Original subtitles

BILL GATES: Is that we have invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrence,

but we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic.

We're not ready for the next epidemic.

You can have a virus where people feel well enough

while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market.

The source of the virus could be a natural

epidemic like Ebola or it could be bioterrorism.

So this is a serious problem. We should be concerned.

Germ games not war games so that we see where the holes are.

The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001

and it didn't go so well so far the score is germs one people zero.

SIRENS AND OXYGEN TANK NOISE

CHARLES HOLZNER: Tank of oxygen that only had 30 minutes of oxygen in it

and I go well, how am I going to get home?

Can you give me a bigger canister or fill this one up more?

No, we can't.

LAUGH

You mean so I got a race home?

With only 30 minutes of oxygen? LAUGH

JEFF TIPTON: What if it's a bad traffic day, right?

Yeah. I mean the house was normally 45 minutes away.

So I said well, I'll kind of take my chances

and on the way home. I just had my head

out the window getting trying to get oxygen that way.

LAUGH

It's already by the time I got there was already out of oxygen and

my wife read the instructions really fast and got the thing working and got me

on the oxygen concentrator.

JEFF TIPTON: When I asked them and they were

closing. They wouldn't even give me the test.

I headed back to the pharmacy waiting for them to open and so begins my saga.

Try to get a Covid test so that I can fly home.

Coming to France required no test at all but to go back to my own country.

They require that I have a test done within 24 hours of flight.

ROGER DETELS: I think what what one of the major problems was that?

There was too much information going around.

Some of it was correct and some of missing

information and some of it was deliberately.

Meant to complicate the situation.

ANGEAL MARSDEN: I'm losing everything

everything I own is being taken away from me

we need to do something about this.

JEFF TIPTON: Welcome to Public Health Perspectives The Covid Story.

My name is Dr. Jeffrey Tipton. I'm a board-certified

preventive medicine and Public Health Physician.

In this documentary we will be covering the public

health response to covid in the United States.

We will look into how we succeeded handling covid

how we fail how other countries handle covid,

did they do a better job than us? We have all been impacted by covid, economically.

We've had family, friends who've gotten sick and die, even

the people who have covid and recovered are still dealing

with the after effects of covid.

It's hard to say we're covid will land but I can assure you we'll have

another epidemic in the future and we can do better job handling epidemics.

Hopefully at the end of this documentary, you'll have a better understanding of how

our public health system works of how epidemics

go how the public health system reacts.

So when the next one comes around perhaps you can get involved and

make the whole process go much better.

So what is public health?

According to the American Public Health Association

Public Health promotes and protects the

health the people and the communities where they live vlearn work and play.

Our public health system is

supposed to be there to give communities, states and

the nation the capacity to prevent disease promote

health and prepare for respond to

both acute threats and chronic challenges to health.

Every state has a public health department.

There are over 2,800 local

Health departments in the US

and of course, there's the good old CDC.

Some of the public health system responsibilities are

diagnosing and investigating health problems

and health hazards in the community informing educating

and empowering people about health issues,

mobilizing Community Partnerships, and enforcing

laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.

Such as clean water and air.

And public health departments are expected to take the lead

when a new infectious agent comes on the scene and

come up with the plan to make sure that this new infectious agent

doesn't get everyone sick or kills everyone.

ROGER DETELS: Public Health Systems have

responsibility in terms of infectious disease.

First of all for recognizing

the occurrence of a new

outbreak or repeat of

old outbreak so that

they had the responsibility to monitor.

Not only for existing infectious agents like flu,

but monitoring for new agents

that they didn't know about

before and of course, we have two

we had HIV and Ebola and

now we have SARS Cov 2,

and it's ultimately it's

responsibility of Public Health to control the epidemic.

But in order to do that they got

a responsibility to inform the public.

They also have responsibility to inform the political system

because in the end much of Public

Health intervention is politics.

Because it requires changing a behavior.

LIGHT PIANO BACKGROUND MUSIC JEFF TIPTON: And there are many complaints and

concerns that are public health system does not get enough funding.

In 2020, the CDC budget was seven billion.

The Department of Defense budget was 700 billion,

but it is estimated

that around 90 billion is spent annually on

public health in the United States.

So there's plenty of money to take care of things but money oftentimes

isn't the main problem

when things don't go well. The healthcare system in the United States is complicated.

There are Doctors, Hospitals, insurance and drug companies.

It's hard to navigate all the moving parts of the healthcare system

and public health is part of that system as well.

Our Healthcare System is split into different sectors.

There's a private, a public, and voluntary sectors

Private and public sectors supply insurance and care to most Americans.

In the private sector people get insurance

through their work on the public side

we have programs such as Medicare which covers elderly

Americans and Medicaid which covers

Americans below certain poverty threshold.

The government also provides Healthcare through things like the VA

and the Bureau of Indian Affairs

and takes care of people in prison as well.

The voluntary sector includes charitable organizations that do health research and

provide free or low-cost Health Care Services, like

the American Cancer Society or the March of Dimes.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

provides billions of dollars worth of aid to

many Healthcare non-governmental organizations.

Close to a trillion dollars is spent on Health Care in the

United States every year, but that doesn't make it good.

The US spends more of its gross domestic product

on Healthcare than any other high income

country yet ranks last in access to

care, administrative efficiency, equity and healthcare outcomes.

The federal government has the biggest

role and stake in protecting and maintaining the health of the country.

They set the tone.

They have the money. Covid-19 quickly became a federal

issue when the federal government learned of the outbreak in China.

So let's try to cover a few thousand years of public health history in a few minutes.

Humans have been on this planet for around a hundred thousand years and

during this time people have lived and people have died.

Certainly in the early years when someone

died the cause of death was often unknown, of course,

unless somebody was getting hit in the head with the rock then it was very clear

very clear how they died,

but certainly in early human civilization.

These causes of death were a mystery to most people.

The ancient Greeks got the whole public health thing

going by being into fitness, health, nutrition.

They came up with the Olympics. They saw that oftentimes disease or illness

was caused by the environment that was around somebody.

Hippocrates was an ancient Greek.

He's considered by many to be the father of Western or modern medicine.

He came up with the term epidemic which

means on the people and he had the

Hippocratic oath. The Hippocratic oath is basically a rule or guide for

physicians that if you're treating a patient,

if you don't know how to help them certainly don't hurt them.

Next we had the Romans and they believed

in a lot of the things that the Greeks did: healthy living etc,

but you know, they were engineers. They were

major engineers. They constructed aqueducts

to move the water around and sewage systems.

They were into Administration. When they came

to a place they took it over and kind of took control of it.

Next we had the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages.

These were bad years for public health; black plague came around

and you know wiped out a big chunk of the population.

That's a disease where rats were spreading a bacteria to humans and killing them.

During this time too, religion kind of trumped science and basically people

began to believe that ill people

were getting sick or dying because they had offended God

in some way and so scientists were pushed out.

There were some advancements such as

quarantine and isolation of disease patients,

but overall, it was a pretty bad time.

Next was the Renaissance which certainly was much better than the Dark Ages,

but during that time people sailed around the world from Europe

and they brought with them all kinds of diseases, smallpox, STDs tuberculosis

and basically they wiped out most of the indigenous populations where they landed.

Then we had the Age of Enlightenment and that brought further advances in

medicine and science during that time. Dr. Edward Jenner developed the

smallpox vaccine after doing a very studied analysis of how

people were contracting this disease and the microscope was invented.

During the early 1800s Dr. Snow arrived. He's considered to be

the father of epidemiology and help develop a

lot of the principles and practices of epidemiology.

He helped determine the cause of a particular cholera outbreak in London

and using his methods ended that cholera outbreak saving thousands.

He developed guidelines for handling epidemics. One is determine

what the disease is, look for possible

causes of the disease, look for potential

sources of that disease, if you have a

treatment begin treating people then go back and look at

that source and make sure that's being controlled, stop the

spread by doing things like quarantine and isolation and

then come back around again and make

sure that this disease does not come up again.

Then we had Louis Pasteur. We've all heard of pasteurized milk.

That's the guy, that's the Pasteur.

He developed an understanding that

microorganisms were the cause of many diseases.

He also developed a rabies vaccine.

Along with him, we had Robert Koch

and he was very good at identifying microorganisms again.

This is where the microscopes came into play.

He identified the vibrio cholera

bacterium and also the tuberculosis bacterium.

Once all this knowledge started to come together, there

was a bit of a sanitation revolution led by

public health departments. Public Health departments and other government

entities made sure that the water was safe to drink, inspected food

and continued to promote personal

hygiene developed treatments for various diseases vaccines etc,

made sure the garbage was being collected, tried to

control rodents and other sources of infection.

And again, most of this was led by public health departments.

Public Health departments took the lead in controlling communicable diseases.

So what are viruses? Living creatures? Not really.

Viruses are microscopic particles that exist almost everywhere on Earth.

They are present in animals, plants and other living organisms.

And sometimes they can cause some serious diseases.

Viruses are biological entities that can only thrive and multiply in a host,

that host is a living organism,

and a virus may affect one organism in one way but a different one in another.

For example a virus may get a cat sick, but the same virus won't get a human sick.

Viruses consist of genetic material with the code of protein around them.

Once they get into a host, they replicate. What's their game plan?

Nobody knows they don't talk so you can't ask them.

Smallpox was one of the first virus says to impact humans and it was

a biggie; three out of 10 people who got it died.

And those who lived were left with horrible scars.

It is estimated that smallpox killed around

one hundred million people during its time.

In the 1800s Dr. Edward Jenner developed the first

smallpox vaccine and that was the beginning of the end for that virus.

In 1959 the World Health Organization decided to put

an end to smallpox and by 1977. It was over it was gone.

So see people can get together and get rid of viruses. The first good understanding of

viruses began in the 1890s Russian botanist Ivanovsky experimented with

the tobacco mosaic virus and discovered that

the sap from a sick tobacco plant

can make another plant sick. Then Dutch

scientists by Beijering proved that the agent causing the

tobacco leaf infection was not

a bacterium and called the causative agent

of virus, a Latin word meaning slimy poisonous liquid.

In the early 1900s, Dr. Walter Reed got involved in the virus game.

His exploration of the causes of yellow fever, a viral disease

that also killed millions. He discovered that mosquitoes

were responsible for spreading the disease.

In 1908 Ellerman and Bang demonstrated that leukemia IN chickens was caused by a virus.

And then in 1918, we had the missed named Spanish flu.

No, Spain was not the country of origin for that flu.

That flu killed close to 1 million people in the United States,

mostly people between the ages of 20 and 40.

At that time, the population of the United States was 100 million.

It is estimated that that flu killed around 30 million people worldwide.

Flu comes from the Italian word influenza, which means to have an influence

and boy did it ever. Back in those days.

They had masks, but there were still people who thought that

wearing a mask was an affront to their

liberty and they had isolation and quarantine, but just like

today people got tired of that and then

soon attended events together and those

events became super spreader events.

In 1931, the German engineers Ruska and Knoll

created the first electron microscope and that

microscope allowed them to see viruses for the

first time. In 1935 urologist Wendell Stanley examined the tobacco mosaic

virus and found it to be made mostly of protein.

In 1932, the first flu vaccine was created.

In 1952, Hershey and Chase showed that it was the nucleic acid

portion of the virus that was responsible for its infectivity.

In 1953 Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine.

In 1954, Watson and Crick found the exact structure of DNA.

Then in the 80s, the HIV virus came

around and that was a tough one to figure out unfortunately,

it killed millions and still kills people before an effective treatment was found.

We still do not have an HIV vaccine. in 2002, we had our

first experience with the SARS virus.

That virus had a very high case fatality rate of around 10%

It started in China and then soon spread across

the world, but really was held in check by public

health measures. The world really came together to knock down this SARS virus.

ROGER DETELS: Those of us are working infections disease

sort of call on our experience with other infections.

There's certain general rules about how infectious diseases behave.

Well SARS Cov 2 hadn't read the book. And so we were confronted

with the disease that was behaving in ways that we had not seen before and

so we had to struggle with how to cope with that information.

And this also then complicated the situation with the public.

Because they're used to Public Health officials being able to say this is it,

this is right, this is correct, as we do with influenza,

we've got lots of experience with influenza

so we know what to say, we know how to communicate and that sort of thing.

With SARS Cov 2, we never seen an epidemic quite like it.

There had been two prior epidemics caused by

coronavirus but both of fizzled out on their own.

And it was pretty clear that Cov 2 wasn't going to fizzle out on its own.

And we're learning, that it mutates and

we're used to the situation where you get in fact it with an infectious

disease agent and if you survive.

You get immunity

and so you're protected against reinfection.

Well, that's not true for SARS Cov 2.

And the degree to which one can be reinfected. What are

the predictors about whether you're going to

be reinfected, we haven't resolved completely.

JEFF TIPTON: So what is covid-19? Covid-19 is a coronavirus.

Prior to SARS, coronaviruses were known to be the cause of the common cold.

They are called coronaviruses because

under an electron microscope their outer shell looks like a crown.

They became lethal viruses

when they mutated and became responsible for the first SARS epidemic.

SARS is severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Coronaviruses infect birds and mammals

bats are often the host of many coronaviruses,

but bats don't get sick from these viruses.

People infected by covid-19 can have a variety of symptoms and some people

have no symptoms at all. Some of the symptoms are respiratory with

cough, sputum, shortness of breath

and fever, there are musculoskeletal symptoms with muscle

and joint pain, headache and fatigue and people

get digestive symptoms with covid things such as

abdominal pain vomiting and diarrhea

Loss of smell is a cardinal sign and around 88% of symptomatic

people lose their sense of smell. Covid-19 gets in your body attaches to a receptor

on the cells for an enzyme called Angiotensin converting enzyme,

once attached to the cell covid-19 shoots its RNA into the cell.

Then the cell starts making copies of the virus.

Those copies head out into the circulation then

attach to more cells and then cycle gets repeated over and over and over.

The respiratory tract is most impacted by covid

but covid attacks other types of cells and

organ systems as well. It does work its way

into the brain and destroys brain tissue while there.

This is why some covid patients end up with memory loss

and other cognitive dysfunction.

It does directly damage heart tissue and causes

other problems with the circulatory system resulting in clots.

Covid is transmitted when people breathe

in air contaminated by droplets and aerosols

in small airborne particles contain the virus.

Infected people exhale those particles as they breathe, talk, cough, sneeze or sing.

Transmission is more likely when people are physically close

however, those particles can travel

as much as 20 feet and be suspended in the air for hours.

Unfortunately infected people can spread covid even before the symptomatic.

Once symptoms begin, then people are

highly infectious. But still can be infectious even

after 20 days after symptom onset.

You can theoretically contract covid by touching a

surface contaminated by covid but such transmissions are rare.

One person infected with covid will infect around three others.

There are several ways to test for covid. One of them is

the antigen test. That's the type of test that you might get in

a doctor's office or the kind that you pick up at CVS, these home test kits.

Those tests look for a portion of the capsule of the covid virus.

The other type of test is the PCR

test that we hear about. Those tests. look for the covid RNA virus.

Such samples are sent to a lab where they undergo a technique called

polymerase chain reaction to amplify the amount of RNA virus that is there.

PCR tests will often show positive a couple days before an antigen test will.

We will discuss the sensitivity and specificity

of such tests later on in this documentary.

There are also blood tests that are used and those show

your antibody level or whether or not your body has made

antibodies to the covid virus. So covid-19 is a cold virus

that went a little crazy. When it gets into the body it

causes a lot of damage especially to the lungs.

SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome.

JEFF TIPTON: Here's a brief history of covid. There's a lot of history there.

So it's not all that brief.

On December 12, 2019 a cluster patients in Wuhan China

began to experience shortness of breath and fever.

On December 31st 2019 the World Health

Organization is informed of a number of cases of

pneumonia of Unknown Origin detected in Wuhan, the cases has seem to

be connected to a seafood wholesale market there.

China had already begun their lockdown a couple weeks before that.

On January 25th, 2020 the CDC activates a

center level response for novel pneumonia of unknown etiology.

On January 7th, 2020, Chinese authorities identify in

isolate a novel coronavirus as the causative agent of the outbreak.

January 10th, the CDC publishes information about this virus,

January 15, Japan has its first case of covid.

January 17th, the CDC begins screening passengers on flights coming from Wuhan

at San Francisco New York and LA airports.

Of note, my friends wife was in Wuhan China during that time and she came back to LAX

on January the 20th and she was not screened for covid,

but he knew about covid so he had her put up in a hotel for 10 days.

On January 17th, we have our first covid case in

the United States in the state of Washington.

January 21st, the CDC activates its emergency response system.

January 22nd, the WHO confirms human to human spread of the coronavirus.

January 22nd, the World Health Organization convenes a big meeting to discuss

the coronavirus and decides to not do anything at that time.

Just wait 10 days to rediscuss.

On January 31st, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services

Alex Azar declares a covid emergency and at the same time a travel ban

to the US from most European countries and from China.

US citizen in China were allowed to return, as we're permanent residents.

So not a total ban.

On January 31st, the World Health

Organization, finally declares covid outbreak

a Public Health Emergency.

On February 11th, the World Health Organization decides to

call this Corona virus Covid-19.

On February 8. The CDC sends test kits to laboratory in Manhattan,

but the test end up being unreliable.

On February 23rd, Italy is in a lockdown.

On March 11th, The WHO declares a covid-19 pandemic.

March the 13th, President Trump declares a nationwide emergency.

On March 15, various

places in the United States begin to shut down including Public Schools.

March 17th, a human trial with the Moderna vaccine begins.

March the 26th, the CARES Act is approved providing two trillion in aid

to hospitals businesses and state and local government.

March of 28th, the FDA issues an emergency use authorization for Hydroxy

Chloroquine, a drug that was never proven to work.

April 3rd, the CDC recommends that all people wear masks outside the home.

By April 13th, covid had spread across the entire United States.

April 24th, Georgia, Alaska, Oklahoma decided that

they're going to partially reopen their states.

April 30th, president Trump launches operation warp speed,

to get vaccine out quickly.

On May the first, the FDA issues an emergency use

authorization for Remdesivir.

In the subsequent 18 months Remdesivir is determined not to work.

On May the ninth, the US unemployment rate is

14.7% the worst rate since the great depression.

By May the 28th, the covid death toll had surpassed 100,000.

By September 22nd, the death toll had surpassed 200,000.

On October the second, President Trump tested positive for Coronavirus.

On October 7, New Zealand declares itself virus free.

In December of 2020, the Pfizer

and Moderna vaccines are rolled out and people start to get them.

January 18th, 2021 400,000 people had died from covid.

March the 8 2021, the CDC announces that fully vaccinated

people can gather indoors without masks.

March 19th, the CDC says kids can

socially distance from three feet instead of six feet. By June 2021 the Delta variant

had showed up and a new wave of hospitalizations and deaths occurred.

In July of 2021. we started to see breakthrough infections,

which meant that the vaccine wasn't working

as well as people thought it was going to work.

By October booster shots were being recommended

and in November of 2021 Omicron showed up.

ROGER DETELS: The SARS Cov 2 epidemic, really

illustrates the problem on the need for communication.

JEFF TIPTON: So what was our response to covid? And what should it have been.

Responses to infectious disease outbreaks can be broken down into three

main categories: organization, science and communication.

More simply. What is it?

How do we know what it is? What does it do?

How prepared are we to respond? Who does it hurt? Can we stop it?

How do we stop it? Can we prevent it once here?

How do we measure cases? How do we know who has it?

How lethal is it? How do we prevent it

from infecting others? We have a vaccine?

Who gets a vaccine? What about masks?

Who gets the masks? Should we shut the country down?

Lastly, who is in charge? How much power do they have?

Who's communicating all this information and are they trustworthy?

Early on in the epidemic the CDC determined what a positive covid case is.

There were probable cases, those were people who

had all the symptoms, signs of covid yet

did not yet have a positive covid test

and there were confirmed cases. Those are people who had

a positive covid test, both of those scenarios counted

as a positive covid case.

So the analytical study of this covid outbreak is epidemiology.

Epidemiology is a study and

analysis of distribution patterns and

determinants of health in disease conditions

in defined populations.

Most public health departments have epidemiologists.

An epidemiologic investigation involves a collection and analysis of facts

or data to determine the cause of illness and Implement control measures to prevent

additional illness. Being prepared is essential to

success and responding to an infectious disease outbreak.

So were we prepared? Well, we had a very significant written plan for

dealing with covid like emergencies. We even

did a six month long training exercise at the

federal state and municipal level in

2019, called Operation Crimson Contagion. An exercise that ironically simulated a

US response to a fictitious respiratory virus

that began in China and quickly spread around the world.

Here are some of the findings from that simulation:

the Department of Health and Human Services at the

end of the training determined the US is underprepared underfunded,

and under coordinated to fight and influenza like pandemic.

LIGHT GUITAR BACKGROUND MUSIC The exercise

highlighted the lack of PPE preparedness in the

event of a global pandemic and problems

in the supply chain for medical equipment,

including ventilators and other ancillary medical

supplies. In this fictional pandemic as a virus spread quickly across the US the CDC

issued guidelines for social distancing and many

employees were told to work from home but federal

and state officials struggled to identify which

employees were essential and what equipment

was needed to effectively work from home.

There was also confusion over how to handle school children, the

CDC recommended that states delay school

openings, but some school districts decided to go

ahead with the start of school, while others followed the

federal advice causing the same types of confusion and discrepancies that mark the

response to the coronavirus. The organizers quickly

realized that the US did not have the means to quickly manufacture

more essential medical equipment,

supplies or medicines including antiviral medication

needles, syringes, n95 respirators and ventilators. That exercise ended in

October of 2019 and nothing

was done. A few months later covid hit.

This exercise also showed that we are country of

50 states with more than 50 ways of doing things.

If the federal government says shut your state

down then many of the states answer back:

Who are you again? ROGER DETELS: The public health officer

In public health system actually has power to lock people up

and enforce regulations for public health in the interests of the public.

Arizona and several of the other conservative states

have now passed laws that said no, not anymore.

That's going to be determined by the governor.

So, I mean that's a frightening thought, the governor

is going to determine Public Health policy.

It's particularly important to to get the political leadership behind you.

I would again underscore it. If you can't get the political

leaders behind you in terms of what needs to be done to control an epidemic,

then it's not going to happen.

LIGHT HORNS BACKGROUND MUSIC JEFF TIPTON: We are a country

of tremendous resources, especially at the federal level.

It's not a big deal for us to make and store billions of pieces of

PPE, but we did not act on this opportunity

to do so and when the pandemic hit,

it was impossible to play catch up as noted. Unfortunately

China was not forthcoming with the extent

of the epidemic there, the exact cause, the

lethalness, no info to us or the World

Health Organization for a month. Sure, we should

have been prepared but this made things much worse and while

they locked down people leaving Wuhan they did not

stop potentially infected people from traveling to

other parts of the world. In January of 2020

a man traveled from Wuhan to his home in Seattle

and he became the first recorded case.

Many of the first cases in the US were people who

traveled from Wuhan. As previously noted, on average covid infected patients will

infect three others. Once it started it was very hard. to stop it.

So once it was clear our country had some

cases and the people who had covid were pretty darn sick,

we turned to what are we going to do about it?

One of our first moves was to develop a test for covid

and the CDC took the lead on that and they screwed it up.

ROGER DETELS: The CDC. didn't respond effectively as they could have.

I think in retrospect there are somethings they could have done, but didn't do.

JEFF TIPTON: Speed was critical in this earlier response to covid, so

important to identify those early cases.

The World Health Organization, China, Britain, South

Korea even Russia all had functional tests before

we did. The roll out of the CDC design

test kit to state and local labs quickly became

a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent

Presently we have antigen tests and PCR tests or nucleic acid amplification

tests from mostly private manufacturer.

The tests are pretty good, but they're far from perfect. There are

those false positives and false negative. People often ask,

how good is this test? How accurate is it?

LIGHT SYNTHESIZER BACKGROUND MUSIC A test is considered to be accurate if it

compares well to a gold standard. In the case

of covid, it's a PCR test. In the world of

testing there are true positives, false positives

true negatives, and false negatives. Those values

determine the sensitivity and specificity of a test.

Sensitivity means if you have covid and the test is positive then it is sensitive.

It's a true positive. Specificity means that

if you take a test for covid and it's negative and

you don't have covid infection then it is specific.

PCR tests are very accurate or they're

good tests as long as they don't do a lot of amplifications to get to the result.

Antigen tests are pretty accurate.

As long as you do the test twice. For example,

you take a test and It's negative, you should

take it again two days later if you're symptomatic. So how many

people have been infected with covid in the United States?

We don't actually know because somebody can be

infected with covid and not take a test. And then we never knew

that they were infected.

In June of 2022 we have around a hundred million positive

covid cases in the United States and around a

million people have died as a result of covid.

So on the organization front we did poorly aside from

the bungled communications. It was clear there was

poor planning, infrastructure and cooperation among agencies.

Also if we had a better relationship with China

at the time of their outbreak, maybe they would

have given us a heads up on what's going on.

We could have gotten ahead of the Curve.

It took us months and months and months to get ahead on testing.

South Korea on the other hand. Well, they kicked our butts.

It got so bad that we were actually turning to them for tests. in 2020

South Korean officials had a plan, they decided that

they needed to test as many people as possible

as quickly as possible to figure out how

bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out

who might have come in contact with the infected people.

They decided that they needed all those people

both infected and potentially exposed to

isolate themselves to prevent the

virus from spreading any further. They mobilized

and had widespread testing, isolation and

quarantine while we were still in our pajamas.

They had a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate and they

tracked test results through a nationalized system.

No, South Korea is not a dictatorship. It's

a democracy just like us. Their entertainment

and automotive Industries are also very strong. Well, except

for Kpop, of course. Their population is

50 million. We have around 330 million

On March 1st, 2020 South Korea at about 3,700 confirmed cases.

Italy the first hot spot in Europe had 1700 and the US had just 32 cases.

I know, it doesn't make any sense. We only had 32 cases because we didn't have any

testing going on. By the end of April, Italy had 200,000 cases, the US

finally had a true number, we were above a million.

South Korea still had fewer than 11,000 cases.

South Korea's first wave of coronavirus cases was about one tenth as

big as that in the United States. It did very

aggressive case identification and contact tracing.

Sometimes to beat an epidemic you have

to give up some personal liberties. More recently South

Korea got slammed by Omicron, but because

it has such a high vaccine rate, it has one of

the lowest case fatality rates in the world and they

never really did a lockdown. While diagnostic testing

is an important tool for helping to reduce the

spread of covid, there have been challenges in

scaling up testing in the US throughout the

pandemic and we have done a horrible job of scaling

up rapid-home tests. Rapid home tests have

been identified as an important Public Health

intervention for controlling covid. It took us over 18 months to make such

tests available. In order to Break the Chain of

Infection, you have to identify the infected people

and you can't do that without tests. We have

all dealt with the difficulty of trying to find a test

and sometimes we often have to pay high amounts just to get one.

So we took an early stumble on tests and then we started on treatment and

things went more wrong.

TRUMP: Maybe than anybody, but I'm a big fan. We'll see what happens and we all

understand what the doctor said is a hundred percent correct. It's

early, but we've you know, I've seen

things that are impressive. We'll see we're going to know soon

we're gonna know soon and including safety, but you know

when you get that safety, this has been prescribed for many years for people.

To combat malaria, which was

a big problem and it's very effective. It's a strong. It's a strong drug.

So we'll see. Is it effective against SARS?

It was a very, it was, as I understand that.

Is that a correct statement? It was fairly effective with SARS.

DR FAUCI: John you've got to be careful when you say fairly effective,

it was never done in the clinical trial, they compared it to anything,

it was given to individuals and felt that maybe it worked.

That's the point. Whenever you do a clinical trial you do standard of

care versus standard of care plus the agent you're evaluating.

That's the reason why we showed back in Ebola why particular interventions worked.

REPORTER: About the possible therapies, yesterday Mr. President, you

said that they were for ready for immediate delivery immediate.

TRUMP: Yes, we have millions of units ordered. Bayer is

one of the companies, as you know, big company

very big very great company millions of units are

ordered and we're going to see what happens. We're going to be talking to

the governors about it. And the FDA is

working on that right now. The advantages that

it has been prescribed for totally different problem, but it

has been described for many years and everybody knows the

levels of of the negatives

and the positives, but I will say that I am

a man that comes from a very positive school when it

comes to in particular one of these drugs and we'll

see how it works out Peter. I'm not I'm not saying it will but I I think that

people may be surprised. By the way,

that would be a game changer, but we're going to know very soon. But but we

have ordered millions of units. It's being

ordered but from Bayer and there is another couple of companies also that that do it.

REPORTER: Fauci said there is no magic drug for Coronavirus right?

Now, which you would agree I guess on this issue...

TRUMP: I disagree. Maybe and maybe not maybe

there is maybe there isn't we have to see

we're gonna know. REPORTER: Is it possible, is it possible that your

impulse to put a positive spin on things maybe giving

Americans a false sense. TRUMP: No, I don't think so.

God. Yeah not yet approved drugs. Such

a lovely question. Look it may work and it may not work.

And I agree with the doctor what he said, may work may not work.

I feel good about it.

It is just a feeling, you know, smart guy. I feel good

about it. And we're going to see you're gonna see soon enough and

we have certainly some very big samples of people.

If you look at the people, we have a lot of people that are in big

trouble. JEFF TIPTON: These scenes played out constantly during their

early stages of the epidemic. Trump would introduce

a treatment development.

Fauci would come to the podium and throw ice on it. Then Trump would

try to warm the idea up again. Hydroxychloroquine got

early FDA emergency use authorization in March of 2020. No studies

to support it. And when it was study for

treatment for covid, it was determined.

It doesn't work. Remdesivir, the first

FDA approved covid-19 drug, was

approved for emergency use in May of 2020 without any significant studies to show

efficacy or safety. Remdesivir was a shelved Ebola drug that wasn't effective.

It is manufactured by the multi-billion dollar Bay Area

pharmaceutical giant Gilead. Here's a problem. It doesn't decrease mortality

nor does it shorten hospital stays, put simply it doesn't work.

But Gilead has made nearly six billion dollars off the drug so far.

We also tried monoclonal antibodies.

Monoclonal antibodies are antibodies created in a

lab that target the antigen of interest in

this case the covid spike protein.

They are very expensive at around $3,000

per treatment and their results are mixed.

If given very early to high risk patients. They may reduce hospitalization.

But if you are already sick with covid, they don't do much and don't save lives.

They were thought to be a game changer but not so much and they don't

do squat against Omicron.

One of the companies, Regeneron, that makes the antibody

cocktail has made billions.

The Sars Cov 2 pandemic was the speed with which

we were able to identify what the causative agent was.

The Chinese recognized the epidemic but probably

were aware of it or as early as October,

but they didn't really recognize it until the end of December and

by the end of December and the beginning of

January of 2020, they actually identified the agent

and by identifying the

agent they then opened the door for development of a vaccine.

So ultimately vaccines are one of the great advances of the 20th century,

but the development of a vaccine is not enough.

You've got to know how to use it.

The operation was a success, but the patient died.

Yes operation warp speed though the

Biden Administration has banned the use of

that descriptor, did help develop several somewhat successful covid vaccines in 2020.

Starting in May of 2020, operation warp speed

provided billions in research, manufacturing

and distribution support

towards the cause of making 300 million vaccines available to the

public by the end of 2020. That pretty much worked out. And yes, these vaccines

have reduced hospitalizations and

deaths. Basically the people dying from

covid in 2021 were the unvaccinated.

While there has been much skepticism and

concern about the vaccines, they have been relatively

safe and very effective.

Have there been side effects? Well all vaccines have

side effects and for some the side

effects have been pretty severe: blood clots hard

inflammation. These vaccines use mRNA and DNA technology to get

your cells to make covid proteins, which

then Inspire your immune system to make

antibodies against these proteins. They're supposed

to go in do their job and get out.

That's the idea but we haven't had enough time to study their full effects.

But other countries did their version of warp speed as well.

China Russia Germany and Britain developed vaccines in 2020

Bio in Tech, a Pfizer partner, is a German company.

Moderna is a US company with a long history of government support.

The technology and components

they use in their vaccine really wasn't developed by them.

Most of it comes from research that

was supported by you, us, and some of it comes from other companies

which is why they are getting sued. Moderna, Pfizer

and others will make billions and billions off of these vaccine.

The NIH funds billions on research annually and yes the

NIH and often their university partners

hold patents to many of the technologies used in the covid vaccine.

There is a public private partnership per se but the public partner

shows up in a Kia and the private partner drives away in a Bentley.

Katalin Karicko, senior vice president at Bio N Tech.

And consider to be the mother of the MRNA vaccine,

grew up in Hungary, daughter of a butcher.

At a young age she decided she wanted to

be a scientist, but she had never met one.

She moved to the US in her 20s to find

a science job, but for decades never found a permanent position.

She clung to the fringes of Academia barely making a living working as a researcher at

various universities in the US for 30 years.

She ultimately landed a job as senior vice president at Biontech in 2013.

And the rest is history.

She was one of the first people to receive the vaccine she developed.

So we have a few approved vaccines yet

one out of three Americans has been infected

with covid, around a million people have died

and many others will suffer lifelong disability.

The vaccines were supposed to prevent infection yet many people get infected.

One of those people is Dr. Fauci who has been vaccinated and boosted twice.

This has led to further skepticism about these vaccines.

The operation was a success, but the patient died.

There were tremendous problems rolling out the vaccines. The MRNA vaccines

were problematic because they must be

kept frozen and in a way we ran out of ice.

There were a myriad of other rollout problems,

so our Public Health System had to subcontract to get needles into arms.

The government also tried mandating the vaccine

for some and that blew up and made

even more people angrier about the vaccines.

But the biggest problem was that many people had become

skeptical of the vaccine because they had

heard frankly a lot of nonsense from the

CDC and also from Trump and then

from Biden. They no longer trusted the

messenger and you don't get a second chance at a first impression.

ROGER DETELS: In China they've opted for the lockdown situation,

zero tolerance with disease and they've been reasonably successful.

I mean they have sporadic outbreaks including

in their biggest cities Shanghai and Beijing.

Recently, but it's been at a tremendous cost. It's affected their GDP and it's gone

down there. They're having an economic problem

because of lockdown and supply chain, etc, etc.

And they've got tremendous psychologic problems.

We see those psychologic problems in this country.

And while we did to some extent use the

original Public Health intervention of

isolation and quarantine, we didn't implement it

with the ferocity which Xi

Jinping implemented it and so I I have colleagues in China.

What I'm trying to suggest to them is that they've got to come to some sort of.

Balanced approach.

Where they don't destroy the country.

JEFF TIPTON: Another intervention we tried was lockdowns.

While theoretically not a bad idea, they have

some serious consequences to them and maybe

just maybe actually don't ultimately control the spread of covid and

related mortality. And lockdowns have

been especially cruel to children, the least

likely to become ill or die from covid.

Teen suicide rates have hit an all-time high.

Scientists and economists have found that voluntary behavioral changes are

10 times as important as mandatory measures in limiting the growth of a pandemic.

When people feel they are at risk

of something they change their behavior, people for the

most part are intelligent and ironically

those who stayed at home ended up with higher infection rates.

Maybe spending time outdoors would have been better.

But oh, yeah, they closed the parks and beaches.

Florida was an open state and California

and New York were lock down states.

They ended up with similar mortality rates. Lockdowns did

not make a difference. While lockdowns have

little to no public health benefit, they impose enormous

economic and social costs.

Job losses in the United States in March

and April of 2020 exceeded 22 million and we

have not fully recovered from that.

We also made arbitrary distinctions between essential and non-essential workers.

Essential workers, often lower income, took on greater

risk of covid infection. And so did their families

to maintain some financial stability. And designating one business as essential

and another is not essential, shifted consumer

activity to favor those categorized as essential.

Wiping out many businesses and those businesses have not come back.

ANGELA MARSDEN: I'm losing everything.

Everything I own is being taken away from me and they

set up a movie company right next to my

outdoor patio, which is right over here.

And people wonder why I'm protesting and

why I have had enough.

They have not given us money and they have shut us down.

We cannot survive, my staff cannot survive.

Look at this.

Tell me that this is dangerous.

But right next to me as a slap in my face.

That's safe. This is safe.

50 feet away.

This is dangerous. Mayor Garcetti and Gavin

Newsom is responsible for every single person

that doesn't have unemployment, that says

not have a job and all the businesses that are going under and we need your help.

We need somebody to do something about this.

MAYOR GARCETTI: We need to make sure that everybody continues to let us

know where those folks are. If you've observed recurring

violations of the safer at home order,

please continue to let us know coronavirus

dot LA City dot org slash business violation.

You know the old expression about snitches. Well in this case snitches get rewards.

We want to thank you for turning folks in and making sure we are all safe.

MAYOR LIGHTFOOT: We will shut you down. We will cite you

and if we need to we will arrest you and

we will take you to jail period.

MAYOR DEBLASIO: We start with the fundamental notion.

The NYPD is here to protect lives to save lives.

And where we see the greatest danger to lives in terms of the coronavirus

and the area where we can enforce is around

gatherings, particularly large gatherings.

JEFF TIPTON: Because of lockdown children lost years of educational and

social development that will affect them for the rest of their life.

Psychological problems have soared throughout society.

And Johns Hopkins researchers have concluded that lockdowns

should be rejected as a public policy practice for pandemics.

ROGER DETELS: In the initial phases of the epidemic

Sweden said we're going to let people go for a natural immunity and they failed.

It did not stop the epidemic.

JEFF TIPTON: Sweden tried a no lockdown policy when covid first hit

that ultimately did not work when they were hit

with the Delta wave, but overall their mortality rates

have not different much from the UK where they employed sporadic lockdown.

ROGER DETELS: Gonna be interesting to see what happens with New Zealand.

I think, which basically shut it borders

and although it did not go into lock down like China did they now opened up

and so it'll be interesting see what happens with the

men they have I believe they have a high vaccination rate as well.

JEFF TIPTON: Yeah, New Zealand has handled covid

quite well, they were kind of a locked down country,

but there are also very serious about testing in contact tracing.

They also restricted travel and employed quarantines for returning New Zealanders.

By January 2021, the country

of five million people had only 2,200 confirmed cases and only 25 deaths.

New Zealand's efforts to combat the spread were orchestrated using

an all-of-government approach.

While their approach has been restrictive, they were able to

secure popular support for their efforts.

New Zealand took a hit financially, but I suppose or

hope people dying is a much worse outcome than an economic downturn.

And we tried masks.

Oh gosh, where do I even start with that?

Let's start with Fauci's own words:

DR FAUCI: There's a lot of confusion among

people and misinformation surrounding face masks.

REPORTER: Can you discuss that?

The masks are important

for someone who's infected to prevent them from infecting someone else.

Now when you see people and look at the films and China and South Korea,

whatever, everybody's wearing a mask,

right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks.

REPORTER: You're sure of it because people are listening really closely to this.

DR FAUCI: Right now people should not be what there's no reason

to be walking around with the mask.

When you're in the middle of an outbreak wearing a mask

might make people feel a little bit better and

it might even block a droplet but

it's not providing the perfect protection that

people think that it is and often there are unintended consequences, people keep

fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face. REPORTER: and can

you get some Schmutz sort of staying inside there?

DR FAUCI: Of course, of course, but when you think mask

you should think of Health Care Providers needing them and people who are ill.

The people who when you

look at the films of foreign countries, and you see 85% of the

people wearing masks, that's fine. That's fine.

I'm not against it if you want to do it, that's fine, but it can

lead to a shortage. That's the problem because it could lead

to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.

JEFF TIPTON: And then he said: DR FAUCI: People who are vaccinated when

they are in an indoor setting that they

should wear a mask. JEFF TIPTON: And then he said:

DR FAUCI: In fact if you are vaccinated

you are protected and you do not need to wear a mask outdoors or indoor.

That even if you are vaccinated

you need to wear a mask in indoor public settings.

That we were thinking we would run out of

masks and other things for them.

So the recommendation was

not to wear a mask because of the shortage of it. Two things happened, one,

It became clear that we had enough of the equipment.

When the children go out into the community you want

them to continue to wear masks that children outside particularly when

they with the family of walking down

the street playing a game or what have you, don't have to wear a mask

at the Academy of pediatric actually makes that

recommendation that children should be wearing masks from two years old.

REPORTER: I mean, I think I've got this right one mask

is better than zero masks. Two masks

is better than one mask, but you don't have to have

double masks. Is that right? DR FAUCI: Make sure you wear a mask.

So you wear a mask, then you want

it to fit better so one of the ways you could do it if

would like to is put a cloth mask over which actually, here and here

and here where you could get leakage in

is much better contained.

That's all they're saying. One mask at least but if you want to

really be sure get a tighter fit with the second mask.

REPORTER: Are you a double master doctor Fauci? Look like you are.

DR FAUCI: Let me show you. See this. This is what I do.

You have it on you go like this Bingo and

you're okay. Then you go like this then bingo it's up.

BYSTANDER: She got a kid with her.

CHARLES HOLZNER: It was hard to find 95 masks that fit right the face masks

were hard to find, and and the gowns

were hard getting harder and harder because there was so many admissions.

So there just wasn't enough. They were under

prepared with the masks, under prepared with the PPE.

When you wear these equipment working in in a closed area.

I wore glasses, my glasses would fog up,

so I couldn't see anything right? So I have to

pull my mask down to clear my eyes and maybe

that's how I got the covid because in in

in the emergency room, everybody had covid.

It was a lot of misinformation and

because you know, they kept giving contradictory information themselves,

you know, like Fauci would say one thing one day another

thing in the next day, you know, I just started

not believing anything... JEFF TIPTON: trust begins

with truth and ends with truth. CHARLES HOLZNER: Yeah, and I think

it's credibility was really, you know

compromised, when it found out that under his leadership,

the NIH had been giving millions of dollars to the Wuhan

lab to develop a gain of function virus. I mean all that. smell rotten.

JEFF TIPTON: And the fact no proper investigation of that lab, right and

we lost our relationship with the World Health Organization because

they seem to be taking a China side on this.

CHARLES HOLNER: Right, right. They they seem to be saying the

Chinese Communist party, you know is correct.

It didn't start in the lab.

Well you know, what's the saying? It looks like a duck, walks like

a duck, it's probably a duck and they

were getting millions of dollars from Fauci's NIH to do this research.

I don't think it was, you know, let out deliberately,

but it got let out and you know, and then the Chinese hiding it from everybody.

JEFF TIPTON: There's a saying trust begins with the truth and ends with the truth.

Nobody could figure out what to believe about masks and respirators because the

CDC told so many stories.

Fauci was the anointed Public Health doctor in the

United States. And then those questions about his

role in the Wuhan laboratory began surfacing

on social media and then he was lost

to at least half of the people in the United States.

So people started going their own ways.

Only properly fitted n95 respirators truly protect you from

getting covid or passing it and those

are really difficult to wear when worn properly,

they tax your lungs as do other

types of masks. Air easily escapes and

enters from the edges of most masks..

Cloth masks are a joke yet they

were promoted by the CDC. We're gonna try a cloth mask.

REPORTER: Remember we want to stop this moisture that's

coming out of our mouth because that's what covid rides on.

There's one. Here's two.

Next we're going to try an n95 with a cloth mask.

There's one.

Here's cloth mask on the n95.

Now we're gonna try 2 95.

JEFF TIPTON: We started the epidemic with the

shortage of PPE especially n95 respirators.

And when we got the needed PPE,

we couldn't figure out who was supposed to use it.

And let's not forget that China made billions selling us PPE.

Yeah the place where covid started.

LIGHT HORNS BACKGROUND MUSIC We drove people away from each other, put people

in masks and yet somehow we still ended up

with a hundred million covid cases and

1 million deaths.

Organization? We stunk.

Science? so so

Communication?

Just awful.

They end up being kind of random or arbitrary.

Maybe they believe that they're trying to help people.

But the reality is for the

most part at his stage they're just hurting people.

REPORTER: If you travel abroad soon, you won't need a covid test

to get back into the US. CDC is dropping the

requirement for all incoming air Travelers on Sunday.

Puts an end to one of the last travel restrictions of the pandemic.

REPORTER: And the chief medical advisor to President Biden

who leads the administration's covid response, has tested positive himself.

The NIH announced today that Dr. Anthony Fauci tested positive for covid-19 on a

rapid antigen test. 81 year old director of the

National Institute of allergy and infectious diseases is fully vaccinated

and has been boosted twice. REPORTER: More than 1.6 million

cases of reinfection have been reported across 24 States,

and those numbers are still climbing.

JEFF TIPTON: So, how do we do a better job when the next epidemic comes around?

And like I said, we will have another epidemic.

As I noted earlier, the response to these

infectious disease events involves organization,

science and communication. What is that saying?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

To best respond you have to prepare then over prepare then over over prepare.

We ran an exercise operation, Crimson contagion, that had

some major findings, but we did not act on

those findings, the people in charge were

not in charge. So the public, you and

me, have to get involved because we are the ones ultimately impacted.

We have to ask our officials now. What is the plan for the next epidemic?

Are we prepared? Do we have enough PPE? It's like sometimes the kids have to

tell the parents how to do things.

The CDC and other government agencies have to get involved in the science.

And lastly, what did Hippocrates say?

First do no harm. If you don't know what

you're talking about. If you're not rooted in

the science, if you don't have clinical trials

to provide evidence that something works.

Then you can't say anything about

it until you have that proof. Throwing out half information in the

middle of a epidemic, middle of a pandemic,

did so much harm. And we also have to have better cooperation among countries.

Whether it's through the World Health Organization

or otherwise we have to figure out where

these infectious disease outbreaks are occurring

so we can get ahead of these outbreaks.

We had and have a bad relationship with China

and that relationship definitely impacted us.

ROGER DETELS: The recent Sars Cov 2 epidemic really illustrates the problem.

The need for communication.

JEFF TIPTON: We have to communicate.

Communication is the key.