Steven Levy: I was in the room in 2006 when you gave that
TED talk. Your wish was “Help Me Stop Pandemics.” You didn't get your wish, did
you?
Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant: No, I didn't get that
wish at all, although the systems that I asked for have certainly been created
and are being used. It's very funny because we did a movie, Contagion—
We're all watching that movie now.
People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the
science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the
past 10 or 15 years that it wasn't a question of whether we were going to have
a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It's really hard to get people to
listen.
I mean, Trump pushed out the admiral on
the National Security Council, who was the only person at that level who's
responsible for pandemic defense. With him went his entire down line of
employees and staff and relationships. And then Trump removed the [early
warning] funding for countries around the world.
I've heard you talk about the significance that this is
a “novel” virus.
It doesn't mean a fictitious virus. It’s not like a novel or a novella.
Too bad.
It means it's new. That there is no human being in the world that has
immunity as a result of having had it before. That means it’s capable of
infecting 7.8 billion of our brothers and sisters.
Since it's novel, we’re still learning about it. Do you
believe that if someone gets it and recovers, that person thereafter has
immunity?
So, I don't see anything in this virus, even though it's novel, [that
contradicts that]. There are cases where people think that they've gotten it
again, [but] that's more likely to be a test failure than
it is an actual reinfection. But there's going to be tens of millions of us or
hundreds of millions of us or more who will get this virus before it's all
over, and with large numbers like that, almost anything where you ask “Does
this happen?” can happen. That doesn't mean that it is of
public health or epidemiological importance.
Is this the worst outbreak you’ve ever seen?
It's the most dangerous pandemic in our lifetime.
We are being asked to do things, certainly, that never
happened in my lifetime—stay in the house, stay 6 feet away from other
people, don’t go to group gatherings. Are we getting the right advice?
Well, as you reach me, I'm pretending that I'm in a meditation retreat,
but I'm actually being semi-quarantined in Marin County. Yes, this is very good
advice.
But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for
the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this
is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their
detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible
act of an elected official that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime.
But what
you're hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is
it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever?
No. It's a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.
Flatten the curve.
By slowing it down or flattening it, we're not
going to decrease the total number of cases, we're going to postpone many
cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there's nothing in the
virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18
months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring.
What’s that?
That means, A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and
become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is
enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.
I hold out hope that we get an antiviral for Covid-19 that is curative,
but in addition is prophylactic. It's certainly unproven and it's certainly
controversial, and certainly a lot of people are not going to agree with me.
But I offer as evidence two papers in
2005, one in Nature and one in Science. They both
did mathematical modeling with influenza, to see whether saturation with just
Tamiflu of an area around a case of influenza could stop the outbreak. And in
both cases, it worked.
I also offer as evidence the fact that at one point we
thought HIV/AIDS was incurable and a death sentence. Then, some wonderful
scientists discovered antiviral drugs, and we've learned that some of those
drugs can be given prior to exposure and prevent the disease. Because of the
intense interest in getting [Covid-19] conquered, we will put the scientific
clout and money and resources behind finding antivirals that have prophylactic or
preventive characteristics that can be used in addition to
[vaccines].
When will we be able to leave the house and go back to
work?
I have a very good retrospect-oscope, but what's needed right now is a
prospecto-scope. If this were a tennis match, I would say advantage virus right
now. But there's really good news from South Korea—they had less than 100 cases
today. China had more cases imported than it had from continuous transmission
from Wuhan today. The Chinese model will be very hard for us to follow. We're
not going to be locking people up in their apartments, boarding them up. But
the South Korea model is one that we could follow. Unfortunately, it requires
doing the proportionate number of tests that they did—they did well over a
quarter of a million tests. In fact, by the time South Korea had done 200,000
tests, we had probably done less than 1,000.
Now that we've missed the opportunity for early testing,
is it too late for testing to make a difference?
Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be
doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out
where the hell the virus really is. Because we don't know. Maybe Mississippi is
reporting no cases because it's not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe
reports zero cases because they don't have testing capability, not because they
don't have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test,
that you can do at home.
If you were the president for one day, what would you say
in the daily briefing?
I would begin the press conference by saying "Ladies and gentlemen,
let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the
Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and
made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has
the respect of both the public health community and the political
community." We're a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest
that we come to that.
Are you scared?
I'm in the age group that has a one in seven mortality rates if I get
it. If you're not worried, you're not paying attention. But I'm not scared. I
firmly believe that the steps that we're taking will extend the time that it
takes for the virus to make the rounds. I think that, in turn, will increase
the likelihood that we will have a vaccine or we will have a prophylactic
antiviral in time to cut off, reduce, or truncate the spread. Everybody needs
to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It's not a mass extinction event.
Should we be
wearing masks?
The N95 mask
itself is extremely wonderful. The pores in the mask are three microns wide.
The virus is one micron wide. So, you get people who say, well, it's not going
to work. But you try having three big, huge football players who are rushing
for lunch through a door at lunchtime—they're not going to get through. In the
latest data I saw, the mask provided 5x protection. That's really good. But we
have to keep the hospitals going and we have to keep the health professionals
able to come to work and be safe. So, masks should go where they’re needed the
most: in taking care of patients.
How will we know when we’re through this?
The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have
happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like
an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see
everything. If we're only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease
because we're not testing enough, and we're just blind to it, then we're in a
world of hurt.
Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral.
And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of
people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen,
firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested
them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that
identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and
some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children
back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.
And instead of saying "No, you can't visit anybody in nursing
home," we have a group of people who are certified that they work with
elderly and vulnerable people, and nurses who can go back into the hospitals and
dentists who can open your mouth and look in your mouth and not be giving you
the virus. When those three things happen, that's when normalcy will return.
Is there in any way a brighter side to this?
Well, I'm a scientist, but I'm also a person of faith. And I can't ever
look at something without asking the question of isn't there a higher power
that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could
be? I thought we would see the equivalent of empty streets in the civic arena,
but the amount of civic engagement is greater than I've ever seen. But I'm
seeing young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to
people who are homebound, elderly. I'm seeing an incredible influx of nurses,
heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked
before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I've never seen
the kind of volunteerism I'm seeing.
I don't want to pretend that this is an exercise worth going through in
order to get to that state. This is a really unprecedented and difficult time
that will test us. When we do get through it, maybe like the Second World War,
it will cause us to reexamine what has caused the fractional division we have
in this country. The virus is an equal opportunity infector. And it’s probably
the way we would be better if we saw ourselves that way, which is much more
alike than different.
Larry Brilliant, MD MPH: Chair, Ending Pandemics; CEO, Pandefense; former Chair, National Bio-Surveillance Advisory Subcommittee; former Prof Epidemiology, UMich, Head of Google.org, CEO Skoll Global Threats, smallpox eradication program WHO, CDC, board member Skoll Foundation, Salesforce.org founder, Seva Foundation, co-founder The Well and author of Sometimes Brilliant and The Management of Smallpox Eradication. TIME100 and Ted Prize; multiple honorary doctorates, CNN on-air analyst @larrybrilliant. info@larrybrilliant.com
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