the world. As long as there's been humans around on most. So we have successfully wiped out a bunch of diseases. What we're seeing though now is, you know, people saying, oh, I don't want to get back. So I don't trust the vaccines. Well, the vaccine will save your life polio. Do you know anybody who's caught polio lately? I know. And when I was a kid, you know, the vaccine came out right before I was born. My parents must have been living in terror until I could actually get that vaccine. And now I don't have to worry about polio. Don't worry about smallpox and how to get my flu vaccine every year. I don't have to worry about the flu so much. The vaccine isn't perfect. There's, but the thing is that, okay, this virus, which we haven't seen much of is now flowering. And hopefully we can beat it or subdue it. But I'll tell you now, I'm 100% guaranteed that when this one's done, there'll be another one. There will be another one. Yeah. And so what we, what we have to do is invest more in the predictions of where the viruses are going to be the research because Corona viruses, they were just dismissed as, Oh, that's just the common cold. They're not going to worry about them. And this one comes along. So now there's research funding, but we were ignoring it for a long time. We were putting money into the wall street casino instead of into our public health. And we really need, you know, governments to step up and allocate resources appropriately for the common good. We need governments to actually be sponsors of clinical trials for medicines. So we don't have to rely on companies to do it. Because companies only do this a big profit motive, which is understandable. But, you know, for a vaccine, you want to be cheap, widely available and such and give doses to everyone without anybody not being able to afford it. Because if anyone is at risk, everyone's at risk with this disease. So what we need is a new paradigm for how we conduct medical research because we are scientists can do it. It is brilliant people in the United States, Europe, China, India. We can solve these problems, but we have to make it a priority for our societies to solve these problems and really put the right funding behind it and better public education. People really need to be getting vaccinated. There's no excuse for a measles outbreak in the United States of America in 21st century. No excuse. I mean, yeah, measles should have been a thing of the past in the first world. Because nobody can vaccinate against it and save lives. Well, you're being kind to say that it's a question of public education. I rather think you make a, you make a law. And I think ultimately they'll have to be laws like this. You see, if you want to take a chance on this, you can't do it in public. You have to do it in jail. And then we don't. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. But I say so that matter of public education. Because we live in a democracy. And the voters have to vote in the politicians who will make the laws. And so if the politicians. Won't make the laws. Or they vote in politicians who are hostile to making laws promoting public health. And we still have a problem and it's still a problem of education. We've got to educate the voters. That, you know, this, this is science. This is real. And we need to protect ourselves as a nation, as a world from these threats. I mean, if it was space aliens coming down with ray guns, yeah, we'd be mobilizing the military and developing new weapons. This is an invisible pathogen that, you know, it was, and it still wants to kill us just like the space aliens, the ray guns would want to do. I mean, I mean, it doesn't have conscious intention, but it's, you know, it's still going to go after us. So maybe, you know, we can find out about immunity and now the body has natural defenses and processes to deal with its antigens that it has not met. Or maybe it's met in another form. Yeah. Maybe we'll learn something here in this thing, experience with COVID that we can apply against the next pandemic and some other antigen. Are we doing that? Or is the focus on just dealing with COVID, which would be very narrow minded, I think in these times. Well, there are coming up whole new approaches to creating vaccines and that approaches that don't rely on just looking at the surface proteins, the virus that look at targeting the entire virus. So it's inside the virus capsule as well. So there's whole new approaches to this, developing, which would then have applications to other diseases in the future. The more tools in our arsenal for developing vaccines, the better. But you say it's a global experience and you have to save everybody to save anybody. And it's like we were talking in another show yesterday about global economics. The way to get to improve the global economy is trade. It's exchanging goods and services among nations and putting the borders down, not bringing them up. That's the way to have a global economy that befits everyone. Sounds to me like science must put the barriers down. Science must, you named a number of countries that are working on this, but there are barriers to that, especially right now in this administration. I mean, if you're going to make the Chinese close their consulate in Houston and otherwise put barriers between us and the Chinese, it does stand in the way of joint research, which could be very valuable. So to me, it's like trades. You have to collaborate on an international basis in order to achieve a meaningful vaccine. Yeah, it's like we shut down the research group that was actually looking at bats in China and trying to understand how these viruses involved in bats because there were Chinese researchers involved. The wrong way to go in my opinion, we should be doing everything we can as a species to save ourselves from these viruses, understand these viruses, to make sure, because if everybody in the world isn't safe, like the simulation showed, if you think you have herd immunity in your group, but there's still people vulnerable, if you're trading, if there's any visitors, if there's any external source, anywhere, it could be you had to go visit your sick auntie in Kansas and now you come back and you spread the virus. Nobody's safe. Nobody's safe if everybody isn't safe. And to think that we can be isolated from each other is not realistic. I mean, even in the age of sale, sailing ships, it wasn't realistic. It took maybe longer, but just met there was more time for immunity to wane between exposures. Tell me if this is relevant, Mike. You know, in my earlier days, I was fascinated with the notion of bacterial colonies. And what I understood from people who studied more science than I did is that a bacterial colony has a life cycle. It starts out knitting itself together. You can hardly see it, but it getting stronger under the hood. And then one day it sort of pops up, goes into the logarithmic phase and, you know, huge growth in the number of bacteria. And then it hits a plateau and it fiddles around in the plateau for a while. And one day it drops down the other side into the death phase. And what I understood was every bacterial colony goes through that process. It's physics. It's a rule of the natural world around us. And there's only one exception to the death phase. And that's when you introduce bacteria from another colony. And that reinvigorates the bacteria in the first colony. And this seems to me a parallel here. I mean, you know, take a virus that's a scourge around the world. It ultimately will, I don't want to use Trump's word disappear, but it ultimately will expire. And the way that you're in a given location and the way that it can reinvigorate itself is with the introduction of other viruses, other antigens that reinvigorated. Am I right? Is there a reasonable parallel here? Well, like one simulation showed, even if you don't have a different virus, if your immunity wanes, you can go through the long periods where you don't have that much virus in your community. And then it ramps up. And in the simulations, the same virus, same people, same cells that could be infected, same citizens, if you will. But it just goes through these waves and cycles. So you think you beat it and now it's back. Now with this virus, it will evolve and it will evolve faster than humans will. It takes us many generations. You mean mutate. Right. It will mutate. Most mutations might make it less virulent, but it will some of them might make it more virulent. We don't know yet how that will go. We know that if it kills 90% of its victims, it will be self-limiting. If it kills 2%, there's no reason for it to be self-limiting. What if it starts killing 3%? What if it just starts being more contagious? What if it becomes as contagious as a measles? So right now coronavirus, on average, if you leave it alone, two or three people get infected by every person who has the disease. For the measles, it's seven. It's about seven people. The measles are so contagious. If a person with a measles has the disease, leaves the room and you walk in 15 minutes later, you can catch it. Doesn't that happen with coronavirus too? That's not clear. If you can do it that way, if it's that long or the droplets have to be a little larger. There's some evidence that masks are effective because they block the larger virus droplets and limit the dose of virus you're inhaling. And it seems that in this case, a high dose may make the poison that a high dose infecting you overwhelms your body's defenses quicker than they can mobilize. A low dose infecting you, you might get a mild case. That was just in the research news in the last couple of days. So measles seems to be, doesn't take much at all to infect you. It looks like coronavirus takes a little bit more. But what if it becomes as dangerous, as infective as measles? Then we've got a whole nother problem. But the delivery system is still in the droplets of the aerosol. That is by air, by breathing. And so what I was going to say is it's okay to buy more masks than you think you need. It's a good investment for the future, even if we come up with therapeutics that are impressive. And vaccines that last at least for a little while, I think our species is going to need masks for a longer while. Yeah, because it's going to be years before we can distribute a vaccine to everybody in the world. Even if the vaccine was available next week, they proved it works, safe, et cetera. It'll be years before they can get it to everybody in the world. And so we're going to be dealing with this for years. So if I asked you on a given, given what we know about the immunity system, given the research, given the focus on research, you know, we haven't, as you said, we haven't focused on it. Maybe we should have been focusing more on it. We've been focusing on other areas of science and technology, but not this one. But all of that considered, would you say that on behalf of the species that we should be optimistic, very optimistic, not so optimistic? On behalf of the species, we should be optimistic. I mean, on behalf of any particular individual, that's another matter. We'll solve these problems. I mean, if the United States closes its borders and says, we're not going to accept any vaccines from other people, the Brits will do it, or the Europeans will do it, or the Chinese will do it, or the Indians will do it. Somebody is going to crack this problem. And the species will be fine in the long run. I mean, yes, we might be dealing with this virus for years, but it's not going to wipe us out. Well, even plague didn't wipe us out. I mean, so plague wipes out half the people in Europe in the 13th, 14th century. And then the Europeans go on to take over the world anyway. I mean, just because everybody else is he, you know, not, not conquering things. So, given that, so the speed, by me, given that I'm reminded of these baskets of stock you can buy, or you used to be able to buy on the stock exchange where you say, you're interested in energy. Okay. Here's a basket of stocks of energy. And, you know, whether this company makes it or that company makes it. You believe that energy is the big thing by the basket. It seems to me that we don't really know yet what company is going to come up with, you know, a vaccine. It's not clear. And one company was quoted yesterday to say when the government asked them, are they going to give this away? No, no, we're looking for profit. We want to get a return on our cap. We put a lot of money in, in addition to what the government put in. And so you say to yourself, well, I don't, but I don't know which one. So maybe there's a basket, a basket of COVID stocks, everybody working on it, put all those stocks in one basket, invest in the basket. That wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm, I'm almost certain there's an ETF for COVID-19 research and development vaccines. And you got five exchange credit fund. It provides huge fees. The, you know, probably a couple, you could buy your own, you could do your own research and buy individual stocks if you want. But you went, yeah, it's very hard to predict who the winner is going to be. So you want to put your eggs in, you know, and you have more than one egg in that basket. You might buy the Pfizer, you might buy AstraZeneca, you might buy, you know, I don't know the names of the ones in India, if even the Chinese ones are even on the stock exchange. So yeah, you can buy a healthcare, I know you can buy a healthcare ETF. You might be able to buy a COVID ETF now. And if I were in that business, it would be really smart for me to put together such an ETF and be offering it for sale. Very interesting. It demonstrates your essential optimism, Mike. Right, right. No, I, yeah, the species will survive. The individuals will die. There may be even countries that go into decline because they are ignoring this thing. You know, it strikes me that if you, if you, if you move the frame back for a month or two months, we knew there was COVID and we, we talked to, you know, incessantly about vaccines and to a lesser degree therapeutics. You know, but we didn't know any of the details. We didn't know who was working on it. We didn't know the mechanisms. We didn't know about the T cell thing you mentioned before. We didn't know about the interaction with the, you know, the immune system. But now we hear about it. And now we can drill down. Now there are articles, not only in scientific journals, but in the mainstream media about what companies are working on what and what their timeframes are. I don't know if I believe what the government says about this, but I mean, I take a lot of these articles. And after a while, it gives you an idea about what's happening out there in science. And so that means Mike that we have to continue following this because my, my guess is there'll be more coming out about it every day. Right. Well, we're going to hit, you know, another million people in the United States sick with it, have been sick with this thing in two weeks, two weeks after that, another million people. And we're on track to hit six million people by first week of September. In the United States alone. And it's out of control. So yes, we're going to be dealing with it for a while. And it does worry me that people might be scared away from the election in November because they don't want to risk being in a crowd and getting the virus. We'll have to deal with that as a democracy as a society, figure out how to work around that. Because we really, really need a vibrant healthy democracy. And we can't let this stupid virus be the thing that takes it away from us. Yeah. The way things set up, it's not only we need the democracy because it's a better or more humane way to govern ourselves. But, but it's clear to me that we need a democracy because that helps us make better decisions about public health. Yes. And it's therefore becomes life and death. That's why for the moment we really needed democracy. Yeah. It is life and death, you know, the Chinese or not democracy, the real democracy, they have elections, but they're, you know, only the party, one party allowed. And they were in denial for a long time. They denied the severity. They weren't listening to the people. They weren't allowing healthy debate. They finally couldn't ignore it anymore. But it took them a while and then the thing got out of control. And you see that happening in all kinds of countries in the world where the leadership doesn't want to have healthy debate. You can see it in Brazil, sought in Russia and other Russians. Have this disease like a fourth, you know, largest nation in the fourth, most cases in the world. And then by no means got the population to have that level of caseload. I mean, they're like half the US population, if that. So we're, we see where democracy is have healthy debate. Like, you know, European Union, they've done an amazing job. Yeah. With the controlling this thing and coming to a consensus and how to control this thing. European Union, maybe the safest place to live right now. Well, people say that I really, except for Hawaii, we're very good in Hawaii because we have an ocean protecting us. We've got a governor that's listening to enough science to say, look, quarantine the visitors until we have a vaccine. Yeah. And then everybody needs to wear a mask. Right now you have to wear a mask. You're going to go to the gym, which makes perfect sense. You're breathing heavy. You're sweaty. You know, there's not much circulation in most gyms, you know. So you've got to actually take those extra precautions. So we have a government here that listens, governor here that listens to enough science that we are very, very safe in Hawaii. We'll see what happens when the tourists come back in full force. Yeah. And we have a, we have a vantage point where we can look out to places, perhaps less fortunate than we are about how this is going. And we can see, we can read those scientific journals. We can, we can read the mainstream media. We can get a handle on the numbers from here. And I think, you know, to me, the big challenge is that people here should not be complacent. You know, if we're suffering too, maybe we will, we have to know we have to be aware. We have to raise the level of awareness. So that's why you and I have to meet from time to time here of a couple of weeks and check in on what's going on because I can tell you one thing. It's going to change. It is going to change. Yeah. I'm optimistic. Although I realize that I could die. Stay healthy. Stay healthy. Take care. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Joey. Aloha. Aloha.