Hi, it's your host Laura Carlson, and I've got a quick request for an upcoming episode. We want to hear your stories. Has the pandemic caused you to seek mental health care? If you're willing to talk about it, we'd like you to leave us a voicemail at one six or six three, two four three four nine zero. Tell us as much or as little as you want about your need to reach out for help, and then tell us whether you've been able to find it. That number again is one six four six three two four three nine zero. We may use your voice on an upcoming episode. Now onto the show. Welcome to Prognosis. It's day twenty two since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today, how long will it take to develop up the vaccine? But first, today's news, a new intelligence report suggests China has concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak. Three US officials told Bloomberg about a classified report the intelligence community sent to the White House saying China underreported both its total cases and deaths. The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and did not describe its contents in detail. But they said the thrust of the report is that China's public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. In the US, which now has the largest public reported outbreak in the world, estimate show as many as two hundred and forty thousand Americans could die from COVID nineteen, and that's with mitigation efforts in place. Based on these projections, US President Donald Trump took a newly sober tone in a Tuesday briefing. I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We're going to go through a very tough two weeks and then, hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied it so hard, you're gonna start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel. But this is going to be a very painful, very very painful two weeks. For weeks, Trump had downplayed the threat of the virus, frequently telling reporters that it would simply go away. But at the Tuesday briefing, Deborah Burke's, the top public health official coordinating the Coronavirus Task Force, cited an estimate that US deaths would be between one and two hundred thousand, even with the most stringent mitigation measures in place. Mitigation measures like isolating people in their communities have started to show signs of working in some countries. Lockdown steps in the Netherlands seem to be having an effect. The number of fatalities and hospital admissions in the country is increasingly slower than would be expected without such measures at a Dutch research institute. Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun holding meetings remotely from his residence outside Moscow after being exposed to a doctor who is later diagnosed with coronavirus, said a Kremlin spokesman. The Kremlin says that Putin is regularly tested and is fine. Now for today's main story, why does a vaccine take so long? Scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for COVID nineteen, but experts have said it could take a year to eight months for one to hit the market, and some think even eighteen months is conservative. The process for testing and approving of vaccine is long and complicated. That can be frustrating when the coronavirus is taking more and more lives every day. But cutting corners to push a vaccine through faster can lead to devastating consequences. We know that because it's happened before. Jason Gale has more on what it takes to develop a working vaccine and just how close we are to finding one for the virus. Today we met with the big great pharmaceutical companies and they're really working hard and they're working smart, and we had some We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies, and they can have vaccines, I think relatively soon, and they're gonna have something that makes you better, and that's gonna actually take place, we think even sooner. So it's a lot of good things are happening. But we have strong quarters. And you could be forgiven for thinking we already have a vaccine for the coronavirus, and actually that's sort of true. There are several, but there are only in the experimental stages. Healthy adults were immunized with an investigational vaccine in Seattle in mid March. These volunteers are due for a second shot in the upper arm in a week or so. It's part of clinical research funded by the National Institutes of Health that will continue for twelve months, which means it will take more than a year to fully evaluate the safety and efficacy of the vaccine candidate. And there's a good reason for not cutting any corners. No one knows exactly how serious this threat could be. Nevertheless, we cannot afford jadaka chance with the health of our nation. In nineteen seventy six, a late winter outbreak of swine flu at a military base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, led to fears of a devastating pandemic. President Gerald Ford announced him mass vaccination plan. First, I am asking the Congress to appropriate a hundred and thirty five million dollars for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States. Congress passed a liability act that basically indemnified the United States government for the safety of the vaccine. A first shot was withdrawn over safety concerns, leaving a second. By the end of the year, forty million out of some two hundred million Americans got the JAB. The problem was no pandemic appeared, but that second vaccine well. One of those who did roll up hers leave was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy and active woman when in November of nineteen seventy six. She took her shot. Two weeks later, she says she began to feel a numbness starting up her legs. I talked about at that time. I said, I've been under the knees by Friday. Is it keeps up by the following week? How was totally fair aline. It was linked to an immune dysfunction, a disease called Giame Bret syndrome. He's Laurie Garrett pullit Surprisemann, science writer who covered the story. And so a fair percentage of the recipients I mean when I say a fair percentage, less than one, but more than the zero that would be the norm, came down with giambre, which causes paralysis. And you know, it kind of stunned the nation. And because there was this giant pot of gold, meaning the indemnification that Congress had done, lawyers came out of the woodwork from everywhere. And the lawsuits persisted in federal courts for well over a decade. And that was a real mess. Needless to say, governments and vaccine makers are a lot more cautious. In fact, it wasn't unusual for a vaccine to take ten years to develop newer technology has helped beat up the process, but the real breakthrough came in two thousand and fourteen. The World Health Organization was able to coordinate clinical trials to test the safety of an experimental vaccine for a bowler a parallel study gauge the optimal dose needed for immunity. It demonstrated a new way of truncating early clinical research into just a few months, and that meant doctors could begin testing the evowl of vaccine and large numbers of people in West Africa just six months after the first person was given the shot. The brains behind that expedited research and development plan is Dr Murray Paul Kenney. She's a veteran vaccinologist who was an Assistant Director General at the who. You don't want to to confront people with a preparation which is not protecting them against the disease. So at months six we were able to start the phase three clinical trials in several thousand people to test whether easifficacious and the face turned out was successful. So it took about a year for scientists to determine that the candidate a bowl of vaccine worked. The vaccine is made by Merken Company. It was subsequently registered and it's played a huge role in containing a more recent bowler outbreak in the Congo and Murray Paul's process for fast tracking research during outbreaks informed a blueprint that research teams around the world are using now for testing not just COVID nineteen vaccines, but also drug treatments and diagnostics. Already, two candidate vaccines for COVID nineteen are being studied in humans. Besides the one that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Maderna are developing, there's a trial and a way of a vaccine in China. In addition, the WHO accounts fifty two other experimental immunizations in preclinical study. Here's Murray Paul again, and when they start king to try, they will need most likely a year to be sure that this vaccine work and to be able to start choosing people. Murray Paul retired from the w h O in two thousand and seventeen, and it's back working as a director of research for in the French National Health Research Organization. She's also on a pandemic committee advising French President Emmanuel Macron. She says the time it will take to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus. Means we need to do as much as we can now to slow its spread and to find drug treatments. But what if there was already a safe and inexpensive vaccine on the market to blunt the pandemic. Well maybe there is. Vacillus kalmic gerin or BCG is the name of the tuberculosis vaccine that's been around for a century. It's safe, it's inexpensive, and we give it to one and thirty million newborns a year, mostly in countries with the lung diseases still a major health problem. But the shot isn't us to use to prevent TB. It has some off target benefits, and it's a common immunotherapy for early stage bladder cancer. It also seeks to train the body's first line immune defense to better fight infections. Scientists are seeing if it can be effectively repurposed to fight COVID nineteen, studying with healthcare workers. As you know, it's probably going to take many months before a specific vaccine for COVID nineteen is developed, and in the meantime, we need to think of every possible way that we can protect healthcare workers, who of course are very high risk and it's going to be particular need to reduce the amount of time that our healthcare workers are absent. This is Professor Nigel Curtis. He's had of infectious diseases research at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne. He's also head of the Infectious Diseases unit at the city's Royal Children's Hospital. Staff they're volunteered to get the BCG vaccine this week in a randomized controlled try involving four thousand healthcare workers. Even people who got the shot as an infant are eligible to participate. That's because any beneficial off target effects of the vaccine are probably lost with time. Miragel says, we will follow our participants for the following six months or how the long coronavirus lasts in Australia, and we will compare those who didn't didn't get the BCG vaccine to see where the first of all, they actually developed symptoms of COVID nineteen and if they do, how severe those symptoms are, and that will enable us to see whether the vaccine and both reduces the number of people who have become affected by the virus and whether it can reduce the impact of that so particularly not only how un well they are, but how long that means they have to be off work, which of course is the very important thing for healthcare workers. Similar researches underway in the Netherlands, and other testing sites are planned in Australia and possibly the US. The Studies Data Monitoring Committee will review the results after three months to look for any signs at the approach is working. Nigel says he's optimistic, but there are no guarantees. The only way to find out is by doing a clinical trial. That's it for the Prognosis Daily Edition. For more on the coronavirus crisis from one bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus. If you appreciate the podcast, please take a moment to us and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted by me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by me tophor foreheas, Jordan Gaspoure, and Magnus Hendrickson. Reporting by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Hi, it's your host Laura Carlson, and I've got a quick request for an upcoming episode. We want to hear your stories. Has the pandemic caused you to seek mental health care? If you're willing to talk about it, we'd like you to leave us a voicemail at one six or six three, two four three four nine zero. Tell us as much or as little as you want about your need to reach out for help, and then tell us whether you've been able to find it. That number again is one six four six three two four three nine zero. We may use your voice on an upcoming episode. Now onto the show. Welcome to Prognosis. It's day twenty two since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today, how long will it take to develop up the vaccine? But first, today's news, a new intelligence report suggests China has concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak. Three US officials told Bloomberg about a classified report the intelligence community sent to the White House saying China underreported both its total cases and deaths. The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and did not describe its contents in detail. But they said the thrust of the report is that China's public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. In the US, which now has the largest public reported outbreak in the world, estimate show as many as two hundred and forty thousand Americans could die from COVID nineteen, and that's with mitigation efforts in place. Based on these projections, US President Donald Trump took a newly sober tone in a Tuesday briefing. I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We're going to go through a very tough two weeks and then, hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied it so hard, you're gonna start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel. But this is going to be a very painful, very very painful two weeks. For weeks, Trump had downplayed the threat of the virus, frequently telling reporters that it would simply go away. But at the Tuesday briefing, Deborah Burke's, the top public health official coordinating the Coronavirus Task Force, cited an estimate that US deaths would be between one and two hundred thousand, even with the most stringent mitigation measures in place. Mitigation measures like isolating people in their communities have started to show signs of working in some countries. Lockdown steps in the Netherlands seem to be having an effect. The number of fatalities and hospital admissions in the country is increasingly slower than would be expected without such measures at a Dutch research institute. Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun holding meetings remotely from his residence outside Moscow after being exposed to a doctor who is later diagnosed with coronavirus, said a Kremlin spokesman. The Kremlin says that Putin is regularly tested and is fine. Now for today's main story, why does a vaccine take so long? Scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for COVID nineteen, but experts have said it could take a year to eight months for one to hit the market, and some think even eighteen months is conservative. The process for testing and approving of vaccine is long and complicated. That can be frustrating when the coronavirus is taking more and more lives every day. But cutting corners to push a vaccine through faster can lead to devastating consequences. We know that because it's happened before. Jason Gale has more on what it takes to develop a working vaccine and just how close we are to finding one for the virus. Today we met with the big great pharmaceutical companies and they're really working hard and they're working smart, and we had some We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies, and they can have vaccines, I think relatively soon, and they're gonna have something that makes you better, and that's gonna actually take place, we think even sooner. So it's a lot of good things are happening. But we have strong quarters. And you could be forgiven for thinking we already have a vaccine for the coronavirus, and actually that's sort of true. There are several, but there are only in the experimental stages. Healthy adults were immunized with an investigational vaccine in Seattle in mid March. These volunteers are due for a second shot in the upper arm in a week or so. It's part of clinical research funded by the National Institutes of Health that will continue for twelve months, which means it will take more than a year to fully evaluate the safety and efficacy of the vaccine candidate. And there's a good reason for not cutting any corners. No one knows exactly how serious this threat could be. Nevertheless, we cannot afford jadaka chance with the health of our nation. In nineteen seventy six, a late winter outbreak of swine flu at a military base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, led to fears of a devastating pandemic. President Gerald Ford announced him mass vaccination plan. First, I am asking the Congress to appropriate a hundred and thirty five million dollars for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States. Congress passed a liability act that basically indemnified the United States government for the safety of the vaccine. A first shot was withdrawn over safety concerns, leaving a second. By the end of the year, forty million out of some two hundred million Americans got the JAB. The problem was no pandemic appeared, but that second vaccine well. One of those who did roll up hers leave was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy and active woman when in November of nineteen seventy six. She took her shot. Two weeks later, she says she began to feel a numbness starting up her legs. I talked about at that time. I said, I've been under the knees by Friday. Is it keeps up by the following week? How was totally fair aline. It was linked to an immune dysfunction, a disease called Giame Bret syndrome. He's Laurie Garrett pullit Surprisemann, science writer who covered the story. And so a fair percentage of the recipients I mean when I say a fair percentage, less than one, but more than the zero that would be the norm, came down with giambre, which causes paralysis. And you know, it kind of stunned the nation. And because there was this giant pot of gold, meaning the indemnification that Congress had done, lawyers came out of the woodwork from everywhere. And the lawsuits persisted in federal courts for well over a decade. And that was a real mess. Needless to say, governments and vaccine makers are a lot more cautious. In fact, it wasn't unusual for a vaccine to take ten years to develop newer technology has helped beat up the process, but the real breakthrough came in two thousand and fourteen. The World Health Organization was able to coordinate clinical trials to test the safety of an experimental vaccine for a bowler a parallel study gauge the optimal dose needed for immunity. It demonstrated a new way of truncating early clinical research into just a few months, and that meant doctors could begin testing the evowl of vaccine and large numbers of people in West Africa just six months after the first person was given the shot. The brains behind that expedited research and development plan is Dr Murray Paul Kenney. She's a veteran vaccinologist who was an Assistant Director General at the who. You don't want to to confront people with a preparation which is not protecting them against the disease. So at months six we were able to start the phase three clinical trials in several thousand people to test whether easifficacious and the face turned out was successful. So it took about a year for scientists to determine that the candidate a bowl of vaccine worked. The vaccine is made by Merken Company. It was subsequently registered and it's played a huge role in containing a more recent bowler outbreak in the Congo and Murray Paul's process for fast tracking research during outbreaks informed a blueprint that research teams around the world are using now for testing not just COVID nineteen vaccines, but also drug treatments and diagnostics. Already, two candidate vaccines for COVID nineteen are being studied in humans. Besides the one that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Maderna are developing, there's a trial and a way of a vaccine in China. In addition, the WHO accounts fifty two other experimental immunizations in preclinical study. Here's Murray Paul again, and when they start king to try, they will need most likely a year to be sure that this vaccine work and to be able to start choosing people. Murray Paul retired from the w h O in two thousand and seventeen, and it's back working as a director of research for in the French National Health Research Organization. She's also on a pandemic committee advising French President Emmanuel Macron. She says the time it will take to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus. Means we need to do as much as we can now to slow its spread and to find drug treatments. But what if there was already a safe and inexpensive vaccine on the market to blunt the pandemic. Well maybe there is. Vacillus kalmic gerin or BCG is the name of the tuberculosis vaccine that's been around for a century. It's safe, it's inexpensive, and we give it to one and thirty million newborns a year, mostly in countries with the lung diseases still a major health problem. But the shot isn't us to use to prevent TB. It has some off target benefits, and it's a common immunotherapy for early stage bladder cancer. It also seeks to train the body's first line immune defense to better fight infections. Scientists are seeing if it can be effectively repurposed to fight COVID nineteen, studying with healthcare workers. As you know, it's probably going to take many months before a specific vaccine for COVID nineteen is developed, and in the meantime, we need to think of every possible way that we can protect healthcare workers, who of course are very high risk and it's going to be particular need to reduce the amount of time that our healthcare workers are absent. This is Professor Nigel Curtis. He's had of infectious diseases research at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne. He's also head of the Infectious Diseases unit at the city's Royal Children's Hospital. Staff they're volunteered to get the BCG vaccine this week in a randomized controlled try involving four thousand healthcare workers. Even people who got the shot as an infant are eligible to participate. That's because any beneficial off target effects of the vaccine are probably lost with time. Miragel says, we will follow our participants for the following six months or how the long coronavirus lasts in Australia, and we will compare those who didn't didn't get the BCG vaccine to see where the first of all, they actually developed symptoms of COVID nineteen and if they do, how severe those symptoms are, and that will enable us to see whether the vaccine and both reduces the number of people who have become affected by the virus and whether it can reduce the impact of that so particularly not only how un well they are, but how long that means they have to be off work, which of course is the very important thing for healthcare workers. Similar researches underway in the Netherlands, and other testing sites are planned in Australia and possibly the US. The Studies Data Monitoring Committee will review the results after three months to look for any signs at the approach is working. Nigel says he's optimistic, but there are no guarantees. The only way to find out is by doing a clinical trial. That's it for the Prognosis Daily Edition. For more on the coronavirus crisis from one bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus. If you appreciate the podcast, please take a moment to us and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted by me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by me tophor foreheas, Jordan Gaspoure, and Magnus Hendrickson. Reporting by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.