From a New York Times. I'm likeable borrow this everyday today, the United States, has granted emergency authorization to fighters vaccine for the corona virus. A turning point in the pandemic. I spoke to my colleague, science reporter Donald Cheat, Macneil Junior on what happens next its Monday December fourteen. Don't I just want to start by getting your reaction to this new is the fact that we now have an approved vaccine for the court of our us in the United States. I think it's great. I mean this is what room waiting for this is the way out, we're not getting out through masks and social distancing in,

The other steps it in countries like China took so we're gonna have to get out through pharmaceutical means. Unfortunately, this step, one we're gonna, need several vaccines, but several vaccines are on the way right. This was are in some ways. First and last best hope- and it has happened- a heck of a lot faster. Then I think many of us, including when I first began speaking to you back in February and March, you thought was gonna happen. Yeah the record was four years I thought. Maybe we could cut that half, but we're doing much better than that and we ve got a vaccine out in less than a year its amazed and it shouldn't take too long for other vaccines to come out because the epidemic is raging so fast right. Now that the face free trials of other vaccines. Oughta go quite quickly. I want to talk about the fact that the pandemic is still raging in such an ETA control way and

where that is going to leave us during this kind of weird interlude between approval of a vaccine and the vaccine actually reaching lots of people, and I wonder just how dark you think this is all going to be during this. Kind of inter period. I think we are in the valley of the shadow of death. It is really dark. We know the sun is gonna, come up over a mountain at the other side of the valley, but it can't rise fast enough right. You have invoked this very dark biblical reference, but how deep and dark will this valley of the shadow of death be given? ok, we are now seeing more than a million new cases a week now confirmed cases. So, presumably there's more that we aren't testing

We have more than a hundred thousand people hospitalized and its growing. We have about three thousand dead a day. Which is almost impossible figure to absorb them? Well, that's about how many people died and nine eleven bags out how many people died. A pearl harbor, that's more than people die of cancer or heart disease each day, what we're normally the two biggest killers in America and if nothing changes we are on track. Four or five. Thousand dead by the end of winter, unless we have a giant change of heart as a country. So are we in the really awful place that we are in right now, partly because of the Thanksgiving holiday, partly because, as we saw in many televised images, people did travel is that party what's going on here,

yes dear, say: figures show that about forty percent, as many people came through their airport checkpoints this year as last year on Thanksgiving Week, so forty percent of a normal, very I travel weak as long as a lot of people. Yes, so, and you know many of those people gathered together and houses and therewith clearly a lot of transmission and were now a little bit more than two weeks beyond on Thanksgiving and normally, if you get infected they won? Wait till you show symptoms, two weeks to show hospitalization and then usually it's three to six weeks before death, so we expect, but that's to keep going up and if nothing changes you know we might go through this again. A christian and Christmas and very far away a surge upon a surges, woodfall chief, calls it and he's right on extremely depressing I'm curious how you would Donald described this period that we are

when it comes to the government's approach to the virus, because it for those like both at a national level and at a local level. In many places there is not really any effort to keep. People from behaving the way that they are beyond rhetorical guidance right? There are a few states, California, Pennsylvania, New York just made some announces that are trying to tell people. That they can't even doors that they can't go to the gym, but buying a large that is rare. So what do you make of how the government is approaching this right? Now, there's no guidance out of the national government in Washington. I mean Donald Trump is just sort of lost interest in the problem. It sounds like and then you've got the fifty different states and

states that had resisted imposing mask mandates the governors, a sort of finally come around, realizing that their hospitals are filling up and said, put on a mask. I think it was the governor of Iowa, the Governor Hampshire does another one. A north Dakota and the hospitals in the in the mostly unmask states are the hospitals that are filling up, something like two hundred hospitals process, country already capacity. One third of the hospitals in this country are at ninety percent capacity, and there are also states where you have people out in rural areas. With me. You know sometimes hundreds of miles between hospitals and many of our hospitals full up, so that the truth is that what we gotta Whilst the country is even though the idea of achieving heard immunity by letting the virus worse through is made fun of by all public health experts, we are de facto sort of following that policy, because in a lot of places, the measures, the masks and the social distancing of the shutting down of restaurants of that would hold off getting hurt him

today that we are not being imposed so the virus is blasting through us and old people are hiding from it. But young people are not the problem. As we are seeing. The flaws in that strategy, which everybody every responsible, public health Social said were there. You can't hide all the vulnerable, and some people die, even though they have no underlying conditions, no reason to think that they would have a bad outcome from this disease, and yet there be no people dying. So is fair to say at this point that the United States has caught up unofficially decided to let the virus more or less wash through depopulation and other anybody's decided it, but

individually, one by one by one. Every state is not doing anything to stop it. So you ve got the fact on the ground that the virus is washing through the population and filling the hospitals and killing people. I'm just curious. How much that surprise you that we have arrived at this point as someone who has covered so many different approaches to who pandemic in the past, I knew from the beginning. It would be difficult to get Americans to go along with the kind of locked down that were imposed in China, obviously thought that once the virus began hurting and killing. People around the president and around the governors of the of seeing their own voters or their own family members die. They would embrace social business can mask things, and that didn't happen. I mean

president got it himself, then he got. You know that monoclonal anti bodies that saved them- and that is his wife got at his child, got it several of these children have had it it's either. I cannot believe that the lesson doesn't get through so long as we continue to exist in this valley of the shadow of death phase and we, wait for mass inoculations. I wanted just quickly touch on the treatment options that are available to people who do. sick and you have introduced us to monoclonal Anna by treatments, and you have told us how effective they are, and we have seen that because of those around the president who have received and unwell by them. So should we expected that treatment may end up serving as the key stop gap? While we wait for the vaccine to make its way to the population,

No, and the reason is that there is not enough of it. The two company he's regeneration, Eli Lily that were making the Andy bodies were, I think, on track to make bout a hundred thousand doses each by the end of this We are now we ve got two hundred thousand people getting infected every day, so it's impossible and our colleague John sobered, that great store the other day saying that people who are connected to the president were getting these anybody's an The bees were using their connections to try to get them for themselves or for their relatives. That's not the way you're supposed to distribute medicine and right so. The bottom line is that we should not expect any treatment, whether its monocle antibodies or

something else to serve as a meaningful treatment to get us through these dark days before the vaccine is widely available. Not as long as we keep crowding into our hospitals as fast as we are. A novelist would do something to stop the increase in cases where we still have what we had before. We still have oxen, thank God we still have. Ventilators was still have steroids and we have monoclonal, but the just enough for everybody. So, worse, sort us stuck waiting for the vaccine. Does no choice will be right back,

for this podcast in the following message: come from doctors without borders, providing vital lifesaving medical care in over seventy countries to those who need it most learn about including doctors without borders and your estate plants by visiting legacy, dot doctors without borders, dot org So don't, let's turn to this new much brighter world that we are about to start entering the world of inoculations throughout the United States. starting with Pfizer's vaccine and eventually with vaccines from viable companies like Madeira, Astro Seneca. Johnson Johnson, I wanted to start now that we are living in. Old, where a vaccine has been approved with a few very practical questions. Once you get vaccinated, how evil will end.

one b to start resuming life in what might be a normal way. Unmasked unencumbered will, firstly, have they get the to those for the vaccines. That are two doses and those are the three or four weeks apart and you do get some protection from the first those we believe. But you really have to wait for this. Take the second those and then you have to wait at least a couple weeks, your anybody's to build up, and then you are considered I've gotten basically the full protection to looking at something like a month or so. We are looking more like six weeks from the first shot. You get the shot you gonna another shot close to a month later, and then you have to wait another couple weeks for the effects of that booster to kick in and then you're about as protected is you're going to be now. The important question is: even if you are protected against severe disease.

Yes, and if you're protected against infection, is it possible that you can get a mild infection that combats reside in the cells your nose so that you can actually spread the virus. And the answer is we don't have that data yet so that is one area where public health leaders are being conservative and saying, let's assume you might still possibly even be able to get. A second, in fact, or transmitted somebody else, so the benefit of asking people to keep abiding.

This was it maybe psychological rather than medical, but it's likely to happen. Dont, who, at least at the beginning, will not be eligible for this new vaccine. It's not who won't be eligible. It's that beef, the egg Parthenon, this a little bit back towards doctors. The vaccine is authorized for people over sixteen. There are people who were in risk groups for which there is not enough data for the FDA to make really specific decision, for example, pregnant women, for example, people who might be amino compromise because of HIV.

or cancer treatment, but in most cases they said essentially consult with your doctors, because what they recognize is, even though the safety data doesn't exist for these specific groups, they know the virus is dangerous for these specific groups. So they like everyone to talk to the doktor about whether or not the vaccine is safer for them. The risk of the virus is not a fair number of Americans, especially those under sixteen. Children are now being enrolled in some of the clinical trials and you wouldn't, or in it people who are you compromised in trials because its potentially dangerous, so they haven't tested. It will learn that overtime, yeah. Ok, what about people who have had the virus and covered from it. Do you expect that they will be taking the vaccine? Should they

I talked to a doctor friend of mine who had a bad bout of the virus and he expects to take the vaccine he's doing it because we don't Oh, how along immunity from the virus last summer, and also he wants to set a good example for his patience and sees a gerontology studios got if elderly patients and he wants them very much- wants them to vaccinate and one of the first things it happens for doktor as at the patients as well Doc. Would you take it and if he can say, I really did then that's very persuasive and what a good or bad have we learned from the first few days of vaccinations in the United Kingdom. It's going pretty well, it's encouraging going into very elderly people and most of them, as far as we know, are doing fine. There were a couple of an electric reactions. That's it intense allergic reaction, sometimes in which your throat begins to close up.

But those were in people who have a history of animal attic reactions and we don't know if they were actually caused by the vaccine or maybe latex him stop or on the vaccine, or something like that, and it should not surprise people. You know they feel bad. What you're doing is putting an anti jen. so the body that provokes the body into producing an immune reaction as it does with You actually get sick and so right you feel the fever it makes you feel crummy, but its technical aids. The immune reaction, that's causing the fever, not the the gold virus. You telling us we should be celebrating on some level Many our bodies reaction to this, and I guess, if you're, getting a reaction, good you're, getting what they call in fact and algae eight, take as the vaccine is having an effect and ensure your reacting to it and basically breeding the soldiers that will fight the disease. If that disease overcomes, do ok,

So with all this knowledge, let's talk about how things are likely to unfold in the United States in the coming. Weeks. As we start inoculating. We know from previous relations with our colleagues that frontline medical workers, nursing residents. They will be in the front of a line. Then we enter this kind. Nebulous territory of essential workers who, as best you can tell, determines who is essential and will that vary from place to place and state state yeah. I think it will vary from state to state. I mean there. There is an advisory committee to the city, see which will make up a recommended list of sort of the order in which this ought to go to people, but then those are just recommendations and they're gonna be a lot of people screaming and clutching at the governors. Coattails frightening me me me first and the governors going to have to make some tough decisions.

you're saying. This could very well be subject to lobbying from all sorts of people look. What happened! Monoclonal anybody's there are very short supply, and so the bees are going after them. I could see, this turning into chaos for a while, you know in them in the beginning stays because there's gonna be a lot more demand than there is supply. Ok. So this is a trickier question. What does the government do? with people in these various categories. Who don't want the vaccine and how widespread use think that phenomenon we'll be at this point. Okay, this is a really complex question. A few months ago, Poles suggested a fifty one percent of Americans

would not take it back scene, but I was never that pessimistic, because I thought those poles were being affected by fear that the vaccine was being rushed in order to help Donald Trump get reelected, and then once we got past that as soon as I seem to say that they would be more faith in the vaccine, What happened exactly that's? What not only did the results I come until after the election, but then they were astonished We better than anybody expected me. Ninety five percent effective that I think, gave people more confident that you could actually see that in the polls and ember people saying they wouldn't wouldn't take it back scene started. Dropping give it to you no more, like forty percent, that's heading for thirty percent and what gives people confidence in vaccine is seeing people they know and trust advocate. And then take them and suffer no ill effects

as you look around people you know, I've had the vaccine and there has gone wrong and they also haven't gotten sick and you look at what your life could If you took the vaccine, that is to say a venture you'd, be able to plan aeroplanes and go back to work and take your bid. Kids back to school and all the rest you'd have pretty strong motivation to take. It Maxine right. Your fears have been delayed by this all points two together and participation and vaccinations right. But has also, I mean, if you think, masks were polarizing. In the last few months, vaccines, I feel are going to be far more polarizing because mass thoroughly simple technology to understand you know a piece of cloth goes over your face and you can't blow your germs to somebody else. But vaccines all this, the questions of you know: Amran, a dna add no virus. What's that a chimpanzee,

Virus are you kidding me you wanted and inject myself something came out of a chimpanzee. I mean the rumours that spring up around vaccines are enormous and there being fed by everything for he went on to russian trolls and there's a chunk of the United States that has said that they're not gonna, take a vaccine under any circumstances. The promise, if you have enough people refusing the vaccine your epidemic, never end It slows down quite a bit, but you have this low level of continuous. circulating virus and there are people who could be victims of that virus with bad outcomes like people who can't get vaccinated like people with compromised immune systems like people who are undergoing cancer but I hope we by that time will have accelerated children, but there will be a number of people in society who can't be vaccinated because of allergies to something that accident or something like that. That's always true, and if their

constantly low level of circulating virus. Those people who can't vaccinate might get hurt right. It's tempting to think. Well, I'm getting back so I'm protected. But what you are saying is there are people who can take the vaccine. Example, somebody with a serious allergic reaction and that person is put at risk by somebody who refuses to get vaccinate exactly and when you have that situation. Sometimes a government has to step in and say this won't stand cause. It's not just your personal choice. You are putting other people in danger talk more about that, because we have established on the show that the government of the United States is extremely unlikely to mandate that Americans get the vaccine. I wonder if there will be rules in various workplaces or businesses about what you can or cannot do

Depending on your vaccination status is the government of the United States that would mandate the vaccine, because most of these laws are state laws and in the big smallpox outbreak of one thousand nine hundred to one thousand nine hundred and three eleven states mandated smallpox vaccine Massachusetts among them and that's what led to the famous one thousand nine hundred and five case of Jacobson vs Massachusetts, where there was a lutheran pastor who refused to take smallpox vaccine and he was find me- was fine five dollars, but that only when, although it had Supreme Court, he said this is my personal liberty. I dont want the vaccine and the Supreme Court said no, you can be punished for refusing the vaccine. People misunderstand the law. People think the law is about my personal rights, choose, and conservatives tend to see this as a version of the second amendment that you know the costume

gives me a right to you know the government can take away my guns or the government can maybe take a back vaccine and Girls tend to see it through the lens of Roby, weighed the notion that you know the constitution provide me right to privacy and the integrity of my body, and so the government can go and violate my body and those are both wrong analogies because Jacobson versus Massachusetts was based called the police power of the state. That is the power of the state to prevent me from doing damage or the state may not be, take away my gun, but if I walked down the street shooting people whether they can definitely take my gun away. It is the right of the government to stop people from doing harm to others, whether it is with bullets or pathogens, and that is definitely definitely within the tradition.

police powers of the state, and on top of that it's also had has been established. That is legal for employers under the right circumstances. To require vaccination and we make it may get beyond employers it. Maybe you know airlines may refuse to fly. People who have been vaccinated cruise ships would be crazy, not Oh let people on who were vaccinated. You know these are gonna cause serious union battles, but there are no where's hospitals in this country, where the doctors and all the nurses and all the janitor aerial staff and everybody else has to have a flu shot every year and if not just a flush out, they have to have had all that they have to have the Brca losses test every year. They have to show that they are up to date on the other vaccines that you don't need every year, they have to be basically vaccinated against any possible disease that they could transmit to the patients in the hospital.

Some hospital say: well, you have to wear a mask and flew season, and other hospitals say your fire. If you refuse and the union's fight against this, but the union's often lose so given the patchwork of rules are likely to come from states and from employers that raise the really important question of verification and enforced and how we will know that somebody has gotten vaccinated and isn't just saying yea. I got my vaccination and don't we started talking about this with you way back at the beginning of the pandemic, what mechanism might exist to tell the world that you been vaccinated and I was very theoretical at the time. I wonder how far along we have gotten in creating now that a vaccine is about to reach many Americans a relief. able system for signalling

Someone has actually been inoculated. Well, we don't have it and- and as far as I can tell through interviews, I've doing there aren't any firm plans to do at either in the trumpet ministration or in the incoming by administration right now the CDC is handing out little cardboard cards that say CDC and they and on them, when you get vaccinated, they should scribble the Name of the vaccine, the large number of the vaccine and the date you were vaccinated networks both theoretically, will be stamped with a rubber stamp. So not a very high tech system, no lotta high tax system at all. No reason you couldn't do it. I mean you could have a way of showing through your cell phone through a unique code. You are coda, something that you, You over a scanner, any the laughter give nay more particulars or anything else just have to set Europe pudding. Green Jack, saying yes, this prison have been vaccinated. but using no such system is in place or even as planned at the moment the Eu S, as far as I can tell nothing,

is even envisioned. This is something that is being discussed, but no decisions have been made some gathering for what you're saying that we don't know. How widespread acceptance, will be out the sex scene and we don't yet have a system for even verifying that someone has the vaccine, all of which is suggesting to me anyway that this next phase is going to be pretty complicated and a little bit messy yeah. It could be pretty chaotic, okay, Now that you have described all these variables and all these kind of unknowns, I wonder if You subscribe to the timeline that has come out of a government, especially from the head of operation, warp speed that life might look normal in the United States by the summer of next year by June of twenty twenty one.

Yeah, I mean everybody fudging a little bit on saying you know what month or what quarter they think Tony fancies, as by the end of twenty twenty one or some time before that maybe fall, I be earlier, it's it's. very hard to know, there's so many moving parts. You know you have the how many vaccines get approved. Are they made and distributed with no big hitches? That kind of thing you know what I intend and what level of acceptance is the. I mean if there was a hundred percent acceptance and all the vaccines that are now in the pipeline or came out yeah? I would think we'd be able to get it by late spring early summer, but well enough. That's gonna. Happen is impossible to tell. It will definitely slow down. That's one thing that you can count on: it is that as more people get vaccinated and particularly as you vaccinate people in nursing homes cause that's been the source of many of the as you may, actually see a slowdown in this and that my

an earlier than than the overall appearance of the beginning of the end. Well, I don't know, I wish you a very happy holiday and thank you for all your wisdom and your warnings the past year and I look forward to catching up in the new year when the vaccine- is reaching as many people as possible and, let's hope for a happier new year in twenty twenty one, indeed, Turkey them thanks. On Sunday morning, the first doses of Pfizer's vaccine or packed in dry ice and loaded onto trucks,

the companies plant in Kalamazoo Michigan Workers their applauded as the first truck left the facility. Those doses will now be sent to hundreds of distribution centres in all. Fifty states

inequalities are expected to begin today. All the way back, there's a new way to pay. When you shot it's called split it I mean you're, ready to pay gestures, split. It had check out despite your payment on your credit card and pay over time, there's no interests, no application, no fees, it's fast and easy split. It gives you more spending powered by the things you want to live. A bigger life all deserve to get more far harder money split your payments and lived big, get a split at tat, come to death it hears what else you need a new day, the time

reports that, after failing to challenge and Joe Biden, victory in court allies of President Tromp, our plodding of final stand on the floor of Congress in early January. The constitution allows for members of the House of Representatives to seek to disqualify states vote before Congress certifies the result of the election. That effort, which is based on groundless claims of voter fraud, is not expected to succeed, but could further road confidence in binds victory

Today's episode was produced by us such authored eighty and were shall banya. It was edited by peach count and Wendy Door and engineered by Chris would that's it for the daily. I'm, like all of our own seat. Morrow more than later, have then learn german and experience culture, but the official German Cultural Centre at Debbie Debbie W dad That D Flash New York you'll find a whole world of events with movie screenings, online performances discussions and a free on my library. Twenty four seven improve your German with tailor made language courses at W W W Thy good TED Thy De Slash New York G, o e t, h e don t. Nobody said it would be easy.