which is economically damaging for the country. there are probably going to be other variants from other parts of the world particularly in those places that have not seen vaccine roll out. when are we going to get back to normal? people are tiring of this. that are we going to get back to normal? people are tiring of this. people are tiring of this. that is the question people are tiring of this. that is the question and people are tiring of this. that is the question and i people are tiring of this. that is the question and i am people are tiring of this. that is the question and i am not - people are tiring of this. that isi the question and i am not going people are tiring of this. that is i the question and i am not going to be able to answer it. what i can say is that we have antiviral drugs. we will have to see how well deployed they are and how well used they are. you need to take then early in disease process and of course there is the threat of assistance if we do no
tenacity. reporter: the protein that could be the key to a vaccine that would prevent the most deadly and aggressive type of breast cancer known as triple negative. the vaccine works by jump starting the immune system and attacking any tumors that contain a specific protein that should not be present unless a woman is lactating. once we ve established that we can produce an immune response, we want to rapidly move it earlier to the disease process, again, to the prevention setting where we think it will have an even greater impact. reporter: dr. vince touhy and dr. thomas budd are leading a trial still in the early stages. if successful, the vaccine would be given to young healthy women at higher risk for triple negative breast cancer. how is this different from anything that we ve seen before? it s prophylactic. we need a 21st century vaccine program to develop immune defenses and primary immune defenses against diseases
tests for my home so i could have it with my family and it cost me a good $150 in order to make sure i had enough tests available for me and my sisters. that is a luxury i have the ability to do. we know many families do not. what we need to do is think of strategies like we have the social vulnerability index which categorizes zip codes based on who is more or less likely to have a burden of a disease process. we have that data already available to us. why don t we mail free covid-19 tests to those households, n95 masks, and help the most vulnerable protect themselves and all of us in the long run? i have a 7-year-old daughter. this week president biden announced a test to stay strategy for covid exposure at schools and allows students to skip quarantine if they test negative. how would you improve testing access to make this work for somebody like my little girl to make sure she stays safe in school? i would not only, for one,
dr. holman to hear that that s what your doctors are subjected to, and you know, i just want to ask you about something that s controversial, but i have heard it mentioned a few times in the past couple of months from primary care doctors as well as celebrities, and that is why not have the unvaccinated go to the back of the line in terms of hospital care. when you say that people with cancer and heart attacks and strokes may not have a hospital bed, why not give them first preference and make the unvaccinated maybe not have a hospital bed. well, i certainly understand the emotion behind some of that. i think all of us went into health care have an understanding that we re here to serve everybody. in medical school, we frequently talk about the hippocratic oath. we re committed to take care of our population and communities. they depend on us no matter what the disease process is. someone could also make the similar argument, for example, someone with a self-inflicted disease of some
omicron that seems to be where it is trending right now. other encouraging news today, pfizer released more data on the antiviral after the fact pill, finding that it reduces hospitalizations and serious illness among people who take it, almost 90%. how important is this? it is very important. i think the way that viruses work, this one being a particular example, initially the virus attaches, enters your nose, reproduces itself and reproduces itself hundreds of times, thousands of times. then your immune response kicks in. as your immune response kicks in, that s when you develop symptoms and then the virus reproduces itself less and less. if something like an antiviral medicine is going to work it has to be given early in illness because later in illness, while you re already pretty sick, virus replication is not really an important part of the disease process anymore. i think antivirals are great. they have to be given early, but, remember, you can prevent all this by getting a va