Hey everybody. Welcome back to
CoronaChat. It's Caitlin. Today
is Thursday, September 3rd and
thank you so much for your
patience while we took a little
break for some staycation
time, just to recharge and
rejuvenate. It's really,
really great to be back here
with all of you all and in the
last couple of weeks, there's
been tons and tons of
developments because of course
they have and so we wanted
to do a brief catch up on some
of the kind of biggest
headlines that we've seen
within these last couple of
weeks and so the first one
really has to do with some stuff that
probably you've seen actually
today which is about the
vaccine developments, so you
may have seen some headlines
that the CDC, the Centers for
Disease Control, is advising
states to be ready for a vaccine
to be available by November
1st. And if you're like us,
this might seem a little bit
too good to be true right and
if you're a regular viewer, you
know that on CoronaChat we try to have a healthy dose of optimism,
but also a healthy dose of
skepticism any time we see kind
of a big splashy news announcement. So let's dig in to this one a
little bit. The backstory is
that on August 27th, the CDC
Director Doctor Robert Redfield
sent a letter to governors
across the country urging
states to prepare not just to
have a vaccine by late October,
but also to fast track
licensing and permits for
vaccine distribution sites and
really kinda filled out all of
the infrastructure that would
be needed to get a vaccine
actually into people very, very
quickly and there's two kind
of key takeaways here to note
right. The first is--Or I
guess two key takeaways when we
think about what the, where we
might wanna take a critical eye
and be a little skeptical
right? So the first is that as
we've talked about many times on CoronaChat, you know
vaccines take a lot of time and
effort to bring to market right
so often times vaccines undergo
years of rigorous trials to
make sure that they're
effective and also that
they're safe. Remember we don't
want a vaccine. that's gonna
make anybody you know sick and
certainly not sicker than the
illness it's preventing
right and you know it can take
time to make sure that you do
all of the rigorous safety
checking to make sure that a
vaccine doesn't have any
negative side effects and this
is why we need to have strong,
robust, very thorough clinical
trials and we you know we've
talked about this before, but
there's kind of three stages of
those and so you need a vaccine
to get through-- a vaccine
candidate-- to get through all
three stages: phase one, phase
two, and phase three before
we decide that we've got enough
data that it is safe and
effective and ready for use
in the public. And although there are a
few vaccine candidates for
covid-19 that are now in the 3rd phase of their clinical trials, and that's
the phase where you give it to people to test safety and efficacy, a big
group of people, right? Those trials, those phase 3 trials have only started
recently and so you know we may
have some questions about
whether there will be enough
time to get enough data to know
that these vaccines really work, provide good coverage and
are you know safe, to back
any of these candidates up in a
meaningful way. But you
know, let's say that we do get
a candidate vaccine that is
kind of approved in late
October and sent out to
everybody. One of the big
questions that you know many
public health people have
raised is well if we haven't
had the time to do as many
safety checks as we would like and it turns out that this
vaccine isn't quite as strong
as we'd like it to be or maybe
it has some kind of nasty side
effects, it could really
turn people against the
vaccine. You know we've seen
this happen with like the flu
vaccine right, which can
typically give kind of
limited immunity for so many
months and only works
against you know the specific
strain of the flu as opposed to
every flu and so you know
people may get the flu vaccine and
they get sick later in the
season and say like, "well it
didn't work. I'm never getting
a flu vaccine again and for
that matter like how do I even
know that any vaccine works?"
Right? And so we worry about a
vaccine that isn't fully, fully, fully ready
to go and as close to perfect
as we can get it getting out
and you know creating some push
back or some negative
sentiment. That's said, right
again, as we've said many times
on the show, we're in the middle of a
pandemic, we really need to
figure out something quickly.
And so if we go in knowing that
okay, you know this vaccine
might not cover me for my whole
life I might need boosters
or you know it might have some
negative side effects, but
that's like I might have some
body aches for a couple of
days, but that's it, you know
those kinds of things, if we're
very clear with people about
kind of the limitations of a
vaccine that can help to you
know prevent people from having
some, some negative backlash.
But if we're all just saying
like, "Rah, rah, we have this vaccine, it's
gonna save everything we can
all go back to normal." If it
doesn't work perfectly, we may
actually see a lot of anti
vaccine sentiment start to kick
up following the roll out of
this vaccine candidate. Plus
you know it can be scary to be
the first one to get a vaccine
if you don't know that it's
safe right. Most of us would
rather say, "Well, you get it
first but I'll wait and watch
and see what happens to you."
Right? But if too many people
refuse to get the vaccine, then
we don't get to herd immunity
and it's actually not really
very different than what we're
living through right now. So
for us to have hopes of things
getting back to normal, we have
to get this vaccine right the
first time. So you know, can
we have that by November? Maybe
but you know, I think the
thing that all of us want at
this point is to make sure that
when we do have this vaccine
that we've done the proper
checks to make sure that it's
something that's safe, that's
effective, that we know works
and so all of us are going to
need to be vigilant and pay
attention to not just the
headlines that say, like, "Oh
vaccine will be ready. Sign up
for a testing site," but also
kind of what are the checks?
Is there evidence to show
that this vaccine works? And
of course you know as we get
more updates, we'll be sure to
share that information on CoronaChat, to
kind of go through the data.
And tell you what we've learned.
So the other couple of
things that have been going on
since we've been gone, as you
probably know by now colleges
have been reopening and many of
them have very rapidly been pivoting
to be online only and that's
in large part because a lot of
these colleges don't
necessarily have good ways to
test or quarantine students and
faculty and staff who test
positive right. It might be
difficult to get tests for
people and plus you know we've
known from earlier in the
pandemic when we saw what
happened in the nursing homes
and we saw what happened in
prisons that anywhere where
you've got what public health
folks are calling a congregate
living facility, a place where a lot of
people are living together in
very close quarters, with this
virus, because it's a
respiratory virus, it can
spread very, very quickly. And
so what we've seen with many
colleges that have tried to do
in-person opening is that lots
of people have gotten infected
very quickly, particularly with
students living in the dorms.
And so we you know we really
need to be able to have a good
strategy in place to be able to
test, contact trace, and
quarantine anybody who's been
exposed, isolate those who are
affected right and make sure
that we can kind of contain the
community-level transmission of
the virus on a college campus.
So if colleges don't have the
infrastructure to do that, it's
probably not safe for them to
reopen and have lots of
students come back. If they
do, they'll just follow the
same thing that we've been
doing here at UNC, that's
happened at Notre Dame and
other schools across the
country right of trying to
reopen and then pretty quickly
having to put it online with 
students trying to figure out
housing once the dorms
close, do they end up bringing
back any illness back to their
home communities if they end
up moving back home? So it's
kind of all of these other
things that need to be thought
about and so if you are
headed off to college yourself, if
somebody in your life is headed
off to college, you know ask
about what the university's
plans are around, making sure
that they're able to test, that
they can contact trace and make
sure that you get answers that
you're satisfied with. Okay so
your piece of good news for
this week. This is another
thing that came out of the CDC
kind of surprising thing that
happened overnight. The CDC
has ordered a moratorium on
evictions for any renters or
for renters nationwide under
the Public Health Act, meaning
that you know you can't be
evicted by your landlord for
not paying your rent if you
can't pay it due to COVID.
Now this isn't a total blanket, right, there's
a five-part test that you
have to pass to qualify and it
doesn't prevent evictions for
reasons not related to not
paying your rent because of COVID
right, but it does help a lot
of Americans who are out of
work due to the pandemic and
can't quite make those bills.
So this is, you know why is the
CDC doing this? Shouldn't this
be like HUD or some other group
that does housing?
The reason that CDC is taking
this move is because there's
real public health concern that
if people are evicted and wind
up either in homeless shelters
or living in homeless
encampments on the streets, that
they could get sick and the
virus could spread very quickly
through a population that's
already you know  at high
risk, maybe because they're not
eating super well, lots of
folks may have kind of other comorbid conditions.
So they also be older folks folks who for whatever reason have a compromised
immune system right, so we see a lot of those things
hand in hand with folks who are
renting a low income right
because you don't necessarily
have access to the same healthy
foods, to the same kind of 
doctor's appointments and
things like that to be able to
keep you healthy right and
you're super stressed out
because oh my gosh you just got
evicted. So we're seeing the
CDC recognized and take action
on the things that those of us
in public health call the
social determinants of health
right, the places we eat, live,
work, play, all of this other
stuff in our life that affects
whether we're gonna be healthy. And those of us in public
health talk a lot about the
social determinants of health,
but this is kind of the first
time that we're seeing the CDC
say you know, "we're invoking
the Public Health Act to take
an action about evictions
because we need to do this to
stop the transmission of a
dangerous infectious disease
right, so this is something
that public health folks have
been saying like please do this
for for some time, but we
don't really often see public
health agencies actually do
this. They usually focus more on
things like vaccinations or
medications, things that are
kind of more closely related to
the health system. Now that said,
you know, because this is the
first time that the CDC is
doing this, there's probably
gonna be some pushback. We may
even see legal challenges and
lawsuits about this so it'll
you know kind of remain to be
seen whether this ends up being
an effective strategy moving
forward but in terms of kind
of really taking a stance to
protect people in a time of
nationwide crisis, this really
seems like an important
step. So thanks for tuning in
as always, we'd love to hear
your questions, comments, any
other feedback, drop stuff in
the comments for us. Let us
know what you wanna talk about and in the meantime, stay safe. Take
care of each other and remember
we're all in this together.
