Full transcript: Every New Virus Already Exists
2:15 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Dennis Carroll, the American virologist, tropical disease expert, and founder of the Global Virome Project. You starred in the Netflix documentary Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak, which eerily foreshadowed the global coronavirus crisis. Previous to this, you were instrumental in leading the medical response against the H1N1 and bird flu epidemics and you received the USA science and technology award for your work fighting malaria and avian influenza. Throughout the global coronavirus pandemic, you have been critical of the lack of government response and leadership while advocating science-based proactive solutions to this ongoing crisis. Dr. Carroll, welcome to London Real.
2:50 Dennis Carroll: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
2:58 Brian Rose: Great to have you here. You know, before we get started, I just want to announce to everyone that we are streaming now on our new Digital Freedom Platform, which is a censorship free independent broadcasting system that is of the people, by the people, for the people, and available exclusively on our website at freedomplatform.tv. Can everybody watching us now please share this link via the sidebar to any and all of your social media channels? Let me just repeat that. Can everybody watching us please share this link via the sidebar to all your social media channels? Just ask your friends and family to give us 15 minutes and then they can decide. Dennis, I pledge to you and everyone watching us that none of this conversation will be edited, censored, removed, or banned, and that anybody in the world can watch the full version of this episode free at freedomplatform.tv/carroll, thanks to the generous donations of over 34,000 people around the world that we affectionately call the London Real Army. For anybody wanting to become a founding member of the Digital Freedom Platform, they can go to freedomplatform.tv/give to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights.
3:48 Brian Rose: Here at London Real, we’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011. And Dennis, I’m excited to have you here today. I got to ask to start off. I mean, you’ve been predicting for the past 30 years this, as you say, this zoonotic shift that was outlined in your Netflix documentary. I mean, are the events of this year in some weird way a vindication of sorts for you?
4:13 Dennis Carroll: No, it’s certainly not a vindication. You know what it really is though it’s indicative of a very predictable pattern that it’s a bit like weather forecasting. And in many ways when you think about the emergence of new viral diseases, think of them as the equivalent of the emergence of a hurricane somewhere out over the Atlantic. There are very predictable forces that turn a weather front out over the water into a tropical storm and then into a hurricane. And you know, we’ve had 50 years of very good data acquisition and modeling by weather services that have allowed us to be much more precise, still a ways to go, but much more precise about forecasting hurricanes.
5:05 Dennis Carroll: Thinking about emerging viral diseases is not that dissimilar. There are forces, dynamics, pressures that in fact propel viruses that currently exist, currently circulate in wildlife to jump into people and then move from people to people. And the more we understand those forces and we understand where those forces are playing themselves out most dynamically then we have a much better ability to you know focus our efforts in those places among those species and those practices that drive relatively unknown innocuous viruses today into headlines tomorrow. So unlike hurricanes, we don’t really have a chance to prevent hurricanes.
5:53 Dennis Carroll: We have a chance to use hurricane forecasting to prepare, but better forecasting around the drivers behind emerging diseases really allows us not only to prepare for them, to minimize their impact, but they also allow us to prevent them. The spillover, the movement of viruses from animals into people, is very much a consequence of us, the way we live on this planet, our footprint, how we interact with the ecosystems around us. And if we really understood those actions that put us at risk, with better granularity, we have a chance to change them. Personal behavioral practices, municipal or industrial level practices all conspire to make this world a far riskier place today than yesterday. So looking at COVID-19 emergence and spread in the pandemic it’s not a vindication in any way but it is reflective what we know that covid-19 is not an accident it’s not a black swan event. It is a direct consequences of we as homo sapiens and how we live on this planet. We can prevent them but we have to be smart and we have to be diligent.
7:13 Brian Rose: So when you filmed this documentary, and I know it was out last year, when did you honestly think there would be an event that would be big enough for the population to say, “Oh, wow. That’s a lot like that documentary I just saw with Dr. Carroll.” What did you think it would have years? Decades?
7:30 Dennis Carroll: No. Look, when we were filming that documentary we were also not the documentary people but work that I was doing, we were tracking and following viruses that we’re very concerned about that have all of the pedigree if you will for turning from anonymous into highly impactful. So there are any number of those viruses that we’re concerned about. Clearly coronaviruses, respiratory viruses at large, those viruses that transmit by sneezing and coughing, those are the things we’re most concerned about.
8:06 Dennis Carroll: Vector-borne viruses such as Zika or yellow fever, their ability to move large distances. Those are the viruses that you’re really concerned about or viruses like HIV that move sort of stealthfully that they infect and are able to transmit from person to person for a decade before you even know because we watch for illness and if it doesn’t cause an illness we don’t pay attention to it. So it’s really a matter of paying attention to the range of potential behaviors out there for viruses, their own dynamics and customizing the way you think about them to be reflective of what an individual virus might look like. You know, one of the biggest challenges we have is that we’re always fighting the last war.
9:04 Dennis Carroll: After the West Africa Ebola epidemic, every event after that, we mounted a response as if it were the West Africa Ebola epidemic. There was a significant plague outbreak in Madagascar. The first response was as if it were West Africa Ebola. You know, whenever we have a influenza event, we respond to the next event, a coronavirus, as if it were an influenza. These things have their own character, their own features. And in some way, part of being smart is being able to develop a detailed understanding of the unique features these viruses have and then be prepared to develop a response that’s customized to those specific features.
9:52 Dennis Carroll: So when we were filming the Pandemic series you know influenzas were indicative of respiratory viruses and we know that China for a variety of reasons is a cauldron of emerging viral threats particularly among influenzas and coronaviruses. So that it came out of China no surprise that it was a respiratory disease no surprise. How we responded to it now that was a shocker.
10:17 Brian Rose: All right. And I want to get into that for sure. Let’s talk about the origin of the virus. I mean, I’ve been, you know, really lucky to have, you know, 20 to 30 of the top doctors, scientists, Kennedys, Nobel Prize winners, generals to talk about this. I’ve heard lots of theories, lots of them from the fact that it was in a lab in North Carolina, shipped off to a Wuhan lab, from things that doc Dr. Zach Bush has talked about similar to you, that the environment was so taxed in Wuhan that we would expect it to show up in a place like that. And I’ve heard everything in between as far as the origin of this, you know, what do you see as the origin of this and how do you explain it to the layman?
11:00 Dennis Carroll: Well, first what we really need to do is to make sure is to stop speculating what the origin and what we need to be doing right now with Chinese scientific counterparts is in an open and transparent way really drilling down going back and looking thoughtfully carefully at the evidence and let that evidence drive our final conclusion. So there’s lots of speculations out there. I have to say most of those speculations are politically tinged. They’re more about to make a political point than a public health point. So let’s use the moment now as things have begun quieting down in China and make sure we do due diligence to really document with evidence what the origin is. So I don’t think there’s a need to speculate whether it’s laboratory based, man-made, manipulated.
11:52 Dennis Carroll: We can find out that answer. There’s lots of evidence out there that right now tells us very clearly that first off it was not a biologically engineered laboratory biologically engineered virus. It’s a natural virus. And there’s nothing again to indicate that it was an escape virus from a laboratory. What we do know is that its emergence was very very very consistent with what we’ve seen to be a steady stream of emergence of any number of viruses over the years. That is a virus in a wildlife animal, a bat that is becomes proximal close to a human or to an animal, another animal that will become close to a human.
12:41 Dennis Carroll: And the natural dynamics of spillover those we’ve documented, we see they happen multiple times a year. This is not an unusual event. Its ability to sustain human human transmission and to cause serious illness that is unusual. But seeing spillover events over and over over again in China, across Southeast Asia, in South Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, that’s a very normal predictable event. So the weight of experience would say what we see with this virus is absolutely consistent with what we’ve seen and continue to see with spillover events involving natural dynamics not man-made or enhanced.
13:33 Brian Rose: Okay. Does the pollution and sometimes the environmental abuse you know kind of ramp up the probability of it occurring in places in addition to the wildlife and the wet markets?
13:44 Dennis Carroll: Well, there are places that we would classify as hotspots that you know viruses can circulate anywhere, but where they’re most likely to spill over, that’s a different story. Where is it that we’re likely to see a virus circulating in a wildlife animal spill over into human population? And there’s been a lot of work done over the last 20 years understanding what underlies the spillover event. And it’s allowed us to zero in on certain places in the world that we would classify as hotspots. And those are the places you really want to pay attention to. It has the greatest probability, not exclusive. There’s always the outlier. But if you really want to understand where it’s most likely to occur, follow the evidence. That speaks to the underlying drivers for spillover. And I’ll give you some examples. First off, you need a place where there is viral diversity. And viral diversity is frequently associated with mammalian diversity. So where you have rich mammalian species diversity, you’re likely to find a range of viruses.
14:57 Dennis Carroll: Secondly, where those mammals that are infected with viruses, the subspecies, those they’re 5,000 plus mammalian species out there. Which of the species are they all equal in terms of allowing for a spillover event? And what we found, it’s really those species that have high interactive engagement with human populations or livestock. Lots of species rarely interact, rarely come close, but there are certain ones and you know the thumbnail sort of summary is rats, bats, and non-human primates.
15:36 Dennis Carroll: Those tend to be most implicated because they tend to have learned how to cohabitate within ecosystems that we occupy. So if you go to those places where viruses are circulating and those species that have high frequency interaction and that there are population pressures that are driving people our livestock in closer engagement with those populations then you’re most likely to see opportunities for spillover to occur. So you know again the rule of thumb population pressures mammalian diversity high frequency interaction and where land use change where we’re changing and disrupting the natural ecosystems.
16:24 Dennis Carroll: So it’s those species that we would call generalist that they have the ability to adapt anywhere as opposed to those species that have a very narrow habitat range. So, as we increase our footprint and induce landscape change, we’re really driving forward the influx of generalist species that tend to have high frequency rats, bats, and non-human primates. You know, London, you will find rats all over the place, right? So, yeah, they learn how to live with this.
16:56 Brian Rose: Does it make it worse when some of those animals are delicacies and it’s actually makes it more profitable if I keep them live in a market and I want to eat it because or is that just a small percentage of how that can occur? I’m talking about bats in like a wet market in Wuhan where I wouldn’t see that necessarily in London. Is that really play a big part or is that just something as westerners that we play up too much?
17:19 Dennis Carroll: Well, it plays a you know, we haven’t been able to get the kind of granularity says what’s the relative contribution of this or that. Certainly consumption of bats as a protein source, it may seem bizarre to us, but it’s no different in some ways than consuming a turkey. It’s an animal and it provides protein for people. But we also know that bats are places that they occupy places that are also frequented for industrial practices.
17:57 Dennis Carroll: Bat guano bat is a major source of nitrogen for a number of different projects. We find them certainly for fertilizer emulsifiers and makeup come from bat guano. And so you’ve got major operations in different regions of the world where people are going into these caves harvesting that guano and bringing high exposure. So there’s a number of practices that are out there that can bring exposure. There’s other about the primary reservoir might be a bat. But we saw, let me give you an example, in Malaysia in 1999, an incredibly dangerous pathogen called Nipah virus circulates in bat populations in that region of the world. And there was an extraordinary event where we began seeing a dramatic increase in people who were being infected and dying from the Nipah virus.
19:00 Dennis Carroll: It’s one of the most deadly viruses we have out there. 70% of the people who were infected died. And what we traced it back to was a farm, a pig farm, was moved into a jungle area. They knocked down the trees, built an open air pig farm, and the bats that accumulated in the surrounding forests tended to have roost in the enclosed huts of the pigs and they would hang upside down and drop feces and they infect the pig. The pig got infected with the Nipah virus and then the farmers got exposed either through slaughtering and so it was indicative of how a bat can transfer the virus to another animal and that animal then becomes whether it’s a pig or a civet cat as in the case of SARS in 2003. So there are lots of different routes and ways that we can look at the movement directly and indirectly.
20:03 Brian Rose: Okay. And that scenario you’re talking about, I think was shown in the movie Contagion, right? The very last scene that was that
20:11 Dennis Carroll: Anyone who wants to get a really graphic illustration, go on to YouTube and type in end of Contagion and there is a minute and a half clip that walks you through precisely that and it was based on absolutely based on that Malaysia model event in 1999. It’s evidence. It’s a clear example and the movie does a brilliant job in illustrating how a virus in a bat can end up even in someone like Gwyneth Paltrow.
20:47 Brian Rose: So I forced myself to watch that movie in March and it’s pretty sobering. This is before we were on lockdown or anything. And I of course I see Gwyneth Paltrow, you know, convulsing on the floor of her kitchen as her children watch her die. So, it was a bit ominous, but you know, I’ve been told it was a pretty accurate movie and it was quite accurate, you know, showing the military coming in and maybe at the end of this conversation, we’ll get to the end with their vaccine portrayal as well. This, you know, this friendly nasal nasal, you know, saline solution that makes everything 100% better. We’ll talk about that maybe at the end. But yeah, no, I was good.
21:24 Brian Rose: People should watch that for sure. Also, bats do harbor a lot of diseases, probably more than turkeys. Though maybe having that human contact is potentially more dangerous.
21:34 Dennis Carroll: Sorry, you broke up.
21:34 Brian Rose: Oh, sorry about that. I mean bats also harbor a lot of diseases themselves and so potentially they are more dangerous than say having a turkey around because they are breeding grounds more so than other animals.
21:50 Dennis Carroll: Well, you know, bats are a double-edged sword. They do they’re able to coexist with a broad range of viruses without showing any adverse effect. They aren’t adversely affected by carrying these viruses. So on that side, you know, they pose a challenge for us, but they also as part of the ecosystem are incredibly important in terms of keeping mosquitoes and other potentially deadly vectors you know, under control. So you know, the solution isn’t to look at bats as essentially the archenemy as the big reservoir of bad things. They also play an incredibly important role in ensuring our own well-being. I think the big issue is this. Viruses don’t jump.
22:41 Dennis Carroll: We make them jump. It’s what we do. It’s not what the bat does. The bat is just a passive carrier. It’s how we The bat isn’t coming to us. We’re going to the bat. And so it’s our responsibility, our culpability, and as such our responsibility to change our behaviors. Not look at the bat as the archenemy. You know, we’ve seen our enemy and that enemy is ourselves. It’s what we do, how we do it. So, take responsibility, own it, and then change it.
23:12 Brian Rose: Well, let’s talk about that. And I definitely think the bats suffer from a PR problem for sure. So, we definitely need to get them better representation on Madison Avenue. You know, for a lot of reasons. You mo you once said, quote, “To know your enemy is key to victory.” And I think you were talking about maybe what you just mentioned and the fact that we need to look in the mirror and look at population growth, the land use, all the things that we’ve been doing to facilitate that. Is that what you were talking about or were you talking about something else?
23:41 Dennis Carroll: No, you know, it’s basically I was I was paraphrasing Sun Tzu, the Chinese general and philosopher who fundamentally said to again abbreviating to know your enemy is to be victorious in every battle. To not know your enemy is to lose. And so when we think about emerging viral diseases, the more we know not just about the viruses and their ecosystems, but what it is that we do that trigger them to move out of that ecosystem into us. So knowledge is power in this case. It gives you insight and if you use that insight well, your ability to prevent spillover first off is fundamental.
24:26 Dennis Carroll: There’s no reason why viruses should jump from wildlife into us. If we managed our footprint on this planet appropriately, these events wouldn’t happen. But if we also know where these events are likely to play out, we understand the viruses and their ecosystems, it’ll also allows us to put in place surveillance systems so that in the case of COVID-19, in all likelihood, you know, COVID-19 didn’t spill over in December in Wuhan. It in all likelihood spilled over months earlier and circulated and was misidentified as an influenza virus because it came in play during influenza season and it was only when some very smart clinician found a patient in December and realized it wasn’t an influenza it was something else. The point is that if we had surveillance out there looking for telltale signatures of a spillover event, we would have picked it up in October.
25:29 Dennis Carroll: You wouldn’t have waited till December. So not only can you prevent their spillover, but being smart with your surveillance, you can pick it up immediately and essentially identify it, contain it, and eliminate it, and it never becomes the headline that it is today.
25:45 Brian Rose: Okay, let’s talk about then the events of the last I guess nine months now. I mean, what do you see as some of the key points of ways we could have prevented or decisions that maybe we can learn from? Because from what I understand of your research, this is something that we should be expecting to happen in some way, shape or form annually from from here out like hurricanes. So, what do you see as some of the things? I mean, I know there was a pivotal decision to allow people to go home for Chinese New Year in December. You know, obviously shutting down airline traffic or not at certain points. What do you see as some of the big benchmarks of this whole crisis?
26:26 Dennis Carroll: Well, first off, the big benchmark it was, I think, underscored by countries like Vietnam and Thailand, which showed that you could control it. These are two countries that are right up against, you know, China. I mean, Thailand is one country removed, but the point is they are immediately vulnerable well before anyone else to these events. And to this day, very same virus that we’re dealing with, they dealt with also. And Vietnam and Thailand together, total population represents half the population in the United States, half of the population in the EU. And they don’t have half the mortality that the EU has and half the mortality that the United States have.
27:13 Dennis Carroll: There’s a total number of 58 people who have died in Vietnam and Thailand. And all of those, in fact, are in Thailand. No deaths in Vietnam. There’s something they did that showed that this virus was very containable, very controllable, and without destroying their society. And we need to be really clear about that. These are not the most technologically advanced, right? They’re not the ones that you would think of as you know the leaders in being able to control an event like this. You would think North America and United States and Europe would have been. The fact of the matter is Europe and United States responded equally bad in the beginning profoundly misread the events playing themselves out in Asia in ways that the Vietnamese and Thais did not. They heard the same messaging coming out of China at the beginning of the new year.
28:10 Dennis Carroll: They understood that the vulnerabilities about a novel infectious disease and they took action immediately. They began controlling population movement from China into their countries and they did the simple stuff that we still have trouble doing. Getting people to wear masks, diagnostics, and contact tracing. They did it early, effectively, and sustainably. And you’ve not seen sustained community-based transmission of this virus in those countries. That’s a wildly different situation than what we see in North the United States and Europe.
28:51 Brian Rose: So, a single death in Vietnam. That sounds suspicious, doesn’t it?
28:59 Dennis Carroll: No, because you know there are some really good research facilities there that are working in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi and they are very clear they’re doing very good case management looking trying to identify and they’re not finding any. Now the numbers themselves aren’t perfect numbers but what you are seeing very clearly is that Vietnam and Thailand are places where sustained community transmission never really took root.
29:29 Brian Rose: Okay. And that’s because they locked down early which obviously the EU didn’t do, America didn’t do. America didn’t lock the Europe EU down which hurt it, right? What looks like the strains in the East Coast came from us here in Europe. Also didn’t buy into the distancing to any of the other stuff and still haven’t I guess and you’re saying these are the reasons or big reasons why.
29:52 Dennis Carroll: Those are the you know ultimately Europe did get its act together. It did not respond you know its initial response was very similar to the US response. It however you know had its Saul on the road to Damascus moment where it realized they have to start doing and they did. UK was a bit slow in bringing that together. And you ultimately look at the numbers now and you know the dramatic sustained reduction in community transmission across Europe at this point. With maybe Sweden being a bit of an exception in the United States those we’ve never embraced politically or culturally the measures that we know work we’ve seen it demonstrated country after country South Korea Indonesia over and over China over and over again this is not demand a high-tech response it requires a mask incredibly protective.
30:54 Dennis Carroll: Incredibly protect. We’ll be lucky if we get a vaccine that is as protective as a mask.
31:06 Brian Rose: So I’ve had experts on that have told me that the virus itself is, you know, multiple orders of magnitude smaller than what a mask can guard against. And so they’ve gone on to tell me that the mask itself can’t block the transmission of that virus, making it pointless. What do they get wrong when they say that in your opinion or what do the masks do?
31:30 Dennis Carroll: The vast majority of virus that’s being transmitted as you know coughing and sneezing isn’t a free agent. It’s not out there as an individual virus. It’s trapped in sputum mucus globs and the mask can protect us against those globs. And that’s what the vast majority of viruses that we’re exposed to are being transmitted in and they also can end up on surfaces. So that’s why good hygiene constantly using sanitizer is critically important. And then the issue about social distancing, keeping six feet apart further reduces the opportunity for a cough to propel even a globular encrusted viral agent, you know, directly to you. It’ll fall to the ground beforehand. So yes, in a virus, if you look at how big a virus is and then how massive the mesh is, no, the mask wouldn’t protect against an individual virus. But individual viruses are rare and far between. It’s really, you know, if we’re trying to stop the spread of a virus, go after what’s the most common form of that virus, and it’s largely encased in some kind of mucus, some kind of bodily fluid that it will trap that it will protect one against it being expelled if you have a mask on and if you don’t, it protect you from inhaling it.
33:10 Dennis Carroll: Now, you have to wash the mask and handle it carefully. But if both people have a mask on, and this is where you get a powerful multiplier effect. If I’m infected and I cough and sneeze and you have a mask on, you are not going to get I’m going to have stopped 99% of anything getting out and your mask is going to protect against that last percent.
33:36 Brian Rose: Okay. Let me ask you a question about the reporting of deaths because it’s been very controversial about the accuracy and the qualification of COVID-19 deaths. It became even a meme about a month ago, doctor, where people were saying that, you know, a husband shot his wife at home because he couldn’t stand being around her and it was because of COVID-19 cuz they were locked at home. You know, these kinds of things. And so, you know, we saw Italy with all these cases and then one of the members of the parliament came out and said, you know, 99% were comorbidity. And then other people said that wasn’t true. You know, we saw aspects in America where we thought people were getting financial benefits for that.
34:16 Brian Rose: And this obviously caused mistrust in the public which then doesn’t help when you ask him to wear masks. What’s what’s your stance on all of this? Was it misreported? Was that happening?
34:25 Dennis Carroll: No, look what you’re talking about is what’s the impact of the virus? And in this case, you know, people with comorbidity, what was the probability of their dying in this is only, you know, in the last five months, what’s the probability of their dying from that comorbidity? What’s the probability of their dying because they’re over 60 years old? And a missing ingredient in this equation is the virus. The virus. There’s a in the United States there are 140,000 people that celebrated New Year’s this year that are not alive today. And it’s safe to say those 140,000 people with fine-tuning a few here and there would still be alive today if it wasn’t for that virus.
35:07 Dennis Carroll: That’s fundamentally what you’re what you’re talking about.
35:12 Brian Rose: Yeah, it is and isn’t. I just some people have said, you know, an autopsy report, I’ve been forced to put COVID-19. I never had to do that before. I just talked about what they died from. You know, other people say you’re not taking into account what people would have died from naturally. You know, Trump was on last night saying that the median age was 78. And maybe we can get into the ramifications of the lockdown on the back of that. I mean, there are some reasonable questions here, are there not?
35:40 Dennis Carroll: No, I don’t. I look what we’re talking about. What is the impact of a virus on public health? And as I said, there are 140,000 people that are dead that are attributed to this virus in the United States. You could go through all of those and sort out how many of those would have died if the virus hadn’t been around and it’ll be a very small fraction. There may be a handful, a relative handful, but then there are lots of people who died. Remember, you’re only making the attribution of a COVID-19 death if what you done what you’ve done is confirm they had COVID-19. There are lots of people who are dying who in fact have not had a COVID-19 test. And they may have died from COVID-19, but because they didn’t get a test, it will not be attributed to COVID-19.
36:36 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, some were being attributed without even a test, I was told. But let let me ask you another question.
36:42 Dennis Carroll: I think I think that’s part of the problem is that there’s a lack of uniformity in how the numbers are counted and I think that’s part of the chaos that you know we’ve seen the absolute lack of singularity in the response to this virus and among those lack of singularity is having a clear case definition that becomes uniformly and universally applied. And we don’t have that. So, we’re comparing apples and oranges. But if people want to use that argument to say that this virus is less deadly than it is, that’s a misinterpretation because you’re losing both because of this lack of uniformity. There are people who did die because of this COVID-19 that are not attributable because they didn’t get a diagnostic. And then there are people who died from this virus died who are attributing to COVID-19 even though they may have been in the final stage of a of cancer and have pushed them over the edge.
37:44 Dennis Carroll: So all of these things fundamentally I think people are focusing on arguing on the edges of the issue as opposed to the fundamental issue is that there are people dead today who never should have been who never should have died because of this virus that you have 58 people in Southeast Asia and 140,000 in the United States. That’s inexcusable. It’s just still strange to believe.
38:12 Brian Rose: But also the test itself is flawed. I mean there are false positive and false negatives even in the test itself.
38:21 Dennis Carroll: Well, again that’s one of the remarkable failures. And quite frankly the few number of tests that are actually available. It’s really quite extraordinary that this far into a pandemic that two things we have the technological limitations to testing that we do have people will wait a week in order to get their results back. We that we don’t have a point of capture diagnostic essentially a rapid diagnostic that there wasn’t a significant pool of resources put out on the table for industry to essentially give us a the equivalent of an early pregnancy testing capability. If there were billions of dollars put out there, we’ve already spent multiple trillions of dollars as a consequence to this virus that we haven’t been smart enough to really energize and focus industry to give us a home-based easily used technology that would allow everyone to know whether or not they’re infected or not is really quite profoundly inexcusable.
39:33 Dennis Carroll: And then the issue with the quality of the tests is really quite extraordinary. Yes, false positives, false negatives. We have a really difficult time answering the question, are people reinfected after they’ve survived a first infection? We’re finding lots of examples of people that are showing positive after they’ve presumably been cleared of this virus, but we don’t know whether the it’s a testing problem that they really weren’t cleared, that there was still virus there. So it’s it we have the technologic capability.
40:21 Dennis Carroll: What we don’t have are the incentives to drive the availability of this kind of technology. So we get clear unambiguous and rapid determination. And this becomes even more complicated when you think there’s estimates now that 30 to 40% of the transmission of this virus is attributable to people without symptoms. So, you know, not knowing that you are infected, but you are and you’re transmitting this virus that you don’t know that or the person you’re sitting across from is infected and transmitting the virus. And at this point in time that we lack that information and we lack the technology to be able to rapidly get answers to that is I just find extraordinary that we could have had a quote unquote a Manhattan-like effort to generate this technology and have it widely available and we’re going to still need it over the course of the next year or two. You know the vaccine is not going to get us out of the wood.
41:29 Brian Rose: And let me ask you whose fault is that? I mean, a lot of people point to Trump, the federal government, but it’s also states responsibility to also prepare for this. So, is everyone at fault?
41:41 Dennis Carroll: Well, states have a responsibility to prepare, but look, think of a virus as essentially the equivalent of a foreign adversary. And what we don’t in the United States, we do not look to each state to develop a militia to respond to a foreign adversary. What we look at is the federal government to develop a national capability and to trigger national leadership and national resources to deal with a national threat. Viruses are no different. Viruses are equivalent to a foreign adversary and leaving it up to each state to make it up leaves every next state vulnerable to the mishaps of the state next to them. It’s a national event, a national threat.
42:33 Dennis Carroll: We have to stop think of it as a threat that’s only the responsibility of that given state. And I would expand that in a region like Europe that it should not be each state unto itself. Italy competing against Germany to get personal protective equipment. It’s a regional problem. And when you at least have a regional organization like the European Union, then there they did not mount a equivalent of a federal response. Every state was left up to its own. And as such we saw grossly gross inequities in terms of how people got access and availability and the response was hugely uneven compared the United Kingdom to Germany. Yeah so it’s a it’s a real issue.
43:24 Dennis Carroll: Viruses need to be treated as a global event, a health and economic event that requires a global coordinated response.
43:36 Brian Rose: Yeah. When you have fear in there, everything kind of breaks down. I mean especially in the states I mean you know a lot the states a lot of times want their own sovereignty and in Europe yeah you have the European Union but as we can see it’s only functions for certain reasons at this point.
43:43 Dennis Carroll: But I don’t think you know states weren’t arguing for their states rights in this case you had state after state after state imploring the federal government to step forward and provide leadership to ensure that there’s a national PPE stockpile that there’s a national stockpile for respirators as opposed to states having to compete against each other. You know, Republican and Democratic leaders across the United States at the state level were arguing for federal leadership and we did not get that.
44:26 Brian Rose: Yeah. I don’t know. We can go down this road, I guess. I mean, I just wonder is it the federal government’s responsibility to provide respirators to every state?
44:35 Dennis Carroll: It’s their responsibility to manage the flow of life-saving equipment and to act as a union as opposed to 50 independent states. So the flow and movement of goods has to flow and move in accordance with how the virus is moving. And that’s not uniform. It’s very episodic. And it’s the federal government that’s in the best position to be able to bring the kind of flexibility that can flow with the challenge and to move with the geographic movement and the threat as it we know that from influenzas. We know it from other diseases that you know you have to have geographic flexibility in being able to respond and the federal government is the one that has the ability to do that.
45:23 Brian Rose: Let me ask you a question. The CDC last time I checked had had said that the mortality rate for the coronavirus was at 0.26%. Which put it about the same as the typical influenza. Now tell me if I’m wrong here and if that is the case, how why are we treating this virus differently than we would the flu because we are treating it in a massively different way. And I just want to get your thoughts on that and then maybe we talk about the lockdown and if that was the right thing to do or is that the wrong thing to do.
45:54 Dennis Carroll: Well, first off, flu doesn’t the seasonal flu doesn’t have a mortality rate of 0.2 or 0.3. It’s a it’s a tenth of that. So we typically there are about 30 to 50,000 people who die annually in the United States from seasonal flu. So first and foremost fundamentally different order literally an order of magnitude difference between the virulence of this virus versus seasonal flu. There was a mega study that was just released in the last couple of days looking across Asia Europe the Americas to try and get a better picture as to what the mortality rate given the large number of asymptomatic carriers and what they are now looking at is a mortality rate of about somewhere between 0.3 and 0.7% mortality. That is more than an order of magnitude more than a seasonal flu.
46:56 Dennis Carroll: And it’s you know the let’s put in perspective the H1N1 pandemic virus was less than a tenth of a percent. So this when you when you look at you know the relative percentage is not in itself overwhelming 0.65% is not an overwhelming number but the number of people who get infected ultimately the sum of the population that is impacted becomes really significant. This is an easily highly transmitted virus.
47:29 Brian Rose: Right. No I agree it’s denominator changes dramatically.
47:33 Dennis Carroll: Right. It’s very high highly transmittable.
47:33 Brian Rose: What about the mortality rate for under 50 healthy people that could have been working and going about their business and maybe even keeping the economy functional and sometimes keeping medicine functional in the UK here? I mean, there’s been a lot of people dying from lack of access to the NHS. I mean, what do you think about that? I’m kind of referencing the lockdown, you know, obviously and we’re talking about some of these, you know, older people and comorbidity people being in danger and dying, but was that the right thing to do to keep everyone at home or could we have done that better?
48:05 Dennis Carroll: Well, remember the whole issue about bending the curve wasn’t plan A, it was plan B. Plan A is to stop the virus from establishing itself in a country and preventing community transmission. We failed miserably on that. So plan B we now recognize that there was and Europe was in the same position that there was uncontrolled spread of the virus and this was sort of in America we would call it a Hail Mary pass. An attempt to really try and catch up for what is an out-of-control situation.
48:50 Dennis Carroll: Bending the curve was to protect the integrity of the health system. The real concern is that if you continued to let the number of people infected spiral out of control, it would collapse the health system at large. So not only would people who were infected with this virus not be able to get adequate care, people dealing with normative health issues would not be able. So you would have not only deaths from this coronaviruses, you would have people who couldn’t you know they couldn’t get emergency medical care because of a cardiac arrest who had a traumatic accident of some sort and they wouldn’t be able because the hospitals wouldn’t have been able to absorb it. So this was really clear clearly an emergency response not a long-term response. So that the strategy was this, lock it down, drive the number of cases down to a manageable point where you could reopen in a thoughtful way and then bring the kind of diagnostic and contact tracing that would keep the amount of virus very very very low.
50:04 Dennis Carroll: Europe did this after they let it get out of control. They brought the they bent the curve. They essentially broke the back of the curve, flattened it out, and they now are again, if they remain diligent and continuing to use diagnostics and contact tracing, and people use masks and some smart social distancing, they’ll be able to reopen the economy, go back to work, go back to school. That’s the stuff that you want. But until you flatten the curve, you’re not in any position. And in the United States that impatience, it was attention deficit disorder. We’re tired of dealing with this virus. So even before the curve was flattened, it wasn’t even broken in many of these states. They reopened and then just all hell broke loose.
50:59 Brian Rose: But it actually turned out that the medical system was not ever taxed. So that was a mistaken assumption, right? Because we had we had people here in the UK we had empty hospitals and nurses being laid off and patients not getting access to medical care.
51:13 Dennis Carroll: Well, I’m not getting access to medical care. That’s more a systems issue. It wasn’t a virus issue. Look, the measures that were taken dramatically reduced the influx of patients. Right now in Houston, all of the ICU beds are completely absorbed with this virus. That means anyone else who needs intensive care cannot get it in Houston.
51:31 Brian Rose: Is that true? I was just speaking with Representative Dan Crenshaw yesterday of Houston and he just says something completely different on his social. Also, we’re finding the respirators aren’t needed for the for this disease. Right.
51:51 Dennis Carroll: Respirators. Look, it’s really interesting the experience with respirators during in New York City during in April March and April when they were battling this virus going on an a respirator basically 70% of the people went on respirators died. It. You know, if you were one of the 30%, yeah, were appreciative, but a lot of those resources going to respirators, most the vast majority of people died. But out of that experience also came more insight into what were the co-therapies that you could provide, steroidal therapies of different kinds.
52:34 Dennis Carroll: And the survival rate now is the inverse that 80% of the people going on respirators are surviving and 20% are dying.
52:42 Brian Rose: So, they’re also actually not using them as much as they thought they were going to use them, right? And they were kind of surprised where they thought people would need respirators, but they were still breathing. And that’s why
52:50 Dennis Carroll: That’s right. Yeah. I mean, look, it the story about public health is fundamentally this. You plan for the worst, pray for the best. So, always have to anticipate what’s the worst case scenario as you are trying to protect the population that you’re responsible for.
53:13 Brian Rose: Let me ask you about vaccinations because it’s something everyone’s talking about. I alluded to it earlier when I watched Contagion and I watched it with kind of open eyes four months ago. And at the end of that movie that seems fairly accurate like you said on some of the possibilities if it was a high mortality rate infection. At the end the day is saved with this beautiful innocuous saline injection in your nose that looks to be 100% effective and everyone goes back to normal. And you know we were talking before here I’m an engineer from MIT and I understand science and I was always for vaccines. I used to get my flu vaccine but I started speaking to people like Robert F.
53:53 Brian Rose: Kennedy Jr. And other people and they talk about the kind of history of vaccines and I started really wondering if a rushed fast-track vaccine is the smartest thing I want to stick in my body and if it’s again not going to have anywhere near 100% effective rate and all the other downsides. So, I want to get your thoughts. Is this really the solution to this problem?
54:16 Dennis Carroll: Well, look, vaccination we’ve seen over and over and over again is a life-saving intervention. Every vaccine has some associated side effect. Ultimately the question is the side effect anywhere near as impactful as what it is that you’re trying to protect against? And there are no vaccines that are out there that are part of the normal toolbox of vaccination that have side effects that are anywhere anywhere near as consequential as what it is that you’re being vaccinated.
54:51 Brian Rose: A lot of people would disagree with that a lot. There’s like 50 I think 54 vaccines that are given to our children now these days.
55:00 Dennis Carroll: I think I don’t know. 54 sounds like a ridiculous number. It’s hard to imagine. That’s high. Okay. We did not get 54 vaccines.
55:17 Brian Rose: Now, how long do you think we need to properly test a vaccine? And then how effective does it need to be before we administer it to eight billion people without having the long-term effects known? Because it could literally change the course of humanity if we get it wrong.
55:32 Dennis Carroll: And it and it can also change the long term course of humanity if you get it right. So it’s a double-edged scenario here. That said, look, there is this rush for a vaccine that puts an enormous amount of pressure on making sure you get it right. And you know, the there are two issues. You’ve talked about efficacy. You know, a vaccine to be effective has two. One, how protective is it and how long is that protective effect for? And does it protect against illness or does it protect against illness and transmission? We already know that people can have this virus and be asymptomatic.
56:17 Dennis Carroll: But they can also shed the virus. So ultimately we have to be able to show that this vaccine will ultimately not only protect people from illness but prevent the transmission of this virus as well and not turn everyone into silent transmitting carriers of the virus. So we have to have real clarity on that. The worst one of the worst things we could do is be successful in protecting against illness but everyone is still carrying the virus and shedding the virus and we have you know stealth transmission and continued pressures for evolution of this virus.
56:55 Dennis Carroll: The second issue is how long is it good for and what’s the protective effect. There are a lot of again early data that suggests that the natural exposure does not provide long-term protective immunity. So there’s a lot of controversy there. We’re still learning more, but even more data that just came out from South Korea suggests a fairly narrow window in which the protective effect might be there. If the vaccine itself can outdo mother nature, that’ll be really important. But it’s going to be able to show that this vaccine can at least protect and prevent transmission for at least a year is going to be the minimum. The Food and Drug Administration in the United States put out as a minimum requirement that the vaccine be at least 50% effective. So that remains to be seen.
57:58 Dennis Carroll: But then you’re alluding to the alo the other issue about what percentage of the population is going to resist vaccination. So with if it’s only 50% protective and you’ve got 30% of the population who’s refusing vaccination, we’ll never get to a point where you get herd immunity, which is really what you want to be able to get if you’re going to stop essentially eliminate this virus as a public health threat. So there are really complicated issues. You’ve got both the vaccine, its safety, its efficacy, and then ultimately the public’s willingness to take advantage of this vaccine. For this vaccine to really work, you’re going to have to have something that really essentially eliminates the ability of this virus to be transmitted. And you’re going to need something highly efficacious, but even more importantly, something that the vast majority of the people will in fact use. And I think I’m dubious on the latter.
59:04 Dennis Carroll: I think that there’s a lot of really unfortunate misinformation about vaccines. And you know, having worked in global health for over 30 years, and seeing the consequences of people not having access to life-saving, vaccines and then seeing the consequences when they have access. We live in a bubble. We live in a society where we have achieved a essentially a bubble around us from the generations that went before us that got vaccinated. And as more and more people back away from vaccines, we’re seeing with more episodic events with measles epidemics happening around the world as we see more and more the percentage of the population becoming unvaccinated. We run the risk of taking a big step backwards.
1:00:03 Dennis Carroll: Vaccines save lives, but we have to be smart about them. We have to continually to monitor to make sure that there aren’t those adverse effects. You never let up on that. And we have to make sure most importantly that they’re equitably available that all populations, not just the wealthy, have access to these vaccines that the people who are most vulnerable need to get these vaccines.
1:00:33 Brian Rose: I think the quickest a vaccine’s ever been created is like 10 years. It’s something like that kind of an order of magnitude on time. So when you hear them talking about it’s going to be ready by fall or early next year, especially like you said you have to test these vaccines, that worries me as a scientist trying to fast-track science always worries me. Does it worry you?
1:00:54 Dennis Carroll: Well, there is this, you know, there is an unnatural pressure right now to get a vaccine available as rapidly as possible and I think we have to do due diligence to make sure that we do not sacrifice the integrity of the vaccine either in terms of its safety or in terms of its efficacy. So those pressures are political and we have to be very very careful. So, I would not argue for the earliest availability. I would argue for making sure that when something’s available, we’ve done due diligence and proven evidence-based that there is it’s e efficacious. We know what it does. We know how long it does it. And we know what it’s if there are adverse effects, what are they? So you can make the smart appropriate decisions. We should not be surprised by this vaccine at some later date. So I’m totally in favor of making sure we do not compromise the integrity of making sure safe and effective vaccines are available for political expediency. That said, we all then have a collective responsibility to we have a tool in hand. Unlike the movie Contagion, there was no countermeasure available.
1:02:30 Dennis Carroll: People were exposed, they were infected and they died. We have a counter measure that’s available. Face masks work. Social distancing works, personal hygiene works. It’s inconvenient. A vaccine will get rid of that inconvenience, I guess. But the fact of the matter is we have stuff we can do now. And if we’re compliant, then the curves that we see that are out of control will flatten out and drop down to near zero very, very rapidly. These are very impactful. So vaccines, we need them, but we have a toolbox that we can draw on now. But we’ve got some real social and political issues which are compromising our ability to exploit their effectiveness.
1:03:21 Brian Rose: And what do you say to people who say it infringes on my personal freedom and I should have the right to wear a mask, etc., etc. You’ve obviously thought about this.
1:03:29 Dennis Carroll: Look, we have all sorts of stuff that we sacrifice our personal freedom on. I don’t know how you came to work today. But just a little while ago, I was driving the road down the road in my car and I sacrificed as a personal freedom to drive as I wished down the road to come to a stop sign and stop. And the other car coming the other way came to a stop sign and stopped. Infringed on my personal freedom just to drive as I want to drive. But there was this contract made where I knew that if I just went through that intersection at the same time that other guy went through that intersection, there was a price I was going to pay. So, I gladly roll back the freedom of my being able to drive any way I want because I know that collectively we’re in a better position. Face masks are no different.
1:04:22 Dennis Carroll: It’s a modest mild infringement with an incredibly profound impact. Far more impactful than stop signs. I’ll tell you that.
1:04:33 Brian Rose: Doctor, let’s talk about the future because you made this hurricane analogy at the beginning of the show and it’s a fascinating one because you know we know now that hurricanes they come every year. Now the severity varies and then the big ones we hear about every eight or 10 years. But from what I understand you’re telling us that this is now the new normal. We need to be ready for these varying degrees of pandemics to continue coming. And I think you’re predicting the next one’s going to be in sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe explain this new normal to us, but because I think a lot of people, and correct me if I’m wrong, think, oh, we just got to make it through the coronavirus and everything will be back to normal. Tell me how you feel about this.
1:05:13 Dennis Carroll: Well, look, let’s put it this way. 102 years ago 1918 pandemic if we were having this discussion then the total population on the world was 1.8 eight billion people as a species. Homo sapiens took us 300,000 years. We emerged somewhere about 300,000 years ago. Took us 300,000 years to hit the 1 billion mark. In 10 decades, we’ve added another six billion people and we’ll add another four or five depending on what demographers are saying by the end of this century.
1:05:50 Dennis Carroll: That incredible uptick in our presence on this planet doesn’t come without a price. And part of that price is a disruptive effect on the ecosystems we live in. And one of the metrics of that disruption is increasing the frequency of interactive dynamics between us, our livestock and wildlife. So right now we’re really looking at the consequence of the population explosion of the 20th century when we think about the coronaviruses and the influenza viruses. As we move further into this century and we look at the epicenter for new population growth it’s not Asia it’s Africa. When we look at the 20th century most of that population growth came out of Asia. When we look at the population growth of the 21st century, it’ll be in Africa and we think about mammalian and viral diversity we’re not going to get more diversity than in sub-Saharan Africa. So as populations grow, as ecosystems are disrupted, as our footprint expands in sub-Saharan Africa, we’re going to begin seeing patterns of emergence spill over and spread not dissimilar to what we’ve been seeing coming out of Asia. So the world is dynamic. It evolves and the profile of the 21st century is very much going to be reflective of these very predictable, very understandable changes that are a foot and very much like again weather forecasting.
1:07:30 Dennis Carroll: We know what these dynamics are. We know what the equivalent of changes in sea surface temperature a big driver for hurricanes. You know atmospheric pressures. We understand the different variables to a really extraordinary degree for hurricanes which allows us with multiple generations of modeling to be much more insightful about forecasting what a not just what a hurricane will look like but what a hurricane season will look like. And we need equivalent data sets as we go forward into this century to be much more insightful, much smarter, and have the ability with this data to run lots of models. Right now, we are pitiful in terms of our ability to forecast with any reasonable precision. But with more data and more modeling, as we move over the course of this next decade, we can do two things. We can be much more insightful about where these events are most likely to unfold. But as I said, hurricanes, we’re not going to prevent.
1:08:39 Dennis Carroll: We can use this knowledge about where these dynamics are playing themselves out most significantly. And those dynamics are us, what we’re doing, and we can change and mold and modify those. So we actually have the power to use this forecasting not only to better prepare, we have this power of forecasting to prevent and that is incredible. So the 21st century is different. These are not black swan events anymore. Think of them as gray rhino events. They are not that common but and but clearly not that uncommon. And so we’re going to be not just pandemics, epidemics, events that used to happen in one place of the world used to stay in that one place of the world because population movement was limited.
1:09:28 Dennis Carroll: But with population movement, viruses that don’t have pandemic potential. Pandemic potential means the ability to spread unchecked because of just the way they move from person to person. There are lots of viruses out there that are much more restrictive and they are more epidemic prone. But now an epidemic-prone virus can get on an airplane h you know essentially hijacking a body and fly from one region of the world to the next. So we have increasing risk of pandemics but I would say even more dramatically increasing risk of global epidemics which again will not only raise significant public health issues but huge economic and social and security issues.
1:10:13 Brian Rose: Sounds like a scary world to live in.
1:10:22 Dennis Carroll: Well and let’s be clear it’s a scary world if we don’t take responsibility. It’s not a scary world if we take responsibility. So let’s own it and act on it.
1:10:34 Brian Rose: I’m just curious. We kind of expected, you know, sub-Saharan Africa to really suffer, but we haven’t necessarily seen that I know of. And also India comes to mind. I don’t know if we’ve seen that there. First of all, is that true? And second of all, do we know why?
1:10:49 Dennis Carroll: Yeah. Well, two things. We only know what it is that we’re looking for. And so the availability and the distribution of diagnostics across Africa are limited. And similarly in India that look we’re talking about a continent with two billion people another continent with one plus billion people so we only have the narrowest insight as to what’s going on within these populations one two the virus moves in ways which are not against our playbook we expect them to move from point A to point B to point C to point they move from point A to point D to point J, back to point E, over to point L.
1:11:34 Dennis Carroll: They move. Look at the look at the pattern in the United States. It’s been in some ways almost a like Brownian motion. Helter-skelter. It’s not that random because it has to do with population movement. But it’s not as uniform. It’s not like watching a tsunami wave move uniformly from one point to another. It’s much more chaotic. If you are a follower of art, it’s much more like a Jackson Pollock painting. Sort of a splatter all over the place. It’s not uniform.
1:12:13 Dennis Carroll: And so that’s one of the things we keep superimposing uniformity on how this virus move and it doesn’t move that way. That said, you know, I do continue to keep my eyes on Africa and on the subcontinent. And you know, it’s a puzzle to me. I don’t quite understand it. I don’t know how much of it is just that we don’t have adequate diagnostics or whether something about, you know, getting sustained community to community transmission is disrupted in some way by something local that we’re not taking into account. We have to however presume that we will we had the same question if we were talking about this a month ago you would have added on to that list Brazil why aren’t we seeing anything in Brazil and of course Brazil’s out of control now and we’re seeing it quite dramatically so these viruses you know they don’t move against our playbook they have their own playbook
1:13:07 Brian Rose: Yeah last question doctor how is it going to play out in America because you know we’re watching this and We’re watching, you know, the that the number of cases at least go right back up. You know, every state is responding differently. Trump did a coronavirus live last night. He hadn’t done one in months. You know, it’s an election year. There’s protests. I mean, there’s so many things going on. The economy is down and people are concerned about that. What’s going to happen and what do we need to make happen in your opinion?
1:13:44 Dennis Carroll: Well, I think what we need to make happen is everyone wear a face mask. Simple. Everyone wear a face mask. If everyone wore a face mask and smart social distancing, this isn’t, you know, being isolated at home. It’s just smart social distancing and face masks. The curves that we’re watching going up will go like that. They’ll they’ll plummet. The virus will only transmit if we allow it to transmit. And a face mask will stop that transmission. If you’re infected, the person next to you will not get infected if you have a face mask on. And if they’re not infected and they have a face mask on, they won’t get infected.
1:14:25 Dennis Carroll: So first and foremost, if we want to, you know, educate our children, get them back into school, the social dynamics of school are so important and parents need to have some home sanity. We need to get the schools opened up and we can do that if people wear masks. It’s out of control because we have been collectively stupid. Simple, high impactful measures. Putting a cloth over your face for God’s sake. How complicated is that? And people do that, this virus will disappear very quickly.
1:15:06 Dennis Carroll: It’s not the miracle that Donald Trump is talking about. We don’t need miracles. The miracle maker is us. All we have to do is use the tool. You know, it’s the old joke about the person who refuses to take a mask, refuses to do social distancing because he believes in God and God will protect them. Ultimately, this person gets infected and is at death’s door and goes and says, “God, why didn’t you help me? I believed in you.” And God says, “But I did. I sent you masks. I sent you social distancing. You just wouldn’t use them.
1:15:44 Dennis Carroll: It’s all we have to do.”
1:15:44 Brian Rose: Do you worry about getting it?
1:15:44 Dennis Carroll: Do I worry about getting it? Of course. You know, I live like you do. We live in an ecosystem where this virus is circulated. But I’m equally worried about making sure I don’t infect anyone else. I always assume I’m infected. So my I have a social contract where I believe in taking care of the person next to me and I would hope that person next to me believes in taking care of that person next to them, which would be me. And so my biggest fear is making sure that I don’t infect someone. And if I do that right and if everyone takes that same mindset that the biggest problem and this is where I think the events of the last six months have really shown a light on a fracture within our social fabric is our sense of social responsibility. We are in it for ourselves. The individual has primacy.
1:16:42 Dennis Carroll: This whole issue about why giving up my individual freedom because of a mask. Sorry. It’s about how do we protect the community that we live in and it’s about a social contract which we’ve abandoned. We have a responsibility.
1:16:59 Brian Rose: I agree with you on that. I just think unfortunately the message around masks was obviously convoluted.
1:17:07 Dennis Carroll: It was awful. It was awful. Yeah.
1:17:12 Brian Rose: Community CDC sent a bad message out early. WHO as well.
1:17:18 Dennis Carroll: WHO. No, there’s been confusion about masks. I’ve been an absolute firm believer in masks from day one. It’s so there’s confusion in the communication legacy.
1:17:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think that Yeah, I just think that’s one of the probably the biggest problems is that there’s been so much incorrect information. And I’m not saying that everyone expected everyone to get it right. But between government agendas and politicians and maybe just honestly trying to keep masks for the surgeons. I think the public has been bombarded with so many things that they don’t know who to trust anymore. And I think some of that is fair. It doesn’t mean that’s the solution to our problems, but it definitely means they don’t know who to believe. And that’s where we’re at right now.
1:18:02 Dennis Carroll: I think that’s part of it, but I think also where politicians have exploited that confusion for their own political agenda. So that the fact that we have life-saving measures which have been politicized so that if you embrace that life-saving measure, you in some way are now making a political statement about who you’re for as opposed to who you’re against. It’s just incredible. And that’s that to me. Yes, there was messaging from the public health community that set the stage, but the exploitation of that by politicians is inexcusable. It’s self-serving and it’s quite frankly those politicians they’ve they own many of the deaths that have occurred over the last six months.
1:18:55 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, it seems like everything is being exploited by politicians these days. In America and the world unfortunately and everything’s being weaponized, but that’s a whole other show. Doctor, I appreciate your time. It’s an amazing show on Netflix. What are your plans? What are you doing for the next couple years?
1:19:12 Dennis Carroll: Well, you know, I’ve spoken a lot about knowing your enemy, right? Trying to shine a light on that viral dark matter. When we talk about the future threats, they already exist today circulating in wildlife, but we really only know about the ones that have already made the jump. We don’t know about the ones that haven’t. And I’m a big believer that we do need the systems to be able to respond after they make the jump. But I’m an even bigger believer that we need to build the systems to go to the viruses before they come to us. Understand where they are, how they’re circulating, what their host range, what’s their geography, begin to granularize hotspots so we can really prevent their spillover and then build a genetic database essentially due to viruses what we did to the human genome. Build a comprehensive genetic database.
1:20:07 Dennis Carroll: So when we talk about future biomedical countermeasures, a future vaccine, a future pharmaceutical, it’s not developing against COVID-19 because we know about COVID-19. It’s about developing a countermeasure because you now know in detail the genetic profile of all what we estimate to be 4,000 other coronaviruses out there and using machine learning to transform the sciences of virology from small data to big data. So let’s really move this agenda upstream, go to the viruses, build that in-depth knowledge, transform our ability to build a generation of new interventions and use that knowledge to build the systems and the policies and the practices to first and foremost prevent you know future spillover.
1:20:56 Dennis Carroll: So the Global Virome Project which is based on a program that I ran for over 10 years PREDICT, which was about viral discovery and building that kind of insightful database the genetic database and the ecologic database to prevent to detect and respond. We can do it. It’s a matter of political will. It’s simple stuff. No new technologies needed. We just need global commitment, global partnership and global ownership. So, watch for it. That’s what I’m focusing on. Global Virome Project. It is the coolest thing out there right now.
1:21:34 Dennis Carroll: We’ll never have another COVID-19 if we embrace this way forward.
1:21:39 Brian Rose: Yeah. And I appreciate all the work you’ve been doing over the past 10 years on that. And it’s an impressive piece. So, how can people find out more about that, more about you? Is there a website or social media? What’s the best place?
1:21:48 Dennis Carroll: Global Virome Project. Virome is V-I-R-O-M-E. So, Global Virome Project, one word.org, great website. Go in there. You know, get wise. The world is ours to have, you know, we can we can we own it, so let’s make it a better place.
1:22:12 Brian Rose: Excellent. Doctor, thank you so much. I appreciate your insights, your perspectives. And yeah, it’s a great conversation and great to hear this stuff from you. Also I highly encourage everyone to watch the Netflix series as well. It’s pretty incredible and even more incredible that it was filmed a couple years ago. So, again, wishing you all the best and thank you so much for all the work you’re doing and for all the work you’re going to do in the future.
1:22:37 Dennis Carroll: Okay. Thank you. And to everyone out there, stay safe, wear a face mask, social distance, personal hygiene, love your neighbor. That’s all you have to do.
1:22:46 Brian Rose: There he is, folks. Fantastic. That’s Dr. Dennis Carroll. As I said before, please share this link via the sidebar to all your social media channels. Get your friends and family out there having these conversations, getting this new information. We appreciate your support here at the Freedom Platform and we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care.
