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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Richard Helppie, with one of our favorite guests, Dr. James Baker. Dr. Baker, of course, is a physician, a researcher, and an immunologist with Michigan Medicine here in the great city of Ann Arbor with the University of Michigan. I want to say that Dr. Baker is not only one of our most popular guests, but indeed kind of a surprise guest today that you're back again. How are you?
Dr. James Baker
Yes, we thought we'd be done with COVID.
Richard Helppie
Just seems to be that story that keeps giving. There's a new phenomena happening today and I think that there's nobody better qualified to speak about this. For my listeners, and viewers, and readers, please go and listen to our prior episodes with Dr. Baker. His prognostications were far more accurate than anything. He is, in my opinion, the most learned person about the virus, about the disease, how it spread, how the vaccines work, and it's really great grounding, without a political agenda at all. Today, we're going to go into where we stand and some unusual happenings. Am I using the correct term if I say a bio lab in Boston?
Dr. James Baker
First off, I think we've all learned a lot about this going forward. The amazing thing to me is that we don't really have a way forward. It's been announced that the pandemic is over, we can argue about the technicality of that decision or that statement, but I think the real problem here are these large problems of where are we going with this right now and all the noise that's generated around us. The bio lab issue, I think, is an important one.
Richard Helppie
I agree because we recently had it announced that perhaps the need to vaccinate children, and for my late perspective, I don't see a case for that. So few children were infected, so few of the deaths affected children, yet we have this prevalence now, particularly in adolescent males, with myocardial issues, and with young women, interruptions in the menstrual cycle. It seems to me that the risk reward balance or the calculations changed.
Dr. James Baker
So that's a very good question. And I think, there are a number of levels that we have to look at that. The first is what is our overall goal for controlling this disease going forward? Quite honestly, we have not heard a plan from the CDC about going forward. How do we anticipate we're going to control this, and yet make sure that all of the people are healthy and taken care of, and the vaccines and the drugs have use in this. But until we know the overall plan, I can't tell what the benefit is to young people. The good news is that the risk is very low; if you look at the risk of the vaccines for myocarditis, and menstrual disruption and other issues, it's less than the risk of the infection. But at this point, what are we achieving with vaccination? And that's what we need to understand. The CDC hasn't enunciated that for us. So if I don't know as a physician and investigator, how does the common man understand what the risk reward benefit is and make that decision for their child?
Richard Helppie
Precisely. And in my readings and in keeping up with with the issue, the conversation turned from what do we do about public health, how do we keep people healthy, to, we just need to vaccinate everybody. The objective is not vaccination. The objective is to control the disease. In springtime, I heard Dr. Fauci on with Wolf Blitzer and he said, well, we're going to get five to 12 year olds before the spring and then by the first of the year, first of 2022, we want to have it for infants being discharged from the hospital; [he] never said anything about the disease or the risk. It was just, we're going to vaccinate everybody. It just didn't make any sense to me about accomplishing an objective, as you stated.
Dr. James Baker
The reason it doesn't make sense to you is that there's no goal associated with that vaccination. I think what we've learned is that by getting at least the initial series of vaccines, which I now include the third, six months later, as part of that initial thing - not a booster itself - I think we learned that we could protect most people from serious disease and death; even older people, it's been very effective for that. But what are we now accomplishing by these rounds of re-immunization? What did the new boosters accomplish? People talk about antibody titers to neutralize new viruses. But in fact, if you look at each of these rounds of infection, they become less and less. And that's a typical thing with pandemics and epidemics, the virus mutates to become less deadly, because it has to propagate itself. And people develop immunity that protects them. In fact, the most effective immunity we're seeing right now is the combination of the virus and infection, the vaccine and infection. So that combination yields very good protection for a long term with people. The vaccine itself, we're always guessing too, and I'm very concerned that they've not stated any interval they're going to do these boosters, they're talking about changing them every time a new variant comes out; well, that's happening every three or four months. Immunizing somebody every three or four months doesn't make sense immunologically, let alone in terms of public policy.
Richard Helppie
So I really appreciate the way you talk about how the virus and the pandemic mutates, that the virus becomes less deadly over time. At the same time, I read claims that the vaccines limit the severity of illness. Is there any data that says that the severity of illness is reduced because of the vaccine, or it's just getting weaker and the vaccine took out people that were more susceptible? Even Dr. Fauci - and I don't like to keep bringing him up - but he admitted, well, the vaccines really aren't that good at stopping infection but perhaps they were limiting severity. Do we have any data that tells us that or how can you tell?
Dr. James Baker
We do have data and what they did. For each virus variant for each wave, they looked at people who were unvaccinated and vaccinated, and the ones that were unvaccinated have much higher rates of severe illness and death. So in fact, relatively speaking, the vaccines have helped a lot. But there's also a natural evolution of this whole process. I think at this point, we need to start looking at what viruses are out there and not just saying, oh, I'm worried that a new variant will come up that's really bad. If there is a new variant that the vaccines don't protect against and is really bad, that's a totally different equation than what we're seeing now. It's nothing that we really would anticipate from what we've seen with the virus so far.
Richard Helppie
I've heard from a number of people, and these are lay people by the way, that say, look, if I take my next booster, I'm going to be sick for a day and a half and if I get the current version of COVID, I'm going to be sick for a day and a half, so what's the point?
Dr. James Baker
I think there are a couple of points and these are points that are not being laid out for us. When you're sick with COVID you are contagious so in fact, you serve as a vector to infect other people. I think if we were 100% vaccinated and had been 100% infected, then I think the risk would be fairly small, but we aren't, there are still unvaccinated populations and many elderly people or immunosuppressed people, they are at risk.
Richard Helppie
My understanding though, the vaccine didn't stop the transmission. If a person was vaccinated yet got a case of COVID they would have less severe illness, but they'd still be able to transmit it. Am I wrong about that?
Dr. James Baker
Well, there's a less likelihood. You weren't wrong, it doesn't stop transmission completely but it reduces the likelihood of transmission and it reduces, more importantly, the likelihood of infection. Now there, as you point out, has been much less than it did initially. I think probably the worst case scenario is Dr. Walensky, who got the brand new booster and a month later when her immunity should be the greatest, got infected. That doesn't mean that the booster didn't work. In fact, it meant that the virus mutated again and she was protected against what was there in June, but not what was there in October. On the other hand, she didn't get ill, and this is the real issue; why are we immunizing people? We're immunizing people to protect them, to prevent spread to other people, to try and reduce the burden on businesses, on all kinds of activities, workplaces, schools. I don't think there's data that really supports we are doing any of that right now. I would love to hear from the CDC, what their overall plan is moving forward. Are we going to continue trying to immunize every time we see a new virus out there? Are we at some point going to say, most of the population is protected, people aren't getting sick from this, people aren't really dying from this unless there's a high risk in them. And in that case, the vaccine probably won't work as well. So I think we need to really define what this is and how it fits in. I think the same thing is true for the antiviral drugs. I mean, they're now effective, especially in elderly people, or people that have some type of health problem but the data doesn't show that they're helping at all in younger people are even in vaccinated people.
Richard Helppie
Is that right? I remember when you were on the show earlier, you talked about the need, if you are infected, to intervene with antivirals and my lay understanding was eventually if you don't interrupt that, your body becomes a virus processing factory, and you can't catch up with it and then you can be in real deep trouble.
Dr. James Baker
Right. If your immune system doesn't work, right. But those studies were done in unvaccinated people where they showed a 95% reduction. When they went into young, healthy vaccinated people, they saw no difference from the antiviral.
Richard Helppie
Is that right? So if I'm a 35 year old, no existing health conditions, and I've been vaccinated, and I get an infection, that the Paxlovid and the other antivirals aren't going to work.
Dr. James Baker
Probably aren't going to give you much benefit.
Richard Helppie
Just going to ride that out. You mentioned workplaces and now we all know the stories of people that were fired indiscriminately because they didn't want to take what was then an experimental vaccine. We now see reversals, particularly in public sector employees, saying you can't keep us out of work, and seeing a lot of those policies reversed. A lot of people were really harmed by this; put out of work, basically, for making a personal medical decision, (Dr. Baker: Not to mention the school issue.) Oh, the schools are among the worst but let's look at the workplace. We're not dealing with children. Did it ever make sense to fire everybody that didn't get a vaccine?
Dr. James Baker
I think there should have been positive reinforcement for people to get vaccines, trying to educate people, explaining to them it was for their own good, especially initially. That first wave of virus took a lot of people out, it was a severe illness, especially if you had no immunity. So that initial vaccination really changed the table for everyone. We could argue at that point, especially with adults, where we have lots of data, that it was something that should have been encouraged for everyone. I think forcing people to do something that was in the public good and in their personal good, if they were refusing to do it, I don't think helped. It hardened resistance for people. I think it was a demonstration about how ineffective our communications, our public health system was in encouraging people to do something that would help them. At this point, we're seeing sort of a redo of that. We're just talking about, as you point out, vaccinating people without making the argument what the vaccinations are going to achieve and without providing data for that. But just by saying you get more antibody doesn't mean that you're going to be protected from being infected; I think they admit that now. If you're in a high risk group, you have to do this and you have to keep immunizing yourself because you're at risk for death still. But if you aren't, we need to make some type of statement about what would be reasonable for people.
Richard Helppie
Personal medical decision, absolute risk reward; if a person is elderly, got asthma, they were a former smoker, obese, you might want to think about keeping your boosters going because you're at risk. If you've got a robust immune system, none of those other issues that would amplify the disease, you're probably okay and should be left alone. Because we've seen some really extreme things, like we had governments mandating vaccine passports; we have a theater in town here that probably is on the verge of bankrupting itself because they went that direction. And they're still, to the best of my knowledge - we're recording this on November 4 - still requiring masks indoors. This is in Ann Arbor where I did see a guy driving in a BMW convertible with the top down, by himself, wearing an N95 mask, and I think it slipped off so I think that is...
Dr. James Baker
For aesthetic stuff. [Laughter.]
Richard Helppie
He couldn't grow a beard or something, I don't know.
Dr. James Baker
It's more fashionable in Ann Arbor driving your convertible with a mask. [Laughter.]
Richard Helppie
Indeed, yes. So we got into that - not dealing with facts, not dealing with the notion that there are personal choices, but we're going to wear the mask as a badge. But let's talk about masks. My understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - is that the common cold and flu were severely reduced by use of masks (Dr. Baker: Absolutely.) I believe, and we know that. As the guy that used to fly a lot for work, like, I wish we would have had a culture that said, let's put on masks before we fly, because lord knows how much stuff you're exposed to. So you think that could be a discovery, that when we get cold and flu season, and you're traveling in crowded places, maybe it's a good idea to have a mask on.
Dr. James Baker
Well, exactly. Right now the flu is a big issue. Flu season started early, probably because we were protected for two years and people were so focused on COVID, they weren't getting their flu shots. I've been telling all of my patients who are at risk, get the flu shot first. Get it right now because that's out there. The incidence of these infections is very important in this. If you have a high incidence of infection, if we have another outbreak where we're seeing ten or 15 percent of the non-symptomatic population coming up for virus, then it makes sense to wear a mask over COVID. We're already seeing those levels in parts of the US with influenza. So the idea that we didn't learn that with respiratory disease, for true outbreaks this makes sense, is really disappointing. I think some of that is that they initially told people not to wear masks - which was really the only effective thing - washing your hands with Lysol, all this stuff, was crazy. The thing now is that during outbreaks masks are effective, but they kept them on so long people have become resistant. Again, we've had a failure of public health to really explain the value of these interventions and use them appropriately. They've become more issues than they've become really public health means.
Richard Helppie
Right. I think part of that people were looking for absolutes. Just like we are in this political environment that seems binary, which is really unusual given the diversity of opinion and overlaps if you Venn diagram things, but people were looking for absolutes. They found masking in schools - I don't believe that there's any evidence at all that masking in schools had any positive effect at all.
Dr. James Baker
The data is very controversial and not at all in one direction. So I think, again, the schools were a big mistake. Even the most potent shutdown people, Randi Weingarten, are now saying, yes, it was a mistake, forgive us. Well, I mean, forgiveness is not the problem. It's what we do going forward in making sure we don't make these mistakes.
Richard Helppie
We do need to revisit the policy. (Dr. Baker: Yes.) And when you think some of the crazy things that happened in our home state here in Michigan, where certain aisles and stores were taped off, you could go and buy a can of tomatoes, but you couldn't go buy tomato seeds to put your garden in, that kind of thing. It made no sense to do that. So talking about schools and kids in schools, the vaccinations for children, likely not a great risk reward profile, given that we don't know what the objectives are. Does adding the vaccine to the childhood schedule, does that give the manufacturers any protection at all? Are there other non-clinical reasons why that vaccine would be on that schedule?
Dr. James Baker
I can't answer that. I don't think it does. I mean, one of the interesting things that is the original vaccine is now fully approved, whereas these new boosters are again under emergency use authorization and that does provide some protection for the manufacturers. But putting them into the standard child vaccination protocol and without even defining the frequency, it's like everybody at every age gets it. The doses are a little bit different. I think this is why people like Paul Offit, who is one of the leaders in pediatric vaccination, have raised issues with this. We haven't defined what the benefit is, we haven't defined how we're going to use it. And rationally, how do we communicate with parents that this provides something of value to their child? None of that has been done. I've never seen a vaccine added to the standard protocol without doing that, without providing long term data that shows that the frequency and the type of vaccination being done provides true benefit to the children. That's why people are concerned about this.
Richard Helppie
You mentioned long term, have we had something that in the world of immunology could be defined as long term yet? Because these are brand new, right?
Dr. James Baker
Well, I mean, part of the problem is that the former pandemic, now non-pandemic, has evolved so rapidly, the situation keeps changing. So in fact, the risk is much lower, because the frequency of infection is much lower. Many of these children have already had primary immunization schedules with this, which is the most important thing to do. So it's sort of chasing itself right now. We really need to decide if we think public health-wise, not politically, that the pandemic is over. How do we look at the long term now with this infection? What frequency of immunization is important? What groups should get this? What value is it for them? There has to be a value for people, they don't want to expose their children to things that provide them no useful protection.
Richard Helppie
It can be worse than that, too, because I have read from people firsthand saying, now I'm questioning all vaccines. It's like, no, we don't need to bring back polio and whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, etc. There's no need to bring these back. But they're saying, well, if this vaccine was kind of oversold, and that people want to give it to my child, and I don't think that's a good thing, what am I doing with the rest of these vaccines? And it seems to me to be real easy to introduce...
Dr. James Baker
It's a disaster from that perspective. We really need appropriate people to stand up in government, in academia, in industry, and give an honest perspective on this together. I think what we need to do is have a public health summit about this, and review what's happened, review where we've been, review our best guess about where we're going, and how to deal with this medically. Whether it's vaccines, whether at this point that's antivirals for the people at risk, the monoclonal antibodies clearly need to be updated all the time, because they're the one thing that gets knocked off with a new variant. But we need to do that. And part of the reason we need to do that is your other question, which was about the bio lab. What we're seeing now is what I would call the the publication craze of science. It used to be when you did a research study it went through rigorous peer review, where independent people looked at it and decided whether or not it made sense. Before you even did the study, your grant was reviewed to see if it made sense. Now what we're seeing is that papers get put out on the internet without any review. People do things without asking the appropriate review committees whether or not they should be doing them. This episode with the New England, highly dangerous, pathogen lab, I think is a good example.
Richard Helppie
What exactly is going on? What is being built? What's its stated purpose, and what are the risks?
Dr. James Baker
This was actually something that came out of 2001 and the anthrax attacks, and we realized we really didn't have an infrastructure where people could study a pathogen that was being released, either as a natural contagion or as a weapon. So in fact, NIH funded nine centers across the country. I was actually on the review committee for this and also among the panel for the Argonne National Laboratory site. Most of them are in lock-down places because you don't want this thing to get up. There was a lot of debate about the Boston site, because there wasn't a natural collection of people there that did this type of research. It's more of a biotech hub, that they felt that if people were going to develop drugs and vaccines, they needed a place to test some. So they built this beautiful - as you've seen in the pictures - new facility to do this work. But because there really isn't a lot of ongoing work there it's been underutilized and a group of, basically, chemists thought it would be interesting to try and mix and match corona viruses to see if they could make some of the Omicron variants more deadly. And they actually chose [crosstalk].
Richard Helppie
Why would you want to make Omnicron more deadly?
Dr. James Baker
We already know that the primary changes in Omicron that make it less deadly are in the spike protein, which is the protein that attaches the virus to mucous membranes. So that's not brain surgery. We know, basically, why we're making vaccines of only the spike protein, because that's the difference. So what these folks did, they took the spike protein from the original virus and put in Omicron and showed that it became more like the original virus. I mean, there was nothing to gain from this. They put it up on a website without any review. Turns out they were using NIH facilities, although they claim not NIH funds, so they never asked NIH or the bio-defense community about this. And then my favorite part is after people pointed this out and said, we don't think this is appropriate, they attacked the press for sensationalizing this. I mean, what the heck are we talking about here, you put this out for general distribution without any caveats, suggesting that it wasn't the right thing to do or what you're going to gain out of this and the bottom line is, then you argue that the press is making something of it. NIH has stepped in, fortunately, and said that this was wrong. This was wrong to do without approval in their facility. They're going to investigate, and I hope they look long and hard at these facilities. Some of them like this [one] that are open in the middle of Boston, we might think about closing down.
Richard Helppie
Right, they were in a population center, they're making a virus that is more deadly, that we know spreads more easily. I guess we should take some comfort there's not a wet market there, right. [Laughter].
Dr. James Baker
People aren't buying rats and bats on the streets of Boston to eat. But most of the other sites, not surprisingly, are in national labs where you have full protection, you're away from everything. Oregon has a fully protected perimeter. This thing is in the middle of Boston, and sure they've got a nice fence around it but bugs don't abide by fences. I was just astounded, not just by the fact they did it without much to gain but then they attacked the press for sensationalizing it.
Richard Helppie
Well, the media handling of all this, and we've seen it on social media, where if the then current thinking about the virus was challenged, people got shut off. Highly regarded researchers, of course, the three people that wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, who proved themselves correct, they were shut down. We had the highest levels of our government manipulating social media and the legacy press about what was actually going on.
Dr. James Baker
I think shutting off that debate was one of the most harmful things to public perception. I think people felt that if we couldn't have rational debate among appropriate people there was something wrong.
Richard Helppie
And so much misinformation. There were treatments, let's take Ivermectin; there was a false story that a hospital in Oklahoma was being overrun by people overdosing on Ivermectin. Associated Press picked it up, New York Times picked it up, and it went around the world. People were being mocked. It never happened, that event never happened.
Dr. James Baker
On the other hand, when we got true data - blind use of Ivermectin that no one, either the patient or the doctor, knew they were getting it - it made no difference at all in treating these people, that wasn't publicized well. It drove me crazy because the good data gets lost in this morass, and this is not just saying people that don't have scientific credentials; it's like these guys in Boston, you're doing things that don't make sense, that don't help people, that just either make them more afraid, or basically make you not trust the scientific community. That's really what's undermined everything going forward and we need to do something to correct that.
Richard Help pie
Indeed, and part of this is the origins of the virus. What do we know today? Is there a consensus about whether this was manufactured in a lab in Wuhan, or somehow, where it leapt from an animal of some type to humans? Is there a consensus or any ongoing investigation of that?
Dr. James Baker
So I think there's more agreement about the fact that this was probably not engineered. Whether or not it was isolated from an animal and accidentally released, either from a commercial source or a laboratory, isn't clear. And obviously, very reasonable people - David Relman, people in the scientific community - have raised the question that we really haven't answered the origins of this. That's important - not to blame people - I mean, it would be good to know where this came from because if this came from a laboratory, then we need to focus on laboratory safety. If it came from a market, then we need to focus more on natural exposures and evolution. I think we may have to do both, quite honestly. But what's the relative risk? If the relative risk is mainly with laboratories, we need to be much more careful in our laboratories. If the relative risk is that nature keeps throwing these things out, we need to have some sort of system that periodically is checking nature. We've seen now people going into bat caves in different parts of the world to see what viruses are there and what the potential is. It may be that we could have vaccines on the shelves, waiting for some of these to come out. Because as humans get closer and closer to animals and move into animal environments, we're going to be exposed to new things.
Richard Helppie
That is exactly the conversation that should be in the public eye versus we're not going to talk about this because we've decided that it is a forbidden theory. Similarly when the treatments with Ivermectin came out, they said, oh, this is a horse medication. It turns out, well, maybe there is a human dosage, now whether it worked or not that should have been the discussion. There are people who have a theory that it works, data looks at it in a blind study, doesn't really make a difference - case closed. Instead, it was used to excite people and demonize other treatments or demonize the people that thought they wanted to try this.
Dr. James Baker
There were lots of things at the beginning that looked like they might be helpful. These transfusions from people who had been infected, the plasma exchange, also failed. Actually it was an interesting story, but the day that Henry Ford released their open label data suggesting there was benefit from Ivermectin, we also had the large study in Europe, of course, where they did the double blind that showed it didn't help. And this also gives you an idea that physicians want things to work. I mean, as a physician, I want a drug to work. So in fact, if you're going to do a study, you need to do it blinded, you can't let your own predisposition...
Richard Helppie
Right, you cannot direct the outcome. So now we've been fighting this pandemic for a period of years, the president of the United States who, of course, was also infected, declares that the pandemic is over. Our president gets the best health care in the world, thankfully, yet was unable to prevent an infection. We've lost a lot of people no doubt about that. The scientific and medical community rallied, it should have been a great uniter of society. It seems to be something that's polarizing us even further. If you had to summarize where are we today and where do we go forward? What things are on your mind?
Dr. James Baker
What's on my mind is how little we focus on the good things and how we could take them forward. I think the vaccine development that was kick-started by this is really remarkable, and it will have implications for many diseases, maybe even cancer. We seem to have lost that in the debate about how we're using this particular vaccine at this point. I think the other thing is we took the worst punch that nature could give us, we lost a lot of people, it disrupted society; God help the poor young people who were out of school for a year in places like Ann Arbor. But we continue and we move forward. The resiliency of the human race is really a remarkable thing to me. People are trying to work, people are trying to get back to normal, to restore society to normal. I think one of the things that Tony said early on - Tony Fauci is a friend, a hero of mine - but one of the things that bothered me the most, he said early on, I don't think things will ever return to normal again. And I think that's totally wrong. That's against human nature. That's against what we've seen; the minute we got the deaths controlled, people wanted to go out, they wanted to fly, they wanted to visit places, they wanted to go to restaurants, they wanted their lives back. We should be supporting that and reveling in the fact that people have been able to move on, that the science did help with this. And now where does it take us? Where do we go with this now? And yet, we've lost most of the good things that this taught us in the noise and the fighting.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, and from a political or public policy view, I take note that virtually no one running for office in these 2022 midterms is talking about, hey, look at the great job we did fighting COVID. If you go back just two short years ago, on the 2020 election, President Biden, Vice President Harris were saying, well, first thing, we're going to fight this virus. They're not even talking about that now. They don't want to talk about the decisions they made. Certain governors, like Governor DeSantis in Florida, is saying no, we did the right thing, we protected the vulnerable, we kept kids in school, we think we managed that public health crisis as well as could be, we think we made more right calls. New York, Michigan, elsewhere - they don't even want to talk about it. You mentioned out of school in Ann Arbor for a year, our governor only thought it was three months. Speaks volumes to the disconnect between science and the government.
Dr. James Baker
Most of us, it felt like five years.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. I know how it personally affected me and I said we're going to get back to normal. But after numbing month after numbing month, I kind of forgot what normal was. That's the real tragedy. How were we feeling and we seemed happier, and now it's like, we're kind of running in molasses, so to speak.
Dr. James Baker
Well, we need to have some type of summit and look at all the outcomes. Florida versus Michigan versus New York; what people did that worked, what people did that didn't work, so that the next time we don't waste our noise and our energy trying all kinds of things that made no sense. I mean, just the amount of craziness that went on, that should go away. Now we have a modern society that's been through this, we need to learn from what happened here to put best practices together for the next time so we don't have this fighting, we don't have this argument. People know that this is going to hit us. We know we're going to take a hit with this but we can expect within 18 months to be back. If we just do these things, protect the vulnerable, maybe not keep kids out of schoo,l we'll do okay. And that's the real problem here; we haven't learned from this.
Richard Helppie
Well, we're refusing to learn because it may run against the political narrative that somebody's running. Look, I can't say that closing the schools was a bad idea. Because [crosstalk]
Dr. James Baker
We need to get the damn politics out of this; it is poisoning the discussion and it's poisoning any benefit we can reap from this, and there should be great benefit.
Richard Helppie
I am in heated agreement with you that everything's going through a political lens instead of science. Then we are [saying] well, we're going to follow the science but never mentioned what science are you following? I'm a data guy. I'm a fact guy. I'm also willing to accept [that] we don't know, certain things didn't work yet. We've kind of got this political expectation that there's going to be a magic bullet. Remember that one political persuasion was saying, you get the vaccine, it stops the virus. The right answer would have been, we hope it stops it, because that's the best thing we've got now, but we don't know. We weren't allowed to say we don't know. I hope you're on everybody's shortlist for surgeon general or running the CDC, because we need more common sense, but our political system doesn't bring our best and brightest in.
Dr. James Baker
We need non-political, intellectual discussion about what we're going to do next time. Don't let an opportunity, don't let an experiment of nature like this, go to waste.
Richard Helppie
Could the University of Michigan host that summit?
Dr. James Baker
Absolutely. We have one of the world's best public health schools, we have world's best hospitals. It would be a great place. It's a public institution. I think that would be a great idea. If they want to hold it in Washington, or someplace else, that's fine, too. But get the politics out of it. Get the public health people, get the scientists, the vaccinologists together and plod forward. The Institute of Medicine should get involved - the National Academy of Medicine, they changed the name - but the National Academy should get involved in doing a concise, best practices. Learn from the pandemic so that the next time we aren't flailing at this.
Richard Helppie
Well, I agree with everything except take it to Washington. Come on here to the Midwest, where we can speak honestly, where we're really trying to solve problems. A place to house it, if the weather was good, put them in Michigan Stadium, bringing 100,000 of the best scientists in the world for that.
Dr. James Baker
That would be a super spreader event for truth.
Richard Helppie
I like that. In fact, there's the headline: super spreader event for truth in science. All right, we have a new president of the university and we'll make sure that he gets a look at this. Let's see if we might be able to host that. Who knows?
Dr. James Baker
Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed that somebody does.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. Dr. Baker is or anything that we haven't talked about today that you'd like the listeners and the readers and viewers of the Common Bridge to hear or any closing remarks? It's been another great session.
Dr. James Baker
I love to tell everyone, you've done a tremendous thing: you've survived. You've done what you thought was best for your children and your families. You've restarted society in a way that many had predicted would never happen and people should be proud of that. They should be proud of what we've accomplished as individuals in a society. And we should move forward with more confidence having dealt with this thing. I hope everyone can take that message home.
Richard Helppie
So clearly, it's a win for the society that we're not claiming.
Dr. James Baker
Absolutely, we focus too much on the negative.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. Thank you so much for the generosity of your time to be on The Common Bridge. I know you've been appearing on local TV with Devin Scillian, on the local NBC affiliate. Devin does a great job with interviewing (Dr. Baker: He's terrific.) You started here on the Common Bridge, and to NBC, just don't forget about The Common Bridge, as you become the spokesperson nationally and internationally, because we sure appreciate your willingness to share.
Dr. James Baker
Well, it's great having the time to get into depth on these issues with you, Rich.
Richard Helppie
And that's what The Common Bridge is about. We're here to inform versus influence. And we're just very grateful for your bringing your expertise, sir. (Dr. Baker: Right. Thank you.) We've been talking today with Dr. James Baker of the University of Michigan; physician, researcher, immunologist, expert in viruses, pandemics, and what we've done well, what we've not done so well, what we know, what we don't know. Thank you for joining us on The Common Bridge. And with our guest, Dr. James Baker, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
COVID Today- Kids, Politics and …Bio labs in Boston?