This morning author of epidemic ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next killer outbreak. Also ana National Portal with te hill newspaper. The book epidemic ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next killer outbreak, what was the scramble like . Guest the scramble has been going on for a couple of decades now but in the wake of Ebola Outbreak in west africa that infected more than 20,000 0 people and killed more than 11,000, the world has really undergone a sea change in the understanding of how pandemics have the potential to spread. We live in a in a different wow that we did back in 1918 when the spanish flu struck or even in the 1960s when there were some pretty significant outbreaks. We are an integrated f f world. We are a globalize world. We travel all over the place. Americans traveled to every continent in the world and people of the continent in the world travel here and so that interconnected this means that something that pops up in a wet marketme in china is just a plae flight away from the United States. Something that erupts in the jungle of africa or in the amazon the south american is just a short wait a way from the United States. In the years after the Ebola Outbreak in west africa, the american cdc funded a bunch of many cdcs and countries across the world, informing and countries, aiming to increase what they call surveillance, basically monitoring to make sure the able to see when one of these novel viruses pops up and begins to spread. That effort basically ended in most of those countries last year, and that is a key part of the sunlight that were still trying to understand. We dont know exactly when this coronavirus began to circulate in china. The first case that scientists have identified goes back to november 17 which is about a month and a half before the World Health Organization spottedor a cluster of a typical pneumonia in wuhan, china, but its possible this virus mightve been circulating even long before that. What a world has done is the sort of Surveillance Network to monitor for these diseases. The problem is were not always something it at the level it needs because as weve seen in the past and as we are seeing now in a lot of cases of countries around the world, this virus is controllable if its spotted early, if the people who have it our contact traced an isolated, and if the authoritis differ hands on the situation early for this becomes a make outbreak. Its all but. Certain this virus within the United States at least three weeks c before the first case tested positive outside of seattle. If we had the testing capability and the ability to find that virus we might not be in the position we certainly wouldnt be in the position were in today. Host reporting what happened with testing and the cdc . Guest thats an interesting question because its not just the cdc that is involved. What the cdc. Typically does ina novel case like this when they have a new virus is they will develop a diagnostic test quickly and then its really been up to the fda to bring that test to private industry. Its the private industry that builds on test to scale. The problem, cdc tests basically cede the state laboratories that are able to test when the virus is very small. There is no historical precedent for the cdc building a test that then scales to the scope and size that we need to control of virus and monitor it across the world. The disconnect here appears to be somewhere between the fda and the commercial companies that didnt race to fill that void and create these diagnostic test that then could be used by private laboratories around the country. Thats going to be big part of the investigating how this went so wrong. Host do we know why these private companies did not race to fill that void, as you said . Guest not yet. That something of a mystery. Has fallen to senior officials of the fda and the department of health and Human Services to gather those companies together and light a fire under them and say it is time to ramp up building the testing capacity. Now we havee tons of diagnostic tests. The fda has factory fasttrack a number of them. Cdc made thise test that turned out to be corrupted. There were three elements and wasntthe elements properly working. There were a lot of false negatives and false positives. Basically the cdc testing didnt work but there was no back end fill from the private industry until the fda gave the emergency use authorization in late february. Basically we lost this month of time when we should have been testing as many people as possible so we could have found the virus when it was contained in tiny clusters as opposed to when it was turning to overwhelm our hospitals. Host we want to invite our viewers to join in on this conversation. Lessons learned from the Ebola Outbreak to the coronavirus pandemic we are seeing now. If you live in the eastern or central part of the country, 202 7488000. Mountain and pacific, 202 7488001. Reid wilson is our guest this morning. What was the response to the Ebola Outbreak . What were the Lessons Learned from it . Guest the response was overwhelming. This is an outbreak to hit three of the most impoverished countries in the world, liberia, sierra leone and guinea. The Life Expectancy in those countries is 25 years less than the u. S. And 30 years less than the most advanced countries in the world. The response was global, immediate and overwhelming. States sent 3000 troops to liberia which is not something we have ever done before in response to a virus. They deployed more than 1400 people from the cdc which had never happened before. The cdc wasnt that sort of organization. The french deployed to guinea. We saw this overwhelming response. I should not minimize this at all. We saw People Racing back to the countries and staying in their countries at times when they could have left to save their own people. The real heroes for the people who were walking towards the fire in their own countries to try and save them. A lot of them did not survive the virus. The lessons we learned were pretty monumental. To democratize information which is something we need to see more of. People are smart and if they are told how to protect themselves, they will take the steps, in some cases violating their own thousands of years of cultural tradition in the case of say, burying or washing a body after death. In the case of the ebola virus, that is how people that is how most cases were spreading, people washing the bodies in preparation for the burial. When Public Health officials in liberia told people to stop doing that and allow safe burial teams to handle dead bodies, that saved thousands of lives and it goes to show that if competent and reasonable information is presented in a calm and logical way, the public will understand and take the steps necessary to protect themselves and kill the virus. Host we will go to calls. Sergio in florida. Good morning to you. Your question or comment . Caller good morning. Good morning to you all, how are you . Host doing well. What is your question or comment . Caller how are you today reid . Guest im doing fine today. What have you got . Caller a couple questions. How do we learn from it and if ebola is more effective than the corona. And ebola coronavirus virus are from different families. The difference is a coronavirus is very easy to contract to contract very easy to contract but it is very less deadly. The mortality rate is somewhere between half a percent and 1 . The ebola virus by contrast if untreated, the mortality rate can be 80 or 90 . Coronavirus is easy to contract but will public not kill you. The ebola virus is very difficult to contract. You actually have to touch blood or bodily fluids of someone who has it but it is highly deadly if you do get infected. The prospects for a vaccine are interesting and i think this is thatt of the communication Public Health officials are struggling to convey. Are eight to 18 months away from a vaccine, which is probably what the more optimistic estimates are, it would be the fastest element of any vaccine in human history, the fast the fastest vaccine previously developed was for the moms over the course of about four years in the 1950s. The good news is we are significantly more advanced than we were in the 1950s but vaccines are not like treatment. They have a new bar they have to clear in order to get approved and become effective. For a treatment, you are treating something and somebody who already has the virus. You are not introducing them to anything new, any new threat. For a vaccine, you are introducing something new into somebodys body. That can be pretty dangerous. An improperly designed vaccine can do more harm than good, which means there are several more layers of testing a vaccine has to go through and of the 100 plus vaccines that are in design and develop it right now, the fast majority of them are going the majority of them are going to fail. When it shots on goal comes to the vaccine, and it would be great if we could have 10 or 15 different vaccines that work but they are all going to have different efficacy rates. There are vaccines will for things like the flu that only cover a third to half of us who get the vaccine in the first place. All of these things are going to have different efficacy rates. They will be available at different times and once they are approved, they then have to be developed. Just because you approve a vaccine does not mean you automatically created 7 million doses 7 billion doses we are going to need around the world. We are a ways away from a vaccine. If one thing is not being communicated effectively to the American People or to people around the world its the fact that we are not going to have a vaccine tomorrow or next week or next month or even by the end of the year and even if we did, it will still take a substantial a lot of time to develop and this tribute and basically get it and distribute and basically get it to all of us and into all of our Doctors Offices. We also have to hope the people he actually that people actually take it. It is a huge puzzle with a lot of different challenges and one we have to be realistic about. Host rosemary is next in west virginia. Caller hi. Host good morning. Go ahead. Welcome to the conversation. Caller my concern is that people are panicking. I am a dialysis patient. I have to go out. I have to survive. Nobody wants no one to die, but that is life. That is a part of life. People are dying from different things. And they told me to take a flu shot in 90 in 1996. I got the flu after i took the shot. I havent taken a flu shot since then. You cannot blame from for everything. The swinecame out fluke, ebola, all of these things come and they go. Some people survive, some dont. Children are dying, grown folks are dying. Everything from one thing or another. Host reid wilson, this is a comet that has come up throughout the show a comment that has come up throughout the show. Can you explain heard immunity . Guest herd immunity is a troubling concept, imagine a population of 100 people. If a new virus is introduced, 100 of those 100 people are susceptible to getting it. Once 20 of them get it and recover, that only 80 of those 100 people are susceptible to get it. Eventually the population of those who are susceptible become small enough that they wont come in to contact. The odds of one person coming into contact with somebody who has the virus who is susceptible shrinks until eventually the virus has nowhere else to go. Viruse like a fire in the has burned up all the wood. When there is no more wood to burn, the virus eventually burns out. Immunitypt of herd comes from herds of sheep and cattle. We are not sheep and cattle. The value of a life is substantially different as you can imagine. Thing that she brought up is this notion of dialysis and people having to go out. One troubling thing about this virus is that people are suddenly afraid to seek care. Not may be ok if you are going to your Doctors Office to check out your flu and you are recovering at home, but it is not ok when you may be suffering from a cardiac problem or a stroke. I was talking to an er doctor in new york. He said in the early days of this, he didnt understand where all the heart attacks had gone. It was as if people stopped having heart attacks and were only having coronavirus. Of course that is not the case. People are having these cardiac problems and they are afraid to go to the hospital. One thing we saw in west africa the more people former director of the cdc likes to say more people died because of the ebola virus than from the ebola virus. What that means is more people died from things like malaria or cholera or some of these common diseases people know how to treat but they werent seeking treatment because they were afraid to go to a hospital setting because they were worried that ebola was present. We may be seeing a significant amount of excess deaths coming from things like Heart Disease and hypertension, things that would be treatable if people sought treatment that they are not seeking treatment because of the coronavirus. That is a troubling thing, and it is why we are seeing a lot of rural communities, Hospital Systems having some real problems keeping their funding. Hospitals in boston are talking about losing 5 billion in lost Services Provided through the next couple of months. We had a caller talking about the henry ford clinic in detroit in the last hour, they just laid in the middle of a Public Health pandemic. Why are they doing that . Because nobody is seeking treatment for these other things. Nobody is having the elective surgeries that are the bread and butter of your typical Hospital Systems. There is a real risk that more people will die because of the coronavirus than from the coronavirus. Wouldntially more people die than would have otherwise because they are not seeking treatment for the stuff they need to seek treatment for. Host we will go to texas, lloyd. Caller good morning. I would say i agree with a lot but whateid was saying is really scary is all the miss all of the misinformation. Ask one of the callers where did she read something and she just talking to a point where she done she did not even address where she got her information. There is so much gross misinformation and people are just running rampant with the fact that this information is coming through social media, coming through wordofmouth but there is no fact of where the stuff is coming from and the information that is actually true and valid is not being recognized because of the abundance of misinformation being spewed. Host reid wilson, your thoughts on that . Guest that is a good point and something that Public Health officials know about and have been paying a lot of attention to. A very smart woman at the World Health Organization calls this the infodemic, it happens every time there is an epidemic. Mids misinformation gets out there as broadly as possible and in some cases it can be damaging but not deadly. Ebody seeking treatment seeking the wrong kind of medicine or Something Like that. Somebody here is that essential oils can solve something when they cant or Something Like that. In other cases, it can be massively destructive to the response, to Health Care Workers and things like that. Is an Ebola Outbreak that is winding down in the democratic republic of congo. They are beset by Ethnic Violence and have been for decades. Saw which was like six months ago, there have been 200 attacks on Health Care Workers and Health Facilities because there were rumors that they are bringing the ebola virus to congo. People have died because of these fake rumors. Example ofextreme this, but we have also seen the World Health Organization said last week they have seen more than 30 attacks in 11 countries around the world on Health Care Facilities and there have been dozens of attacks in the United States on asian andicans and hasidic choose hasidic jews and minorities being blamed for a virus that had nothing to do with their ethnicity. Misinformation can go from a minor annoyance to a lifethreatening disaster in just a short time. Has no agenda. It just is. Meanwhile a lie does have an agenda and can have a political advantage over truth. That is a scary thought. We need to be paying attention to the actual experts who are talking about what we know about the virus. Fauci orke Anthony Robert redfield in his top two lieutenants. And his top two lieutenants. Thing that i find fascinating about this. We are learning about this coronavirus at an unprecedented clip, faster than we have ever learned about any pathogen or virus in world history. As an example, in 2009 the new england journal of medicine published 54 articles on h1n1 that might have been a pandemic. It turned out not to be as bad as people feared but it could have been. April, the middle of new england journal of medicine had already published 64 items on the coronavirus. They published dozens more in the weeks since. Basically we are learning a ton about this virus. We are also learning how much we dont know. We started off by diagnosing people with a fever, a cough, fatigue. Cause know this virus can things that look like heart attacks and things that look like strokes or actual strokes. Pinkeye is a potential symptom as well. As if this it is virus is sitting at the intersection of every single one of our internal systems and just decides which one to attack at any given person. Foran be totally different two people who might otherwise be equally susceptible or equally resilient. Virus learning about this but it remains a complete mystery in a lot of respects. Host jackie in ohio, good morning. Caller good in a lot of respects. Host jacquie in ohio, good. Morning. Caller good morning. Host go ahead with your comment or question. Caller my comment , is aboui think we should go back to work and im actually one that im actually making, im a dental assistant and i make more on unemployment that if you honestly believe this economyhe needs to go back to work. My big thing is im sitting here and these people are whining about having the government is responsible for them. They are responsible because they were broke. We were only off work for a month. I know since i was a kid, my mom always taught you should be able to takeld care of yourself at least three months if anything happens. Say someone broke the arm, got sick, anything could happen. You could lose your job, get fired. You should be up to take care of yourself for a good three months. He chad you should have enough money in the bank. People blame the government because they cant afford to be off work for for a month . Its just insane because Everybody Needs to be business, youom a should of money in the bank to take care. I also some rentals. Something goes wrong i cant let anybody else. I have to fix it so i should of money in the bank. Guest one thing that a struck me about the downturn here, the economic downturn, is how different it is from the last recession. The last recession hit the people at the top first. Remember bear stearns going under and Lehman Brothers collapsing and things like that. And then trickle down to impact basically everybody else in the workforce, and it was those everybody else in the workforce who took so long to recover. It was really only in the last six months or so that we started to see those at the very bottom experiencing real wage growth for the first timee since the recession, and basically the onus of being on the employers to provide higher salaries and better jobs because the employees that so many options for where theyop could go work. This downturn has now targeted those very people who just finished recovering from the last recession first and immediately. Something like 40 of lowwage lowwage workers are out of work right now. In the space of two months. So to her point about people need to have the money and the bank to take care of themselves, this recession, this downturn, i dont know what youd call, recession, depression, has targeted the people who are least likely too have that money in the bank in first place and thats what makes this just doubly tragic. Host sharon in oklahoma. Good morning. Caller good morning. I was wondering, i know everybody else has so much running through their heads these days. I am so disgusted. There are so many people at afr like this. It just seems like those that are supposed to be in charge, that have been elected, everybody is fumbling the ball. Nobody can hang onto it. Nobody knows nothing. One says one thing, the other one says something. Facebook, it is just a great big hot mess. I mean, if you listen to all these people that are getting hysterical, i mean forevermore. Just use your common sense, do the best you can. People do not apply discipline. Its long fell by the way it seems like. Host reid wilson, when ebola hit in these countries in africa, how did their governments respond . Did they have stayathome restrictions put in place . Guest so the response in all three countries werens a little different, primarily because the virus hit all three countries in different ways. In a lot of ways the response from the liberian government in particular mirrors what we saw inar the United States in the first couple of months in january, february and early march when the federal government was downplayings the severity of this virus, and at times denying that it would, in fact, a significant number of americans. In liberia they were actually worried about tourists and tourism dollars, which was a pretty growing part of their economy. There was a point early on in their outbreak where they basically denied that they had any ebola cases whatsoever, despite the fact that was clear and obvious that a hemorrhagic fever was raging in several Rural Counties north of monrovia. When it came to quarantines and blocking people down, we had there was a real trust deficit between the federal government in all three countries, the federal government based in monrovia, and the tribal regions also. Thats a legacy of colonialism and now those countries were founded. Who have had to struggle and scramble when they dont get the supplies that they actually need. One thing that weve seen if you talk about our leaders failing us, lets shine a light on some of those who are getting it right in places like New Hampshire, maryland, massachusetts, washington state. Governors have gone to significant lengths to secure the goods that they actually need. I told a story last week of governor chris sending you in New Hampshire had sourced personal protective gear from china through a company thats based in New Hampshire. The guy who invented the segway as been flying plane loads of personal protective gear into New Hampshire into manchesters tiny airport and theyve gotten so good at it that a couple of weeks ago the state of New Hampshire sold 4. 5 Million Masks to the department of federal affairs, to the federal government itself in maryland, governor larry hogan secured Something Like 30,000 test kits and maybe half 1 million , i may be misquoting that. Test gets from south korea. His wife is korean and she used a bunch of her business contacts to help import those test kits from a place that when maryland couldnt get any from the federal government itself so theres some leaders here who have gone to quite creative lengths to protect their states and they deserve some shout outs because its not a partisan thing, sununu and husband are republicans, j tinsley of washington, gavin newsom of california have done the same thing in sourcing a lot of personal protective gear from other countries as well. When the federal government has not always been there, the governors are doing a good job of stepping up and making sure their states have enough equipment what about the International Response from the World Health Organization . What is their role duringa pandemic like this and how have they responded . Thats an interestingthing which is the reverse of what we saw during the Ebola Outbreak. When people broke out it was caught flatfooted. They were an agency that was more used two people telling people howdangerous it was to smoke and keeping specifics on Heart Disease. They didnt really transform themselves and they have now created this Surveillance Network. I mentioned their First Sighting of atypical pneumonia and wuhan on december 31. That was the first time anybody had seen anything wrong in china so it was the World Health Organization that sounded the first alarm and it was the World Health Organization that forced china to release the rna sequence, genetic sequence of this virus so that we create a diagnostic test and get it operated. They are moving millions of pounds, hundreds of tons of personal protective gear, of testing equipment all around the world. I saw over the weekend they delivered more than 1 Million Pounds of personal protective gear to haiti which is in desperate need of medical supplies in the best of times, not even when we are talking about a pandemic so the World Health Organization has stepped up their game and they have done so even as they have come under pressure from the United States. Of course the Trump Administration is withholding funding from who and that is an interesting timing to say the least but the fact is they were the first ones to sound the alarm about this. They warned the United States about this as earlier than we knew about it and therefore they have stepped up their game even as they come under this intense scrutiny and intense criticism and they are going to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes in a highpressure situation like this and there are going to be postmortems and studies about what they could have done better and what they could do better thenext time and thats important because theres going to be a next time. The next one might not be a coronavirus. It could be a new strain of flu. It could be a new strain of the virus, could beanything. The World Health Organization is warning people about what they call disease x which is the next one and their warning about it because we all have to be prepared and investing in global Public Health right now. If we spend billions of dollars bolstering global Public Health systems in countries around the world its going to pay off in the trillions of dollars here in the United States alone if we are able to spot and stop the next disease x before it breaks out like this one has. The World Health Organization today held a World Health Assembly addressing the assembly. They did this virtually and here he is through a translator talking about the world economy. Morning. I want to start today by recognizing the horrific toll that this virus has taken on so manypeople in the commonwealth. I want to talk about whos behind all the numbers that we discussed in thisroom every day