Vaccines: What Next?

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is december 8th 2020. yesterday was pearl harbor day i believe december 7th 1941 a day that shall always live in infamy and today was the day that we entered world war ii for those who are history buffs anyway i did want to make a quick video because i read a great article from a guy named wallace wallace wells out of new york magazine and the title of the article is had we had we had a vaccine the whole time so it came out yesterday at new york magazine and basically the the crux of the article is that from january on two days after we received the genetic sample from a very brave person in china who received significant punishment for leaking the genome to us madarana was able to actually create a vaccine so the vaccine that's going to be approved within the next two weeks by moderna was identical is identical to the one that we had in january so from january to december the entire time first wave second wave stopped the spread lockdowns all these things we had a cure basically just sitting there waiting to go and the fact that this existed really inspired a gentleman named florian cromer who's from mount sinai and he wrote a wonderful preprint pre-proof for journal called cell and the title of it is pandemic vaccines how are we going to be better prepared next time and basically he creates a kind of a road map for how to make a vaccine in three to four months and it turns out that if we as a society pre-spend about three billion dollars we can systematically work our way through all the different potential pandemic causing viruses and basically pre-design what we would need to have to rapidly bring a vaccine to market within three to four months now i have never in my life seen something so politicized as i've seen coronavirus i've seen a whole spectrum of opinions from people who say this is the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity to people who say it's a hoax and the reality is that we probably politically overreacted and we probably could have done things very differently and over the next 10 years that's going to be vociferously debated amongst policymakers in society what could we have done differently and there's a lot of blame to be pushed around and now politicians are going to do what they do best blame those who are no longer in power scapegoat them and pretend like everything's been solved and this will never happen again under their watch because they're brilliant the people they replaced were morons they always do that and the truth of the matter is that had we just been better as a society we could have probably prevented the vast majority of the 250 000 who have died and the 200 plus thousand who will die by april now before you say well those are all old people that's true if you look at the cdc statistics 92 of those who died are over the age of 55. the vast majority of those over the age of 55 were people who have pre-existing medical conditions that aren't exactly the healthiest of people children for example less than 100 children under the age of 14 died of coronavirus during this entire pandemic in the united states worldwide i think it's less than a thousand out of the million plus people who die so the key here is not the death toll the the reality is that this is about 10 times more lethal than influenza just on the number set it's the fact that we now have hundreds of thousands of people in america well over a million people worldwide who are going to be suffering for the foreseeable future years to decades if not longer something called post covid syndrome if you take a look at their overall health after contracting the disease their lungs look a bomb went off inside of them they suffer brain damage from being ventilated they suffer permanent heart damage a vast majority of them have severe fatigue and other conditions that debilitate them this is effectively the new gulf war syndrome of our time and it's a terrible reality that affects two to three people for every person who dies about ten percent of the people who have lost their sense of smell anosmia have not regained it nine months after contracting coronavirus that's a permanent disability imagine never being able to smell or taste things or taking years to regain that the joy of food completely removed natural gas in your home you can't smell it you can no longer smell your loved ones or familiar places like grandma's home it's reality a lot of people have to live and what blows me away is that we've had effectively a cure for this since january we gave emergency youth authorization to rem deserve a drug that has dubious clinical value for the vast majority of people who receive it that is has a pretty worrisome side effect profile we have an emergency youth authorization to many other things to people yet somehow some way rna vaccines or other such things we couldn't even entertain the idea of an earlier emergency use authorization especially for very vulnerable populations and except the five percent case fatality rate and whatever your feelings of chronovirus are we now live in an age where we will encounter pandemic diseases every 10 to 20 years because of globalization and because we now live in the age of synthetic biology right here today right now in south america there's something called the andes virus you've probably never heard of it before it is an incredibly worrisome disease because it has a 32 percent case fatality rate so one out of every three people die who contract it it's a variant of haunt the virus and it can be spread by an airport vector similar to chronovirus that exists and we're very lucky that it has yet to become a pandemic and it looks it's under control but what happens when it's not and what happens when somebody in a lab takes something as lethal as ebola and combines that with something as contagious as measles and puts it together should we as a society with a 70 case fatality rate wait 12 months 24 months 36 months for therapeutics and vaccines to be brought to market to bear reality is that biology is evolved to a point where a small group of people with malicious intent will have the ability to bring something like this to the world within the next decade to two decades we now have to ask difficult questions as a society about how we will respond to these things in the coming years one thing that i care a lot about being a libertarian is that mask wearing and social distancing does not become the new normal indefinitely and we allow the fear of potential pathogen to permanently change the way that people interact with each other the reality is that millions of americans have fundamentally changed handshakes are no longer there hugs are no longer there we view people as potential threats and vectors of disease rather than as fellow humans if that becomes the new normal it's going to dramatically change the culture of all societies and that cannot be allowed to become the new normal on the other hand we now live in a world where we face a reality that pandemics could happen on a decade-by-decade if not sooner basis some of which are man-made a lot of people believe for example the wuhan virus is man-made and a lot of virologists who say there's no evidence to that okay but it is certainly suspicious the origins given that it happened to be leaked in the very type of lab that studies these things it wasn't a small town in rural china it was right next to the very place that studied sars so if not that then the next one so i guess the point of this video is for everybody to take a step back from their politics and take a step back from their preconceived notions and understand that this has been a wake-up call for the entire world we will have three tasks before us one is to get back to the old normal and make that the new normal we need to get back to a world where we don't look at each other as vectors for disease and walk away and don't hug and don't shake hands and we all social distance we have to get back to a society where we're once again social however that's necessary now it might take a few months the fda for example just released a 53-page report on the pfizer vaccine and they will approve it on the 10th there's no doubt which means that by april with just madara and pfizer alone every vulnerable american will be vaccinated and in most western countries because of the astrazeneca vaccine and the vaccines coming most of the vulnerable populations will be vaccinated by june at that point there is no tangible reason for social distancing mass wearing and other measures that were short-term measures to become the new normal so the first task before us is to demand a resume of normalcy and to punish politicians that don't do that second we cannot allow the new politicians who come in to scapegoat the old and claim that everything that was done was incompetence and don't worry in the future everything will be great this recent article from florian cromer that article basically gives a road map to giving us a path to a vaccine in three to four months for all natural pandemic causing pathogens at a cost of only three billion dollars a cost of basically an aircraft carrier for the united states we're willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year for our military to hypothetically protect us from threats abroad and domestic yet we as a society will find it difficult to pay the three billion dollars necessary as an insurance policy to give us a path to rapid vaccine development within three to four months we must demand that that gets done so that this doesn't happen moving forward and as a corollary to that we must better understand where synthetic biology is going to take us where advancements in virology is going to take us and what happens if someone does combine the measles with the ebola and get something with an incredibly high infectivity spreading rate high row with a very high case fatality rate we have to be prepared for that as a society and we have to study the nations that handled this well nations like taiwan nations like vietnam who in the case of taiwan only suffered seven total fatalities despite being hyper urbanized was 20 million people and a great degree of trade we have the capacity to have an equivalent response and not destroy our economy moving forward so in the coming months to years there will be investigations there will be of course politics but especially in the united states we can no longer be passive about these things we must be vigilant tireless and highly active or else our liberties will permanently be taken from us or else we will not have an actual response plan for the next pandemic which will come in another decade or two if not sooner and the next one we will not be so lucky to have a 0.