The COVID 19 pandemic continues to surge around the world shattering lives and sending entire nations into lockdown we’ve seen millions of infections hospitals at the breaking point and more than 400 000 deaths in the us alone what will it take to get the pandemic under control the kobit 19 vaccines offer the promise of ending this crisis but will everyone who wants a vaccine be able to get one you will hear from world-class experts who will answer your questions next on covid vaccines ask the experts

support for this program is provided by baptist health through the john and margaret krupa distinguished chair fund welcome to covid vaccines ask the experts live town hall brought to you as a service of south florida pbs and the health channel i’m olga villaverde we’re here to answer your questions about the pandemic the vaccines and when we might all be able to get back to something close to normal i’d like to introduce our expert host for our evening dr michael zinner dr zinner is the chief executive officer and executive medical director of the miami cancer institute he was the clinical director and surgeon in chief at brigham and women’s hospital as well as the mosley professor of surgery at harvard medical school for 22 years dr zinner it is a pleasure to have you tonight so please i start with this question where do we stand right now with this pandemic thank you olga all of us on this panel have been part of the greatest public health crisis in our lifetime we are navigating through the darkest winter of our healthcare profession and face some of the greatest challenges we’ve ever seen tonight we’re here to answer your questions and deal with your concerns to make you aware of where we are with the most ambitious mass vaccination effort in our history the potential of soon ending this terrible epidemic is real but it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get there tonight we’re here and we’re prepared to move on to the next part of the questions thank you we are we stare illness and death in the face every day and are among the greatest problems that we have to deal with in our heroes so as we look forward to answering some of the questions tonight we turn to our panel and first back to you olga thank you dr zinner by the way we would love to hear from you our viewers tonight so if you have any questions please put them in the comments section or just send them to questions at allhealthtv.com that’s questions at all health tv dot com give us your first name and your location i’d also like to welcome the viewers of h i t n’s vida i salute gracias nosotros esta noche we would love to hear from you as well questions in spanish or english dr zinner introduce my colleagues first dr anthony fauci head of the national institute of allergy and infectious disease and is known as the country’s leading infectious disease expert and the chief medical advisor for president joe biden then dr atul gawande is surgeon at brigham and women’s hospital and a harvard professor the former member of president biden’s transition coveted advisory board next dr andre ford is dean and chief academic officer at the university of miami miller school of medicine and last dr gita nyers whose assistant clinical professor of medicine at florida international university welcome to you all

great to be here thank you for joining us and and let me begin with the first question uh president biden had promised a hundred million vaccinations in ten in a hundred days and now he’s raised it to 150 million dr fauci let’s start with you is that really going to happen well he’s still sticking with the 100 million being the floor and not a ceiling uh the most important thing is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can the goal that was set uh is quite uh you know in some respects an ambitious goal even though early on like right now we have seen the last couple of days of getting a million per day things could get more difficult as we try to vaccinate out into the community because logistically it’s easier when you’re in a hospital setting or going into a nursing home to vaccinate but when you have to go particularly into communities where you have brown and black people who don’t have access to health care as much as others might or who live in areas that are not as accessible so the bottom line is it’s an ambitious goal it’s quite a reasonable goal though and i believe that we will meet that goal

let me go to dr gawande um i don’t know about your area but in our area we’re having a problem we’ve stood up several vaccination sites and we have had to cancel patients with great disappointment on their hand what’s it like what’s going on in in your part of the country uh it’s it’s it can be not dissimilar um i’ve been driving among other things uh we stood up uh stadium vaccination at uh gillette stadium we’re opening fenway park next week and some of the critical things we’ve found is number one um you don’t want a schedule unless you have vaccine in hand and that desire to open up appointments leads to that kind of chaos where you can’t get people in because you don’t have that vaccine you know until now we’ve been in a situation where the vaccine availability has been unpredictable and and the federal government’s commitments have been unreliable um the new administration’s commitment to provide three weeks of forward lookout for three weeks of predictability will will change that enormously well that is good to hear because we didn’t know week to week what we were going to get and unfortunately made commitments that we had to cancel and boy you can understand the disappointment of the people on the other end of the line for that one olga let me turn back for questions thank you dr zinner dr gwandy i actually want to follow up with a question can you tell us about the mass vaccination sites that you are working on including the iconic fenway park and i do have to admit i’m a huge patriots fan so i’m going to include as well the gillette stadium in foxboro as well doctor well so one of the things has been that this vaccine is different from just giving out a flu vaccination and the delivery process is complicated by a couple of things number one uh because we want to monitor people for an allergic reaction a severe allergic reaction you need 15 to 30 minutes of observation period and many offices aren’t set up for that furthermore you have to use every last drop in every vial which means you can’t just leave it on the shelf and have it available for when you’re when your patients walk in we have scarce quantities we want to get it to the high priority people and orchestrate a a high throughput process to make that happen and so that’s made stadiums and those kinds of large sites very successful in driving these kinds of vaccination efforts out and we’re we’re opening more and more of those uh high capacity locations throughout the country thank you dr dewande here’s our next question dr zinner please address the fears many people in under-served communities have about the vaccines were people of color included in the clinical testing dr zinner so there here here’s a situation here’s a problem we’ve got people who are waiting desperately to do anything they can to get a vaccine and then we’ve got a group of individuals a group of people that are having difficulty understanding whether they should get a vaccine whether they can get a vaccine or they don’t want a vaccine that’s an issue that i’d like to address with two of our panelists first dr ford can you tell us what the experience has been with you and the group that you deal with well thank you so very much um without question it’s the real challenge in the black community and what we have tried to do as a health system is to make sure that we are in contact with community leaders uh community centers churches barbershops hairdressers to try to educate everyone on the importance of getting vaccinated because at the end of the day when we look at the effect of the virus we know it affects a greater proportion a disproportionate number of blacks and brown people in particular not only to get a higher rate of infection but also the mortality has been significantly higher in that community so if anybody should be vaccinated it’s exactly black and brown people that’s why we have made a targeted effort to try to address this to try to reach out to members of the community to convince them that this is a very very important uh initiative and then i don’t hesitate to let them know for one thing that i certainly have been vaccinated and then if you’re worried about complications from the vaccine you only have complications in survivors so if you die from coveted 19 from confidential infection then you’re not going to be around to know whether or not there was any complication associated with the vaccine so so i think this is the kind of persuasive argument we are trying to drive home to the community with some degree of success but we recognize that it is indeed an uphill battle because of the historical challenges that we have to deal with as far as skepticism and enrollment in clinical trials especially based on the tuskegee experiment that we all know so well you know you make an incredibly important point dr ford and i want to turn to dr nair you work in that community you have a clinics in those committees what what is your reaction and interaction with the patients that you take care of sure so first of all dr zinner thank you so much for having me olga pbs really just humbled by the the uh my colleagues here on the town hall so listen this is a really important question and and the number one question i’m getting from this community is doc am i the guinea pig am i going to be the first one right and my answer to them is look this is my first pandemic right just like most doctors out there not all of us are dr fauci so we there are things that we know and there are things we don’t know what we know is exactly what dean ford said which is that we know if you are from the black or brown community you are hit harder by this virus you are four times more likely to be hospitalized you are three times more likely to die what we also know is that we have studied this vaccine in these populations we have studied it in the black and brown community we have studied it in men and women and we have found that it works it works across the board i have been vaccinated my family has been vaccinated and i am encouraging every patient to get vaccinated thank you dr green dr patricia i want to turn to you for a second can you can you tell us about herd immunity and what that is but also importantly what if we don’t get the members of that community vaccinated are we going to be able to achieve the kind of herd immunity we want to achieve well herd immunity by definition means you get enough of the proportion of a population vaccinated and or having gotten infected and in most infections most that usually leads to immunity for example with measles it would be lifelong immunity for measles for example which is a 98 effective vaccine and it is a highly highly transmissible virus you need a high percentage of the population to get herd immunity and herd immunity merely means it’s kind of a metaphor when you have the overwhelming majority of the people who are protected the vulnerable among us who either can’t get vaccinated or for one reason or other don’t respond are protected from infection because the virus does not have the leeway to go easily among them because most of the people are protected it’s almost like when you see a picture of a metaphor in the jungle you ever heard of wildebeest they’re all together and you’ve got a couple of lions trying to look for the weak baby or the old person there the herd protects the vulnerable so with regard to infections like sauce covey we don’t know exactly what the number is for measles it’s somewhere around 90 percent because we know from the experience in some of the sections in new york city when some of the orthodox jewish population did not get vaccinated it went down to around 80 percent of the people vaccinated and they had a lot of breakthrough infections we estimate that the requirement for herd immunity for saurus cov2 would be somewhere between 70 and 85 percent which i believe gets to your question and what was just said by the other panelists that if you have a substantial proportion of the population who don’t want to get vaccinated because of hesitancy you won’t reach optimal herd immunity so what you would have is you won’t have the kind of strong protection of infection so there’s two good reasons well a number but two prominent ones why you want minority populations particularly african americans to get vaccinated one for their own protection since they are vulnerable for a number of reasons including their underlying medical conditions which they have in a greater percentage than the general population but also because you want them to contribute to the broad level of protection in the community which we refer to as herd immunity a very good reason why we should get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can what an incredibly important societal point i i thank you very much uh dr patchy olga i’m going to turn it back to you i know we’ve got lots of questions coming in from our viewers we really do we have one now from lauren in minneapolis let’s get to that she writes will the covet vaccine be like a once a year shot kind of like the flu which we do every year or will it be like the measles where we only receive one shot uh once in our lifetime dr zinner you know a couple of you might be able to weigh in on this one let me start with dr g go ahead uh let us know what the experience is when you’re out in the community and get asked that question sure so thanks dr center so first of all lauren great question right but right now it’s too early to tell we’re in firefighting uh mode it is all about putting the fire out and focusing on the lives to save right now today as we put out the fire we are going to focus on whatever we have to do to make sure the house never catches on fire again so the reality is it’s just too early to tell okay any other panelists be able to comment on that no ditto she’s absolutely correct i mean our experience with this is measured in less than a year because we only began vaccinating people on a phase three trial the first one started on july 27th so we’re not even anywhere near a year into the experience so the bottom line is we do not know and only time will tell thank you let me go back to olga any uh addition let’s go on with more questions let’s do that dr zinner i have one here from mary in jacksonville thank you mary her question is what is the latest recommendation for people with a history of severe allergic reactions to not only medications but foods as well dr zinner but let me start with dr gwandy um who should not get a vaccine as we address this issue of allergies and allergic reactions in the past so it’s really only two that we’re instructing the people coming into our vaccination centers one group are those who have a an allergic reaction to a specific component in the covid vaccine called polyethylene glycol those people who have a history of reactions to just that would not be able to we recommend not having the vaccine the second is if you had a severe allergic reaction an anaphylactic attack to the um to the first shot you should not get your second shot as a kid i received the smallpox vaccine my parents are from india they wanted to return to india after they finished their medical training here and and i had a severe allergic reaction to the smallpox vaccine i could not get the booster shot therefore could not actually leave the country which is part of the reason why i i stayed here i didn’t get to leave until smallpox was eradicated in 1979. so this is not uncommon but smallpox vaccination was highly effective and safe and same with the coronavirus vaccine dr guani why didn’t you tell me that before i hired you but

well good for us that he got an allergic reaction

you know i’ll just chime in to also say one category we forget to sometimes mention is the acutely ill right so often in the hospital when someone is acutely ill with kobe we say hey can you know can i get the vaccine doc before i leave and again we you know we want to remember that this is not the population if you’re actively sick this is not the time to get the vaccine you want to recover get better and then absolutely get the vaccine dr zimmer can i also mention one thing that i think is important too because there’s some misperception that if you are a person who has an immunosuppressed disease or you’re immunosuppressed for any of a number of reasons you’re healthy you’re well but for some reason or other you have a compromised immune system the only reason you wouldn’t get vaccinated is if we were dealing with a live attenuated vaccine this is not a live attenuated vaccine now if you have a suppressed immune system it is conceivable and may be likely that you would not have as robust a response to the vaccine but it isn’t a safety consideration because we get asked often well you know i’m i have this uh immune deficiency should i not get vaccinated i think that’s a good reason that you should get vaccinated because you’re going to be vulnerable to a serious outcome from covert 19. you know dr let me follow along with that you know that my current position is with a cancer institute well a lot of the cancer patients ask us that very question should those with compromised immune systems who are either under treatment or or just before just after treatment should they get the vaccine i know how i would answer but i’d like to know how you would answer no i would say yes i think that’s the vulnerable population that you do want to protect that’s the point and there is this feeling that because i have an underlying condition that i should not get vaccinated now again it’s always i would say likely that when you have a certain degree of immunosuppression for whatever reason that you’re not going to get the most robust response to the vaccine but some response is better than no response and that’s the reason why you want to protect the vulnerables well that’s exactly it we told them exactly the same thing some response is better than no response anyway i have to jump in as a rheumatologist and someone who trained with with dr fauci so that’s the question that i’m getting from all of my patients right and and again these are the zebras and the unicorns of medicine so i just want to remind folks that when we have these conversations there is no data on the immuno compromise but just like doctors just like dr fauci said this is the most vulnerable part of our population and it’s not unusual for us to not have a lot of data right there’s there this is again the rare diseases in our community that we don’t have a lot of studies on for many medications and many vaccines so this is something you really want to have that conversation with your rheumatologist and and take part in that decision for yourself thank you dr g all right olga next question all right dr zinner this one is from angie and it relates to women who are trying to get pregnant and women who are not so if i’ve been trying to get pregnant for the last six months and i have not been successful do you recommend i get the vaccine and the other question is if i am pregnant should i receive the vaccine well let me start with this one so that discussion goes on in my family my daughter-in-law is an ob gyn and when we talk she tells me that she has that conversation 10 times a day with the women in her practice about those who are either pregnant those who are getting ivf those who want to get pregnant and they are not sure what the answer is so let me turn to the panelists let me turn to dr g you take care of again that same population what do you tell your patients sure so i’m going to answer this both as a doc as well as a mom and woman of childbearing age i will not tell you how old i am but i but i will tell you this is this is a terrifying time right if you’re thinking about getting pregnant or you are actually pregnant and the best thing you can do is exactly like laura said is you want to get this vaccine because you want to have a happy healthy body and the best way to do that is to arm yourself and shield your immune system so whether it is the covid19 vaccine whether it is the flu vaccine you want to focus on having a happy healthy body if you are trying to get pregnant and if you are pregnant again this is a shared decision you’re going to make with your doctor there is no data at this time we continue to learn as we go but the reality is if you are pregnant you are more at risk of getting an infection any virus or bacteria code included and you’re more likely to end up on a breathing machine and if you lose oxygen so does your baby so these are important decisions you have to make for you for your child and you really want to have that conversation with your doc and you want to keep in mind what your risk is right are you a nurse on the front lines are you a teacher or are you in the basement watching netflix for nine months straight right so you’re gonna assess that risk with your doc but i am telling everyone as if they were my sister you’ve got to get the coveted vaccine you’ve got to do it the first time if i may amplify um we should start with the understanding that women pregnant women were not included in the actual vaccine trials um so the data are lacking however there are many women who got pregnant while after after they received um the vaccine so so some data are becoming becoming to get accumulated uh but it was going to take a little bit of time for us to know what the facts are but having said that we know that during the third trimester that’s when the women are going to be most vulnerable especially if you have comorbidities so you’re most likely to have a more severe severe illness if you happen to have a comorbidity so the certainty would be it would make much more sense for you to be vaccinated uh so as not to end up in the icu and having all sorts of complications we know that the transmission rate is kind of low to the fetus um and last but not least the mrna as we’ve heard before the mrna vaccine is really not as serious but at least the risk is not as great because it’s going to be degraded by the cell it doesn’t really get into the nucleus it does not incorporate into the dna so so for those reasons it does make sense uh for a pregnant woman or someone who is thinking about getting pregnant to actually be vaccinated from the very beginning

for a second let’s not leave that theme for a second um because this is an mrna vaccine i’ve heard also rumors in in the in in the conspiracy world that this is going to affect male fertility is it going to affect male fertility absolutely not absolutely not in fact we know that kovid 19 infection certainly is associated with impaired sperm function from studies that were done right here at the university of miami uh middle school of medicine um so we know that the vaccine cannot consume the virus can actually infect the testes and and impairs for a function but as far as the vaccine itself the cova-19 vaccine it has no effect on male infertility or on sperm function

one of the things excuse me one of the things that people should be aware of is that although pregnant women were not allowed in the trial so that was an exclusion criteria since the eua was given there have been now about 10 000 pregnant women have gotten vaccinated and getting back to what gita just said many of them were health care providers who were saying i’m pregnant i really want to protect myself of getting covert because i don’t want to be a deleterious effect on my baby so we will get data that will be followed the fda is accumulating that data so even though they weren’t in the clinical trial we’re starting to accumulate a lot of data thus far no red flags about that okay thank you dr center i gotta jump in because this feels a little bit like he said she said so i gotta i gotta defend my ladies so one of the things i think is really important to remember is when we don’t have data which dean ford is spot on for one it’s coming in as dr fauci just said but when you’re making these decisions with your doctor right this is a shared decision this is your decision to make as a mom a pregnant mom a mom to be the risk and benefit that you’re going to put together with your doc part of that includes how women of the household are being affected through this pandemic what do i mean by that you have a dual income household right if if mom gets sick pregnant mom possibly has other children if mom gets sick several things happen one income is potentially lost two child care is affected children have to be taken out of school because now they’ve been exposed there are many numbers of things that need to go in that pro and con list and when i’m having these conversations with my female patients invariably we’re landing on more benefits of the vaccine and risk even without the data so very important to keep that in mind and listen it’s hard whether you get sick from covid or mom get sick at any moment when i get sick my whole household goes down there’s no food there’s no child care right so these are things we have to remember nobody wants to see dad doing braids in the morning before school there are a lot of effects that happen to a household when a mom gets sick so make sure that’s on your list when you are deciding the pros and the cons and i think you will find out that taking the vaccine has more benefits than risk thank you dr g all right olga move on next question here we go and i’m glad we clarified all that the next question is will the vaccines work against the new virus strains a lot of concern there and dr zinner i’m going to follow up with bill he takes it a step further if you will he wants to know will the copit 19 virus continue to mutate faster than our ability to contain it leading to a constant cycle of new vaccines dr zinner so dr fauci there’s a lot in that question and and one of the leading parts of that is we’re beginning to see in this country the mutated strains that come from the united kingdom that come from uh south africa and particularly the ones from brazil now there are a lot of brazilian americans in our part of the country that go back and forth to brazil so that’s a several part question about one where are we with the mutations and the strains and then obviously what are we going to think about when we talk about the vaccine

you’re asking me yes not about you i’m sorry okay so it’s a complicated issue so we know that rna vaccines mutate very readily that’s what they do that’s that’s that’s part of their their existence is to mutate the more they replicate in the community the greater chance they have to mutate most of the time the mutates the mutations don’t result in any functional change in a virus but every once in a while you do that’s the situation that we’re facing now and i’ll explain in a moment what impact it would have on the vaccine so the uk variant which is now in more than 25 states in the united states when you take a look at the antibodies that are induced by the vaccine that we are using it does not appear to be a significant diminution in the effect of their neutralization in the test tube usually that reflects what you will see clinically but the proof of the pudding is the clinical observation of whether or not the current vaccines i believe with regard to the uk variant that we will be okay things are a little bit more formidable and concerning with the south african mutants because there’s a constellation of mutants there that in the test tube in vitro diminished by multiple fold the capability of the antibodies that are induced by the currently used vaccine to neutralize the mutant now it is still above the threshold of protection so when you look at neutralizing titers that you may need one to a hundred to protect so what the mean of the titers in the vaccine people is maybe one to two thousand or one to a thousand you may bring it down to one to three hundred it comes down a lot but it’s still above the threshold that you would predict the protection having said that there’s a big caveat here and the caveat is will that be reflected clinically when you get exposed following vaccine the answer to the question i believe is going to be forthcoming in the next few weeks because we have the johnson or j and j as well as novavax which are doing their experiments in a way that might give us the answer because they are testing it in the united states and in south africa and with johnson south africa and brazil so when those data come out we’ll find out whether the neutralizing data correlate with the clinical data bottom line is we take these mutations very seriously currently it looks like it will protect certainly the uk is much less worrisome than the south african mutations that’s where we are right now but in real time we have to be prepared to upgrade the vaccines if it becomes necessary and by upgrade i mean make them with the insert to code for the viral protein that is associated with whatever mutation you’re worried about oh i was going to ask dr gwandy you’re in boston you’re in the area where moderna is and the ceo moderna recently came out and thought that with these mutations he’d be able to his company be able to turn around and neuter with an mrna content that with the genetic code in a really short period of time can you share with us any of the information that’s coming out of modern about this new mrna vaccine type that’s only covered by a lipid outside protein i mean the lipid envelope yeah credit to dr fauci the uh nyad and the nih and their partnership with moderna over many years they really designed this whole approach that puts the code for the virus into the vaccine and allows your body to generate the antibodies against that that that section of code it allows you to change the code to meet the new mutations as they come out and what they what the moderna folks have indicated in pfizer as well is that although as dr fauci said the um the levels of antibodies still seem to be effective ones they’re going ahead and producing these booster shots with the new encoding um the new encoding that would allow you to fight off these other these other viruses and so the beauty of this platform that really is going to change medicine in in much broader ways is that you can almost type out the recipe that you need for the next for the next booster shot the next vaccine the next treatment and it’s only a matter of weeks to a couple of months for them to generate production prove that this can work and then generate production needed to offer that capability so that is a very big deal it’s a it’s a fortunate protection because i am worried as dr fauci said that some of these mutations coming out including the one in uh south africa and brazil is could be evading the vaccine as we as we move forward well the way you describe this engineered vaccine is one of the most optimistic comments i’ve heard yet about dealing with the mutations that we know are going to come because as dr fauci said that’s what this virus does is it mutates as it goes through the population so thank you all thank you let me uh older let’s uh let’s move on let’s do that dr zinner i just got a quick question here from someone that i think would uh would really be appreciated by many parents like me and then i’m gonna have a follow-up dr zinner with another question that i just received so the first one is do kids have to wait until more people have been vaccinated to go back to school that’s something that i can totally understand in terms of asking and experts are now saying with the new strain of coven 19 one mask is not sufficient and the public should wear two masks fact or fiction dr zinner well dr palchi i think you’ve made comments about that so i’m gonna let you open the one mask or two mask comments well the cdc does not recommend that you must wear two masks what they say very clearly is that everyone should be wearing a mask uniformly the president himself has said he wants everyone to be wearing a mask for at least a hundred days and very likely beyond that there are some people who make a reasonable deduction they say well if a mask is a protective covering that maybe two layers would be better that could be true but the cdc still recommends a mask that everyone should wear so people should not get caught up with two versus three just wear a mask in our part of the world it’s hard enough to get everybody to wear a mask let alone two masks so i’d concur 100 with your comments olga your your question and let’s go to that other question that we just got in dr zinner do kids have to wait until more people have been vaccinated to go back to school lots of parents out there wondering dr g you want to answer that question for us sure happy to olga i’m in the same boat so i i feel your pain sister um listen we we got to do what dr fauchi said is we have to wear masks right and the reality of when we’re going to get the vaccine and get it all around the country where we need to that doesn’t need to be the stop gap to getting us back to school it is about wearing a mask sitting down with your doctor if you have questions about the vaccine and getting the vaccine as soon as you can if you’re eligible and moving forward we cannot stop we’ve got to wear a mask and add a couple of comments there oh sure okay oh no please i’ll read it sure i i think the study that was just reported by the cdc uh really begins to shed some light on this issue without question there is the capacity to open schools safely and it all depends on whether or not you are adhering to the um all the principles that dr falchi has been preaching for so long um proper physical distancing smaller classrooms making sure everyone is wearing a masking and what they were able to demonstrate was there was a very low transmissibility rate in that setting so so you can reopen the schools safely if you have the means if you have the resources to implement uh all of the um public health principles that uh i’ve been championing um the data are still not quite there yet but we know that um pfizer has been able to enroll over two thousand uh 259 kids uh um in terms of vaccines between the age of 12 and 15 years and and and soon we’ll be able to uh begin to understand how safe it’s going to be to vaccinate that population and begin to hopefully expand the number of vaccinations to even younger population to the extent that we can enroll other younger children but but right now we don’t have the data yet on what has happened to over 2000 kids that were enrolled in the vaccine trial by pfizer but but a lot of the data on the horizon that will help us open schools and safely but in the meantime though we know that if we adhere to these strict public health principles that have been championed we may be able to do that

i’ll just add a couple of things here um one is to say that uh to to reinforce what uh henri just said uh schools have not been major sources of outbreaks the exception to that has been in communities where there’s a lot of virus in circulation there are a couple of things that the biden administration has indicated that they are backing and uh and in fact in my state and several others we’ve committed to adding not only that the kids wear masks but um and that we want to vaccinate the teachers and get that to happen as soon as uh as quickly as possible but then also that we are offering uh testing for the staff and the students as a as a capability and i hope that congress backs the funding to make that possible because i think it will make it feasible for most most american kids to return to in-person schools if we add in the funding to make that feasible specifically enabling them to get tested on a on a weekly basis

thank you you know uh one of our panelists dr fauci has another commitment this evening and i want to make sure that he is able to make that commitment so tony i appreciate the time you’ve been able to spend with us and i know you are about to go on another network and we appreciate what you’ve contributed to but most importantly we appreciate what you’ve done for this country for your entire career thank you thank you very much dr patrick thank you very much and thanks folks it’s a pleasure to have been with you this evening thanks a lot thank you well i want to uh i want to move on to uh the next question i see we’ve got uh questions coming in from all over the country let’s do that dr zinner i have an interesting one here from christina from orange county new york she writes my husband and i care full-time for my parents in our home soon everyone in our household will be vaccinated soon of course it will be safe to have my brother and his wife over for a meal but can they come over for a meal unmasked they won’t be vaccinated for quite some time based on current guidelines and because she asked that i found another question that came in that i kind of want to put together with that one as well dr zinner this is from rey in miami she writes if everyone is vaccinated is it okay to have a no mask dinner party at a private residence hmm you know uh we get asked a form of that question virtually every day also so i’m going to ask the panelists at least a couple of the panelists to to answer that i want to start with dr g and then dr gawande i thought maybe you could follow and then dr ford if you have any comments also so dr g thanks dr zenner so christina and ray the answer is universally no this was the number one question we got all through the holidays and it’s a big part of why we are really suffering this month right so for christina the family taking care of what sounds like a vulnerable parent you’ve got to stay in your bubble which means everyone that is in your family in your household even if you all have been vaccinated remember you can still pass the infection onto others particularly your brother that you mentioned that would be visiting he sounds like he is outside of your bubble so that is a big no for ray regarding the mass listen we all have to get our head around is that we have to wear a mask for this year we are going to have to commit to wearing a mask for 2021 whether you have been vaccinated or not and i think then pbs will hopefully invite us back and we will talk to dr fauci next year around this time about whether it’s time to take a mask off but we are just not anywhere near that to date and we’ve got to remember with or without a vaccine the mass stays on and you are still susceptible uh to infect to spreading this virus if you are not wearing a mask and again we still have a lot to learn about these variants so unfortunately the answer is no i can’t wait to come over for dinner as well but for now the answer is no dr grande so i’m going to add in that we recognize this is really hard there are a couple of pieces of information that have that we still don’t have first of all all we know about the effectiveness of the of the vaccine is it keeps it reduces the likelihood that you will have severe illness resulting in hospitalization or death you could still be we don’t know we will have the data in the next couple of months that you could be carrying a symptomatic infection and be still capable of of spreading it furthermore there is a subset of people at least five percent who will get who will get infected regardless and that is part of the reason and and presumably an even larger number that can transmit so the reason why we are continuing to ask that you wear the masks even after you’ve been vaccinated is partly it’s protection for that subset who still uh can get sick when we have millions millions of people who are actively infected in circulation right now second though is to bring this this virus under control we’re going to need to have the population we need much more of the population to be vaccinated before those things can happen and then the last part about it is that while we have so much virus circulating and you have people who are getting partial protection from the vaccine if we continue to expose those folks you raise the possibility of driving more mutations that evade the vaccines and we need to escape this pandemic not drive more strains or resistance that develops and i completely agree with um dr g and of course dr grundy now the only other thing to add is as we heard from dr fauci earlier the south african variant is is pretty scary so we don’t know to what extent we would be protected from that and so it holds us to continuing to wear a mask just in case that we could actually be facing one of those variants where we’re not protected against so for all those reasons we’ve already heard keep wearing a mask whether it’s under the year or until we get to that point where it’s safe where dr thatcher says you can take the mask off and i think that’s exactly the right approach well it sounds to me like there’s consensus the bottom line is we’re not going to do away with masks or social distancing anytime soon even if we get all the vaccines in the world we’ve still got to pay attention to what’s going on in this with this virus so let’s move on olga let’s move on to the next question let’s do it dr zinner i have a question from maria and she asked when can we expect a vaccine regimen for infants and young children lots of moms and dads out there wondering this dr zinner uh dr ford i’m going to start with you you’ve got a background in pediatrics so why don’t you tell us that but also can you add to that what do we do now with those children who have severe underlying conditions like type 1 diabetes or severe asthma well it’s an excellent question um simply say it right now we don’t have enough data to start vaccinating children um the pfizer first the first um clinical trial went to 16. um modernity only started at 18 so we can’t really start vaccinating people who would be younger than 16. but we know as i mentioned earlier that pfizer just completed the enrollment of children between the ages of 12-15 so hopefully within a matter of several weeks we will know about the efficacy and safety of the vaccine in that population um the projection is that by late spring early summer no later and hopefully the june we will have we will be ready to start testing even smaller children um so hopefully between ages of 2 all the way up to 15 and so forth so that we can determine about not only the efficacy but the safety of the vaccine in that population and that’s the time when we know if we can con if we can actually vaccinate uh children in in significant numbers but until then uh there’s that much we can do um about that and that’s just a matter of safety so so if i hear you correctly we’re gonna hold off until we get more data to know about the safety of these vaccines in children okay olga next question all right dr center this one is from julia in west palm beach i also need the pneumonia vaccine how long should i wait before getting that dr zinner so i’m going to ask dr gwandy dr gwandy seniors get more than just pneumovax or pneumonia vaccine they get shingles vaccines they get several kinds of vaccines what do we do about the timing between those various vaccines that people really need anyway and the covet vaccine in the trials there were they asked for a two-week period after say a flu shot before you get the coronavirus vaccine not we’re not recommending that you get these simultaneously so a two-week period that once you’ve got your vaccine then you can either you’ve had your flu shot or you can get your shingle shot afterwards try to space them apart space them apart by by two weeks and i assume that’s because the cdc also wants to know if there is a reaction that what caused the reaction as opposed to rolling them temporarily too close together that may well be and also um if the immune response is affected in any way uh by the presence of the uh of the other vaccine and so you know what we know from the trials is that that it worked and was safe when you spaced them apart by two weeks all right thank you olga next question dr zinner unfortunately we are nearing the end of our town hall which has been absolutely amazing with so much information we have time for one more question dr zinner and i believe you have one that everyone is asking every single day so this is one that all of us on the panel get asked every day also and i want to go around horn and ask all three of you to answer when are we going to get back to normal when are we going to be able to go out to a movie when are we going to go out to dinner with our friends and family and enjoy what is as close to normal life as we can let me begin with dr gawande and then dr ford and then dr g well i think earlier we all talked about the idea that we’re gonna we expect to need to be in our masks um through this year but but let me say this is coming in gradations i believe you know some of the signs are going to be first there’s a stage gate that we’re going to see that the hospitals are protected and that the levels of virus start coming down we’re going to find that the because the nursing homes and the assisted living are vaccinated those people can come out of solitary confinement and see family with masks on we will start to see that people can travel more safely again with mass on and doing those things and that’ll be another phase and then another phase is we’ll start to see that um that we’re able to have enough of the community vaccinated that the levels get to such low levels we really can return to more and more of these more normal activities how quickly it happens just depends on two things how fast we’re able to get the vaccine out and get all of us with shots and arms and then the second is the science and what we learn as we progress further along and if we find that transmission is really died down and that we’re able to do more and more of these behaviors without causing this to come roaring back again or to be dealing with mutations then then we will hope we we will turn with the science and if that can happen sooner we will we will see it happen sooner thank you yeah i think this is pretty well stated and and to that all i can add is we will get there faster if we as a nation we as a society understand that we have a moral and ethical obligation to try to bring this uh pandemic under control and it’s a sense of social responsibility that will prompt us to not only get vaccinated because it protects us but it’s also going to help to protect others so we can achieve the hurt immunity that we talk about but also in a responsible manner we need to keep wearing our meds we need to start we need to think about how we don’t protect ourselves but also protect others and if we can embrace these moral ethical principles then i believe that we have an opportunity to bring this pandemic under control very rapidly

so dr center so so dr senator you know my message to the viewers is is really a couple of points and again not different from from dean ford or dr gwandy but number one get vaccinated as soon as you have the opportunity to number two wear a mask save a life commit to wearing a mask for this year we are nowhere near taking our masks off unfortunately so we need to really commit to that have fun with it my nine year old blings her mask out she matches it with her outfits commit to it do it have fun with it make it part of your your daily routine number two if we did not answer your questions tonight please make an appointment with your doctor if you do not have a doctor get a doctor online or offline and if you do not have access to a physician please go see your local pharmacist walk into your cvs or walgreens your local convenience store but please talk to your pharmacist they will be happy to answer any of your questions about this vaccine number three good information comes from experts like those on this town hall comes from websites like the cdc when you find good information share it with your friends share it with your family be wary of bad information do not share it make sure you’re looking at what the source is before you take information home and to heart and lastly we’ve come a long way right we’ve come a long way we couldn’t have even done a town hall like this a few months ago we have a vaccine we have made tremendous progress in a very short amount of time so i’m very confident we can do this we just need to do all the things we just listed and we will get there

thank you let me close we began this program tonight reflecting on a very dark year we’ve all been through but also tonight we’ve heard some wonderful optimistic notes about our future we should be grateful for that and i want to thank all of my panelists for their incredible input you really did help all of us understand what we need to do and where we need to go and hopefully we’ll get there sooner than later we will get there and it’s one of the most optimistic ends to an evening like this that i’ve had the opportunity to be with in a very long time i want to thank you and i want to turn this back to older thank you for hosting tonight thank you for having me and thank you all for joining us for covid vaccines ask the experts town hall it’s been such a privilege to have all of our guests and it’s been such an honor dr zinner to co-host with you i appreciate your time your knowledge and everything you do at miami cancer institute

thank you sir i’m olga villaverde nos vemos peronto we’ll see you next

time

support for this program is provided by baptist health through the john and margaret krupa distinguished chair fund

you