StarTalk Podcast: The COVID-19 Vaccines with Irwin Redlener

[Music] this is star talk i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and for today's episode we're talking about the covet 19 vaccines chuck you with me on this one i am indeed however i am not vaccinated you're not vaccinated okay and and i'm i'm halfway through that so did you did it up at harlem hospital um up in manhattan uh in harlem of course uh so obviously neither you or i have specific expertise in this field so we go into our man who does and that is dr erwin redliner a friend for many decades irwin welcome back to star talk now i i i so delight in reading your title because it's the one of the baddest ass titles that we've got here so you are the founding director of columbia university's national center for disaster preparedness wait and you created the pandemic resource and response initiative at columbia university so this is you're the you are the man if i ever see a disaster i'm running to erwin we're going to think of you help me dr redlinger if you see a disaster don't call me i'll be really offended but when godzilla comes we're calling you yeah no matter what happened so really we're here to um by the way the uh you you have a long history of the medical treatment of children who couldn't otherwise afford that treatment and your author of the book i have to give this a shout out the future of us what the dreams of children mean to 21st century america wow so you're the man thank you for for even agreeing to be on our on our podcast my great pleasure actually neil and hopefully and we got we got chuck here to make jokes so nothing you do is a joke so check exactly yeah so we'll we'll try we'll see how this goes i don't know [Laughter] i called dr redlener a hour our own tony fauci like you know we got our own person we don't need we don't need tony we got we got erwin redliner you know what i mean that's that's where we are so so let me just ask you the the vaccine you know i view it like any other vaccine if it can prevent an illness i'm getting it but there seems to be this gurgling of attitude towards the vaccine holding aside the regular variety of anti-vaxxers okay there's like a new subset or or are there maybe they're not new maybe it's old who have specific objections to this this vaccine can you tell us what's different about this vaccine from others yeah and i thought about this a lot neil you know one of the things was remember when it was introduced it was introduced during one of the strangest most bizarre presidential administrations in american history that is under the umbrella of donald trump so almost anything that was introduced in that weird four-year span was viewed with skepticism and uh doubt and you know when he would say for example that we're going to fast-track this and he had something called operation warp speed which he actually did have people either didn't believe it they were skeptical about it and it was a new technology this sort of uh this so-called mrna the messenger rna technology so this was born in an environment of serious skepticism also at a time simultaneously near where where the anti-vax movement was growing anyway so it was into this kind of perfect very complex situation where people have doubt and if it's fast-tracked does that mean they they bypass the safety assessment that we normally would expect i mean the fastest vaccine ever developed before this was the mumps which was a four-year process most vaccines take well more than 10 years so there was skepticism all right so what you're saying is we were a victim in a sense the vaccine movement was a victim of of the cry wolf problem right because if so much of what emerges in the trump administration was not objectively was not connected to an objective reality and then he says something that is then the entire anti-trump movement it has justifiable skepticism that it's going to be correct when in fact in this case it was it was correct so perhaps we shouldn't just in general we shouldn't be getting our medical advice from elected politicians a very good point think about this he says inject yourself with bleach to cure yourself of covid and get a vaccine do you know i forgot about that okay all right so it's fascinating that it happened in this perfect storm of misinformation and but what about the integrity of institutions right if nasa says an asteroid's coming people are gonna listen all right so certain institutions have an integrity that has been preserved or at least fared better than other institutions you mean like the cdc yeah for example the cdc or any other sort of medical the you know the mayo clinic what whatever it is yeah that we trust are we in a post institutional trust error forget an individual how about just institutions well here's here's what happened with that so within a month of the recognition that we're dealing with a pandemic based on this particular coronavirus the cdc sends out a hundred test kits across the united states for people and laboratories to be able to test to see if one has a covenant or not those test kits one third of them failed so the cdc stepped out of the gate with a very unusual demonstration of that immediately eroded the public sense of faith in the cdc as an institution to your point so again this is like you said it's this kind of collision course of incompetencies disbelief uh dishonesty etc and here we go and we should not be surprised that people are you know skeptical about the vaccines holding aside the the scarcity and you want the medical professionals to be first in line yeah but wasn't there some also some widespread statements from authorities declaring that masks are not helpful there were there absolutely weren't in fact tony fauci himself was not all that enthusiastic about mass early on and that changed obviously but um yeah there was a lot of rumbling and uh grumbling and people making statements that were not necessarily true or things that they probably should have said we think they are but we'll see we'll be test doing a lot of tests and experiments and observations there's a larger point i want to make about that but let me keep moving this forward what about um the distrust of big pharma that's out there that's real that's um and and the people who might be all in on their mistrust uh if you sift through that there's gonna be some things in their mistrust that yeah that actually did happen yeah there is the profit motive so how do you address that dimension of of this misinformation you know let me say this in 1947 and i'm making a point here the country was worried about a a new influx of smallpox into our country new york city called up the six pharmaceutical manufacturers that made vaccines they ordered six million doses they didn't have to check with the state and they didn't have to check the federal government they just the city the city to the new york city the mayor and the that's badass yeah it's totally badass man this is like yeah we need six million doses we need it now they got six million doses and in less than six weeks they inoculated for smallpox six million new yorkers and the pictures are astounding there's new yorkers lined up for blocks and blocks you know these kind of 40s images of black and white images it was amazing people trusted the health commissioner and the mayor they said there was a bad thing coming this small box go get vaccinated and they did in droves now we've had in the 60 years since a gradual increase in absolute skepticism about institutions about corporations about uh government and all this has now you know it's all congealed in this massive mistrust of everything including the institutions that we should be trusting one good thing a good thing about the binding administration is the restoration of trust is happening already and it's happening much faster than i even anticipated deal okay so now what about this idea that you're unlike other vaccines where you put sort of a denuded version of the of the virus and your body thinks it's the full virus yeah but but you don't get the disease but you get the antibodies so that's the more traditional understanding of yeah of of vaccines this one is actually modifying dna and that's kind of has a spooky feeling to it well rna for the for the pfizers and the and the modernist and dna for the new j johnson johnson that's coming up but yes it is spooky and it's actually the the so-called mrna the messenger rna vaccines are actually tricking the body's cells into thinking that they've been invaded by some foreign virus when they're in fact been been tricked into thinking that there's a protein because of a protein that's inserted into the body they're tricked into thinking that it's some sort of uh external virus and then they manufacture the antibodies so there's genetic engineering this is genetic engineering it is genetic engineering wow yeah wow what's this great okay you're not changing my dna right you're not engineering me you know well you kind of are we're making your body think something is happening to it that isn't that that's but but neil we do the same thing with the old style viruses we let's say if we give a dead uh different kind of like what's called an adenovirus uh a dead or uh attenuated version of the actual virus you're also tricking the body into thinking that oh i got i got a real enemy here i'm going to mount a an immune response and okay you know this is what vaccines do okay so it's just it's a more sophisticated version of what we've been doing what we've been doing yeah for our bodies for decades yes that that's a fair way to say that then well okay so this is also a a cosmic queries and we did solicit questions from our fan base um on the vaccines and so i'd i'm curious let's oh by the way one last point the trust or mistrust of vaccines does not land equally in the demographics of this country or even perhaps the world and i think that may be rooted in a distrust of organized medicine all right and let's look at sort of the black community for example uh just there is some really ugly history there and so there's got there's a there's some explaining that needs to happen there's some really significant effort in the restoration of trust that's necessary i'm not letting the government do no experiments on me right well exactly exactly so so can you could you just remind us of sort of the pinnacle of the source of this distrust yeah so there's a particular pinpoint in history that happened in the 30s and 40s which was called the tuskegee experiments where researchers legitimate scientific medical researchers decided you know we'd like to figure out what happens to somebody who gets syphilis and we don't treat them so they rounded up a bunch of men with syphilis black men in tuskegee and said you know we're going to give you free medical care and we want to just observe you over the next few decades to see how you're doing they did not tell them they were denying treatment for syphilis so over the decades they learned what happens with untreated syphilis at the cost of the lives and health of a large number of black americans so the point is there were treatment was available if not cure they believed they were getting treated but they were just getting a placebo and there they were unwitting medical experiments yeah horrendous i i i like to use the term nazi-like i mean you know i i and i mean that in a in a particular way because normal people don't experiment on other people like that it's not okay in any way but the bigger thing too but what was the organization that did it was it the university it was medical government yeah it was university researchers okay and i think those government involvement government funding okay yeah the eugenics movement was still sort of in progress in the early thirties when that was very important but you know this is also on top of a few hundred years of slavery of jim crow of institutional racism this was like the kappa this was the this is a very explicit horrendous experiment on top of mistreatment and of uh african americans we confirmed this there was the public health service in collaboration with the tuskegee institute doing these experiments right right so it was a government funding okay and it went through the 60s into the early 70s so it's multi decades so so what why would you expect anybody to believe anything you're saying when we have that kind of history that's the question and this is what the challenge now is how do we embrace what actually happened and move on from that at a time when it's critically important that black americans brown americans native americans must get vaccinated and one of the things to neil is they are those populations are particularly prone to catching the disease dying from disease and getting hospitalized from the disease so they are the highest risk groups who have the most hesitancy about getting the vaccine and this is this is going to be tough work convincing people that they really do need to get the vaccine in spite of that history and i have the answer i i figured it out what's it what's the answer it's called the racial buddy system for vaccination [Laughter] any black person that goes to be vaccinated a white person must go along with them and they must get vaccinated from the same vial okay the white the white person goes first like a food taster like a food taster oh the black person it's just like all right here's my white buddy he goes first bang if you can be killing black people gonna be killing white people right alongside all right we got to take a quick break when we come back we will indeed get to our questions from our fan base on the covet vaccine what's it all about when star talk returns we're back tyson here i got chuck nice tweeting at chuck nice comic thank you sir all right chuck i'd like i'd love your tweets they're they're insightful and i'd laugh most of the time some they look like you're experimenting on us with whether something is funny well listen i'm i'm very much like the public health service of comedy experimenting on our twitter is your sample base is okay so we're talking about the cobit vaccine um all all nuances of it with our friend of star talk dr irwin redliner who's chief honcho of all disaster preparedness that we know of in this country so uh er we've got questions from our audience if you don't mind taking them chuck you've got them lined up what do you have chuck i got them right here so let's start things off these are from our patreon patrons and of course if you are listening to this feel free to go to patreon.comtalkradio support us and uh we will give you um priority so to speak okay uh hey neil hey dr redliner i was recently listening to an episode of who who who asked this uh this is still cameron bishop cameron bishop okay yes uh he says i was recently listening to a star talk epic uh episode about pandemics years ago which had to be laurie garrett lori garrett for sure uh he says i was curious the guest said that back when we no longer have to vaccinate for smallpox it's because we eliminated the virus how likely is something like this with sarv's covid2 please stay healthy and uh there you have it okay excellent question i love it so so irwin so sarge kovid ii that's the the official that's the the geeky name for the for the coveted 19. yeah sars ko v dash 2. okay so that's the name of the virus is the specific virus and the disease you get from that is covert 19. right a fair way to put that okay it is okay and the reason it's called cov2 is because we had a cov1 back in 2003 in fact which is when people started thinking about how we're going to confront it with vaccines and so on okay but i thought it was covert 19 because it was 2019 when it was discovered yes but the name that's the disease but the name of the virus is sars hyphen c o capital v uh hyphen ii two so it's the second virus it's the second virus in this family of one family viruses got it got it okay all right perhaps you know my father besides kobe 1. we call them big dog big dog kobe that's what you call my dad you shot him down in tombstone arizona and i come for my [Laughter] prepare to die all right so so what so if smallpox is done then what can we have similar hopes for this one no because damn can't okay next question yeah all right yeah yeah yeah go ahead no it's the the problem is that it's a very these coronaviruses which is this this is one of are very very common you can't really eliminate them and it's going to end up being endemic meaning around all the time it may well get mixed the the vaccine for this may well get mixed into the annual flu shots that we get and that's that will control it but i don't think we're going to stop it unfortunately isn't it true equally as important is that humans homo sapiens were the only victim of smallpox so if you get rid of smallpox it's not jumping to you from a bat or from some other creature that we handle that is correct okay so smallpox head was unique in that way now if you're going to have species jumping viruses uh you it's not clear that you would ever be able to stamp them out entirely at all correct and then you have also the the so-called variants or mutations that we're confronting where you have a little bit of a change in the makeup of the virus that causes it to have different characteristics or less sensitive to the vaccines and so on so this is going to be around for a while but i think we'll learn to live with it and we'll adapt to it but uh it's not going away like smallpox yeah and like you said if it's a part of every season's cocktail then yeah we're good to go all right here we are all right all right chuck next question excellent okay let's go to toby sonnenberg who says hello from new jersey we're so sorry for you i know what i just thought but first of all chuck lives in new jersey so that's just a joke that's why i can say it's a joke you could say it's a joke but also just the way you said that i was ready for it to be from a really exotic place all right it's like toby from you know exactly from tasmania no from new jersey okay yeah yeah yeah go ahead uh toby says this why couldn't pfizer and moderner start uh using standard vaccine techniques for covet 19 why was it necessary to use the rna vaccine uh so there you have it yeah so wouldn't it have been easier just to just to denature the virus we already know is in the house and then so what why is one faster than the other well maybe but you know the the mrna technique is really quick and it's very effective and you're not fooling around putting uh live or attenuated vaccines uh viruses into people so there are a lot of advantages even now because you know now we're seeing all these variants and mutations we're worried about them being more effective and maybe uh more lethal you can make a very rapidly a booster shot let's say in fact moderna is as we speak working on booster shots that will specifically address these new variants uh otherwise we would have had to start from start fresh in a very different and much more prolonged process uh to get the the uh protection uh if we were using the old techniques erwin you used a word uh infective is that the same thing as contagious it is in the context of how we're talking about yes that's the same thing okay okay so is it also not true that because a lot of people are somewhat concerned that this technology if you will call it this advancement uh was rushed but is it not true that this has been in the works for quite some time because of some people uh after the sars outbreak saw the opportunity to make these advancements and through these hedge fund investments started working on this years ago so it's not like last february they started working on this mrna technology exactly that's exactly correct and like we're just talking about before uh chuck it's it's actually started as you just reminded us uh after the stars the initial stars uh pandemic and uh yeah and we had a real running start getting prepared to rapidly develop the vaccines that are confronting the sarge kov2 virus and that's a dimension of this entire landscape that i think is unrecognized or unappreciated that that it was a running start up to the starting to the starting line yeah yeah yeah yeah all right chuck keep it coming come here let's keep going i love these let's go with fernando gomes uh or gomez i'm not sure he says uh why do our policies fail so badly in enforcing mass vaccinations since it is a collective protection measure shouldn't everybody partake irwin let me just jump before you answer that uh is there some renewed sense of individual freedom that people feel the need to express in this country so that the idea of being free means i don't have to listen to anybody tell me anything yeah actually that's a really big problem of course again exacerbated by donald j trump who made a political uh agenda from this public health catastrophe and which here's the thing about this so it's a question of i'm i'm deciding to take a risk and you don't have a right to tell me not to except that's not really applicable if you're risk-taking means that you're going to climb up a you know straight wall cliff or go skydiving good luck to you and we'll let you do that insurance and in this country we let you do that yes you can do that but if your risk puts threatens me that's not okay you can't you can't say my risk is i'm not going to wear a mask let's say that's i'm taking that risk uh so i'll get kovi uh starscopy too and and that's my choice it is not your choice because your choice is actually if you implement it if you do what you say you're going to do which is not do the protections that are required and you make me or my family or my friends sick because of your recklessness that you are declaring your personal right that is not okay in a society like ours so it's a it's differentiating between the individual risk and taking a risk on behalf of a lot of other people okay so the people who are now doing that did they just not learn civics did they just not uh are they have no empathy are they i mean you're a medical doctor with presumably some training in psychology or psychiatry how do you analyze this it's it's a little narcissistic it's a little self-centered it's it's about focusing in a very egotistical way on you personally with uh some disregard for your the people who are around you and i i think that's that's really what we're talking about and that could get obviously extreme which doesn't happen all that often but people uh who who say who have no empathy whatsoever and they sort of were drifting into the realm of psychopathology and that's not okay but for most people who are in that category i don't think they're thinking properly or broadly about what they are implying when they say i'm taking this risk and you be damned and that's that's where we run into trouble or it could very well be that those people are anal apertures better known as a-holes okay so that's explained the whole thing there you go okay do i have to answer that no you don't have to ever steep as low as chuck goes okay this is not a requirement so chuck give me one i've got time for another a couple more before this segment ends okay here we go this is woody what he doesn't give us anything except he's woody and he says uh what level of efficacy uh what different groups have receiving the first round of vaccines how does preventing spreaders like youth compare to protecting the vulnerable like uh oldies um shout out to australia's corona cast for the idea well wait so is it okay are those two different questions like one of them is what is the let me split that what is the efficacy of the very first round of experiments that are conducted right if you're going to say it's safe for me because you experimented on some other humans what is that about so i think what he's asking is exactly what you just said but he wants to use the first round as a means of comparing and contrasting the efficacy between the elderly and young people instead of just trying to protect certain people yeah so let me let me say so first of all the long history of uh medical research and the use of human subjects was originally about uh the subjects being you know middle-class middle-aged white males and many many experiments to figure out what drugs work and so on were done with that very narrow group and then people sort of say well what about women what about african americans what about children and i think our understanding of if you're going to do a broad-based full population vaccine for example uh you can't say that you if you gave it to ten thousand white guys uh that will definitely middle age white guys that'll definitely be uh effective in older people or african-americans or kids so so the more demographics are that you have to address the bigger that original sample has to be exactly right exactly right and um so when people say are we going to give the vaccine to children for instance um and dr falchi recently said yeah well probably in the fall we'll be starting to give it to children as young as six years of age which is probably fine but then they're gonna have to before that give a lot of young children the vaccine to make sure it's safe and effective which is ethically a little tough as you can imagine right because plus a child is not unlike an adult a child is not entirely accountable for having received the trial dose of vaccine in the first place right nobody could give you a trial of anything without your permission and that without getting a whole lot of explanation of the risks and the benefits etc but what is it that you're supposed to say to a seven-year-old to make that person you know comfortable or have the ability to give approval oh it's so so easy so easy here's some cookies and some juice the answer will be yes no no here's a lollipop okay i'll take it i'm going to take a quick break our final break and when we return it's to the covet vaccine and dr erwin redliner we'll see in a moment we're back star talk the covet vaccine chuck we're in we're in question mode for erwin redliner let's give me some more all right let's keep it moving let's go with roman prick up who says hi doctors okay well thanks for leaving me out did you feel that as a disc chuck no i mean i mean you know i'm i'm the only one that's not a doctor here he could have said hell doctors plus chuck he could have said that you know all right you know we're fine we're finally getting our doom deal all right he says hi doctors uh do the current vaccines really decrease the spreading or just make the symptoms less severe so yeah so the vaccine people are they spreaders and they don't and they don't but they don't get it what well they might be and unfortunately we didn't set up the trials well enough to know or appropriately enough to know the answer to that question but what we do know is that they're very effective in preventing disease serious disease and hospitalizations all of them are including the new uh johnson johnson vaccine which will be out in uh you know a month or so so that's what we know and uh the degree of spreading unclear it's unknown it's a it's pure and simple okay yeah right right so that would mean you could be a carrier with no symptoms is what that comes down to yeah okay got it okay keep it going chuck all right let's keep it going sam couch would like to know this what makes certain vaccines have the requirement of being stored under super cold temperatures well while others have no issue being stored close to room temperature irwin i was looking at the temperature for the pfizer vaccine 70 below zero come on now excuse me okay ninety seven you're gonna ruin the vacuum so you're not going to have the corner vaccine dispenser doing this this is going to have to only be in major institutions and hospitals that have freezers that long yeah of course so so yeah what what's up with that so pfizer requires about minus 90 fahrenheit modern about minus five the new johnson and johnson single-dose vaccine will be able to be stored for three months in a regular refrigerator wow which is an amazing advance and even though the the j vaccine is said to be less effective it still is a an incredible vaccine when it comes to preventing serious illness and hospitalizations but the big problem here really the big problem is the global impact of of trying to deal with vaccines that need this sort of arctic temperature uh for containment and storage so we will not be able to use the pfizer vaccine for example in many many developing countries where that's called the cold chain that cold chain capacity does not exist so i think so it may be that your less effective vaccine which stays preserved in a refrigerator will in fact be the most effective force fighting absolutely because that will have the widest distribution right and by the way if we don't address covid 19 in every single country on earth it really will will affect our ability to get this virus under control in general so we can't say oh we're doing great in the u.s and in you know 90 other countries we're not doing so great because those will become pockets for infecting mutating and causing resurgence of the uh cova-19 disease so we have a lot of global work to do which is why the j and j vaccine is so critically important part of our armamentarium that's the first positive thing i've heard about it so it's good to good to to realize this yeah people saying for sure yeah in fact on on late night comedians were poking fun if they were third in the list and they ended the 50 rather than 95 percent and so yeah it didn't look good it's like a laggard student in your class you know yeah except that it doesn't have to be stored at you know um moonlight temperatures yeah you know all right give me some more chuck here we go this is matthew power uh matt powell we should collect all the names that would be great superheroes from our fans yeah so matt power wants to know this he says uh hello dr redlener dr tyson it's my understanding that two at least two vaccines by different companies are on the market are these vaccines basically the same thing are they so different that it makes a difference hmm is he talking about you think the j j versus the f i know we just i guess how about just the two rna ones he's talking about the two that are pretty much the same so that's moderna and yeah yeah yeah there's not enough difference to talk about with those you know um i've been vaccinated my wife's vaccinated at the same place she got pfizer i got moderna um you know are it's just they're they're close enough in the way they function uh we're very confident in the results and the safety of both of them uh there are some differences in how they're manufactured which account for why they require different temperatures for storage you know like i said minus 90 for pfizer minus five for uh moderna but you know if you're worrying about which to get don't worry about it take whatever's available yeah get get it get it that's the lesson yeah what you get right okay all right this is mike bertruccio mike bertruccio wants to know this hello what advancements to vaccines in general were developed for the covet 19 vaccine do you anticipate that we'll see new vaccines coming onto the market for other diseases i like that yeah so did was this a leap in any way uh irwin it was definitely a leap but uh again i think we should mention once again that this was not a leap that happened you know a year ago the leaping began at least as far back as 2003 when people were looking at new mechanisms for developing vaccines and came up with this so-called mrna technique but also in the last 20 years there's been great advancements in medical tools and technology to even accomplish this isn't that correct yes no question about it okay and um yeah and this this advancement is occurring non-stop and we will certainly be getting things that we can't even imagine now this is one of the things the beauty of looking into the future is that the research the developments the innovation doesn't stop like in other areas of science this is a an iterative process we learned this last year way what if we modify it this way what will we get or what if we have a whole new vision of how to make a vaccine and uh and that's what's happening by the way i want to say one other word that's really important to the discussion of vaccines the new tool that we'll have in our toolbox will be medications that you can take as an outpatient if you have the early signs of covid and you test positive for it where the doctor can prescribe a new medication you take by mouth and you're done with it so that the combination of the vaccines as they get more effective and more distributed and new medications to actually treat the early forms of disease is what's going to allow us to gain control over this terrible pandemic and that's the light at the end of the tunnel really both of these things cool very cool so you do have something positive to say mr disaster preparedness person okay okay i do you know one of the radio shows that i'm on a lot stephanie miller's show they call me dr doom doctor doom there you go which is good anyway no comment all right all right keep going chuck we got time for like two more questions go all right let's uh let's go to josh v josh v says you know he don't trust you with his last name that's right i know he does he's clearly uh just one person i am not trusting chuck i don't blame him [Laughter] all right josh b says this i read a lot about herd immunity and the numbers of immune people needed to defeat the virus is is there clarity on what percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated to actually achieve herd immunity isn't that dependent on how close we ever are to each other on average isn't hurt immunity different for for rural and that it is for urban not so much when we talk about whole populations really so in any community any community will need to get a certain number of people have either had the disease or who are vaccinated with an appropriate immune response so that number was once thought to be 65 to 70 percent of the population had to have the immunity it's now well into the 85 90 that must have it and um that's that's a a hard row here to hoe here and uh we're gonna see what happens but it's a lot higher number or percentage than we thought so the way that hurt immunity works then correct me if i'm wrong is you're one in ten that has the disease but nine of us can't get it because we're vaccinated so you're not going to spread it and so what are the chances of you finding someone else who is one in ten well that's sufficiently low correct that even if you do spread it that person has to have sufficiently low likelihood of something happen as well so it rapidly tamps down back to zero exactly exactly that's the whole point all right so that just shouldn't say so i know we're running out of time but i just want to follow that up with when you said what you said initially was enough people either have to be vaccinated or get the disease so with that in mind we are now seeing some cases i don't know if they're isolated or not but we're seeing some cases of re-infection does that change the whole uh prosperity concept of immunity at all yeah yeah now well the thing of it is a tiny number of cases or reinfected cases and you know this is weird thing happening that people have had the disease documented and presumably have the antibodies to uh to saurus kov2 are still getting vaccinated so uh my son by the way who had documented um covet 19 in march last you know last march uh recovered had antibodies he still his doctors wanted to get the vaccine which he's getting so small chance but really small okay chuck what we got 30 seconds give me something okay hello neil hello dr redlener as the virus continues to mutate and become more immune to vaccine that's an assumption he's making how often do you think we'd have to vaccinate to maintain life from all the mutations of kovic ooh i like that oh look at that i do too but we don't know we don't know sorry who wants to end the segment with i don't know no no i got another way to come in on that but just to to shed a little bit of light on that are you saying there's not something sufficiently in common with all of the mutations that by attacking that thing they have in common it'll get any mutation that could ever take place you're telling me you're not in that situation no we're not in that situation damn you know i thought you guys weren't like the conversion is like you know dangerous and it may be more lethal than other ones and we just it's a work in progress and viruses are smart they're wily they'll figure out a way around whatever we put there so we have to be very careful and very diligent in addressing it could you end up making a super virus by trying to attack a virus all i know is all i'm telling you is that viruses mutate like crazy and we got new mutations by the way in the united states right now um and uh we just have to stay ahead of it this is why we have to get everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible so that the mutations don't run wild right because the more viruses there are out there the more opportunity there is to mutate so yeah right so the idea is we all have to do what we're supposed to do which is our part in getting vaccinated yes and if you're not vaccinated then you have to do your part by washing your hands and wearing your mask and then after you get vaccinated you still got to wash your hands and wear your mask and all that so basically every everybody's responsible life is cool life is cool damn so i just want to sort of conclude by noting that i think something needs to be updated in our educational system for people to recognize that anything that's scientifically new will have uncertainties and but the best access to what is good for you will not come from people who are not the scientists all right the scientists will find out on that frontier what is working what is not and if at any given moment you got to jump in you can jump in but if things change it doesn't mean the scientists don't know what the hell they're talking about it means at that time that was the known understanding and you and that comes with a risk so the press generally doesn't talk about that risk they just say the scientists don't know anything and that is because it hasn't been taught in a way where people can understand the actual undulating moving frontier of discovery and so i applaud your candor when you said we don't know yet whether after your vaccine if you can spread it we don't know that that is so important and it's not a sign of weakness it's a sign of this is how the science works and stay with me on that this is what you've been teaching everybody forever which is that this is the beauty of science we we learn this there's more to learn we keep learning it's it's constant exploration yes yes and that's a beautiful thing and that's what we have to teach in school this is this is how we know and and learn to know we got it so finally we got irwin to end on a good but a positive note there you go that's right and i'm encouraged i'm encouraged because if not knowing makes science beautiful then i'm the most beautiful scientist there it is all right chuck chuck on that one all right irwin always good to have you thanks for being a friend of the show uh chuck you know i love you love you too all right neil degrasse tyson here concluding our episode of the covert 19 vaccine as always i bid you to keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 105,714

Rating: 4.727252 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: fOOBUixiiac

Length: 48min 48sec (2928 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021