[Kyle]: Welcome to this deep dive discussion
about COVID-19 vaccines. I'm Kyle Allred, and I'm excited to be here
with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who has a PhD in Biomedical Science, is published in a variety
of reputable journals, and is the founder of the popular website and YouTube channel,
FoundMyFitness. And Dr. Roger, who is a quadruple board certified
physician, has teaching appointments at University of California, Riverside and Loma Linda University
School of Medicine, and is the co-founder of MedCram. And on both our channels, we've been gathering
the most popular questions and beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines, safety questions, efficacy
questions, potential risk versus benefit questions. And I'm really looking forward to both of
your responses because, since the beginning of the pandemic, you've been outstanding communicators
about the science and the data as it becomes available. You critically read COVID studies, you confer
with expert colleagues, and then you help break down what do people really need to know. And you've also really focused on ways that
people can optimize their own health and immunity throughout your discussions. I think this is going to be a lengthy discussion
and geared towards people that want to better understand the data and some of the important
nuances related to these questions. So thank you both for being here today. Dr. Seheult, I'm going to send the first question
your way. I've heard some people say that COVID vaccines
aren't necessary for relatively young people who are in good shape and don't have medical
problems. What are your thoughts on this? [Dr. Seheult]: Well, Kyle, as you may know,
I'm a critical care intensivist, and I take care of patients in the hospital. I work in a one ICU hospital in a one hospital
town. So, anything bad that happens, it comes to
me in the intensive care unit. I'm the one that is there when they put the
endotracheal tube in. I put the chest tubes in, the central lines,
and holding the patient's hands. And so for me, in the last couple of weeks,
this has become really personal for me because what I've seen in the last couple of weeks
in our hospital is like nothing else that I've seen even with the prior wave going back
to February and January of this year. So, what is it that I'm seeing? I'm seeing patients in their 30s, patients
even in their 20s coming in with very few comorbidities, maybe just a little bit overweight,
and they are ending up on the ventilator. I've seen fathers in their 60s coming in crying,
asking me to do everything that we can for their sons who are in their 30s, newly married
with small children. We didn't see that back in February. And so, to get to the root of your question,
is what do people who are younger have to be concerned about? I think it's a very good question because
all of the things that we have learned about COVID-19 in the past is now being rewritten
by the Delta variant. So, if you look at some of this data, this
is data from Virginia, and you can see here on the left hand side of the screen in January
is a graph that we're all very familiar with. This is basically the monthly hospitalization
rate by age group. And what you can see there is on the right
side of that first graph is it's a very high number for the elderly, and it goes down very
precipitously for the young. And that's because the young were not being
hospitalized. But as we go across this screen, you can see
here that when we end up in August, a very ominous sign is occurring. What we're seeing is that the younger population
are being hospitalized at almost the same rate. Maybe, instead of, you know, a 20th or a 10th,
it's maybe half of the rate of the elderly. And so why is that happening? Well, we know that there's a very high vaccination
rate in the elderly and a relatively low vaccination rate in the young. Even look at the...you can barely see it,
but the yellow boxes are describing what's happening to pediatric cases. Pediatric cases, of course, those less than
12 years of age who can't get vaccinated are skyrocketing. And so this is the concern that I have. We look at some of these other issues. For instance, this idea of the 99% survival
rate. That's something that they say. Hey, 99% survival, and I really don't need
to be concerned about it. So if you look at this data, and we compare
it to something that we know very well like the flu virus, you'll see here that the hospitalization
rate for the flu virus in young people is about 0.01%. If you look at the pre-Delta COVID-19 data,
it's about 0.2%. It's almost 20-fold higher for COVID-19 in
the young than it is for the flu. Now, if you think about the 1% number, you'll
start to see very clearly that if you start to think about there's only the 1% that are
going to be affected, that won't affect me, what we are seeing right now in this country,
especially in states like Florida and Texas and specifically Idaho, is an overwhelming
of the critical care hospital health care delivery system. Think about this. The population of the United States is 331
million people. If just 1% are going to die, that's 3.3 million
people, and that's just the people who are dying. Let's talk about the people who are sick and
need to be hospitalized because they can't breathe because of oxygenation. We only have under a million acute care beds
in the United States, and so as a result of that, you are going to quickly overwhelm the
healthcare system if you have a problem with an overwhelming infection. Let's take the state of Idaho. It has a 39.7% fully vaccinated rate, and
what we're seeing there, as of yesterday, the governor has declared that hospitals now
because they're overwhelmed are going to start to deliver basically rationed care. You should not expect the same standards of
care that you're used to expecting in the health care delivery system because they're
just not able to give it. Let me give you some specific examples. Instead of having one intensive care nurse
for two patients, it's now going to be one intensive care nurse for six patients with
some help from non-ICU nurses. Because they're overwhelmed, you cannot transfer
patients to higher level of care for things that they need to get done if they have very
advanced cancers, for instance, because those hospitals don't have room. If you need elective surgery, their elective
surgeries are being canceled. Traumas are still happening. Babies are still being born. These are the problems that we're having in
a situation where you may think that because you're healthy and strong and young, you're
not going to be affected. But if you were to get into a car accident,
or you wanted...know somebody that wants to deliver a baby and has a complication, it's
going to be difficult for those things to happen. And so this is the thing that's occurring. And going back to my experience in the last
couple of weeks, every single one of those patients in the hospital that were there in
their 30s, their 40s were not vaccinated. And it's based on information that's coming
out that you're making decisions based on whether or not you should get the vaccine
because you hear about side effects, or you hear about things, for instance, about myocarditis. Well, here's an article from the new England
journal of medicine, peer reviewed published September 16th, 2001 looking at the Israeli
data with almost a million subjects in each arm. So what we have here plotted in yellow is
the risk difference per a hundred thousand persons infected with SARS-CoV-2, and in blue
is the risk difference per hundred thousand persons who received the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. First, let's take a look at SARS-CoV-2, or
COVID-19. We see big risks here for acute kidney injury,
for arrhythmia, for deep venous thrombosis, for pulmonary embolism, and for myocardial
infarction. And again, notice that there is a small signal
here in terms of COVID-19 for myocarditis and pericarditis. Clearly, there is a small signal there with
post vaccination myocarditis, and pericarditis, but actually the data here on these from Israel
is showing that it's more likely to get myocarditis and pericarditis post SARS-CoV-2 infection. But in terms of the relative risks for the
vaccine, which is in blue, notice that the biggest one here at 78 is lymphadenopathy,
which is a normal response to the vaccine. Now there's been a couple of papers that are
in the peer review process, but have been published to a medical archive server. And again, the peer review process is where
the paper is submitted to experts in the field that review it looking for possible bias or
things that were not taken into consideration. And this pre-print non-peer reviewed article
using electronic records in the United States, also agreed with the Israeli data that was
published in the new England journal of medicine and came to the conclusion that young males
infected with the virus are up to six times more likely to develop myocarditis as those
who received the vaccine. Another pre-print, which is still currently
in the process of being peer reviewed, made headlines in a number of papers in the UK
and also in the United States. And it showed the opposite that the incidents
of post-vaccine myocarditis had a higher incidents than hospitalization in pediatric patients
from COVID-19. However, the article glean most of its data
from the VAERS, which as you know, is a reporting system and raw data based on reports that
could be made by anyone and often contain incomplete descriptions and chart notes that
require additional investigation, removal of confounding variables and comparison to
background levels of medical problems to become useful. Now, we'll talk about the VAERS here just
a bit, but as you'll see various data, doesn't allow you to really conclude anything. VAERS can use to generate hypotheses, but
not to test them directly. So in summary, I think it's good for researchers
to generate hypothesis from VAERS data, but it's a problem when newspapers turn hypotheses
of observational data that haven't been peer reviewed yet and turn them into headlines. So it'll be interesting to see what issues
the peer review process points out in these papers and if they go on to be published. So to answer your question Kyle it's, it's,
there's a lot of information there. Um, but for a young person now, today facing
the Delta variant and maybe future variants, it's not the same type of virus that we were
dealing with back earlier in 2021. Yes. Now they are more susceptible to getting the
infection and now the risk of them being hospitalized is higher. [Kyle]: Dr. Patrick, what are your thoughts
on this question? [Dr. Patrick]: Well, I think in addition to
hospitalization, there's also the risk of people who have mild symptoms who don't have
to go to the hospital, they stay at home during the duration of their illness, are coming
down with post-acute COVID syndrome, which is popularly known as the long-haul COVID. The symptoms range from brain fog to racing
heart problems to lethargy. And there's been a variety of studies that
have come out that have looked at what long-haul COVID is and what population it seems to be
affecting. And interestingly, you'd think, well, people
having these long-term effects would be the ones that were, you know, on the ventilator. Well, of course, people on ventilators do
have long-term effects. But you'd think people that are hospitalized
would be the ones mostly having these long-haul COVID effects, and it turns out younger people,
people under the age of 50, teenagers even, people in their 20s are the ones that are
really, you know, coming down with this long-haul COVID syndrome. There's a pre-print that has not been peer-reviewed
yet, and it's a big study that was done out of the U.K. It's part of this ongoing study called the
Biobank Study. They get large population sample sizes. In this case, it was close to 800 people. It was 780 or something like that people before
the pandemic came in and had MRI brain scans. Researchers have all this data on individuals',
you know, brain structure and volume. And so once the pandemic hit, many people
came down with COVID-19, some mild cases, some more severe, some were hospitalized. And a few months, you know, into the pandemic,
researchers doing this Biobank study thought, "Hey, we should bring these people back in
and get a brain scan and see if there's any changes." And so that's what they did. Just, you know, months after their first scan,
they brought them back in for another scan. And what the preliminary findings, again,
that are not peer-reviewed yet, showed is that there are major differences in gray matter
regions of the brain. Gray matter atrophy is occurring in several
different regions of the brain, very prominently in the olfactory region, which makes sense
because, you know, one of the telltale symptoms of COVID-19 at least pre-Delta was loss of
smell, loss of taste. And also there's atrophy in other brain regions
involved in memory and learning. People that had severe COVID do have worse
atrophy compared to the people that only had mild cases, did not need to be hospitalized,
but they themselves were also experiencing brain atrophy. These are people that did not have to go to
the hospital. And, of course, people were matched for the
same age, the same gender, the same ethnicity, and the same time in between scans, so trying
to keep everything, you know, as comparable as possible to compare apples to apples. To me, that was quite frightening because
it really suggests that there are complications, and there are, you know, long-term effects
of this virus that we don't quite understand and that are affecting, you know, hundreds
of thousands of people. I personally know quite a few. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, anything to add on the
long COVID front because I know...that's a concern that I have. At my age, if I got COVID-19, would I have
lingering symptoms? What are you seeing on your end clinically
with regards to that? [Dr. Seheult]: Oh, yeah. So, in addition to me working in the intensive
care unit, I also have an outpatient pulmonary clinic. I've diagnosed at least three or four, just
off the top of my head, blood clots in patients who went to the hospital, had COVID-19, survived,
got better, so they weren't part of the 1%, but then they had persistent shortness of
breath, leg swelling. We immediately made the diagnosis and put
them on blood thinners. And so that's just a small slice of what we're
seeing in terms of comorbidity. So the 1% is death, but there's a lot worse
that can happen up to that point than death. There's a lot of bad things that can occur. So, totally agree. Absolutely. [Dr. Patrick]: To add on to the blood clots
and strokes, there was this study...multiple studies, one out of Israel, and a couple out
of the United States, showing that people under the age of 50 were coming in to the
emergency room for strokes. And one of the studies out of Israel found,
because they test everyone for COVID-19, a high percentage of the people that were coming
in for these strokes, these young people under 50, had COVID-19 and didn't even know they
had had it. So, I mean, we're talking obviously mild,
mild cases, potentially, even asymptomatic if they didn't even know they had COVID-19
and they're coming in with strokes. [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah, absolutely. And so this is the thing is that COVID-19
has many different ways of affecting the body. The one that we all know about is the lungs,
of course, because it can cause inflammation in the lungs. But as Dr. Patrick points out, there are blood
clot issues. So blood clots to the lungs can also occur,
but also blood clots to the brain, which manifest the strokes. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, could you also speak
to this question that some people have, or really the interpretation of something that's
on the CDC website about death certificates and how only...at one point, only 5% of death
certificates had only COVID-19 on the certificate. I know you fill out quite a few death certificates
in the ICU. What are your thoughts on this idea? What can we really interpret from that? [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. So it really boils down to how the death certificate
is filled out. Generally speaking, the way the death certificate
should be filled out when somebody dies is you have the most proximal thing occur at
the top line, and that would be...let's say there was a car accident. Okay. You were in a motor vehicle accident, and
as a result of the motor vehicle accident, there was a rupture of one of the internal
blood vessels, and then you bled out. So, you wouldn't just put at the top of that
death certificate motor vehicle accident. That's not what the bureau of statistics of
your state wants to see. They want to see ruptured, you know, pulmonary
artery, and then under that, they want to have the reason for the ruptured pulmonary
artery. That would be motor vehicle accident. So, when you are describing someone with COVID-19,
COVID-19...you don't die from COVID-19, right? COVID-19 is not a final cause of death. It may be the thing that set things in motion,
and so you would have COVID-19 caused pneumonia, and then that caused something like adult
respiratory distress syndrome or acute respiratory distress syndrome, and that was the cause
of death. Because, as we've just mentioned, COVID-19
can cause death in many different ways. COVID-19 could cause you to die by a pulmonary
embolism or a stroke in the brain. Unfortunately, some physicians are just putting
COVID-19 at the top. So I think, Kyle, what you're referring to
is this statement that we see here on the CDC website, and they say here that "The number
of deaths that mention one or more of the conditions indicated is shown for all deaths
involving COVID-19 and by age groups." "For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was
the only cause mentioned on the death certificate." So people have taken that to mean that really
COVID-19 only caused 5% of the 600,000-plus people that have died in this country, and
all the other things were just comorbidities. But if you actually look at the CDC's website,
you'll see what some of these "comorbidities" are, and as we've just discussed the actual
way that COVID-19 kills people. So, for instance, the number one comorbidity
was pneumonia. Influenza and pneumonia are grouped together. Well, the pneumonia was caused by COVID-19. It wasn't a comorbidity. Another one that's very common is respiratory
failure. Yeah, it's not like people are coming with
respiratory failure, and they also happen to have COVID-19. No, COVID-19 causes respiratory failure. And another one of these ones that was on
there was adult respiratory distress syndrome. That's actually what they mean to say there's
acute respiratory distress syndrome. Again, another thing that's caused by COVID-19. And so what's happening here is that, you
know, these physicians are very busy. They're being handed death certificates. They need to fill these things out. They think, "Oh, yeah, that guy, he died of
COVID-19. That's right." And they just write COVID-19 at the top. That's the incorrect way of filling those
out, and that's the reason why, fortunately, only 5% of those death certificates are being
incorrectly filled out with just COVID-19. [Kyle]: Just to clarify, using that data to
make a case that really COVID-19 is only killing people with multiple comorbidities is not
accurate. [Dr. Seheult]: Not at all. [Kyle]: Okay. Well, Dr. Patrick, this next question's for
you, and it's about spike protein. We know that the spike protein can be dangerous
and cause a significant immune response, and there's this idea floating around that because
spike protein is dangerous from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, therefore, the COVID-19 vaccines must
be as dangerous as well. What are your thoughts on that? [Dr. Patrick]: Well, I have a lot of thoughts
on that, Kyle. I've thought long and hard about it. But sort of before I get into some of the
details, I think, the spike protein has really become a common household name. At this point, most people around the world
know what the spike protein is mostly because it's the entry point for the SARS-CoV-2 virus
to get into our cells. There are about 26 different spike proteins. I shouldn't say different. There are about 26 spike proteins that line
the surface of a SARS-CoV-2 viral particle, and these spike proteins will bind to a receptor
on many different cell types we have in our body that have a receptor called ACE2. And when the spike protein then binds to the
ACE2 receptor, it undergoes a conformational change that essentially refers to the structure
of it changes. So it binds on to this receptor, and it then
elongates, and sort of twists and turns around, and then it fuses with the cell membrane and
is, you know, engulfed inside of the cell. Another way it happens is through endocytosis. But essentially, the point I want to make
here is that conformational change happens because when the spike protein initially binds
to the ACE2 receptor, it's in a conformation called the pre-fusion conformation. You can think of it more like a closed type
of conformation. Once it binds, this triggers a conformational
change for it to, again, like I said, elongate and sort of twist around. When it does that, that is referred to as
the post-fusion conformation. And the reason that's really important is
because all of the vaccines that are available in the United States under either emergency
use authorization or under FDA authorization or up and coming vaccines, so that includes
the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines, the Johnson & Johnson adenoviral vaccine,
as well as the Novavax vaccine, they all contain an insertion of two proline amino acids into
the spike protein to lock it into the pre-fusion conformation. And this was brilliant work done by the structural
biologist, Dr. Jason McLellan. He's at the University of Texas in Austin. And he thankfully had figured out this way
to lock viral proteins into the pre-fusion conformation. First it was with the respiratory syncytial
virus, RSV, and then later, he had figured out for the other beta coronavirus, the MERS
coronavirus. And so he really had a running start there. And the reason that is so important is because,
when you're comparing the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as I mentioned, there's
26 of them on every viral particle, to the spike protein that is in the vaccines, including
the mRNA vaccines and the vaccines in the United States, it's a different spike protein. It's a spike protein that cannot undergo that
structural change. It does not elongate and, you know, dig into
the cell membrane and fuse with it. It's a different spike protein because of
those two proline amino acids that were inserted to lock it into the pre-fusion conformation. And one of the first things you learn as a
scientist, as a budding young scientist is that you can't compare apples to oranges. You can't compare two different things. You have to compare apples to apples or oranges
to oranges. And so when you're talking about a different
spike protein, structurally, it's different, right? You can't take a study that's looking at the
spike protein that is from the surface of SARS-CoV-2 and say everything that that spike
protein is doing applies to the spike protein in the vaccines that are available in the
United States because it's different. And so, I think, that's a really, really upfront
important thing to understand. And the burden of proof is on, you know, people
making the claim that the spike protein from the mRNA vaccines is dangerous because some
studies have shown that the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 by itself can be dangerous. You have to show that, and it has not been
shown. So, what these studies that have shown that
the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2 virus, how it can be dangerous, there's been some in
vitro studies, which means cells in culture in a dish. When you dump spike protein on them, it can
cause the activation of cell signaling pathways that could lead to cell death. This is often referred to as cytotoxicity. There's also been some animal studies shown
where either recombinant protein, which is just basically made in a lab, so they make
the spike protein, or what's called pseudovirus expressing the spike protein, so this is not
the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but it sort of acts like a virus to allow it to get into cells,
if you directly inject the pseudovirus with a spike protein into the trachea of hamsters,
it causes severe lung damage and also gets into the circulation and causes circulatory
damage and vascular damage to the vascular system. And so these studies, and there's been, you
know, a few of those, have really spurred this idea that the spike protein from the
vaccines must be dangerous because these studies showing the spike protein that's found on
the surface of SARS-CoV-2 is. And again, you can't compare. You can't make that comparison, and that's
really just one aspect of, you know, this story. The other aspect has to do with where the
spike protein goes in the body. And, you know, I think, first and foremost,
anyone that's concerned about these studies showing that the spike protein by itself is
dangerous should be terrified about getting SARS-CoV-2 because, for one, you're getting,
as I mentioned, 26 of those spike proteins on one viral particle. How many viral particles are replicating inside
of your cells at any given moment? You know, thousands of them. And on top of that, there have been studies
that have shown that SARS-CoV-2 virus is detected in multiple organs. You know, this isn't just in the nose and
in the trachea and in the lungs, which in and of itself is bad. I mean, the damage to your lungs is, you know,
one major concern. But the SARS-CoV-2 virus, again, with spike
protein has been detected in the heart in humans. It's been detected in the brain. It's been detected in cerebrospinal fluid. It's been detected in kidneys. It's been detected in the GI tract. It's been detected in the testes. It's in many different tissues in humans. Oh, and it's been detected in plasma in the
circulatory system. So, again, you know, the concern should be
amplified for actually contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus if you are concerned about the study
showing spike protein itself is dangerous. And that sort of leads me into the vaccines. And generally speaking, I'm going to talk
a little bit more about mRNA vaccines because there's been some more concern about that,
and there's been some more data on that. But people are concerned that these mRNA vaccines
are getting into multiple organs, and therefore the spike protein is getting into these other
organs and causing damage, again, different spike protein. So, that needs to be considered. But a lot of this data stems from...a lot
of this concern stems from some data that was generated by Pfizer and BioNTech when
they were doing a bunch of safety studies looking at, you know, what happens when you
inject really high concentrations of the mRNA vaccine by Pfizer into rodents. And so, I think, the first thing to keep in
mind...and I know that at MedCram, you guys have had people on like Dr. Shane Crotty who's
explained how the mRNA vaccines work, how you have, you know, the mRNA inside of a lipid
nanoparticle along with some other factors like polyethylene glycol, and that is injected
into the deltoid muscle tissue, and that basically, after that injection into the tissue happens,
you have the lipid nanoparticle with the mRNA vaccine now getting inside of muscle cells
using your own cell machinery, the ribosome, to actually make the spike protein, which
itself has been shown to peak after 24 hours, and then after 48 hours, the spike protein,
half-life of the protein that's made is degraded. It's not very long-lasting. The mRNA itself also has a half-life somewhere
between, you know, 48 to 72 hours, and the lipid nanoparticle has a very short...like
within hours. It really only lasts long enough to protect
the mRNA from being degraded. But once you actually do make the spike protein,
the spike protein itself is...it is expressed on the cell surface, what's called the plasma
membrane of the cell. And the spike protein itself has a region
on it called a transmembrane domain that sticks it. It's like an anchored...anchors into that
plasma membrane, so it is not freely floating out into your circulation. It is stuck there. And at that point, you have other immune cells
that recognize this foreign protein and begin the process of, you know, making antibodies,
and you have that whole, you know, immunity effect. But the concern was from this Pfizer study
where rats were given a dose that is 10 times the amount of what humans are given. So humans are given 30 micrograms of the Pfizer-BioNTech
vaccine for one dose. The rat was given 50 micrograms of the Pfizer-BioNTech
vaccine. So, if you were to do the calculation for
a rat equivalent dose, so if you want to give the rat what humans actually get, an equivalent
dose based on their body mass, it would be more like 4.86 micrograms. So they got 50. That's essentially 10 times. Okay. And this was done for a reason of, "Okay,
what happens when we give them a huge amount of the vaccine?" Well, what was found...the lipid nanoparticle
that contains the mRNA was radio-labeled. It's like a tag that you can visualize things. And that radio-labeled tag was found in other
organs. It was, you know, found in a variety of organs. Again, it was to a very small degree, but
it was found in other organs. And so people got really concerned that these
mRNA vaccines were traveling to other organs and causing damage. And a few things to keep in mind there. One, the dose was super high, and, in fact,
within the same document, the same Pfizer study, they gave a more equivalent dose to
mice. In this case, they give mice 2 micrograms
of the mRNA vaccine, and that vaccine did not go to all these other organs. In fact, the only organ that was shown to
have any amount of this radio-labeled tag was the liver, and it was completely gone
after 48 hours. And so, I think, that's really good news because
it suggests, yeah, when you give, you know, a rat 10 times the amount of what the humans
are getting, you might have some spillover. But on top of that, again, the radio-labeled
tag that we're looking at is the lipid nanoparticle, and if there is some spillover, you know,
in the muscle tissue, what surrounds the muscle tissue is your lymphatic system, lymph, where
all the immune cells are. So you essentially have your immune cells
like dendritic cells recognizing something foreign, in this case, a radio-labeled lipid
nanoparticle with some mRNA in it, and they basically chop it up, and, you know, it undergoes
phagocytosis and is taken to other tissues for recycling. And so, whatever we're seeing in those other
organs, we don't even actually know if that's, you know, the intact mRNA vaccine lipid nanoparticles. It's probably just remnants of it because
that's what your body does. So, I think, all of those factors in combination
give some reassurance that people should not be so concerned about the spike protein from
mRNA vaccines or from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine getting to other organs and causing...you
know, wreaking havoc essentially. And I will just add one more thing to that,
and that is another study, and this is something that I've seen concern about on the internet. This study was done in humans. It was a very, very small sample size. It was 13 people, and they were given the
Moderna mRNA vaccine. What was found in that study is that 11 out
of 13 people, the S1 subunit of the spike protein was detected in their plasma. Three out of the 13 had the entire spike protein
detectable. However, the assay that was used to detect
this S1 subunit and the spike protein itself in these 13 people has a false positivity
rate of 25%. That's one in four people, showing they have
spike protein. This was another study done, they took samples
pre-pandemic, there should be no people with spike protein pre-pandemic, and they were
showing that they had spike protein. So with a sample size of 13 and a false positivity
rate of 25%, you can't make any conclusions from that small study showing, you know, that
11 out of 13 people had, you know, S1 subunit of spike protein showing up in the plasma. It just doesn't make any sense to make any
strong conclusions from that. So, I guess that, you know, the bottom line
is that, you know, as Roger mentioned, we've had over 177 million people fully vaccinated
in the United States. You know, if this thing was causing severe
damage in people, we would know about it. And, you know, we do know about the adverse
effects that are occurring like the myocarditis that is happening, you know, in some young
people. It's still quite rare. It does occur. And, again, as Roger mentioned, it's happening
six-fold higher in younger healthy individuals than it is in the same individuals that are
being exposed to the COVID-19 vaccines. [Kyle]: Well, that is a perfect segue to a
discussion about adverse events and deaths reported from the COVID-19 vaccine. And, Dr. Seheult, could you explain what VAERS
or the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System that we use in the United States is and how
that data should be interpreted? [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. Thanks, Kyle. So, to back up a little bit, let's talk about
a six-month period of time here. So, if we look at December, January, and February
of just a few months ago, that was a period of time at least where I'm working in Southern
California where there was a lot of COVID. In fact, we had to build an entire new ICU
with isolation precautions. We had to have nurses trained. We basically used a lot of resources because
surgeries weren't happening at the time. And compare that with the next three months
after that, which would be March, April, and May. So, the reason why those two groups of three
months are very different is the first group of three months had a lot of COVID-19 patients
coming in. We were very full. And then after that wave went away, we basically
disbanded the second intensive care unit. We were able to contract back to what we were
doing before, and this despite the fact that in March, April, and May of 2021, we were
vaccinating millions of people a day. And so, again, I just want to underline what
Dr. Patrick was saying there. If the spike protein from the vaccine was
so dangerous, how were we able to contract down our hospital ICU intensive care services
during that period of time? However, what did happen during that time
was that there was a huge spike of...so the argument may be made, for instance, that maybe
the spike protein is not causing disease or conditions that would get people into the
intensive care unit, but it might be causing more mild symptoms or more mild problems. And that might show up in something called
the VAERS systems. Let's talk about the VAERS. So, as you can see here on the screen, there's
this chart that has made the rounds on the internet, and what it does is it shows the
total reported deaths post-vaccine. And you can see obviously not post-COVID vaccine
because the COVID vaccine didn't exist back during these years. And we're going back way back into the early
2000s. And then all of a sudden, there's this huge
spike here in 2000, and these, again, are reported deaths. So this is evidence, some say, that these
patients that are receiving the COVID-19 vaccine are dying. So, again, I don't know how they could be
dying without going through the intensive care unit. I guess it's possible they could be dying
at home and never making it to the hospital. So let's investigate exactly what it is that's
going on here. The thing that you've got to understand about
this reporting system is that...first of all, a couple of things. Number one, you have to understand that because
the vaccines that were given emergency use authorization in the late 2020, because of
this, they expanded the reporting requirements for the VAERS. In other words, before a physician would make
a report to the VAERS if he suspected that a vaccination led to a death, and they were
under suspicion that something was connected. Now that was completely eliminated. Now, no matter what happens, if a patient
gets a vaccine, and anything happens, hospitalization, death, anything, it should be reported under
law. So, I wanted to take a look at this a little
bit more, and what I did was I looked at this paper that was published back in 2016, so
pretty early. And it was looking at the flu vaccine because
a lot of people say that this has never happened before. This huge increase in reporting from the vaccine
has never happened. But yet there is a situation that occurred,
and it was published here in December of 2016 titled, "Surveillance of Adverse Events After
Seasonal Influenza Vaccination in Pregnant Women and Their Infants in the Vaccine Adverse
Event Reporting system, July 2010 to May 2016." So, as you may recall, in 2009, we had a flu
epidemic called the swine flu epidemic, and in that year, there was a huge amount of H1N1
influenza. And you can see that here on the screen with
that red bar. So you can see the blue is sort of the endemic
influenza, and then in 2009, this massive increase in H1N1 reports. And so what you also see here is that purple
line is the amount of vaccinations that happened. So because there was a lot of influenza that
was going around, a lot of people were being vaccinated. So what you're actually seeing here, these
bar graphs, is the number of reports of adverse events. Okay. So that's key to understand that. Even though the vaccine had not changed, the
makeup of the vaccine had not changed, what we saw was because there was more vaccinations
being given, there were more reports being given. But there's something actually more to it
than that even still, and that is that there was more understanding and more awareness
of influenza. So what I've done here is I've superimposed
Google trends. So how often somebody would get on the internet
and search for influenza, you can see clearly there at the same point in time that we're
seeing increased reported spikes, we're seeing an increased interest in influenza in general. In fact, the highest that there ever was during
that time because it was a very important news item at that time. Now, again, this was under strict reporting
system. So, they only could report whether they felt
that there was a connection. But even that after they looked at it, and
published this paper, this is the conclusion that they came to. Despite the increase in reporting events,
they said that the peak in the number of pregnancy reports observed during 2009 to 2010 followed
by a decrease in reporting suggest that the 2009 spike in pregnancy reports after 2009
H1N1 inactivated vaccines may have been due to stimulated reporting. In other words, the vaccine hadn't changed,
the side effects hadn't changed, and so their conclusion was is that as in 2000 and 2009-2010,
no new or unexpected patterns in maternal or fetal outcomes were observed during 2010
and 2016. So, if we take the same kind of methodology
that we've done, we've looked at this huge spike here with COVID-19, and this is supposed
to be evidence that people are dying from the COVID vaccine, we see a very interesting
pattern because, if we look at Google trends, and we type in COVID vaccine, obviously, there's
a massive spike at the same time, the same kind of recipe that we would see with the
influenza. And then also, again, just to make sure that
we understand here, this is the deputy director for the Centers for Disease Control, and this
is what he says. He says, "Health care providers' reporting
requirements are much broader than for other vaccines. After someone receives the COVID-19 vaccine,
their health care provider is required by law to report all serious adverse health events,
that would include death, even if the provider does not think the vaccine caused that event. These events can include death, inpatient
hospitalization, or a serious case of COVID-19. That reporting protocol is due to the fact
that the FDA authorized the COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use." So you can see that the rules have changed
in the middle of the game, and so we have to look at that. If we were to give a placebo injection, the
question is is we would still see deaths associated with the vaccine. Why? Because we're vaccinating so many people and
because of just chance. I did a little bit of an epidemiological exercise. So bear with me. If you look at the U.S. death rate per 100,000
population per year, it's around 870 deaths. So, in other words, if you were to take at
random 100,000 people in the United States and follow them for a year, you would find
at the end of that year that about 870 people would have died. Obviously, as the age goes up, that can go
up to as high as 4,000. Here in the 75 to 84-year-old age group that's
much higher. So let's just take the average. We'll be conservative. And also if you were to look over the period
of the last seven months, going from January this year to August, seven or eight months,
you'll see that there's a fairly linear...if you want to take that approach, fairly linear
increase in the amount of vaccinations over that seven month period of time. And in fact, over that 7 month period of time,
there's been about 166 million people that have been vaccinated. So, if that's over a seven month period of
time, the average period of time that someone's been vaccinated is about three and a half
months. And over that period of time, which started
in January, that's when we have the highest death rates, but then as we go through the
year, it comes down to the lowest death rate. So that's over that period of time, there's
about an average death rate in the United States. So let's do a little bit of calculating. If there is 870 dead people per 100,000 people
per year, and we adjust that for the 166 million people that we've vaccinated in 1 campaign,
and then we adjust that for instead of 12 months just 3 and a half months, which is
the average period of time that people have been on average vaccinated, we come to this
number of about 421,000 people that should be dead just by chance from getting the vaccine. And clearly, that's not the number of people
that we're seeing. The reports show maybe 10,000 or 15,000. So, clearly, there is a huge amount of underreporting
occurring. Now, realize that, again, most of the people
who are being vaccinated at least in the country are actually much older. So this number should actually be higher. And number two, that most of the people that
were vaccinated very early on and therefore have a longer range of vaccination were the
older group as well. And so when you look at that, you can see
here that the reported deaths totaling about 5,000 or 6,000 is a huge underreporting of
the number of deaths that we should have if we just put a little red dot on their shoulder
or gave them a placebo injection. That's very important to understand because
some people...some disingenuous people will show this and say, "Look, the vaccine is causing
these deaths," and that cannot be gotten from that type of data. The other graph that you might see is this
graph, which shows the number of days after vaccination that deaths are reported. So, based on our 400,000 number that we've
come up with, if we were to prorate that on a daily basis, we would come up with about
4,000 people dying on a daily basis on average. Obviously, that gets bigger as more and more
people get vaccinated. But what we're seeing here after a vaccination
is only 600 to 700 deaths per day. Again, huge underreporting here at this point. And again, so because there's huge underreporting
occurring, one might think that what would be the most likely reporting situation, someone
who got a vaccine and died the next day, or someone who died maybe a month later? Obviously, when you have a death occurring
close to an event that has to be reported, the reporting is going to happen more likely
in that situation, and you're going to have underreporting occurring much more likely
a month later. And that's exactly what is demonstrated here
with this graph. We see that the most reporting occurs within
one or two days, and then it goes down precipitously consistent with that type of pattern. The other last thing I'll leave you with here
as well is that with the mRNA vaccines, with Moderna, for instance, it's a four-week interval
between shots, and for Pfizer, it's a three-week interval. If, in fact, that second shot is causing the
problems that we see with myocarditis, myocardial infarction that's been proposed or been suggested,
I would expect to see another peak here about three to four weeks out, but, in fact, we
don't see any such peak. And so that, again, lends me to believe that
this graph is the result of reporting events and human psychology rather than an actual
spike protein that's causing deaths in these patients. I agree that we should look for this stuff. This stuff needs to be taken seriously, and
that is exactly the purpose of the VAERS system is to look to see if there are patterns. But to go out and say that simply because
there are deaths, that that must mean that the vaccine is causing deaths. I think that is disingenuous and not supported
by the data. [Kyle]: Dr. Patrick, anything to add to that? [Dr. Patrick]: Yes. I do agree 100% with that last statement that
Dr. Seheult just said because people are taking this data that is, you know, accessible to
the public from the VAERS system, and they're trying to make sense of that data. But scientists from the CDC and from the FDA
analyze that data. They have to, you know, stratify it by age,
by gender, by ethnicity, and see how many people die of X, Y, or Z in that age range
of that gender, of that ethnic group without a vaccine, just what's the normal background
death rate. You need to do that comparison. Otherwise, this is like the worst epidemiology
data you could ever imagine without any correction for confounding factors. You know, it would be like one year, you know,
there was 200,000 births in the city of San Bernardino, and at the same time, we had,
you know, 10,000 storks that flew by, therefore, storks have to be causing...delivering the
babies, I mean, you know...or causing the births basically. So, you know, epidemiology is a big mess,
and so you can't just take that data and make these correlations. And I think to sort of add to what Dr. Seheult's
kind of brilliant epidemiology experiment that he just explained, to add to that, in
the United States alone, every 30 seconds, someone dies of cardiovascular disease, every
30 seconds. Now, generally speaking, most of those people
are going to be 50 or older because cardiovascular disease doesn't usually, you know, affect
people in their 20s or 30s. It can, but generally speaking, it's an age-related
disease more or less. And so, you know, if you look at the reported
VAERS deaths, more than half of them are in a population of people that are 50 and older. So, it's like, what are the chances that some
of those people are probably just dying from a heart attack or from cardiovascular disease? Stroke, every 40 seconds, someone has a stroke
in the United States. They die from it every about four minutes
or so. Like Dr. Seheult said, there are a lot of
people dying every day in the United States completely independent of COVID-19, completely
independent of vaccines. It's not accurate to try to interpret the
VAERS data yourself without stratifying it and looking at all the other factors that
I just mentioned. But even on top of that, last time I did a
VAERS report actually was probably close to a month ago, maybe three weeks ago, and at
that time, I was stratifying the data by age and looking at the reported deaths. Over 584,000 people of the age of 50 and over
have died from COVID-19. And last time I looked at the VAERS, which
is about a month ago or so, about 5,000 people over the age of 50 had reported, you know,
VAERS deaths. And so even if you were to take that 5,000
and triple it, you're still 40 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than you are from
a vaccine if you're over the age of 50. People aged 40 to 49, about 20,000 people
have died from COVID-19, according to the CDC website. If you look at the VAERS, it's much lower
than that, about 200 people. And if again triple that number, even after
tripling it, you're 33 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than from a vaccine if you
are age 40 to 49. Bring that age group down even further, 18
to 39-year-olds, about 10,000 people have died from COVID-19 in that age range. And if you look at the VAERS data, it's somewhere
around 200, let's triple it 600 people, you're still 17 times more likely to die from COVID-19
than from a COVID-19 vaccine if you are in the age range of 18 to 39. So, again, at every age group, you're much,
much more likely to die from COVID-19 than you are from a vaccine. We're just directly taking the VAERS reporting. And as I said, you can't do that. We don't even know if those deaths are actually
causally linked, right? It's correlation. I think when you look at it like that, it
makes a lot more sense that everyone's going to be exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at some
point, do you want to be vaccinated when you're exposed to it? I do personally. [Kyle]: Okay. Let me summarize my understanding of this,
and correct me if any of this sounds wrong. In our country of over 300 million people,
there is a background number, an expected number of deaths and other medical problems
that are going to happen on a daily basis or an annual basis on average. And then we have this reporting system, the
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, where medical professionals are not only encouraged,
but they're actually required to report any medical problem or death that happens after
someone gets a COVID-19 vaccine, whether or not they think the vaccine caused it or not. So it's an epidemiologist and other scientists'
job to look at the number of reports that come into the VAERS and compare that with
the background numbers for each age group and other demographics and assess, does the
number of reports actually rise above what we would expect for that age group and other
demographics? And listening to you, Dr. Seheult, it sounds
like for deaths reported from the COVID-19 vaccine, the number of deaths actually falls
far below the background level that we would expect, which suggests that there's underreporting. But it also suggests it's very unlikely that
a significant number of deaths are happening from the COVID-19 vaccine. Do I have that right? [Dr. Seheult]: Yep. [Dr. Patrick]: Absolutely. And I think just to kind of even add to that,
you know, the myocarditis link that we now know about linked to the mRNA vaccine specifically
came out of the VAERS data, and after the scientists, epidemiologists analyzed the data,
they found myocarditis was above that background noise. It was higher. So there was something there. I've heard so many conspiracy theories that,
you know, the government agencies don't want us to know about it, don't want us to know
about the adverse effects. Then I just don't understand why we would
know about myocarditis being linked to the mRNA vaccines, or why we would know about
rare blood clots in some cases with Johnson & Johnson, very, very rare. If there was some big conspiracy, why would
we know about some of the potential rare adverse events but not others? [Kyle]: It's always powerful when someone
knows someone who got a COVID-19 vaccine and then had a death afterwards, or, you know,
some new onset of symptoms. So what would you both say succinctly to someone
who says, you know, "My parent, or grandparent, or whoever, got the COVID-19 vaccine, and
then 3 weeks later, they died of a heart attack. I think that those are links"? What would you say to that person? I'll start with you Dr. Seheult on this one. [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. I mean, this is really what makes us human
beings. We have to put on our scientific hats when
we talk about numbers because we can't be attached to it, and on the other hand, we're
also human beings, and we live with it. So, it's hard to do that. I can tell you that when I'm in the hospital,
if I give a blood thinner to somebody because they have a condition, and they bleed out
and die, and the next person that comes in with that same condition, I'll have to tell
you as a human being, I'm a little bit less gung-ho about giving that person a blood thinner
even though it's indicated, and it's the right thing for that person. In other words, what happened before doesn't
necessarily tell me what's going to happen again. It's statistics that tells us that. That's actually one of the fallacies of medicine. So, when you're making medical decisions,
there's always going to be risks. It's always going to happen. I can tell you that. Don't let anybody tell you that we don't do
harm in medicine. We try to do more benefit than harm. We give aspirin to people who have heart attacks. We give blood thinners to people with atrial
fibrillation. Are you telling me that we've never had a
situation where someone has bled on a blood thinner, or someone has gotten an ulcer from
aspirin? It happens, but we have to look at the benefits
versus the risks. So, in that situation, I would tell them that,
you know, it's possible that whatever they had could be linked to the vaccine, that we
have to look at epidemiological studies to see whether that's the case. And I would understand if they were hesitant
to get the vaccine in that situation. I would completely understand as a human being
because that's the same struggles that I have as well. But if we want to make policies going forward,
we always have to realize that no matter how many times you've rolled the dice, and it's
come up six every time, that the next time you roll the dice, there's still a one in
six chance that it's going to be a six despite the previous rolls. And unfortunately, that's what we have to
deal with when we're looking at risk to benefit ratio. Maybe one day in the future we'll be able
to do a better job at predicting who will benefit and who won't, but right now we do
the best that we can. [Kyle]: Dr. Patrick? [Dr. Patrick]: I think just to add... Sorry. [Kyle]: Yeah. Go ahead. [Dr. Patrick]: Just to add to that, I think,
you know, the fact of the matter is that in the United States alone, over 177 million
people are fully vaccinated, over a billion people worldwide. And, you know, as Dr. Seheult point out, people
respond to things differently, to drugs, to different...the foods that we eat every day,
you know, if we were to give peanuts to 177 million people in the United States, a good
size of people would have a pretty serious adverse reaction. Same goes for shellfish. You know, it's a really big world out there,
and there are individual differences in the way we respond to foods, to medications, to
vaccines but it does not mean... So, you know, in other words, it's not a zero
risk as Dr. Seheult was saying, but 100% of the population is not responding that way. It's not because there's something inherently... For the most part, you can have a medication
that is dangerous, but, you know, we would know that by now with 177 million people fully
vaccinated in the United States and over a billion people worldwide. We would know. [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. And, Kyle, this is all be...probably a good
time to also say that, you know, the purpose for Dr. Patrick and myself being on here is
really to educate people on what are the risks and the benefits and the relative risks so
that they can make a decision. And the reason why we want to arm them with
that information is so that they can make a decision. We're not for forcing people to get vaccines. We're not for the purpose of saying it's okay
to be forced to get these vaccines. We're not really for mandates. We're really here to educate. And I think that's an important distinction,
but Dr. Patrick can speak for herself. [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah. I 100% agree. I would never want to force anyone to do anything
they're scared of. I certainly wouldn't want to force a parent
to do something to their child that they were scared of. And I think that the purpose of this podcast
and in general speaking about what the data shows about vaccines and COVID-19 is to really
help people that don't have the capacity to interpret the scientific literature to help
them have a more...a well-informed, you know, basically background so that they can make
a good decision on whether or not they want to get or choose to get vaccinated. And I think that there are people out there
that are not giving good information for whatever reason. To be honest, there's a lot to gain from making
sensationalistic claims that something you think is good for you is actually not. So we think vaccines are good for us, but
they're not. And you can gain a large following, and there
can be a little bit of a perverse incentive in some instances for people that are technically
versed in the scientific literature that may have a degree, higher education and yet are
cherry-picking and misleading people. That does happen, and in order to counter
that, I think it's important to put an unbiased approach. Try to, you know, interpret the data for what
it is and also put that information out there. [Kyle]: Right. Dr. Patrick, this next question is for you. It's about antibody-dependent enhancement. Can you explain what that is and if you think
it's relevant or applies to COVID-19? [Dr. Patrick]: Sure. So, antibody-dependent enhancement refers
to when your immune system makes antibodies against a pathogen that is...it's non-functional. So the antibodies can bind to the pathogen,
for example, in our interest here, a virus. They can bind to it, but they don't neutralize
the virus. And, in fact, not only do they not neutralize
it, they can activate other immune cells to become more aggressive and cause more damage. So, in the end, the immune system can end
up being more damaging after being exposed to a virus than if it hadn't previously had
those antibodies. And so when I say previously had those antibodies,
most often I'm referring to vaccine-induced antibodies. I would say that in the United States, we
really became aware of this phenomenon back in the 1960s. So this was when the respiratory syncytial
virus vaccine...one of the vaccines was made, and it was being clinically tested in infants
and toddlers. Half of the infants and toddlers in the treatment
group were given the vaccine, and the other half were given the placebo. And then the infants were then, you know,
going to be exposed to the RSV virus, which as all of us parents know like every child
gets, and it's a respiratory virus. They end up having a cough that can oftentimes
linger for quite a while. So, what was terribly tragic about this vaccine
story is that the infants and toddlers that had received the RSV vaccine, about 80% of
them were hospitalized after being exposed to the RSV virus naturally versus the infants
and toddlers that had placebo, only 5% of those infants and toddlers actually ended
up in the hospital after being exposed to the RSV vaccine. So this was terrifying, and, of course, the
vaccine never made it past this original clinical trial. But, you know, what was happening is antibody-dependent
enhancement wasn't quite known at the time, but you know, much research has...you know,
decades of research since then have been done, and it's now known that antibody-dependent
enhancement occurred. So the antibodies that were generated from
the RSV vaccine were binding to the virus. They were not neutralizing it, and, in fact,
they were making the immune system worse. They're making the immune system act worse
in response to the virus and become more damaging. And so what was figured out by many scientists,
and including some of the work of Dr. Jason McLellan who I mentioned earlier, is that
the antibodies that are generated that play a major role in antibody-dependent enhancement
are called post-fusion antibodies. And you probably can guess it. We talked about how viral proteins go from
a...they make a structural conformation change. They go from a pre-fusion conformation to
a post-fusion conformation. Well, guess what. Your immune system is making antibodies to
both of those different types of viral proteins. And so what the brilliant work of Jason McLellan
showed is that you could basically lock a viral protein into the pre-fusion complex,
and when you then, you know, use that pre-fusion viral protein in a vaccine, you don't make
post-fusion antibodies because you don't...your body isn't exposed to that structure of the
viral protein. That's what we have in all of our U.S. vaccines,
the pre-fusion viral protein, the pre-fusion spike protein. We are not making post-fusion antibodies against
the spike protein, which is so reassuring that antibody-dependent enhancement is so...it's
so unlikely to happen because we don't make those antibodies. And, of course, on top of that, what we would
see in the hospitals as I mentioned with RSVs is that if you take an unvaccinated versus
a vaccinated person and, you know, randomly choose them at any point, then the vaccinated
person would always have the most severe disease. They would be the one that are most likely
to be hospitalized compared to unvaccinated. They would be the most likely to die. And I'm not talking about, you know, if you
have all of your population vaccinated. Well, of course, you're going to end up having
some people in the hospital that have been vaccinated. I'm talking about comparing the unvaccinated
to vaccinated. What you would see is that unvaccinated people
would be less likely to have a severe disease, and that is not what we've seen at any point
during this pandemic at all. So, that's also reassuring. I think a lot of concern for antibody-dependent
enhancement came out of both in vitro studies, again, those are studies done in cultured
cells in like a petri dish as well as in vivo studies. These refer to animal studies, it can be,
you know, a rodent or a hamster. Pick your animal. These studies were done with the original
SARS virus back in 2003 or 2002, what we now call SARS-CoV-1. When vaccines were made for that virus and
injected into some animals, they did cause antibody-dependent enhancement. That was not the case with all studies and
all vaccines for the SARS-CoV-1. So it was sort of an inconsistent data. But that's really what started the initial
concern. I myself was concerned. I was reading this data, and I thought, "Oh,
geez, well, that's scary." So, at the time, I didn't know anything about
the post-fusion antibodies that were involved in that and how, you know, Dr. Jason McLellan
and his collaborators had figured out a way to bypass that, to lock that viral protein
in the pre-fusion complex so we don't make those antibodies. So that is really...at the end of the day
gives me a lot of peace of mind that antibody-dependent enhancement is not likely to ever happen with
our current vaccines in the United States. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, anything to add to that? [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. As Dr. Patrick was saying, if we look at Israel,
which has been vaccinating with the Pfizer vaccine the longest out of any of the countries
on the planet, and we look here at the Delta variant, which is what we're interested in,
we really need to make sure that we're concentrating on the Delta variant because that's the current
variant here in the United States, there was a study that was released. And you can see here on the graph we've got
red as those who are unvaccinated in Israel, and green, those who are fully vaccinated
in Israel. And you can see here that over the months
of July and August, which were just pure Delta at the time, clearly, you can see that it
was the unvaccinated that were having the most severe cases. And that would not be the case if we had antibody-dependent
enhancement with the Delta variant. That's clearly not the case. If you break it down in the next graph even
by age, you'll see that the same relationship occurs with age. But again, in each of these age categories,
if you age stratify them, you will see that is the unvaccinated in these that are leading
the severe cases. So this goes against the grain of what you
may hear that Israel is telling us that the Pfizer vaccine is just breaking down, it's
useless, it's not working. That's just totally not the case in terms
of preventing severe cases, which is an important endpoint. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, this next question's
for you, and it's about the vaccines and human fertility. There's an idea that's been floating around
that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow impact human fertility. What are your thoughts on that? [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. So it's come from many places. One place in particular was this idea that
the antibodies made against the vaccine would crossreact with proteins in the placenta. So, let's go back and look at some of the
data to see if actually this is happening or not. And you can see here I've got a table of the
phase three trials in the four different major vaccines that are available. We have Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and
Janssen, which is the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. So, in the phase three trials, one of the
specific exclusions for entering into the trial was the fact that you might be pregnant. So those were excluded, but, of course, you
know, accidents happen. And so what we have here is a number of subjects
in the phase three trials that became pregnant after enrolling in the study. And so while these aren't huge numbers, they
just sort of give us a little bit of an insight. What you can see here is you've got the control
group on the left, the vaccinated group on the right, and in all of these cases, the
amount in the vaccinated group and the control group were the same. So if you look in the Pfizer vaccine, we had
12 pregnancies that occurred in the control group, 11 in the vaccinated group. We had seven pregnancies in the control group
in Moderna and six. We had 9 in AstraZeneca and 12. Four in the Johnson & Johnson, and four in
the vaccinated group. So, in terms of miscarriages, that was also
looked at, and as you can see there, there was no statistical significant difference
between either pregnancies or miscarriages at least in the phase three trials. Well, that's not where we have to leave it
because we've looked at this now after the marketing, of course, so post-marketing, and
there was a very good trial data that was published in the "New England Journal of Medicine"
entitled "Preliminary Findings of Messenger RNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons." And what they looked at was a number of areas. They looked at pregnancy loss, spontaneous
abortions, stillbirth, neonatal outcomes, preterm births, small size for gestational
age, congenital abnormalities, and even neonatal death. And they compared the rates of people who
have gotten the vaccine and were pregnant to the registry, so the V-safe pregnancy registry
data, to see...which is what they got the data from and compared it to the published
incidents of these occurrences. And what they found in every one of these
cases is that there was no statistical significant difference in terms of what they saw in the
pregnancy data versus what they should see in the regular population. Finally, what I would say from my aspect or
from my standpoint is to direct you to Dr. Viki Male who we've had here on MedCram and
has a Twitter account who's actually updating this. She is a reproductive immunologist that has
found it her duty to always constantly being updated in terms of data in terms of not just
pregnancy, but also breastfeeding, in terms of getting pregnant, in terms of all of those
risk factors. And I would highly recommend that you check
her out on Twitter. But I'll be interested to hear what Dr. Patrick
has to say. [Dr. Seheult]: I'm just sort of adding on
to the "New England Journal of Medicine" paper that you just referred to. There was a follow-up study. It's still a pre-print to my knowledge. And this study was done in around 2,500 people,
and they were women specifically. They were given a COVID-19 vaccine before
20 weeks of pregnancy, and much like you mentioned with the study in the "New England Journal
of Medicine," the miscarriage rate was on the low...within the normal range, and it
was actually on the low end. So it was about 12.8% of miscarriages that
occurred, and the normal range is between 12.5% to 18.7%. So, again, it was on the low end of the normal
range. There was another study that was published
last June, and it was in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. And that study found that neither having...previously
had a SARS-CoV-2 infection or having had a COVID-19 vaccine affected embryo implantation. So, there was no effect on the ability of
the embryo to implant into the uterus. On top of that, there was a very small study
looking at fertility in men, and this study found that there was no effect of COVID-19
vaccines on any of the normal sperm parameters that are measured like motility, etc. Like there was no effect on that. So, I think, generally speaking, it seems
as all the data so far points to no effect of COVID-19 vaccines on...no real, you know,
large effect of COVID-19 vaccines on fertility. [Kyle]: Okay. Dr. Patrick, this next question is for you. This is in your wheelhouse, and it's about
the mRNA vaccine specifically. And since this is for a lot of people new
technology, technology they haven't heard about, and there are rumors that this is somehow
gene therapy, and it's going to be impacting our own DNA within ourselves, can you speak
to that, and what are your thoughts about those rumors? [Dr. Patrick]: Well, sure. I think it's understandable for most people
to be a little concerned because they've never heard of this mRNA technology. The word RNA is in it. It's just overwhelming in a sense. And, I think, as I mentioned earlier when
I was talking about...you know, from a thousand foot high...mile high, you know, viewpoint,
how these mRNA vaccines work, and how there's, you know, a sequence of the messenger RNA
inside of a lipid nanoparticle and along with some other factors that essentially when that
lipid nanoparticle with the mRNA gets inside of your cells, your cells themselves, our
ribosomes translate that mRNA into actual protein. And so really, it's more accurate to be a
protein making technology in a way. But nonetheless, there's been a lot of fear
that mRNA vaccines are gene therapy that are altering our DNA. And so to understand that, you need to understand...I
mean, I think first and foremost, if someone says that to you, you might want to ask them,
"Where inside the cell does DNA reside?" And if they don't know the answer to that
question, then they probably don't understand what they're saying. So our DNA resides in a part of our cell called
the nucleus. It's inside of a nucleus. Things don't just freely pass into the nucleus
of the cell. In order to get inside of the nucleus of the
cell, you have to have what's called a nuclear localization sequence. This is a very specific sequence that allows
something to get inside of the nucleus. And so there's no nuclear localization sequence
anywhere in this mRNA, anywhere, you know, inside of the lipid nanoparticle. It's not present. It's not there. There's no way for it to get inside of the
nucleus of the cell. If somehow it did somehow miraculously get
inside of the nucleus of our cell where our DNA resides, in order for it to alter our
DNA, the mRNA would first have to become DNA. And in order for that to happen, you would
need an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. There's no reverse transcriptase inside of
our nucleus, inside of the, you know, lipid nanoparticle with our mRNA. It's not present. So, that is not likely to happen. But if all those things were to happen somehow,
then in order for the DNA...so if you somehow got inside the nucleus, turn the mRNA into
DNA, and then in order for it to alter our DNA, you'd have to have something called an
integrase enzyme, it would have to integrate into our DNA to get in there to change it. And again, no integrase enzyme present there. It's not going to happen. So, the chances of the mRNA vaccines actually
changing our DNA are so small. I mean, it would just take some sort of grand
conspiracy where, you know, we're somehow getting these enzymes into this mRNA, and
it's doing all this stuff. I mean, like it's just not going to happen. It's not biologically plausible. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, anything to add to that? [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. I mean, the central dogma of molecular biology
is that DNA goes to RNA, RNA goes to protein. And what we're doing with the vaccine is we're
simply instructing the ribosomes, which reside in the outer portion of the cell, to make
the protein. This, by the way, is exactly what the virus
does. And so if you're a little bit freaked out
or creeped out by the fact that your cell machinery is being taken over to make something
that it shouldn't be making, well, let me introduce you to COVID-19 because that's exactly
what's happening in the viral infection. And instead of it happening just in one or
two cells, it's happening in millions of cells. In fact, there's billions to trillions of
copies of the virus that's being made in one individual, and it goes all throughout the
body. So, what's happening here with the vaccine
is that it's simply using the ribosomes to make proteins. There's no aspect of the messenger RNA vaccines
that do anything with the nucleus. And it's the nucleus that holds the DNA, and
that's where your genome is. So, that's basically it in a nutshell. [Dr. Patrick]: Well, just to add to that,
Dr. Seheult, you know, speaking of viruses and what viruses do, we know some viruses
actually can change back into DNA and affect our DNA. So, HIV is one, some of the herpes viruses
as well. If there's anything to be worried about changing
our DNA, it's actually viruses themselves. [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, working in the ICU, I
know you've been following any potential treatment for COVID-19 very closely throughout the pandemic,
and you've featured a number of potentially promising treatments in your COVID-19 update
videos. And I want to ask your thoughts on this idea
that, you know, viable treatments currently exist or viable options exist if one were
to get COVID-19 or even potentially to prevent them from getting COVID-19, and therefore
they don't need the vaccine because they can just treat it effectively if they get it. What are your thoughts on that? [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. So that's a very interesting philosophy. I follow the philosophy of the Swiss cheese
model. Let me explain what that is a little bit. Imagine you've got a block of Swiss cheese,
and you've sliced it up all throughout. And if you were to pull out one of those slices,
you would see that there may be some Swiss cheese holes in there, and each slice would
have the holes in different places. Maybe some slices would have more holes than
other slices. Maybe some slices would have very little holes. Maybe others have a lot of holes. But the bottom line is, is that the more slices
of Swiss cheese you put in there, the less likely you're going to be able to find a hole
that's going to get through all of those slices. And that's kind of the general principle here
that we see with the Swiss cheese model of making sure that we have the best protection
we have to avoid the outcomes that we don't want to have. Let me put it in a different perspective. In the operating room, we want to make sure
that we have no post-operative infections, and we have a lot of layers that we put into
that. For instance, the surgeon wears a mask. They sterilize the instruments. They put a solution, a sterilizing solution
over the area of the skin that they're going to make the incision. I mean, this goes on and on, positive pressure
ventilation in the room, a scrub nurse, adjusting the humidity in the room just right, adjusting
the temperature in the room just right. So we don't say that because sterilizing the
equipment works, then therefore the mask doesn't work, or say the fact that we have to put
sterilization solution on the skin that therefore we don't have to humidify the room. That's foreign to medical thinking. I mean, if we even think about it in the general
practice, right, we do crash tests on vehicles, not because we don't think seat belts work. We don't put airbags into vehicles because
we don't think crashed...I mean, what we're doing is we're doing multiple layers because
the more layers we have, the better protection we're going to have in the end to avoid the
undesired outcome at the end. So, to hear this about saying that people
are getting vaccinated, but because we're making everyone wear masks, that must mean
that the vaccines don't work. Completely, I'm lost on that. That's not the way we think in medicine. We try to avoid these things. And so the Swiss cheese model is how we think
about this. So one of the things that's come up is the
idea of ivermectin. Ivermectin is this medication that was initially
studied. This came out in June of 2020. And what they found was that in high enough
concentrations in vitro in a test tube, when they went to something called 5 micromolar
concentration, they were able to completely shut down and reduce by about 5,000-fold the
ability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to reproduce. And so obviously, there was a lot of excitement
because perhaps we might be able to use a repurposed medication like ivermectin, which
has been around for years and is used as an anti-parasitic or anthelmintic medication,
especially in South America and Africa. Perhaps this could be used to treat COVID-19. And so this paper, which was an in vitro paper
looking at 5 micromolar concentration that was required to shut down, was one of the
things that were looked at. The problem was is that when you look at the
actual dosing of ivermectin in a human being, you only get about 0.28 micromolar. So that's a number of orders of magnitude,
if you will, reduced than the concentration that you would need to have in the cell to
get that. And so this paper here that was published
in the "British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology" said that "The free plasma concentration of
ivermectin would need to be 250 times lower," was actually 250 times lower than the concentration
required to reduce viral replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro. And so that was one of the things. But again, this is all in vitro, and so we
look at actual randomized controlled data and meta-analyses. And there was a meta-analysis that came out
in June of 2021 titled "Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic
Review, Meta-Analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines." And what they did was they looked at a number
of different studies, up to 25 different studies that were...some of them were randomized,
some of them were not as well randomized. Some of them had bias. And they analyzed all of those things, and
they came up with the conclusion that there was moderate certainty of evidence that there
was a reduction in death compared with no ivermectin. But the rest of the conclusions had a very
low certainty evidence. Now, this meta-analysis included a randomized
controlled trial that was later retracted because there was basically fraud going on
in the study. Although that hasn't been fully investigated
yet, but it seems as though there were some problems in that study. The authors of the meta-analysis say that
it wouldn't have changed the overall conclusion, but you can kind of see that there are some
questions. And a lot of these studies were done in patients
that were in basically outside of the United States. And why would that be an issue? If you think about this, ivermectin is a medication
that kills off parasites. And if you look at some of the data, for instance,
in Egypt, and in the Middle East, South America, the amount of clinically silent parasitic
infections in the population approaches in some studies 50% to 60%. So you can imagine, if you take these patients
who then come down with COVID-19, put them in the hospital, and apply to them large doses
of dexamethasone, which is an immunosuppressant, it's possible...we don't know for sure, but
it's possible that some of these parasitic infections may be coming less silent and becoming
activated with the suppression of the immune system. And so it makes sense that in those types
of situations, that adding ivermectin may be beneficial, not because it's helping out
COVID-19 specifically, but because it's suppressing these concomitant infections that are going
on. That is a potential possibility. And so, if you're asking about whether or
not ivermectin should be used in the United States, what you really need is randomized
controlled trials in the United States, looking at the United States population. And right now I'm happy to say that there
are a number of studies that are undergoing, not only in the United States, specifically
at Temple University in Philadelphia, but also there's a trial data that's looking at
McMaster University and also in Brazil called the Together Trial. And what they've done is they've actually
made this platform where they can rapidly assess the efficacy of repurposed medication. So things like hydroxychloroquine was looked
at. That didn't find any improvements, so they
stopped that study. They looked at lopinavir-ritonavir, and they
stopped that study because there wasn't improvement. They stopped the metformin study because there
wasn't improvement. But there are two medications that they're
currently looking at. They're looking at the ivermectin single dose
to see if that is causing any improvements. They've now gone to three doses to see whether
or not they are. There is some evidence that they're seeing
some signal that may be appropriate, but the one that they're noticing actually has an
even better signal that they're studying more is fluvoxamine, which is an antidepressant
medication. It has some claims that it may be an anti-inflammatory
medication, antioxidant. The point is, is that we should be looking
at these medications. It should be done in a randomized controlled
trial under a specific study platform, and we shouldn't be writing these things off. So, the question is, is whether or not we
should be requiring the high level of evidence that we normally would have in a pandemic
or not. And I think that's a reasonable question to
have. But these things do need to be studied. They do need to be looked at. But realize, at the end of the day, this is
just one slice in the large slices of cheese. We can't all depend on that one slice because
every slice has holes in it, and the more slices we have, the better. And so as part of my philosophy, if there
is something that works, great, that's a slice, but it doesn't mean that we don't do the other
things that are important because nothing is 100%. [Kyle]: Dr. Patrick, what are your thoughts
on this question? [Dr. Patrick]: Well, I do have many thoughts
particularly with the ivermectin being as good as vaccines statement that is very sensationalized
and I think is doing a lot of harm because, as Dr. Seheult pointed out, you know, we should
study any type of therapeutic that is repurposed, anything we know is safe in humans, and anything
that could have even the slightest positive effect on the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19
illness because we need everything that we can to fight this. We need multiple therapeutics. We need vaccines. We need everything. And so, I think, when you sensationalize something
more than the data suggests it deserves, then you have a couple of problems. One, you're misleading people, and that's
a big problem. And two, you're getting a sort of knee-jerk
reaction from researchers, scientists, from physicians that are going, "Whoa, wait a minute. Something feels a little, you know, off." And so you kind of put off those people that
otherwise may be more open to looking at that therapeutic if they otherwise didn't hear
a very sensationalistic claim like ivermectin is just as good as vaccines at protecting
against COVID-19. And so meta-analysis, Dr. Seheult mentioned
a very popular one that was a systematic review and did show some conclusions that were positive
generally speaking. But when you actually go down and look at
the individual studies within that meta-analysis and other types of analysis that are aggregating
a bunch of data, what you'll often find is a common set of problems. And these problems are manifold. One, they include the co-treatments, and the
treatments are very different with each of these studies. So, for example, sometimes you'll have ivermectin
alone. Sometimes you'll have ivermectin plus azithromycin. Sometimes you'll have ivermectin plus some
kind of nose spray. Sometimes you'll have ivermectin plus vitamin
C and zinc and blood thinners and azithromycin in the kitchen sink basically. Then you'll compare that to sometimes placebo,
sometimes hydroxychloroquine, sometimes hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, sometimes doxycycline. There's so many variables here that you can't
look at just one of the variables and say ivermectin is doing this when you have ivermectin
plus the kitchen sink, or you have ivermectin plus something else compared to the kitchen
sink or compared to...you know, so there's a lot of variables that are just being aggregated
together that are very different. The second major problem with a lot of these
studies is that they are small sample sizes, and so at the end of the day, when you're
looking at a clinical endpoint, for example, hospitalization, when you have 50 people in
a group, you know, then if 2 people end up in the hospital, so you have 2 people in the
control group end up in the hospital, but out of the other 50 people, you have zero
end up in the hospital, so let's say in the ivermectin group because you'll find studies
like this, it's such a low sample size that the risk of that event happening, the certainty
of that event happening being actually, you know, causal by that treatment is so low. Like you can't make a definitive statement
about that. And so what you'll see happening is that more
and more studies will be pulled together so that you now have larger sample sizes when
you pull them all together, and then your certainty becomes a little bit better. But then you have to ask yourself, well, is
that really true? When you have such a low sample size within
that individual study, pulling them together is kind of a statistical way of manipulating
the data in a way saying, well, look, there's statistical significance when you pull it
all together. I think that's really important to keep in
mind when you're looking at some of these meta-analysis with ivermectin. And then you also have the clinical endpoints
varying. So you have people looking at hospitalization. You'll have research groups looking at deaths. You'll have research groups looking at viral
clearance time to a negative PCR. And in some cases, they're all being aggregated
together, and it's like clinical benefit is the end point. And it's like, well, geez, these are vastly
different clinical endpoints. So, you really need to be careful when looking
at aggregated data. Certainly, there's a number of websites out
there that are doing this. And I can tell you that I've looked at these
individual studies, and in many cases, I mean, it's everything I just mentioned and worse. It's where you can't even find the numbers
that they're coming up with. But sticking to just the scientific literature,
you know, even that systematic meta-analysis that Dr. Seheult mentioned, you know, if you
look at all the different studies, and a lot of them were pre-prints that they included,
the only real consistent finding that was found, consistent meaning every study showed
it, was basically time to a negative PCR, in other words, an ivermectin plus the kitchen
sink or ivermectin plus whatever, it seemed to lead to a faster viral clearance to some
degree. And again, it might be that it takes ivermectin
plus the kitchen sink to do it, but that ivermectin plays a small role. We don't really know. And when you take ivermectin plus the kitchen
sink, you can't pinpoint it and say it's ivermectin doing it. You just can't do that unless you give the
kitchen sink without ivermectin to the control group. And then you can say, well, look, they were
given the exact other, you know, array of therapeutics, and they didn't have the same
improvement as the other group with the array of therapeutic treatments plus the ivermectin. So, there's a lot of nuance to this. And I think that at the end of the day, there
is a little bit of a signal. There is something that seems to be going
on with ivermectin, whether or not it's in combination with all these other things or
by itself. It's unclear. What is clear is that we definitely do need
more data. We need more high quality data. We need more data from, you know, states that...or
from countries that don't have a really high background of parasitic disease as Dr. Seheult
pointed out. It's a very big confounding factor. But also we need to not sensationalize something
and, you know, speak about things that are not true. Like there's just no evidence that ivermectin
is going to protect you from infection and from severe disease as well as a vaccine. There's no evidence of that, and so don't
make that claim. Make the claim for what the data speaks to. There may be an effect. There may be an effect particularly on viral
clearance. If people would tone it down and not make
these grandiose claims, there would be a lot more interest in ivermectin and studying ivermectin. And, you know, the other thing to keep in
mind is that there's been a lot of people that have now sought out a veterinary form
of it because it is something that in addition to being used in humans for parasitic diseases
and helminths and also scabies and lice and things like that, it's also used in like...you
know, people are calling it horse dewormer, which, you know, it's just...it's not a good
idea to go and get a veterinary type of medication and try to treat yourself because there's
vastly, you know, different doses involved. I mean, you know, horses are much larger than
humans. It's very dangerous to do something like that. And I think people have sort of heard these
sensational claims and sort of taking their own action trying to get some form of ivermectin,
and really, that could be quite dangerous. I agree with Dr. Seheult that we should be
studying these repurposed therapeutics. There is a potential for ivermectin. At least in my opinion at the very least,
it seems as though it's pretty consistently involved in speeding up the viral clearance
to some degree. It's not like a huge, huge effect, but there
is an effect, and it's consistent with pretty much all the studies that I've personally
looked at. So, I think that, you know, we should really
go after that and try to see if that's real. That's pretty much my thought. [Kyle]: Excellent. And speaking of those studies that you both
talked about and these meta-analyses, one argument I've heard for ivermectin is some
of these population-based studies where certain countries have decided to give ivermectin
on a large scale. And you can understand, you know, potentially
their motivation. They want to protect their population and
prevent COVID-19 if they can, and they're going to use whatever resources they think
they have to do that. What are some problems with these population-based
studies for people who aren't familiar with what those are? [Dr. Patrick]: So basically, they're known
as ecological studies. They're great to look at. They're hypothesis generating. You don't rely on hypothesis generating studies
to determine whether or not somebody gets a medication. So first off, you know, all the disclaimers,
don't take this as medical advice, talk to your doctor, see if it's right for you, and
don't get your ivermectin from the feed store are some reasonable advice to take. But in terms of the studies, what you need
to be able to reach the point where you're able to prescribe someone something is what
the FDA requires, which is a randomized placebo-controlled trial that's usually multi-centered, and it's
very large. And that's what you have to do to be able
to say this is the medicine that's indicated for this condition. And we just haven't had that yet here in the
United States. [Dr. Patrick]: And to sort of add to that,
Dr. Seheult, I mean, you know, even going back to the original clinical trials with
our mRNA vaccines, there were 75,000 people originally in that randomized controlled trial
where, you know, half the population was getting the treatment, which were the vaccines, and
the other half was getting the placebo. And then on top of that...so that's a large
number of people. The sample sizes with this ivermectin is a
fraction of that, I mean, a fraction. And on top of that, we now have all this real
world data where we've got billions of people worldwide who have had a COVID-19 vaccine,
and they are protecting from severe disease, and to some degree they're also protecting
against even getting infected depending on which, you know, vaccine a person has gotten. So, we know they're effective. We know from large, large, large numbers. And to sort of even add on to that, everything
has changed since the Delta variant. We have had to sort of start again and look
at...aggregate new data because this is a new variant where our vaccines are not as
effective at preventing infection. And, you know, the reality is, is all these
meta-analysis and all this data we just talked about with ivermectin, this was not when Delta
was the dominant variant. We don't really know what ivermectin even
does with, you know, the Delta variant. I haven't seen data really showing how ivermectin,
you know, affects Delta variant. So I think that's also something to consider
as well. [Dr. Seheult]: Yeah. That's a great point. And, you know, FoundMyFitness even more than
MedCram, we've been talking about things that you can do, things that are easy for you to
do like sleep. We talked about vitamin D. We're not opposed...I mean, look at our video
histories, our respective video histories, we are all in for trying to take control of
your health care, take control of your life, and to do this. So let's just take the 3,000 foot level here
or the 30,000 foot level. This vaccine is indicated for this particular
virus. I mean, I'm not naive to believe that this
is the only pandemic that we're ever going to see in our lifetime. It's not the only illness that we're ever
going to have to deal with. Some of those other things that we talked
about with vitamin D, with sleep, with exercise, stress reduction, fresh air, sunlight, these
things have enormous benefits, not just with COVID-19, but every other aspect of our life. And so again, it's the Swiss cheese model. The more slices you have in there, the better. [Dr. Patrick]: 100%. I mean, the low hanging fruit is obviously
the things that you can do to improve your lifestyle, making sure your vitamin D levels
are high enough, you know, trying to be metabolically healthy, you know, eating the best diet or
losing weight if you're overweight or obese, getting good enough sleep. All these things are hugely important for
overall health and certainly for immunity. So, again, thank you for pointing that out
because it really...at the end of the day, there are so many factors that do need to
be optimized as well. [Kyle]: Dr. Patrick, this question's for you,
and it's about transmission. And we know that the Delta variant has been
a game-changer, and we've seen the efficacy of vaccines drop to some degree with regards
to do they prevent symptomatic COVID-19. And we're also aware that transmission of
the Delta variant may be happening among...well, is happening among fully vaccinated people. So, what are your thoughts on this? Should this shake people's confidence in getting
a COVID-19 vaccine? [Dr. Patrick]: Well, I think people have...it's
always easy to make generalized statements when you see a little piece of data coming
in, which, by the way, new data every day, things are changing constantly, hard to keep
up with. I think people have made this overarching
statement that vaccines do not prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus. In other words, they do not prevent people
from contracting COVID-19. And, I think, to understand why that is not
true, we need to start with the word transmission because there are two major types of transmission
when we're talking about a viral illness here. First is called onward transmission, and this
is the type of transmission that is more at the individual level. So a person becomes infected with a virus. They have viral particles in their nose, and,
you know, they're basically shedding viral particles. And this can be transmitted through aerosols
and large respiratory droplets to other individuals, right? So this is the transmission of the virus that
most people think about. But there's also what's called its overall
transmission, and that is the transmission in an overall population. This is the population level. So if we have a treatment or a vaccine that
is able to prevent even a small percentage of people from becoming ill, then it still
reduces overall transmission because fewer people are actually getting the illness. And so as you mentioned, the Delta variant
has sort of changed everything because, when, you know, we had the Alpha variant and even
the Beta variant, we know that the vaccines in the United States were largely effective
still and, you know, in many cases still 90%, 95% effective at preventing people from even
getting COVID-19 symptomatic and seeking out health care. We know that in addition, people that did
become...that did get infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus, they actually had fewer viral particles. They were not transmitting the virus like
an unvaccinated person was. That's all changed with Delta. Now we have to aggregate new data, see, you
know, what the data shows. And, I think, I would say that the data shows
that in about July of 2021 is when the Delta variant in the United States really started
to become dominant, sort of took over. And so there was a large study that was done
out of the Mayo Clinic. Many states were involved in terms of like
the sample population from many different states in the United States. And this was like 25,000 people that were
vaccinated versus 25,000 people that were unvaccinated. What the Mayo Clinic study was looking at
first was vaccine efficacy, like the ability to, you know, prevent people from getting
COVID-19 and also looked at the efficacy of preventing hospitalization. So that's also very important. And so when the Delta variant became dominant,
it was clear that efficacy for preventing infection went down. So people that were fully vaccinated with
the Pfizer vaccine went from an efficacy of like 88% to 93% or something like that down
to 41%. So, there was still some efficacy. In other words, you know, 41% of people that
were fully vaccinated were still not getting COVID-19, which means that the Pfizer vaccine
still reducing overall transmission. And on a similar level, the Moderna mRNA vaccine
also had reduced efficacy in terms of preventing infections, although it wasn't quite as dramatic. So the Moderna vaccine is about twice as protective
as the Pfizer vaccine in getting a SARS-CoV-2 infection. So that was about 77% effective at preventing
SARS-CoV-2 infection. So, again, overall transmission is reduced
because, you know, a large percent of people that are fully vaccinated with Moderna are
still not getting even infected. That was good news. Both vaccines were still quite effective anywhere
from 80% to 97% effective at preventing hospitalizations, which is ultimately the most important thing. As Dr. Seheult pointed out earlier in this
discussion, you don't want your hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients because,
when your parents have a heart attack, or if you get in a car accident, or your child
comes down with a severe form of RSV, you know, or fill in the blank, you're not going
to get the care that you need and you deserve. So it's good to prevent hospitalizations because
that protects our health care system from being overwhelmed, which is important for
all of us. The other thing that was found was that...not
with the Mayo Clinic study, but there was another study, a large study that was done
out of the U.K. and this study showed that this was...the most interesting thing in my
opinion in this study, this also included AstraZeneca vaccine because AstraZeneca has
largely been used in some European countries like in the U.K., that people that were fully
vaccinated were still...you know, there was still some efficacy in terms of protecting
against, you know, getting the virus as I just mentioned with the Mayo Clinic study
something similar was found. But when you looked at peak viral load, in
other words, when the virus is at its peak for replicating, the peak viral load was similar
in a breakthrough infection from a vaccinated person versus a unvaccinated person that had
contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And so that sort of caused a media frenzy,
you know, to sort of make this general statement that vaccines don't prevent transmission. And it's just not accurate to say that. For one, they're still preventing overall
transmission as we just discussed. But two, you need to look at overall viral
replication. So, you know, it's not just peak transmission
that's important. You're transmitting this virus to other people
at many different stages of being infected. And so that's exactly what this pre-print
study out of Singapore, which was with the Delta variant showed that while initial viral
loads were similar between a breakthrough vaccinated case and an unvaccinated person
that had SARS-CoV-2 virus...infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus, those initial viral levels
were the same. If you followed those individuals over time,
the vaccinated people cleared the virus faster than the unvaccinated. So they actually had a shorter negative PCR
time. If this was true, you would have the hypothesis
that at any given time, if you were to take a random person out of the population and
sample their viral load, then you would see vaccinated people at any point in time should
have a smaller viral load because they're clearing the virus faster. And that's exactly what this real-time data
that's being aggregated out of the U.K., it's called REACT Study, that study found that
if you were to take a random sampling of people at any point in time, vaccinated breakthrough
cases, they had a lower viral load than unvaccinated. So, I think, with this data, it suggests that
not only do the vaccines still prevent...sorry, still reduce overall transmission, they also
still reduce onward transmission. They're still affecting transmission on multiple
levels. And so, I think, that's really important to
keep in mind. In addition to that, understanding who gets
the breakthrough infection. Why are 41% of people vaccinated with Pfizer
still protected from even getting, you know, SARS-CoV-2 virus? And why are 77% of people fully vaccinated
with Moderna not getting infected? There was a big study that came out of Israel
looking at breakthrough infections. Now, this wasn't necessarily when Delta was
dominant, but I think it still is important to keep in mind that what's causing these
breakthrough infections. We don't know exactly everything, but if you
look at this Israel study, they were looking at health care workers. And there was about 15,000 of them basically. These health care workers, they took blood
samples, and they could look at their antibody levels against...these were vaccinated health
care workers. They could look at their IgG antibodies, and
I'm not sure what other antibodies they looked at, but they could look at the levels of them
and quantitate them. And then if they came down with a breakthrough
infection, they could sort of use that data and go, "Oh, could we predict whether or not
this person came down with a breakthrough infection based on their antibody levels?" And that's exactly what was found. People that had lower antibody titers were
much more likely to get a breakthrough infection than people that had higher antibody titers. And there was another great study that came...it
was a Miles Davenport group, and it published in "Nature Medicine." And he did this mathematical modeling to predict
breakthrough infections. And what he found was that it seems as though,
according to his model, people need a six-fold higher antibody titer level to be protected
from contracting SARS-CoV-2 virus. Then they need to be protected from being
hospitalized from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In other words, you need a much lower antibody
level or titer to prevent yourself from being hospitalized, but you need a higher level
to prevent yourself from actually contracting the virus itself. [Dr. Seheult]: So what Dr. Patrick has told
us is that there is a difference that you have to look a little bit deeper. I was able to find a pre-print of an article
that just came out a couple of weeks ago that looked at the quality of those viral particles
that are shed from those that have breakthrough infections. So in other words, is it possible that the
shedding of the virus that comes from unvaccinated are the same as vaccinated. And what this pre-print showed very interestingly
if you look at this graph, here we have the amount of viral load being shed on the X-axis,
and on the Y-axis, what they did was they tried to see what was the chances of these
viral particles of actually growing in a viral culture, kind of a surrogate to successfully
infecting the next person. What you can see here is the dark blue are
those that are unvaccinated, and the light blue are those that are vaccinated. You can clearly see here that at any given
viral load, the vaccinated health care worker in this study from the Netherlands was shown
to have a less likelihood of infecting somebody based on viral culture. So, not only do we see with the vaccinated
less breakthrough infections, and when there are breakthrough infections, they are cleared
faster. But we're also seeing that the viral particles
that come out of vaccinated people are less likely to infect. And that's important because there has been
some talk going around that it's the vaccinated people that are transmitting the virus more
and causing these outbreaks to those that are unvaccinated, and those are the ones that
are showing up to the hospital. But clearly, here, the data is showing that
is not the fact. [Dr. Patrick]: Oh, just to add to that, Dr.
Seheult, that is very interesting...that the study is very interesting because the way
that researchers are measuring, you know, peak viral load is through real-time PCR,
and real-time PCR can actually be detecting dead viral particles. That makes a hypothesis even quite likely
that there are some dead viral particles, which you would even...you'd sort of, you
know, theorize would be true because, if you do have antibodies against the spike protein,
that your immune system would start to kill or to, you know, clear the virus that you're
being exposed to since you have some antibodies, you'd think there would be some effect. So that's very interesting. [Dr. Seheult]: Right. It boils down to the thing that I've heard
that explains this as PCR is a way of looking...it's kind of like looking at dead body parts and
assuming that those dead body parts are alive. All it's looking for is parts of the virus,
and parts of viruses don't infect. They just make PCR positive. [Dr. Patrick]: Right. Exactly. The question is, is like how many of those
viral particles are actually even alive. If they were alive, you would imagine that
when you put them in culture that they would replicate. So, very interesting study. [Kyle]: Dr. Patrick, I've heard some people
say that the vaccines themselves might be contributing to putting certain pressures
on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, specifically this idea that the vaccines can make the virus
actually more deadly or more virulent. What are your thoughts on that? [Dr. Patrick]: I certainly like coming into
hearing these statements, which I've heard and it's proliferated on many different areas
of the blogosphere and people that...you know, friends of friends, you know, etc. My first thought was, well, if this is...we
need to know whether or not this is true because, if it is, it changes everything in a way,
right? You don't want to make a virus, you know,
more deadly to the unvaccinated. And that's kind of what the general statement
is, is that vaccines are causing selective pressure for the virus to mutate into a more
virulent form, which is more dangerous and deadly to the unvaccinated. Nobody wants that. Like if that were the case, I mean, all of
our children are unvaccinated. So, you know, as a parent, to me, I wanted
to get to the bottom of this and understand, is this something to be concerned about because,
if it is, it's a game changer in my mind. So, as a non-evolutionary biologist, I went
on a path to trying to understand to the best of my knowledge, you know, the literature
and what the literature out there says on how viruses evolve and what the selective
pressure is and, you know, what that typically, you know, entails. And so from all of my reading and understanding,
again, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, to me, I came out of it with the understanding
that viruses...the selective pressure on viruses is to evolve to become more transmissible. They are not under a selection pressure to
become more virulent. In other words, it's not in their best interest
to kill their host because, if they kill their host, then their host can't incubate the virus
and allow them to reproduce and infect more people. And so all the studies that I've read outlined
that there's these factors and that virulence isn't something that's selected for. It is something that happens incidentally
to transmission. In other words, it sort of hitchhikes alongside. So, a virus evolves to become more transmissible,
like that is its major purpose. And in some cases, if it becomes more transmissible,
sometimes it can also become more virulent. It can be more, you know, dangerous to its
host. So many of the different studies have outlined
that there are factors that limit transmission. So, if something limits the transmission,
then it's also going to limit the potential of the virus to become more virulent. And the factors that limit transmission are,
one, physical constraints. So, the virus infects human cells, and the
human cells then make viral proteins, and, you know, are basically allowing the virus
to replicate. So, our own cellular machinery, the ability
of our cells to assemble viral proteins, the ability of ourselves metabolically to do it
quick enough, like there's a limit to that. Like we can only do that so quickly. So once that happens, then, you know, a virus
has sort of reached its peak transmissibility in a way because our cells physically can't
do it quicker than it's already doing it, if that makes sense. And so with the Delta variant right now, we
may be at a peak transmissible...you know, we may be at the point where our cells can't
assemble all the viral proteins quick enough for it to become even more transmissible. We don't know. Maybe we're not there yet, but maybe we are. We have no idea. It's definitely a much more transmissible
variant. So that's the one thing that limits the ability
of a virus to become more virulent is the limitation on transmission. The other thing is host mortality. If a virus is killing the host within a certain
time frame before transmission ends, then, you know, you start to like not be able to
transmit the virus more, and you're not going to have more variants crop up because the
host is dying. And so this is something people have been
very concerned about with vaccines because the argument is that vaccines are preventing
more...they're preventing people from dying from COVID-19, and therefore, they're going
to allow the virus to have a chance to mutate into something that is more virulent. Again, it has to mutate into something that's
more transmissible, virulent hitchhikers alongside of that. But if you look at the deaths in COVID-19,
people that are unvaccinated, or just generally speaking, people usually die much later than
the transmission phase. They die, you know, days and days and days
after actually becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2. And so the transmission phase is well over
before people are even dying. The reality is, is that people that are unvaccinated
have...they're creating these mutations and allowing variants to evolve even at a greater
rate because, not only are they, you know, able to do it even before they potentially
succumb to death, but, you know, the fact that we just talked about overall transmission
reduced by vaccine, so, people that are vaccinated are less likely to even get infected, and
we talked about onward transmission reduced, in other words, people are clearing the virus
faster that are vaccinated than unvaccinated. In every sense, people that are unvaccinated,
there's more chances for the virus to replicate and to potentially mutate and form another
variant that could become more transmissible, and that's potentially more virulent. Now, people are also conflating the vaccine
escaped immunity. That is a completely different thing. That is not something that is relevant to
virulence, if you look at the large body of scientific literature covering this topic. I shouldn't say large body. It's actually quite limited. So there's no example of human vaccines causing
a more virulent strain. There are examples of vaccine escape. So in other words, variants crop up that are
no longer...that can evade the antibodies produced by vaccines. That's a different thing. That isn't something that's more virulent. That's something that's going to affect people
that are vaccinated because now they're going to be more likely to be infected, and their
vaccine is less effective. That's a very different thing than what we're
talking about, which is the evolution, the selective pressure on viruses to transmit,
become more transmissible. And that is the selective pressure that exists,
not virulence. Virulence hitchhikes alongside the transmission
aspect of why viruses, you know, mutate basically in the selective pressure that's on them to
do that. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, I want to hear your thoughts
on that. And also Dr. Patrick mentioned how, you know,
with Delta variant and other variants, and in the past with vaccines, how sometimes a
variant can crop up that escapes vaccine antibodies. Can you talk a little about the other big
aspect of the immune system, and that's the T cell response, and how that can still offer
us a lot of protection potentially? [Dr. Seheult]: Sure. Yeah. So first of all, in order for you to have
variants, you have to have replication because it's the errors in replication that cause
variance. And so the only way you can have replication
is if you have viruses in hosts. So, if you look at the examples that we have,
whether it's Alpha, Beta Gamma, Delta, most of these variants, if not all of them, came
from populations that were not vaccinated. Now, India's done a great job at producing
vaccines, and they're well on their way to vaccinating their population, fortunately. But the Delta variant came out early on when
they were not having a lot of people vaccinated. Same thing with the South African variant,
and the P1 that came out of Brazil. This was during a time where there was not
vaccinated. If it was vaccination that caused variance,
then we should be seeing variants coming out of Israel, in the United States. These are probably the two most vaccinated
countries in the world. And that's just certainly not the case. Now, in terms of B cell, or I should say antibodies,
antibodies are very important when it comes to neutralizing a virus that is outside of
your cells predominantly. So, neutralizing it before they become inside
your cells, before they infect the cells, that's very, very important. But there's a whole another aspect to the
immunity that help in terms of hospitalization, in terms of those memory T cells, and that
is what we just mentioned was the T cells, the cytotoxic T cells and the rest of it. What's interesting that I found about T cells
is that when they reproduce, they also reproduce in a way where they put errors in there so
that as the virus may mutate, there seems to be some evidence that the T cell response
may be able to anticipate and mutate along with it. Now, that's not 100% science yet, but there
seems to be some evidence of that at least in the research articles that I've read. And if you look at what's happening right
now with the Delta variant in Israel, in the United States, we see a reduction in the ability
of the vaccines to reduce transmission, right? So with the Delta variant, instead of the
80% to 90% that we enjoyed early on in the pandemic, it's been knocked down somewhat. But we really haven't seen an erosion to that
extent in prevention of hospitalization and severe disease. That has more to do with T cell responses
in cytotoxic because by this point, the virus is inside the body already inside the cells. And antibodies have very limited ability to
take care of those types of situations. So, the immune system is very complex, and
I think we need to just sort of look back and always couple our in vitro hypotheses
with real-world data. And so far the real-world data is still holding
up in terms of prevention of severe disease. And I'd also like to add, there's been some
sort of a false equivalence, if you will, that is made in terms of what we know that
overuse of antibiotics can cause bacterial resistance to those antibiotics. And there's no question about that. That's a whole other topic of discussion,
the overuse of antibiotics in humans and in animals especially. And that gives rise to these superbugs that
emerge that are no longer susceptible to the antibiotics that we have, but that's a different
situation. That's where the antibiotics that are being
used are basically selectively killing out all of these susceptible bacteria and only
leaving those that are resistant. So in other words, the resistant bacteria
already exist, but we're knocking out the bacteria that are susceptible and allowing
the resistant forms to produce. That's very different than what we're talking
about with vaccines because, in the terms of vaccines and viruses, the resistant viruses
don't exist. What allows them to be created is the ability
to replicate. Okay. And that's very different with bacteria. In bacteria, very few resistant bacteria are
occurring because they're being allowed to replicate. The only way that they can become resistant
is if they acquire DNA that gives them, they're called plasmids or vectors that allow antibiotic
resistance to then be incorporated in their DNA. That's not the case with viruses. Viruses and bacteria are very different. [Kyle]: Dr. Seheult, I think the most common
reason I've heard for people choosing not to get the vaccine is that they feel like
the process may have been rushed, that there isn't enough long-term data yet. They may be willing to get the vaccine at
some point, but they will, you know, look at the historical timelines for vaccines and
realize that it takes often 10 years, you know, maybe the average for a vaccine to actually
be manufactured and go through the authorization and approval process. What are your thoughts about this sentiment? And, you know, do you feel like the vaccine
was rushed? Do you feel like we can trust the process
in this case with this particular technology? [Dr. Seheult]: That's a great question. So there's no question in my mind and anyone
else's that this process was accelerated. No question about it. The question is, is was the quality of the
product compromised by the acceleration of the process? And here you can see on the screen a typical
vaccine timeline. If this was done under normal situations,
we would have started in 2020, and we wouldn't have had a product until 2034. And the reason for that is because there is
risk in making these vaccines, but there's also processes that they have to go through. So there is the research that has to happen. Then there's the pre-clinical trials, the
bench top trials, and then phase one, to figure out the right dose, phase two, to do the small
randomized controlled trials to see if there are problems, then finally, the big phase
three trials, leading up to building the factories to make these vaccines, and then the manufacturing,
and then the approval process, and then finally, the distribution. So what you can see in the lower portion of
that screen is everything got compressed. Now, notice that nothing got skipped. So we still had the phase one trials, and
the phase two, and the phase three. Some of these were being run concomitantly,
which means at the same time. But notice something very interesting. The factories were being built at the same
time that the phase one and two trials were being done. Why is that? Why were they able to do that? Because what the government did by stepping
in and providing them money and resources and providing those barriers is they're saying,
"Look, we'll give you the money to build the factories," realizing that if these phase
one, two, and three trials are a bust, you're not going to be held liable for the amount
of money that you've spent in building these factories that aren't going to do anything. And so that was one of the major barriers
to getting this thing done was the risk that the companies would not normally be willing
to take on these vaccines. But the government was saying, "We don't want
you to take that risk. We want you to get those things started." Now, this sort of thing has happened before. If we go back to World War II, and we talk
about the Nazis and World War II and the tremendous machinery that they had and the amazing amount
of the war machine of the Nazis, what happened was Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat down with
a guy by the name of William Knudsen, who was basically the most powerful man in terms
of...in Detroit and the auto manufacturing process. And he basically offered him a salary of $1
to basically coordinate the infrastructure plan to build the war machine that would be
able to go against Hitler. This is what William Knudsen, the president
of General Motors, said in a meeting of the executives. Basically, the first half of 1941 is crucial. He said, "Gentlemen, we must outbuild Hitler,"
and that's exactly what he did. There was a point in time in Detroit where
they were at the Ford manufacturing plant putting out a B-24 Liberator, which is a large
plane with four engines, at the rate of one per hour. That was because the entire infrastructure
of the United States was turned towards one goal, and that was defeating Hitler in World
War II. And the same thing happened with the implementation
of the project of coming forth with a vaccine. Now, some of the vaccine companies took advantage
of the funds. Others did not. But the bottom line is, is that those barriers
that created a lag time because of risk, because of money, those sorts of things were completely
eliminated, and they were able to speed up the production of the vaccine. Now, the phase one trial still happened. The animal studies still happened. No, the animals did not die in the production. In fact, it was because the animals did so
well that they were able to go to phase one, two, and three. The other aspect of this that is tossed around
is that this is new technology. Now, I know that Dr. Patrick knows more about
the technology in terms of the history, but I will just give you a very short timeline. Back in the 1990s, we injected for the first
time mRNA into the muscle cells of a mouse, for the very first time. By 2005, we had modified the nucleotides,
which are the signaling in that mRNA vaccine to get around early destruction. So the problem early on was that we couldn't
allow these messenger RNA molecules to last long enough to make the protein product. The problem wasn't that they lasted forever. It was that they didn't last long enough,
but they were able to finally figure out how to do that. And by 2013, they started working on medications
that were based on mRNA. And then finally, we have the vaccines. Here is a paper that was published in 1990,
so over 30 years ago, that was for the first time showing that this technology actually
had viability. And so this technology is not new. It's been around for 30 years, and it's been
looked at. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Patrick. I think she has some more details on this. [Dr. Patrick]: Yes. I do. You know, in addition to this technology not
being new in the sense that everyone...most people think this is the first time it's actually
been used in humans, just to kind of speak to your point about the acceleration of the
process of getting this vaccine into people, and you were talking about all the money that's
available for building the factories, I think another really important thing to point out
is the difference between this vaccine and our history of vaccines in terms of how we
make them. For the mRNA vaccines, all you need is the
sequence. That's all you need to make it. And it's so easy to make in mass, mass, mass
quantities versus having to actually grow vaccine in some kind of animal cell type. And like, I mean, you're limited. There's a limitation in how much of it you
can make, physically, limitation. So, just going back to the actual history
of mRNA vaccines and this mRNA technology in humans. In 2001, we have the first clinical trial
of this mRNA technology that was made. It was mRNA-induced dendritic cells. In 2009, we have another clinical trial where
mRNA was used as a therapeutic. In 2014, there's the first mRNA vaccine in
terms of immunotherapy for cancer, so trying to treat cancer with mRNA vaccines. These are all in humans. In 2017, there were 2 clinical trials, one
for mRNA-based vaccine for influenza, and another one for mRNA technology used to treat
patients with heart...basically had heart failure, and they were injecting mRNA vaccines
into their heart. So, we've got a lot of clinical data dating
back to 2001 where we've been using this technology in humans, you know. So this is not the new technology that people
in their minds they think that this is the first time it's ever been used in humans and
how scary that is. It dates back to decades, well, you know,
a couple of decades being used in humans. To kind of add to that, I really...moving
forward, it's amazing how this field has exploded in terms of all the clinical trials now being
started and planned for this mRNA technology. There is so much interest, and there's a lot
of funding now to understand this technology as a therapeutic for infectious diseases in
addition to the SARS-CoV-2 virus for other ones. There are now clinical studies that are now
starting to look at this technology to treat genetic disorders like muscular dystrophy
where there's no treatment that exists. Can you imagine being the parent of a son
that has muscular dystrophy and knowing there is no treatment and having to watch your son
degenerate and die? I mean, we may see a treatment for muscular
dystrophy in our lifetime because of this. It's accelerated and exploded this clinical
arena where now we're seeing tons and tons of trials for mRNA vaccines as immunotherapy
for cancers where they're going to be injecting this mRNA technology into a variety of different
types of solid tumors. And again, we may very well in our lifetime
now see a cure for different types of solid tumors. Solid tumors are the type of cancers that
are hardest to treat with chemotherapy because they often grow far away from blood vessels. And so blood vessels, you need them to be
close to the cancer site because that's how the chemotherapeutic gets, you know, delivered
to the tumor site. And so you'll get these tumors growing far
away from them. They're what's called hypoxic. They're growing far away from blood vessels. And so it's one of the reasons why many different
solid tumors are resistant to many types of chemotherapeutic treatments. So imagine being able to directly inject the
tumor with this mRNA technology where we're going to, you know, test a variety of different
immune generating, you know, molecules and things that are going to activate the immune
system to go right directly to that tumor and kill it. It's a very exciting time, and I understand
that people are scared because it's new to them. And it's always scary when something, you
know, is new, and there's change. But there's a bright side, and that bright
side is, is that science is moving forward at an accelerated rate. And we are witnessing something that would
have not have happened otherwise without this terrible pandemic that obviously a lot of
bad has come out of. But, you know, to try to see the silver lining
here, the good out of it is that the science has really catapulted forward, and there's
some exciting stuff going on with the mRNA technology. [Kyle]: Thank you for that. Definitely good to have some silver linings
right now. And before we sign off, any items that we
didn't cover that you want to? [Dr. Seheult]: I was just going to say this,
Kyle, is to keep in mind this image in your mind that I've got here on the screen, and
that is the U.K.'s second wave, which was non-Delta, and then the third wave, which
was Delta. I want the audience to sort of keep this in
mind when it comes to the vaccines and what they can potentially do. In the second wave, which is in red, the left
half of that shows how quickly the infections rose as time went on. And concomitantly, on the other side of it,
on the right side, you can see how quickly deaths unfortunately also rose in that second
wave. And that's without the vaccine. That's without the vaccines that we currently
have now. And then the third wave came, which was Delta
wave, and what you can see there, which is a stark departure from the wave on the left,
is that while you have the increasing amount of infections, which are basically positive
PCRs as we've talked about, what's missing there from that is the increased amount of
deaths in that third wave. And that is with the vaccine, and that's something
to keep in mind that I really want to make sure the audience understands is when you
hear news stories talking about the decreased effectiveness of the vaccine, make sure that
you understand that they're talking about their ability to prevent infections. What they're not talking about at least up
to this point in time and with the Delta variant is that we're still holding on its ability
to prevent hospitalizations and deaths. Now, there is some data that is coming out
of Israel where at least some experts believe that that ability to hold may be waning in
the most elderly and in those that have been vaccinated the longest. And that's where we're talking about booster
shots and things of that nature. I think that data as we're talking right now
at the beginning of September is still needing to be settled. The FDA is still looking at that and deciding
whether or not booster shots are going to be offered and to whom and when. And so we don't have the science on that settled
as yet. But I still want to at least make sure that
people understand, that's an issue for people that have been vaccinated for six to eight
months already. That's not an issue for those that have not
yet been vaccinated and are concerned about where the Delta variant is especially in those
states right now where Delta is raging. So, I just wanted to leave that as a general
point and as really the motivation for me and I'm sure for many others in making these
kinds of videos so people can understand that. [Kyle]: Well, thank you both so much for your
time and all the information today and throughout this pandemic. Thank you for empowering people to better
understand the data and the science of this pandemic and also ways that they can optimize
their own health and immunity. And I want to thank everyone who tuned in
for this discussion and made it to the end here. If you enjoyed this discussion or found it
useful, please share it with friends and family. And if you haven't already done so, please
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about this discussion. We really appreciate reading through those
and get ideas for future videos to do and future interviews to have. So thanks again, and we hope to see you all
soon. Be safe.
