I don't have the sound alerts.
It's on the blank scene here.
I apologize for that for playing that biology chant.
If you play it when I'm on screen or when there are any graphics on, then we'll hear
it.
I think truth is good for kids.
We're so busy lying, we don't even recognize the truth no more in this society.
We want everybody to feel good.
That's not the way life is.
The world's protected stuff at all times, follow my instructions, keep it clean, touch
gloves if you wish, let's do it.
This is so crazy, like these bumps, this is so crazy, I feel so nervous, like what
in the world, man?
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, good evening, welcome to the show, this is GIGO and biological.
We're a little late tonight at 20 in the hour, but that's the way it works.
Sometimes you can get on during the day like I plan to, sometimes I can't.
Welcome very much to the stream.
If you've been here for a while, you're here at the top of the wave, we are staying focused
on the biology here, we don't take the bait on television, we love our neighbor.
We're trying to rescue these skilled TV watchers down here at the bottom, the way
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message is getting out there, and so if you can share the work, get it out there,
the independent bright web is growing very slowly, and I'm really, really excited how much progress
we've made. So let's see here, I do believe I am prepared to shift over
to the desktop.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Giga Ohm Biological, a high resistance low noise
information brief brought to you by a biologist, it is the 14th of February, that's right 2024,
and we are still trying to continuously push back against that big hand in the picture there,
that is consciously manipulating the organized habits and opinions of the masses,
and we really need to start to understand this. More importantly, we need to help our children
understand how vulnerable they are to this and how easily we were misled with just a few TV
channels and a few newspapers, and now it is ever ever ever easier for these kinds of ruling powers
to control everything that matters, and these weaponized piles of money are what we're really
up against. So I've got my empire jacket on today, I used to be a cat and magician, I used to work
at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, so I was knee deep in this, I was neck deep into
this, I fully believed that the vast majority of science being funded in America was a great idea,
I was pretty skeptical of the just sheer amount of money they were throwing at cancer,
but it never really dawned on me that the fundamental idea of how they were trying to cure it was wrong.
Anyway, here we are, the principle of informed consent has been ignored for the duration of the
pandemic, and it's not a lot we can seem to do about it, that's not what I want and I want this one,
and so we're trying to push against this, and I went past that a little fast, because actually
this hidden ruling power in our country, one proxy for it, one way to kind of understand it is how
these intellectual dark web people were put in place between 2017, 18 and 19 and slowly used
the algorithm and artificial means and you know, bros with shows having each other on their shows
and collectively promoting each other through social media, we have an invisible sort of governance
structure that influences us through social media and it shouldn't be underestimated how much of those
avenues and opportunities have been harvested by the people who would like to control us.
I really think we're very close to people starting to really catch on to the big picture that people
like Mark and I have been able to see for quite some time. I think it's really starting to come
into focus for us and we're starting to get better handles on how to share it with you and with others
and so I'm very excited about it. I do think one of the bigger insights that we've had in the last
six or eight months is really honing in on the idea that there was likely a coordinated worst
case scenario team of medlers. People in behind the scenes funded by various sources of money,
including you know, just weaponized piles of money and the idea was to fuel this worst case
scenario so that the fear and uncertainty and doubt that would be necessary for people to go
along with the lockdowns, to go along with the school closures and to go along with the
testing and all this other yada yada that they rolled out in order to make sure that that was
taken very seriously. They needed this to be taken as real and the worst case scenario is being
plausible and in fact we know that this was not only drilled into number one, the publication
record and number two, the upper level bureaucracy with tabletop drills. We also know that it was
most likely done in a way in terms of the preparation for this or any other of such crisis,
it was already drilled into those crisis preparations that when this happens,
before we know how bad it is, we need the citizens of every nation in the world to take it seriously
as though it is the worst case scenario in order to achieve the level of compliance that we're
going to require if any of these non-pharmaceutical interventions are going to have any effect.
In other words, if you don't take everybody doesn't take the masking seriously, the effect
won't be significant. That's exactly what Brett Weinstein argues even now as he pseudo-apologizes
for having allowed our children to be forced masks for a year and a half.
Well, the effect wasn't significant. Was I dumb for advocating for masks? No, because we didn't
know if they wouldn't work. That was his argument. And again, that's about teamwork case scenario.
You don't have to be necessarily on board with the worst case scenario. You have to be on board
with the possibility. And that's what would make the idea of wearing masks. If this was really
a 50% kill rate virus, wearing masks to increase your chances of not getting it from 50% to 55%,
according to Brett Weinstein might be a different difficult thing to measure, but it's definitely
a significant. That's the kind of thinking that's going on in his head. As long as the numbers
are small enough, they're not zero. And so since they're not zero, I wasn't wrong for advocating
for this stuff. But what he doesn't see is that masking children for a year and a half and confusing
adults for a year and a half with the use of lockdowns and the use of masks and goggles,
which he also advocated for, created the illusion of worst case scenario as a legitimate possibility
of a billion people dead, like Kevin McCarran said, a legitimate possibility.
And so as we focus on the team worst case scenario, the other half of this idea of driving you into
this fear, uncertainty and doubt was to get you motivated to solve the mystery of where did this
thing come from? Because once you're considering that maybe I'm going to lose half of my family
to this in a year and a half, you start to become very curious about where this actually came from
and who's telling the truth. And that cleverly enough was also part of the orchestrated plan
to make sure that they got maximum compliance. Because if they convinced the left and the right,
when the mystery was solved, the conclusion is the preponderance of evidence points to a lab leak,
then the worst case scenario has just been accepted. And you've just gone as far away from the truth
as you possibly can if you accept that, wow, we just experienced a lab leak. It might have even been a
lab release. And now you're as far away from understanding that intramuscular injection of
any combination of substances with the intent of augmenting the immune system is dumb. Here is far
away from understanding that is possible. And maybe you've even bought into the idea that
transfection and healthy humans saved millions of lives rather than being criminally negligent.
Again, as far away from the truth as you possibly could be.
And if you believe that viruses are capable of circulating the globe for five years with high
fidelity, and we have recorded millions of sequences as a result of this, this high fidelity,
then you are as far away from the truth as you possibly can be because viruses are not pattern
integrity. Holy cow, look at this. Whatever these signals are, these viruses, they're not
pattern integrity. So, so we have this all cracked now, we have the broad, broad strokes of biology
here. And if we can bring people to want to understand this, we have answers for this stuff.
We can go as deep as they want to. And this, I think, is the way we're going to fight the spread
of these bad ideas is we're going to spread good ideas.
We don't have to worry about the spread of any RNA molecule right now. I assure you of that.
But the illusion of consensus is still spreading. Brett Weinstein is on the Tucker Carlson show,
and and Alex Jones spreading the illusion of consensus everywhere he goes.
And Joe Rogan, quite around of of of PR for a guy who whose boat is sinking rapidly
as the vast majority of the people on the internet realize that this guy is not the sort of thought
leader that that we want him that he wants us to believe he is, and that his fans want to believe he
was. But unfortunately, the real unfortunate thing is, is that a lot of the people on this
screen back here were not the thought leaders that we they should have been. I was not the
thought leader I should have been in 2020. And at at at some moment, I could have come to the truth
had it not been for so many of these medlers. And yes, I'm very willing to blame it on other
people in this scenario, because I tried my best to bounce the ideas that I'm now feeling are the
closest to the target. I have been bouncing those ideas off of other people for quite some time and
running into quite a lot of resistance to them. And it is with that resistance that creates the
confusion and the doubt, you know, I didn't start out a virologist at the beginning of the pandemic,
believe it or not. In fact, I didn't start out as an immunologist before the pandemic either.
I started out as a broadly trained biologist, and a specifically trained neurobiologist.
But I started with the requisite skills, which are, you know, reading and critical thinking.
And so we have to push back. We're trying to organize a a sort of,
uh, not we're trying to organize, we are noticing the organization
of a group of people that seems to all have the same argument.
And there's not a lot of coordination involved in in getting this group to finally coalesce.
And so the question really is how long and how long is it going to take us to push back on this
before the, the idea starts to become to penetrate just our side of the discussion where
ladies and gentlemen, we need to consider the possibility there there was no significant spread
of a risk pathogen. It's just not there. And that we might not understand the molecular biology
as well as they think we should or they want us to believe we do.
And so I've, I've been very, well, this is why that repeating. Am I pushing the wrong
universal? There we go. So I wanted to do three videos of Ralph Barrick right at the beginning
of the pandemic or right around the start or an hour in, an hour in a year in, because
in a way, the naive betrayal of Ralph Barrick as being just this guy who's just trying to do his best
to do good in the world is part of the Scooby-Doo. It's supposed to be so over the top that you think,
wow, isn't it obvious that he's a bad guy? He's obviously responsible for this.
Or the people who took his recipes are, maybe Alison Totura brought the recipe of this to
US Amered. And that's the reason why, I don't know, in 2019, she wrote a paper with Cina Bavari
about a coronavirus pandemic from China from a bat cave that needed Remdesivir.
So let's watch a couple of these videos and see if we notice any patterns with the story that they
tell about Ralph Barrick. And then after that, what I want to watch is a video from 2020
where members of the US Department of Defense and US military are explaining how they plan to
contribute to the look, the search for effective countermeasures. And this is at the beginning
of March 2020. I think you're going to find this video very, very interesting. And I think I will,
so we'll watch them all together. And these, I actually have only scanned one of them. The
other two I didn't have before. These are both from PBS North Carolina. At least two of the three
of them are from PBS North Carolina. I put them on Twitter before I even watched them.
Universal specialists. That's a strange word. Universal specialists.
People who have a creative toolbox that can rapidly employ that toolbox to whatever happens
to come down the pipe in the future. You could say Ralph Barrick has an infectious passion for
science, discovery, and coronaviruses. It's why he's known as the coronavirus hunter. I've studied
coronaviruses since about 1984. I guess that's... It's hard to do the math. 36, 37 years.
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 took most of the world by surprise, but not Ralph Barrick.
He's been on the front lines investigating coronavirus outbreaks throughout his career.
I was attracted to coronaviruses for a couple of reasons. The first reason is we knew nothing
about this family of viruses. The second thing is that what little we did know suggested that
they had a very unique way to replicate in the cell that had never been described for any other
RNA virus. I was interested in how viruses replicate, how their genomes are organized,
and how they regulate gene expression. So coronavirus, a virus that has dominated our lives,
what's it look like? How does it work? I'm going to do my best here at drawing this. I'm going to
draw it from the inside out. The payload of the virus is called a nucleic acid. It's an RNA
molecule that sort of is wrapped around here in the middle of the virus particle. And that RNA
is coated in a protein that I'm going to call the nucleic acid protein. Now surrounding that
is a little bubble of fat. Projecting out from this particle are these large petalimer spikes,
and it gives the virus its unique appearance in the electron microscope, and it looks like a
corona, or a halo around the sun. Hence the name coronavirus. Have you ever seen the
movie Alien? There's these little plant-shaped things that sort of open up those flaps opening
up right on the top is what happens on the coronavirus spike, and three of them anywhere from one to
three of these can open up. Here's your host cell, and there's a protein here called ACE2. It has
spaces in it that this can stick into that, and once that happens, boom. That was a bad
that was whoops that was oh gosh I forgot that this was this was in PowerPoint. My bad
strength in my mouth. It looks like they showed a picture they weren't supposed to show there.
Those little details, but scenes and antibody, they show up, and it looks like they're showing
antibody picture antibodies neutralizing the virus. Have you ever seen the movie Alien? There's
these little plant-shaped things that sort of open up those flaps opening up. So think of this
as a little bit of worst-case scenario as well, right? You don't need to provoke the alien,
you know, you don't need to provoke alien as a way of explaining this. You could also explain
it like a flower or something beautiful, but they always choose war or disease, right?
And combating or it's always a negative and scary thing. Now they're actually showing a picture of
the alien movie. Right on the top is what happens on the coronavirus spike, and three of them
anywhere from one to three of these can open up. Here's your host cell, and there's a protein here
called ACE2. It has spaces in it that this... Oops, that's not the right picture, right? That's
not the right picture at all. This picture is, looks like antibodies that are neutralizing the
spike and preventing them from binding, which is a bad cut on the part of PBS, but maybe not,
if they're trying to throw this image into your head. Stick into that, and once that happens, boom,
virus goes inside the cell and affects it. Look at his face, he's so excited. Look at that.
Emerge, adapt, and revert with like a virus with like jaws in the middle, looks like.
I mean, I don't know, you know, it's really a little bit like, is this a Scooby-Doo villain here?
Is that what a Scooby-Doo villain would put on his door? Or is it like he is definitely a
bio-weapon scientist, and so they put this there to make sure that nobody actually believes he is,
because nobody who is really a bio-weapon scientist would put a bio-weapons jaws picture on their door,
that says Emerge, adapt, and revert? It's just so comical to me, who are supposed to take this
guy seriously. He's definitely a puppet or a pawn, even if he belongs in jail, because he figured
some of this stuff out. He's not the guy who masterminded any of this. Like, he researchers
worked 15 hour days in secure labs under strict protocols. Everyone united in the
tedious process of analyzing the virus, and then testing drugs to create a vaccine to stop it.
It's been a whirlwind of, you know, just absolute pressure,
enjoyed to at the same time when we figured out that a lot of these projects that we were involved
with was some of the major vaccine players. In fact, two out of the five Operation Warp Speed
vaccines, both Johnson and Johnson and Moderna, so it was really a good day whenever we heard that
the vaccines were incredibly effective in humans and face-free clinical trials.
So there he's talking about the vaccines being very effective and them being very
proud of it, because they were involved in both of them. That's pretty cool. I mean, I'd be pretty
proud too, right? Not only have we been involved in developing vaccines and antibody therapeutics
against the COVID-19 virus, but we're also preparing for treatments and therapeutics for
other cousins of the COVID-19 virus that could potentially emerge into humans later on.
Gentle ability to have a very large and experienced lab, so a lot of people are working pretty
independently, heading up their own projects, forming working groups of like, okay, these people
are really great cloner, so they're going to work on making a molecular clone of the virus.
These people are really good with primary cells, so we're going to start collaborations with the
Mercico Lung Institute and really try and understand what cell types are being infected
and what's happening with them. These are our core mouse users, and so these people are going
to work on developing mouse models of disease. Successful vaccines create a protective immune
response in the body. Let's go back to the book. So all they really need is the sequence off the
internet, and then they've got the cloners over there that can make the virus, and then they got
these people with the cell cultures, and they got people with the animal models,
you know, the humanized mice. I mean, it's all right there for you. It's really easy to see
how easy this arrogant laboratory can go from virus to gain a function disaster in a matter
of weeks. It's just brilliant. I mean, I don't know what questions are left to be answered other
than which one of these people is responsible for. To see just how that happens.
When the virus infects you, you make a protein called an antibody, and the goal of that antibody
is to bind to the virus particle and prevent it from binding into that receptor, and prevent it
from infecting that cell. The Beric Labs research was also central to the creation and clinical trials
of the antiviral drug Remdesivir. Antiviral medicines prevent the development of severe
disease. Similar drugs are in the pipeline. We're scientists, but what drives us really in people
in this field is really public health, right? Yes, we're interested in the minutiae of how does
the virus get in, how does it replicate? We're interested in all those little details, but the
reason we're interested in them is because it translates to public health, to what's happening
in people, and what can we do to help mitigate the disease burden, the suffering among people.
It was an all-hands-on-deck approach, and it turned Chapel Hill into a lab bench to bedside
place of research. Lots of interaction, especially as people moved in from other research areas where
they maybe didn't understand quite how coronaviruses were, but they had some ideas about lung biology,
or clotting, or other aspects of disease processes, and they needed to talk to people like Ralph,
so that they could really make sure that they're thinking about the nature of the disease process
correctly. Is the virus in the brain? Would you expect that to happen? Is the virus targeting
different tissues? A lot of these things were still trying to get the answers to.
And so, really, what he's describing is that a few people are the central hubs for any answers,
in this case. And so, you can basically consider the entire NIH hierarchy to be more or less
briefed based on what Ralph Barrack and Mark Denison and a couple other people say is
the gold standard or the running truth right now. If Ralph Barrack says coronaviruses do this,
and Mark Denison says, yes, Ralph's right, then that's what they're going to tell the bureaucracy.
That's what's going to go all through this machine. And you're hearing that even the pharmaceutical
companies and even these developers are calling Ralph for advice and consulting him.
I doubt that he's taking all those calls for free, but there's where we are.
If he is, he's taking those calls for free because they give him the prestige and the
centrality and the control over the narrative that he's supposed to have. And it also puts him
right at the focus of the Scooby-Doo, which is right where they want him to be.
It's pretty fun stuff.
Barrack's work saved countless lives and gave the world hope at a time it was desperately needed.
Because of that, Barrack was given the OMAX Gardener Award, the highest honor for a faculty
member in the UNC system. And when the pandemic happened, he and his team were able to move into
action right away because they had this knowledge of these viruses. So not only could he understand
the virus and work at the basic science level, but what Ralph does, it's really amazing,
is that he also cares about applying that knowledge to developing vaccines,
developing treatments, helping people avoid these diseases. He cares about individuals
and populations, and that's what's really public health. And what he has done, he and his colleagues
have done, will change the course of human history. Yeah, COVID-19, but that's funny.
Infectious disease. Definitely gonna change the course of his actual questions here.
Boy PBS works well with North Carolina, with the University of North Carolina, don't they,
they work well from now. But we will be better prepared because of Dr. Barrack's work. You don't
achieve these awards on your own, right? It's unfortunate enough to work with
a large number of extraordinarily competent and proficient professionals who care deeply
about human health and have dedicated a tremendous amount of their time and energy
to not only build their credentials, but to make me look smarter than I really am.
Quite frankly.
Thanks y'all for watching this video, and if you want more where that came from.
All right, let's keep going. This is awesome. I didn't realize they were going to be this good.
Well, the last couple of years have been just incredibly intense. You have to understand, though,
that this is what the Human Vaccine Institute is for. Our niche is to respond to the needs of
society on problems that are not immediately attractive to the pharmaceutical industry,
because they're so difficult.
To really understand what researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute are searching for,
you have to go back to a 13th century legend. To this guy, King Arthur, who sent his
nights of the roundtable on a quest for the Holy Grail. That term is now a metaphor for
anything eagerly sought after. Uh oh. And after the COVID-19 pandemic
had killed more than six million people in disrupted life across the entire planet,
the Holy Grail for these scientists is creating a vaccine that protects against all kinds of
coronaviruses. You know, we've had three epidemics now of coronaviruses. We had SARS,
severe acute respiratory syndrome that occurred in 2003. We had Middle Eastern
respiratory syndrome, MERS, that occurred in the Middle East, and then we have SARS-CoV-2 that
arose from a bat virus in China. There's reason to expect there'll be another, and that candidate
will be somewhere on the universe of coronaviruses. A vaccine that addresses a broad array of coronaviruses
could stop a future pandemic. That type of vaccine is called a pan vaccine. I have a picture
here of SARS-CoV-2. The receptors on those spikes are how the virus infects us. So the virus uses
these red spikes on its surface to physically attach to cells of the respiratory system,
either the upper respiratory system in our nose or down in our lungs and uses this molecule
to infect our cells. But those receptors can also be targeted by antibodies and prevented from
binding to human cells. So this is a model of an antibody. Vaccines teach our bodies to make
antibodies, and those antibodies block viruses from attaching to the cells in our bodies
and creating infections. Then I have here a model of this red molecule, the spike protein. So this
is the spike protein that is present on all over a SARS-CoV-2 virus. Within the spike protein,
there are pieces of it that bind to that host protein that it uses to infect ourselves. And
that is called the receptor binding domain or RBD. This is the piece of the spike protein to which
this antibody binds to prevent it from infecting. So by physically binding here, it blocks the
infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The key to creating a pan vaccine is finding a common receptor
between many types of coronaviruses that an antibody can bind onto. That's easy. We have a pathway
forward for how we expect to make the universe of coronavirus vaccine. And so that's what the team
here is working on. We have a path forward. So we're going to go forward. The two vaccine developed
at Duke and now in clinical trials may point the way to creating a pan vaccine. Oh come on. This
vaccine is constructed. So if you've ever looked at a soccer ball, you'll know that it has tiny hexagons
that come together to make the larger sphere. So that's what's shown here. And to the sphere,
we basically use it as a scaffold where we can take a small piece of a virus. There you go. This looks
a lot like what they did in Seattle, except Seattle, I think was a little bit more of this
spherical soccer ball. And that allows us a really potent way of being able to target that specific
piece of the virus. Early studies show the vaccine generates a strong immune response to the virus
that causes some kind of particle. So that's how the vaccine has been designed is to really
activate the immune system to see a specific site. And in this animation, it shows a blue
molecule that's the receptor Biden domain from SARS-CoV-2. And so that blue molecule gets a
rate around the surface of the molecule, the scaffold, and it makes the overall nanoparticle.
But what if you place pieces of other types of coronaviruses on that scaffold?
So what we know right now is that with one receptor Biden domain, you can induce a broad
neutralizing antibody response. So these are the antibodies that block infection.
But that can only get you so far. So that covers a certain number of viruses.
But to really go towards a universal coronavirus vaccine where you really are covering the majority
of coronaviruses, we know that we're going to need more than just one. And so this technology
is amenable to that, meaning that you can then take multiple pieces of viruses from multiple
different coronaviruses and array it and show it to the immune system.
That's totally one of the things that yours are scrambling to find.
Which parts of those of the spike protein are similar among all these viruses?
So I think with the- And so the important thing to understand here is that if you talk about
there being potentially a universal epitope or epitopes that are common across coronaviruses
and you talk about targeting those with an antibody, it doesn't mean either of those things
are possible that you can target an epitope with an antibody reliably and then produce it and get
it to work. And number two, it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to create the immunity to
that target and have it be meaningful. This is a- This is something that again, it kind of frames
the- I almost lost my train of thought there. It frames the spectrum of debate with certain
assumptions that if you're not sophisticated enough to realize that these assumptions aren't
good assumptions, then you go along with their little charade here about what's possible.
And so they- they repeat the- the assumptions that if we make this particle with more things on it-
But to really go towards a universal-
That we'll just create a universal-
We'll cover the majority of coronaviruses by adding other spike proteins or other
proteins to the outside of it and this technology is a minimal to that.
What you need to understand what he's saying is that he can fit grant applications.
He knows that there are upcoming grant calls that are going to ask for vaccine candidates
that can generate immunity to specific targets and show demonstrate correlates of immunity that
are antibodies. Hello. They all know how to play the game of getting money from the-
from the NIH for vaccines. It's about generating an antibody response in a robust one at that.
And that's why they're all telling the same story. We were just here a minute ago. The first video was
Robert- was Ralph Barrack singing at a passion coronavirus for coronaviruses since 1984. That's a
little weird. Why? Because we knew nothing about them and because they had a unique way of replicating.
Is that really why he started to work on them? Because they had a unique
way of replicating, isn't that weirdly on theme for the the exo gene exon gene and the proof
reading of coronaviruses debate that we're in right now.
And he said on what in that video as well that he just told the story of antibodies as being
the primary immunity to coronaviruses. Then we moved on to the Duke Vaccine Institute that
clarified that the pandemic disrupted life across the planet. We've had three pandemics,
therefore another pandemic is coming and they want to make a pan coronavirus vaccine.
They then emphasized that antibodies are primary immunity just like Ralph Barrack's video did.
And then they said they have a nano particle carrier candidate that can augment the immune
system usefully to several different targets. Well, holy crap, that's pretty impressive.
Holy grail researchers are scrambling to find which parts of those of the spike protein
are similar among all these viruses. So I think with the upfront work that we're doing now to
really put in place the technology for manufacturing, we'll be able to move this really quickly once
we decide on what's the right mix of coronaviruses for us to target.
Thanks y'all for watching this video. And if you want more where that came from,
check out our channel, Cy and C. So I had to. I had to.
The opportunity to take fundamental scientific advances. And so I had to stop that one there
because I couldn't believe what I was hearing, but so which parts which parts of the spike
are shared across coronaviruses is what that guy asked at the end of that video.
So there are approximately 29 to 31 proteins encoded in the coronavirus genome. And then you
can also argue because virology talks often about alternative reading frames in a viral genome that
can encode for more variants of proteins. And so you could have even more proteins than 30 or so
in a in a virus genome, depending on how those alternate reading frames are used.
Now secondly, the spike protein is one of the more variable proteins in the coronavirus genome.
And there are lots of other more highly conserved proteins in the genome. The E protein tends to be
more conserved. The N protein tends to be more conserved in the and many of the small proteins
in poly protein one A and one AB are also conserved. I'm not sure if it's one A and one B or if it's
one A and one AB. I think it's one A and one B, but it doesn't matter. There's a large open reading
frame that encodes for a poly protein that needs to be cut into several proteins, then reassemble
into the replication transcription complex or one of them. And those are also very conserved
proteins. So it's very interesting already in that that video from Duke, where they have already honed
in on and decided that all the relevant epitopes are in the spike because primary immunity is
antibodies to the spike. And so what we were talking about last night is actually really
important because that's the bad model, right? Anybody's in your blood for a apparently respiratory
and interior virus is just ridiculous. And all of these people should know this. And if they don't,
it's just shows how incompetent this this Academy edition factory has become.
So this is another Ralph Barrick video, but I think it's a little later or it's by it's not
by PBS. Let's put it that way. The clinic and see it undergo a trial and then see that the data
is spectacular. That's incredibly rewarding. And in 2020, it happened twice.
Our group has participated in the testing and development of the Moderna vaccine.
The other time was remdesivir. Nice. Which we had worked on since about 2014. Twice.
About two to three years before the SARS-2 pandemic, we started testing mRNA-based vaccines
against other coronaviruses about the time that date. I mean, I would go so far as to say that
Ralph Barrick's work and contribution to the use of remdesivir during the coronavirus pandemic
is something that he should he should answer for because he should have come out and so
should have marked Dennis and should have come out and said there's no way that this drug is
appropriate for humans. And it's certainly not appropriate for humans that are already in the
hospital because we already showed that. And both of those guys should have said something about
it. And the fact that they didn't say anything about it means either they are on the take or
they're on the the don't talk list like what I've listed back here behind the movie
or they're they're actively participating in the worst case scenario because they they realize
that it's a national security operation that whose goal is total compliance.
I mean, mentioning remdesivir in multiple promotion videos and taking credit for it.
I mean, that's that's that's as nasty as it gets because remdesivir is one of the things
that's really helped to exacerbate the fear, uncertainty and doubt about what's going on in
our hospitals and what's happening in our health care system. So you want to you want to call
Barrick out for that? That's fine. But don't don't give me this he invented the no-seum technique.
And that's the reason why we're here because that's ridiculous.
Once the no-seum technique was published, once that somebody in virology said, hey, by the way,
these these enzymes that recognize a sequence but cut somewhere else, these are really handy for
making sticky ends and and litigating large pieces of DNA together and doing it usefully and making
very big constructs. Oh, wow, cool. We wanted to do that in coronaviruses. We wanted to do that in
all RNA viruses. We'll start using those enzymes. That's great. Thanks.
And just like that, a technique becomes universal just like when somebody says, hey, you know,
if you use powdered sugar in your angel food cake, you get a better result. Oh, wow, great. Cool. Thanks.
You don't have to give credit to the French chef that came up with that idea.
Oh, I learned that from the guy who learned that from the guy who learned that from the guy
who learned that from that guy. And so it's his fault that we all make our cakes like this.
That's ridiculous. This is a very simple insight into assembly of DNA. And it is the
application of already long standing molecular biological techniques to make large quantities
of it. And then it's already the application of large long standing techniques of converting
that DNA to RNA. Just happens to be that this RNA is viral. And so apparently it does stuff.
And it makes any codes for proteins that make stuff.
And that's what RNA virology is all about. It's what that's what Ralph Berwick is covering up.
And pretending is some kind of special magic potion book or or secret grimoire of recipes that only
he has. But I guarantee you that Alison Totura took all those ideas and all those that knowledge
with her to us amored when she went. And I guarantee you that when they wrote that paper in 2019
Alison Totura and Cina Bavari when they wrote that paper, they were talking about the very
techniques that Alison learned in Ralph Berwick's lab for reverse genetics that were first pioneered
by people like David Baltimore. I was about to call him James Baltimore, David Baltimore.
And so David Baltimore is the first guy who made a clone of RNA virus in DNA and then translated it
RNA and it found out that it worked or did what they wanted it to do and made particles.
Now you want to look at that in those experiments and decide if that's really what happened,
go ahead and shoot and knock yourself out. But the point is is that Ralph Berwick didn't invent it.
He's just one guy in a long list of dudes who's you know clever with molecular biology,
but once it's out there, it's like bacon cakes. Once he figured out how to do it,
yes, the DoD knew how to do it. And there were lots of other scientists in the DoD who are
just as capable at the bench at mini-preps and and maxi-preps as as Ralph Berwick's grad students.
I assure you.
It was rolling out SARS-Coronavirus 2 emerge.
We were charged very early on to develop animal models of human disease so that we could immediately
test these vaccine candidates by April of 2020. We had to have all the data completed by the end
of June of 2020 so it could be included in the FDA packets that went forward for approval,
for phase three testing. So a lot of stress on people in the lab.
We're going from a new virus that we received in late February to having all of that done
by the end of June so that we could begin phase three testing with the Moderna.
Late February, he says, they received the virus in late February as if he needed the virus to,
you know, to make the synthetic clone.
When was this the Hohomish County man? Was that February? Was he February?
Is anybody out there? Talk to me, Goose. Was it February that that's the Hohomish County man?
Was he January? Talk to me, Goose. Vaccine by August. It was non-stop here for for some of
the coronavirus. I volunteered to be part of the trial. I figured if I was involved in the
preclinical development, I should be one of the first ones to see how well it worked in humans
and so I volunteered for the phase three trial and when they jabby in the arm with the vaccine,
it was very real. I could assure you it was very real. There's a protein here called ACE2.
It has spaces in it that this can stick into that and once that happens, boom.
Virus goes inside the cell infection. That's the infection.
This was a collaborative effort. There it is again. Other key players certainly were Moderna
and researchers at the National Institute of Health. The unsung heroes are 15 people in my lab
that work non-stop from February through December. So is this already a hint that they're going to
throw Pfizer under the bus for process two but they're going to say that Moderna didn't cut that
corner or what? I don't understand how that works. Did Moderna cut that corner or not? I don't
understand. I don't remember what was the what Kevin McCurnan's data shows if there's DNA in both
or not. The rapid response in terms of therapeutic antibodies, vaccines and drugs against COVID-19
is sort of an unparalleled scientific achievement in biology and microbiology and medicine.
That entire infrastructure of collaboration and interaction. I think he could have taken it
interface paid off. It paid off for the American people. Having said that, we can do better.
We learned that we need to reinvest in public health. We need to speak with a single voice
in a pandemic. And we need to figure out how to deal with misinformation on social media,
which we have not been able to deal with effectively. It's tough. We're strong. We have a new variant
and the lab is gearing up to respond to that variant to understand its biology, its impact on
therapeutics and vaccines and drugs, how best to counter it if some of the products that are on
a shelf lose their potency. There's no time to celebrate. I mean, there's always another variant
emerging. There's other other products that need to be tested. We just keep grinding on and on and
on. Hey, you got to get up and make the donuts every day, baby. Investing into looking and studying
that basic biology of life will result in modern miracles of medicine. Oh, here we go.
The basic biology of life and the modern miracles of medicine. Okay, check this out. Check this out.
This is the website that I'm on. It is a defense website. I'm going to put the linky link in the
chatty chat because I want you to be able to download this. It's actually downloadable.
So you can scroll down to the video here and you can actually just click download and download it.
And so I already did that. And so I'm not going to use my bandwidth to show you the video. I'm
just going to show it to you back here. Okay. And this is a video that took place on March 5th,
2020. And I can't stress enough. The people are like these guys are like James Giordano. They're
going to throw a lot of lingo at us, but I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to try and
keep up with my notes. And I think you're going to find it quite shocking. I want to give
Sorry, I want to give a shout out to
I want to give a shout out to
where is this sub stack democracy manifest sub stack.
The writer or one of the writers of that sub stack gave me a heads up on this video and I
thought it was just so cool. The first five minutes of it I wanted to watch with you tonight. So
here we are. Hopefully this will go rather quickly and I won't have to interrupt too much, but it's
pretty shocking. Remember, this is March 2nd or March 5th. It's March 5th and it's the Pentagon
and it's a real DoD video. It's the first one on their little private site.
No masks. March 5th. Warp speed and the development of vaccines.
Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for coming to our press briefing on the army support
to vaccine development. My name is Colonel Kathy Turner. I'm the director of the Army
Media Relations Division and I will moderate today's session. The following senior leaders
will be on our on today's panel. We have Brigadier General Mike Talley, commanding general of
U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command and Fort Detrick. We have Colonel Wendy
Sammons Jackson, director of military infectious disease research program,
U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command. We have Dr. Nelson Michael, director of the
Center for Infectious Disease Research, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and we have Dr.
Kavan Majerad, director of emerging infectious diseases, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
Today's discussion is on the record. After Brigadier General Talley's opening remarks,
I ask that you limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up until we have gotten around
the room and then we'll continue to field questions until we're at a time. We have about 30 minutes
today and with that I'll turn it over to you, sir. Okay. Hey, good afternoon and thank you for
participating in today's briefing. Our hearts go out to those that are affected or know someone
who's affected by this disease. You know, emerging to infectious diseases like this coronavirus
that we're facing now are COVID-19 or why a global network of military infectious disease
surveillance laboratories exist around the world. Military medical research is a force multiplier
designed to support the service member and the public in every conceivable circumstance.
Through both emerging science and technological advances, the United States Army Medical Research
and Development Command is on the forefront of delivering medical capabilities faster
and more efficiently than ever before. We are supporting a whole-of-government approach
to detect, prevent, and treat COVID-19 and when it comes to infectious disease threats,
we have extensive capabilities and an international research infrastructure
already in place that allows our scientists to anticipate and develop countermeasures
against emerging infectious diseases. COVID-19 infrastructure development command is on the
forefront of delivering medical capabilities faster and more efficiently than ever before.
We are supporting a whole-of-government approach to detect, prevent, and treat COVID-19
and when it comes to infectious disease threats, we have extensive capabilities and an international
research infrastructure already in place that allows our scientists to anticipate
and develop countermeasures against emerging infectious diseases. Okay, so I hear a global
network of surveillance laboratories already in place. I hear global extensive capability of
existing research infrastructure and I hear him advocating for a whole government approach to
responding to the coronavirus. Let's make sure I got that about right. Wow. The United States Army
Medical Research and Development Command is on the forefront of delivering medical capabilities
faster and more efficiently than ever before. We are supporting a whole-of-government approach
to detect, prevent, and treat COVID-19 and when it comes to infectious disease threats,
we have extensive capabilities and an international research infrastructure
already in place that allows our scientists to anticipate and develop countermeasures
against emerging infectious diseases. COVID-19 is the infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus
and this is familiar territory for our team. Our labs have previously studied SARS and MERS,
both of which are coronaviruses. They're in that same family. Our researchers and scientists at
the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research conducted the first in-human phase one trials of the MERS
vaccine and that's the only MERS countermeasure and the only and only the third coronavirus vaccine
ever tested in humans. We're building upon the science for COVID-19 solutions as we speak right
now. Just this week we were able to develop new versions of COVID-19 candidate, one of the first
candidates that we've tried, and we initiated research to determine if there is a response to
the vaccine. Again, this is just one piece of the solution. There's other vaccine candidates
being developed by other organizations, but we're all working toward a solution and we want to
get it done as quickly as possible and we're doing this in a whole of government fashion
and certainly a whole of DOD fashion. In addition to vaccine prevention, we are also exploring
treatments. Efforts are ongoing right now to identify new drug candidates to respond to the
COVID-19 infection. A cooperative research and development agreement with an industry partner
is under review for the DOD to gain access to an antiviral drug for treatment use
in our medical centers, our military treatment facilities. So together with our United States
government partners, we are progressing at very fast rates, revolutionary rates almost,
constant effort, and this is in order to deliver effective treatment and prevention products.
Products that will protect the citizens of the world and preserve the readiness
and lethality of our DOD's service members. I want to thank you in advance, but I'd also like to
tell you a little bit about my teammates here. So Colonel Dr. Wendy Sammons-Jackson is the director
for our military infectious disease portfolio. She dual hats as the joint program committee
director for the entire DOD. So when you're looking at the capabilities and capacity within
the medical research and development command, the demand signal is coming from all over the
joint forces. She's managed that portfolio for the last two years, and when you talk about some
of the most recent accomplishments with MERS, with Zika, she has been involved in all those things.
Dr. Nelson-Michael, about 37 years of experience. Same thing. We talk about some of our latest
successes with MERS. Both he and Dr. Kavan Mujarit have been right at the forefront,
and even with Zika, I'm very proud to say that within nine months, this is the team that was able
to start the first inhuman clinical trials. And just last December of 19, the MERS CO-V
correction, the Ebola-Zaire version vaccine was given full FDA approval. These two gentlemen were
played a big part of that. Dr. Kavan Martin, again, having been the scientist behind a patented
adjuvant that's designed for this same family of diseases, it's an adjuvant that's being used
right now, being shared with our whole of government partners. He just recently returned from
Switzerland. We were lucky enough to be able to recruit him from the World Health Organization,
he's been back for about a week from Switzerland. So when you look at certainly the scientists that
that we recruit and train within the DOD, they are well integrated with some of the top scientists
in the country. And so we're very proud to take part in this effort, and we look forward to your
questions. That is hysterical. I love the help of the Associated Press. They got somebody to come
from the World Health Organization. So they had their own candidate of vaccine. Is that what
you understood too? Because I couldn't tell whether he was hinting that the DOD was working with NIH,
or whether the DOD had their own vaccine that was in competition with the NIH vaccine versions.
He established that SARS-CoV-2 causes the disease COVID, and he started this by apologizing and
expressing condolences for anybody that suffered from this disease. They were supporting a new drug
search. And the team that ran the Zika trials is this same team. And these guys were also involved
in the Ebola vaccine. And then the last person is somebody that they got from the who. Wow, this is
just, this is just, this is just, I mean, wow, a proprietary adjuvant also. So handy. What a great,
what a great team. However, this most applies. Just on the vaccine. Can you talk a little bit,
just more detail about the vaccine, your work that's being worked on. Is it different than
NIH's approach and how soon are you to for like a phase one trial? And then I'll just
throw the follow up out just in case that's easier. The rapid diagnostic that is being worked on,
can you talk a little bit about that and how sort of where you are in the rapid diagnostic
tool and how soon that might also be available for testing?
Yes, ma'am. Let me just take the first two questions quickly and give you over to Dr.
Majard who can talk about some more granular aspects of this vaccine. First thing,
it's one I want you all to know is that we have been around the Walter Reed Armada Institute of
Research for 127 years. I mean, we are, a lot of people like to ask, well, why is the army
involved in vaccine development? We've been doing this for an extremely long period of time. Walter
Reed, I've obviously made his notoriety on figuring out countermeasures to yellow fever. So we've
been doing this for an extremely long time. It's one, two is that we work very closely in the
interagency space. The, my first raider in the army, I recently retired as Bob Redfield as a
CDC director. My second raider is Debbie Burks. Now, obviously, the global AIDS coordinator and
running the COVID response under the vice president and Dr. Fauci is close enough to him that he
retired me about 18 months ago. So we work very, very closely in the interagency space in the
vaccine that I'll let Dr. Majard talk about. We worked with Dr. Fauci's team to find a space
where we could find a vaccine candidate that was scientifically not duplicative but mutually
supportive of what others were doing, but also made sense. And so we ended up moving on two
different vaccine platforms in coordination with Dr. Fauci and his team. Let me let Dr. Majard
tell you a little bit more about that and what our rough timelines could be. Thanks for your
question, Dr. Fauci and his team. His name is Dr. Nelson Michael and he's the director of the
Center of Infectious Disease Research at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Dr. Nelson Michael.
Let me let Dr. Majard tell you a little bit more about that and what our rough timelines
could be. Thanks for your question. So from the first day that the sequences of the new virus
were published, this guy is Dr. Kavran, Kavan, Maad Majarad, M-O-D-J-A-R-R-A-D.
And I think this is the dude that they got from the World Health Organization. He looks like a
very dark version of beaker from the Muppets. We were working on this vaccine and we were doing
so in coordination with our interagency partners at the NIH, specifically the vaccine research
center where the president was visiting just a couple of days ago and which is the place that I
came from where I trained under Dr. John Mascol and Dr. Barney Graham there and have been in constant
communication very much like we did for the Zika vaccine where the NIH and Walter Reed Army Institute
of Research had two complementary approaches towards a vaccine candidate for Zika. Here again,
we're taking a platform that actually has been used in clinical trials so far for influenza or
different respiratory virus and focusing on a component of the virus that a lot of groups are
working on but with a unique platform and a unique what's called adjuvant which is a
chemical that is used in combination with vaccines all the time to enhance their immune response
and that adjuvant is actually patented by the Army. So we see this as a unique and complementary
approach that is non duplicative that is being coordinated as part of the whole of government
response. It's such a weird it's such a weird thing to say it's non duplicative when he started
four or five sentences earlier saying that we're going to make a vaccine using basically the same
viral component that everybody else is focusing on listen carefully. So it's totally duplicative
especially when you realize there are 30 proteins in the or 31 or 45 depending on what reading
frames are read with a unique platform and a unique what's called adjuvant which is a
a chemical that is used in combination with vaccines all the time to enhance their immune
response and that's not right it's not used in combinations in combination with a vaccine
it is a component of almost every vaccine the adjuvant is the chemical that irritates the
immune system and gets it activated to do something and the big joke among amongst adjuvant chemists
is the toxicity and that more toxic it is the more adjuvant it is the better adjuvant it is
it's a joke amongst them. Ladies and gentlemen this is already in fifth of December somebody
misleading very important people or misrepresenting the immune system because they don't understand
it in either way screwing a lot of people over starting on March 5th 2020 by emphasizing antibodies
and saying that adjuvants are something other than separate from a vaccine are you kidding me
are you kidding me?
Under Dr. John Mascol and Dr. Barney Graham there and have been in constant communication
very much like we did for the Zika vaccine where the NIH and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
had two complementary approaches towards a vaccine candidate for Zika. Here again we're taking a
platform that actually has been used in clinical trials so far for influenza a different respiratory
virus and focusing on a component of the virus that a lot of groups are working on but with a
unique platform and a unique what's called adjuvant which is a chemical that is used in
combination with vaccine. So the army had their own thing and the army was going to do an adjuvanted
vaccine that's what you're hearing right here. It means all the time to enhance their immune
response and that adjuvant is actually patented by the army so we see this as a unique and
complementary approach that is non-duplicative that is being coordinated as part of the whole
of government response. I know you asked a question about the point of care testing.
Unfortunately I think we have the world's leading expert in infectious disease diagnostics. This
happens to be in the army at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research Dr. Sheila Peel. Sheila
like me really isn't has been working on HIV almost her whole professional career and there isn't a
what did I say yesterday every one of these people cut their teeth in the HIV industry in the HIV
space every one of them. It is absolutely extraordinary. It's just absolutely extraordinary. Single HIV
rapid test that's out in the market that hasn't at some level passed through her hands so
she's really our lead for looking at the diagnostics that are currently being used a test that would
allow us to understand whether someone's infected or has been exposed and I can tell you that for
now most of those tests are based on detecting the virus itself so developing the kind of test
like a pregnancy test that you might be familiar with is requiring a different kind of technology.
Sheila's is already having those kinds of discussions. I think what you're going to probably see is
much more sophisticated and higher throughput tests that initially would be done in more
sophisticated laboratories and then as time goes on that technology will then roll out
to establish platforms to allow these tests to be moved more at the point of care.
And so what he's describing there are the dissemination of EUA approved testing platforms,
testing supply companies all this stuff needed to happen behind the scenes.
It's not just like you know my wife and I if we would have gotten it in our heads we could have
started doing a PCR testing company in 2020 and be millionaires now.
Would you have thought to do that? How many of your friends thought to do that?
And yet somehow or another all around the United States there were these private companies that
sprung up out of nowhere and had had the wherewithal to set up a pretty complex molecular biological
testing laboratory without any know-how about how to do it. And they were able to source all their
materials and all the necessary supplies that they needed to do it and then they got contracts
from state and local governments to do it. It's really extraordinary when you think about how
quickly it all came out even if they pretended like it wasn't very good and we were really behind
and we should have had testing in February and we didn't.
We had testing in February we'd have been testing with the the PCR test that had the
primers that curled up on themselves like Kevin McCurnan was fighting against.
Not that we shouldn't test with a PCR test he wouldn't fight against that because Kevin McCurnan
after working on the Human Genome Project started a company called Agencourt
who's one of its primary things was was HIV testing.
So he definitely wouldn't say you can't use PCR to test for a virus. He's he's been using PCR
to test for viruses since he was like 30 years old and he started a company with his dad and his brothers.
And so here we are talking about the diagnostic tests coming out and the how long is it going to
take for the development of the diagnostics and on the 5th of March they already know that they
need a vaccine. They already know they need a vaccine for the world they're already bragging
about the global research and surveillance infrastructure that was already in place.
Some pretty bold claims already in this first 20 minutes.
I mean do you have a sense on when when you'll have it just ready to roll out do you have a sense of
any timing on that and you have a sense on whether the vaccine when that would be have you
started testing in animals or have you the phase one time trial. Dibs timing.
So so as far as the diagnostics are concerned there are large and very competent commercial
concerns that are looking literally in the next month or two to be able to take to convert the
current assays that are really relatively slow to execute and can you only do a small number of
samples at a time to being able to do these on very robust machines that could execute up to
800 tests for eight hours which is a standard work shift. So those are the kinds of approaches
that the the industry has already done. I mean I mean we do HIV testing we do almost a million
HIV tests a year at our laboratory up in Silver Spring and we use those kinds of instruments so
they can be adapted for those kinds of other technologies. Let me let Dr. Majora talk about
the point is though is if you're going to adapt a high throughput sequencing or PCR
machine to doing high throughput PCR testing for sea for coronavirus with only one or two
amplicons it's a very different setup in a 384 well plate than it is if that 384 well plate is
supposed to take all the same DNA and all 3348 wells versus it's supposed to have different DNA
and each one of those wells are every two wells and so converting these commercial platforms to
being able to use to go from essentially those commercial platforms existed before the pandemic
specifically to do genome screens for like you know a bunch of genetic markers that we're going
to talk about tomorrow when we watch an Eric Lander video that was inspired by
Mark Coolack's work today what a great show he did and it I was like 30 seconds away from watching
an Eric Lander video from 2019 when I decided at the last minute to switch to this because I'm
trying to keep all the people that are monitoring my my text messages and emails on their toes
but tomorrow we're going to do the Eric Lander video and it's going to be just spectacular it's
just great what he he continues to be so honest it's just really cool so let's keep this going
sorry about that the where we are in terms of stages of development pre-clinically then into
the clinic for a vaccine so if we think about vaccine development at different stages the first
stage is the design and the discovery to decide what is going to be your candidate we've completed
that and we have gone into small animals mice so we're looking at what the
response is to that vaccine in mice and then as far as a timeline to getting into humans I
wouldn't want to speculate too much on that I think the important thing to consider also is that
going beyond a phase one study there's the second phase which is oftentimes looking at a larger
population at the safety and the immune response but also then transitioning to see if it's
effective in populations what I think the field is trying to do is position itself as a whole
so that if there's a second wave during the next season in the winter that those candidates have
made it through phase one studies to be ready to look at the effectiveness during the next now
that's pretty curious because I know that my friend Mark Koolack has often suggested that
the original plan for covid was two years before the vaccine rollout not one and that for some
reason or another it was accelerated a bit and here he's he seems to be even downplaying the
possibility of a second wave is even maybe not going to happen which is very different than
than what a lot of other worst-case scenario people at the time were saying so that's cool season
okay so let's go to Caitlin and we'll come over to Tara Caitlin it's a question slash request
with describing like the vaccine can you be a little bit more broken down in terms of language
about what you're talking about because you're talking about candidates which what does that mean
what does it mean for a vaccine it's March 5th March 5th 2020 so that we can communicate best
about what you're kind of really talking about yeah thank you so think of this as the virus my
fist you know it's a sphere right and it's got little spokes coming off of it that makes it
the corona when you look at it on cross-section it's got that crown look to it
so almost all the vaccine candidates out there are focused on that little spoke what we call the
spike the spike protein and there are different parts of the spike that mediate the attachment
of the virus and the entry of the virus into our cells in our lungs so if you block that
attachment if you give a vaccine that trains and educates your immune response your immune
system to recognize that part of the virus that attaches to your cells and blocks it
that's going to be a good vaccine so that's why everybody's focused on that so we are looking
and then so what's a candidate then candidate means that you're looking at options you got
your different options that's your different candidates and you look in mice or other animals
other people are looking at other animals as well as as our scientists are doing
within our command to see which of those options looks best in small animals and then
larger animals before you go into humans as far as a platform so you have that little piece of the
virus that is going to be the part that educates your immune response but you need to deliver it
in something to the body you need to get it expressed in your body and there are different ways
to do that you can have it on a nanoparticle basically something another sphere that kind of
looks like the virus you can have it in DNA which is part of you know the same kind of DNA but it
goes into our body and our cells express that the Moderna vaccine that you've probably heard about
in collaboration with the NIH it's mRNA it's a different kind of thing like DNA that's the platform
parts the part that expresses that candidates that we're trying to find out how good it is in
this so curiously he's already selling it as not a genetic therapy it's not transfection
it's expressing a protein so we already have words for that if you use DNA it's called
transformation if you use RNA it's called transfection we already have names for that
and yet he says that a small piece of the virus needs delivering then he says it needs expressing
but he doesn't specifically say what expressing is and that is really changing
a genetic signal into a protein and the genetic signal if it's DNA that change is
that that operation that methodology to use DNA to create expression of a protein that is called
transformation and that's usually associated with viruses like AAB because AAB will often
carry DNA and then transfection
is with RNA and so that is less associated with with a virus particle and it's much much more
associated with lipids or electricity and electroporation of course was the way that RNA and DNA was
going to get inside a cell for a company called Inovial which was incorporated and took a lot of
advice from or maybe even was was somehow owned by or whatever by Robert Malone Robert Malone
participated in that that was his big thing was electroporation and the reason why he gave up on
this RNA as a virus as a vaccine was because he knew that it couldn't be made safe
and that's why he gave up on it and let it go and then years later he tells us that he assumed
that they made it safe that's why he decided to take it it's a very strange
set of almost contradicting ideas that he claims to hold in his head about RNA and its safety
now versus when or his his own perception of its safety back then versus
at the start of the pandemic when he claims to have taken it different animals
hope that helps thank you for asking that question Kate we are going to go to Tara and then we'll
head back over to Phil I'll say thank you too it's about to ask something kind of related but
tied to that could you talk a little bit about what your scientists are actually doing in the labs
are they working with test tubes are they did they actually get samples of coronavirus from
someone who was infected how did they do this happy to so so our scientists are doing a number
of things right now there comes there has been receipt of the virus in one of our
laboratories and they're currently culturing growing that virus so that we can have stocks
available for a number of things to test products with that's they're also doing characterization
of the virus to try to understand learn more of what we know about the virus and how the virus
impacts are the host and our immune response to that virus the scientists and our other
subordinate laboratories are yes test tubes pipettes they're dealing with mice they're they're
running cell cultures and and I can let the scientists here they're doing the hands-on work
talk a little bit about that one description and the laboratory that received the samples
that Colonel Sam and Jackson is talking about is the US Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick but if you think of the movie outbreak and the suits that
they wore and a highly contagious environment without all of the drama of the movie certainly
but that capability certainly exists within military medicine and that particular laboratory
is the DOD's only biosafety level four laboratory so that type of work and we're not there yet with
coronavirus where we would actually bring it into containment facilities or laboratory suites to
test it at higher levels we mentioned small animals that would be an advancement to a larger
specimen perhaps not there yet but that's what the laboratory work looks like and I think we're
actually conducting that to some degree now in BSL three conditions biosafety level two conditions
but that's to get a picture of what that looks like at low-scale levels in vitro under microscopes
to all the way to where we would actually begin advanced types of testing there that's where
that's where we're skating through if you will so MRDC is for medical research development
command is really fortunate because we have a very unique national asset as the general mentioned
in our institute for biosafety level three which is current virus is required to be handled within
as well as biosafety level four and so those scientists the critical asset and those scientists
are actively working we have biosafety level level crimson and we also actually have some
facilities with biosafety level purple so you can rest assured that that whatever we do in this
laboratory nothing could possibly go wrong it's almost comical how they talk about it when you look
back on it you can't help but see it it almost like they have it's almost like they want you to think
that to investigate the virus as well in addition we also have the Walter Reed Army Institute of
Research with our two scientists here over here who are working in biosafety level two
and doing the discovery the small animal work and have some of the most brilliant minds in the
world working in infectious disease research and so within that we have a very robust science and
technology platform in addition we also have the capabilities to take products from the science
from from the prototype level and move them into advanced development which is required in order
for us to move them into manufacturing and commercialization so within MRDC as a whole we have sort of
entire pipeline for developing products and just super quick follow-up where did the sample come
from uh the coronavirus sample you're working on the CDC okay but it's no that would be so
very identified of where the infection was was it from China you know did it come from China or
it came from a U.S. patient yeah but we yeah we yeah yeah it's a homeless county man baby so let's
someone get some more questions so just to clarify really quick on the rapid diagnostic
that Lita asked about what what first of all you said if I was clear you said it'd be about
a month or two months before you think such a diagnostic would exist you know I was saying that
that that industry right now is taking their very robust platforms they have been using for a
long time to do high throughput screening for other infectious diseases and are adapting those
for testing for the for the SARS coronavirus too the point of care tests if they're going to be
actually detecting the virus itself that becomes I mean that's a lot trickier to actually take that
that kind of technology and then make it really small so I will tell you that we ourselves
are not involved directly in those efforts we're becoming aware of those that are because historically
we've made so many kinds of research projects along with industry to advance point of care
tests largely for infections like HIV because we're heavily involved in the presence of emergency
plan for AIDS relief which obviously the you know the point of care there are places that are
resource constrained in Africa largely and so you really need those kinds of robust tests that
require very very little skill I could probably teach my cat to one to use one that's the sort
of test you want to be able to use in the field and the same mindset we use is in the in the
military to be able to have those in rucksacks right so those that technology I don't want to
it really feels like the same kind of kind of bullshit pitch that David Hone gave in that talk
that Mark Koolak has featured on his program a few times where he says that well what I wanted
was the cart from Cuba Gooding Jr. in the movie and then his boss said no I want an arm band on
one arm that detects the pathogen and an arm band on the other arm that makes the vaccine and so
he's talking about carrying point of point of care tests in a backpack and all this other stuff so
again just like the last discussion that we were talking about with Duke University and the person
talking about how their their vaccine platform would be able to be universalized by adding more
antibody targets to the outside of their platform and was talking hypothetically about how useful
their platform could be what they're thinking is how they get grant money they're saying if their
platform works like they imagine it will then you should give us money to develop it because the
end when this perfect platform is developed it will be able to be a universal vaccine here he is
again talking about you know little tiny tests that are really really accurate and when we get it
right this is what they will be there are so many hypothetical you know if it works it would be great
if we could have this if it works we greatly could have this and there they haven't managed
to get any of these things to actually work they only work in the in the theoretical version on
paper or in the future and what's crazy about Mark's video from today and the video that we will
watch tomorrow what it will reveal is that when they told us that they had sequenced the human genome
and that they spiked that football they hadn't come even anywhere near
even close into the same stadium or even playing the same sport as sequencing the whole genome and
funny thing is Eric Landers fine with admitting that and so they have so grossly overplayed their
hand with regards to trying to convince us how much fidelity of understanding they have with
so much of this complexity and they just don't have it and it's interesting because in the
military space because they have these very specific applications that they're shooting for
you know the superpower suits and the super soldiers and also their crap then the theoretical goal
is revealed in the cartoon and it's it's almost easier in some ways in the military sense to
understand if the if the DARPA grant says we want an armband on one side that detects RNA and the
armband on the other side to make a vaccine for the RNA that's a grant proposal that lots of
of spin-up technology companies could in theory write a grant to answer
and not only that but you could imagine how one might write a grant to answer that call
we have the you know the latest spandex and we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna cooperate with
apple to get the sensory technology or whatever you can imagine that it's a little harder to imagine
the grant applications that come in when a grant call for a particular gene in relation to a particular
disease describes a animal model and they asks for a grant call
DARPA asks for grant calls like we want to have a point-of-care test that can be carried in a
backpack and used at all temperatures and doesn't require blood
DARPA has grants that say that we want a cart that will make a vaccine DARPA has a grant that
says this kind of stuff so when these guys are talking and when you hear academic scientists
talking about especially infectious disease and responding to them you can hear the grant calls
in their explanations because if it's explanations about about getting money for funding to respond
to infectious diseases you're almost always going to hear about antibodies and you're almost always
going to hear about vaccines it's extraordinary when you listen to them now a few years later
leave you the impression that that's going to be available anytime soon clearly what we're
focused on is the more complex laboratories so that we don't have state and local departments
of public health that are simply overwhelmed with individuals that want to get tested so you had
that so in those situations where the patients are coming to a central so they don't think it's
going to blow over in march 5th they just think that this is just starting there is a whole
industry of testing that is spinning up now that they expect to be relevant for the foreseeable
future notice this this is not panic this is just state and facts we're about to
you know roll out a new thing or two or a hundred well place they're having the high
throughput test makes sense if now you're talking about distributing people that want to go detect
in less dense populations that's where the rapid or point of care test will be important
so you know you preparing yourselves for the possibility that the military is going to have
to test military patients i mean it's large a very large community and when you think about
all the people around the world you know it's unlikely that the civilian capacity would
necessarily be there for one as fast as they need it absolutely what does that look like i mean
like right now my understanding is there's only a small number of kits that have been distributed
to a very specialized about a dozen or so labs so what does it what does that look like when you're
talking about getting ready for testing over a million people maybe potentially
in the u.s military so the goal and there's multiple approaches so the goal is just increased
capacity and as dr michael mentioned um one way to do that is to develop these high throughput
assays and place them in regional critically strategic regional areas so that we can so where
did all these private testing companies come from if the whole thing was a military coordinated
exercise or private testing companies all around the united states that we're up and operating
by april this is now march what are we talking about here did they just put one ads out in major
cities in the united states looking for managers for biotech labs
this is extraordinary increase the throughput of the diagnosis another approach as was mentioned
before with the point of care is actually reaching further out into the environment to
be able to test and rapidly as an initial screen for folks to kind of help understand what the
epidemiology is and so there's multiple approaches within the army across the dvd and in across the
u.s government as well certainly critical and all each one of those approaches is our industry
partners in this to be able to take a product and develop it and commercialize it so we are
working with a number of partners and providing the support within the laboratories to help
develop the escape okay so let's go to lucas and then we'll hit courtney and back and the
lucas tolinson fox news in your modeling how many u.s military service members do you think
are going to contract the quantifiers that that'd be speculative sir uh not uh i i don't think we
have done any estimates on that uh it would depend on the spread certainly uh the way it's
progressing now but uh right now unless uh well we uh we're i i think that's the general 100
percent right we we don't have any data um right now i didn't but where we're beginning to work
with partners that dr major can get a little bit more into that there are lots of people now that
have gotten pretty sophisticated by trying to model infectious disease outbreaks um you know
regrettably because one seems to come up you know every year or so we're getting very good at this
um the problem with with the models it's as only as good as as the data that you have that would
build into it right so i would just say that that that we're beginning so i would just say that if
they created a mass casualty event if they created a mass casualty event in new york city and then
extrapolated from that very bad model where the spread would be in a few months you could get a
pretty worst case scenario going in fact if you look at the slope that you see in the first four
weeks or three weeks of the major bomb-like event that jessica hockett has worked so hard at
characterizing you're going to see a slope that if it's projected into the future at that angle
we're talking about billions dead it's really extraordinary and of course that's exactly what
was done in those weeks while we were all told to stay at home and just shelter in place and watch
tv they showed us that curve they showed us that slope and they said holy crap i don't know what's
going on but this looks pretty and serious to set ourselves up with really good modeling groups
to be able to ask questions in areas of the world where it's the virus is already spreading
and we have good epidemiology data that would allow us to inform those models that's going to
give us some prediction but i can tell you during the Ebola outbreak i literally sat in a WHO meeting
and had one modeler talk about when the epidemic in liberia was going to peak and
essentially i looked at the numbers i said you're basically saying that it's only going to peak
when every single human being in liberia is infected and he basically just shrugged so you
just need to be careful that these models sometimes can really look bombastic
and they're always good as the data that initially goes into them
one thing i can say is that the current assay which is a test i think the throughput is
around 60 patients every eight hours so when we're looking at volumes or what we are trying to
develop in the area of detection our goal is anywhere from 275 to 500 every eight hours
so if we can increase the throughput for this when you're talking about a large number
that would be affected take the military for example we're certainly developing things
in case that were to happen that goes for any any population okay so i want to go
i i would just add so i think general tally is correct in that
um any kind of numbers specific numbers you throw out there is speculative
however we have epidemiologists at our institute working with others modelers who do this all the
time in the defense threats reduction agency ditra who provide responses to the requests of all
the different geographic combatant commands and we have been working with them for the past few
weeks initially based on assumptions but now more importantly on real life data
so we're trying to refine those models better based on the data that we feed into them so this
is something that we're working on but i wouldn't speculate and give you a specific number
what is the earliest that a vaccine would be ready for a u.s military service member go
go go so again it depends on what you're talking about in terms of ready so as i said there's
we when we go into phase one clinical trials when that we have done in the past
we the volunteers who are involved in those trials are a mix of civilian and active duty
populations and then as you go further on there is in discussions with our partners
and our military treatment facilities the potential to have them involved in clinical trials
as far as licensure whether you're talking about emergency use authorization or full licensure
if you if you talk about vaccines in general i think dr fauci's remarks that he's
stated over and over again are really the the benchmark that we should use as the most accurate
as being the earliest earliest earliest probably 12 to 18 months to get something out to the
populations and that would be whether it be civilian or military population and just recognize that
part of that hesitation i mean the science can go very quickly but so that's closer to Mark's
original estimate right 12 to 18 months 18 months would have put us in the middle of 2021
or or late 2021 and that's so they got it out really fast you at first don't want to do harm
right and you know there's obviously there are you know vaccines can cause harm and they provide
benefit so that mixture is something you always have to look at and so so part of the hesitation
to say all we can get a vaccine quickly is you need to make sure that it's really safe if you
test the vaccine in a thousand people but one in ten thousand people is going to have something
terrible that happens until you get to those numbers you may end up doing mass vaccination
campaigns with a vaccine that could cause a significant amount of problems so you so that's
pretty funny because also we have video of of tony fauci saying that 12 years ago about an HIV
vaccine and and not rushing it out because you don't want to have it rushed out and then realize
that thousands of people are going to get hurt by it that's what he's suggesting here too
and i think most of the people who are watching this show for a while now are pretty much come
to the conclusion that that's what's happened that everybody that we know that has taken a couple
of these shots is damaged in some way even if they just get sick all the time or their kids have
strep throat four or five times a school year or you're 22 and you have your third bout of of
pneumonia in the last two years this needs to be a constant reassessment of the risk
and the benefit um the other thing i would tell you and this is so a really good benchmark
we were the first people that tested the vaccine that eventually got licensed by
murk to to um for for Ebola okay that vaccine was first tested by the Walter Reed Army Institute
of Research and so that's a that's a great thing i heard that was a pretty nasty vaccine wow
five years later it was approved by they tested the vaccine on veterans then or they tested the
vaccine on on soldiers what the hell the u.s. FDA in the meantime a half a million souls were
vaccinated that largely in africa during especially during the outbreak in the democratic republic
of Congo so wow you know again that was a risk benefit assessment the the leadership in the drc
said okay we know it's not approved yet by european medicines or by the u.s. FDA but we have a
terrible outbreak of Ebola which is highly fatal and so decisions were made to use that under
emergency use authorizations and so you know there's always that kind of debate but just i think
that's a good benchmark i didn't know they could give an EUA to a vaccine and then roll it out in
another country that's wow he just said that they decided to roll it out with an EUA because you
know i mean it was a real real emergency over there that's a pretty good way it's like i'm just
trying to think of a better way to roll out a bio weapon attack than that so our CDC approved
this vaccine for your country you better take it for vaccines let me also say that
we haven't really talked much about this we are beginning to make other countermeasures
one of those are monoclonal antibodies so antibodies are part of our immune response you
you know it's part of the way the body tries to push infections back but we can actually make
these in test tubes and these are becoming a much more common tool that are being used
especially in the fields of oncology but increasingly in infectious disease so instead of actually
waiting for a vaccine to be made giving you that vaccine and waiting the time it takes for it to
develop the immune response you can give with these kinds of reagents you can give almost
immediate protection so we're literally in the process now of beginning to take those he keeps
saying literally when he doesn't need to say it and i want to smack him first baby steps as well as
looking at at we talked about one drug the general talked about that one drug that's
currently being repurposed and has been looked at for Ebola and now is being looked at for
it's remdesivir baby there are other small molecules because remdesivir
talked about that one drug that's currently being repurposed that one drug that's currently
be repurposed that was used for Ebola is remdesivir so they're talking about remdesivir on March 5th
they're talking about point of care testing on March 5th they're talking about PCR testing
they're talking about lateral flow testing they're talking about seroprevalence testing and they're
talking about vaccine candidates on March 5th 2020 they already know they're going to need all
this stuff they're not sure there'll be a second wave next winter maybe and it's been looked at
for Ebola and now it's been looked at for for CoV-2 but there are other small molecules that could
be discovered and one capability that we have at our institute is every malaria drug that's
ever been discovered it's at some level gone through the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
but we have a really good drug discovery program and so we're looking for other kinds of drugs
that might be lead candidates in partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry that we could
bring those to bear so vaccines monoclonal antibodies and small molecules drugs that could be brought
to bear so we don't have one one theme in play I'm not I'm not so I'm noticing this that small
molecules are somehow being considered different than drugs and I wonder how or why they did that
I bet it has something to do with IP or it has something to do with regulatory structures and
trying to avoid the regulations of biologics or trying to avoid the regulations of certain kinds
of pharmaceuticals by calling them small molecules I'm I'm wondering
Hey we have actually a number of things in play and all these are being coordinated very closely
with our partners either in government or in academia or in industry so thank you sir I know
I want to try to get a little bit more questions out there so Courtney will go to you
I want to ask a couple of clarification so when you're saying that there's testing going on in
my my Dr. Majard you mean you're not saying that they're being injected with the coronavirus and
that right okay I just wanted to be sure of that just just injected with the vaccine candidates
those options they have to see how the immune response yeah to see how antibody responses look
they're not going to look at anything else they're looking for a robust antibody response that's it
to see how it responds to the vaccine not the virus okay good I just wanted to be sure
about that and then I was a little unclear Dr. Michael when you were talking about you were
talking about potentially rolling something out the next time that the next season which I would
assume would be fall winter or maybe it was you Dr. Majard forgive me yeah the next season but I
don't quite understand what that was okay so you know that's a really important question too um
was it was our third the third one was just about the production okay yeah I think you kind of answered
the other one so 50 those that'd be great so so this is a respiratory virus and they're they
always give us trouble you know during cold weather for obvious reasons we're all inside and you know
windows are closed etc so so we typically call that the influenza or the flu season our expectations
that this virus like every respiratory virus is going to be in less troublesome for us as the
weather warms up and that's going to be true across the globe but our experience and most of our
experience comes from influenza like which is sort of the you know the unfortunately the king of
respiratory virus but we know a lot about that and our experience there is that every flu season
equals you know when the weather gets cold again this is when these viruses tend to come back
so this is why it's really important to understand that a lot of what we're doing now is really
getting ourselves ready for what we're calling the second wave of this we hope that that doesn't
happen if you remember SARS SARS came and went very quickly and you know I really hope that
happens again but we we can't count on that we have to be ready is that that even if this
epidemic begins to wane we have to be ready for the worst case scenario we have to be ready for
next next winter when it may come back again I'm sorry I'm still don't understand what it was
that you were hoping to roll out with the next wave so so we're saying that as we begin to develop
any of these countermeasures we're talking about monoclonal antibodies drugs vaccines that even
if this disease abates over the next few months we're pretty concerned that it will come back and
it may come back you know again in the next flu season if that's the case then in the meantime
we've been working steadily on these countermeasures so that they'll be ready if there's a next time
thank you so let's see it current thank you I also just have a couple clarification so it's like
this will go quick but following up with her just to reiterate so you're testing in small animals
mice now you're testing the candidate and then you had said something about the second phase was
looking at large populations of mice would that be with I mean large populations of mice or would
that be of something else that you said that I'm thinking about this next phase in the winter
I'm not quite sure what's going on so I'm just going to break it down again in terms of what are
the general phases of vaccine development first you decide down at the end so they did a lot of
messaging about this in March and April they used Fauci to do it and Berks to do it and Redfield to
do it and Bill Gates to do it and they had lots of different little diagrams to show how you know
phase 1 and phase 2 could overlap in time and then we would accelerate everything and this is what
so he's already starting with that basic mythology right here.
Tomic level what your vaccine is going to be and then you get have your best guess and you have
a few different options as to what that will be then you test all those different options in mice
meaning testing give them the vaccine and see what kind of immune response they have then typically
you go into larger animals like monkeys right that's typically the case whether we this is a new
virus we don't know which one of these animals is the most relevant one to humans you know mice
or mice mice are not humans right monkeys may be closer to humans and then you go into humans
and when you go into humans in that first phase you're just again looking at the safety of your
vaccine and the immune response you're not looking at if it's effective again to protect you from
the virus the next phase is where you look at larger numbers of people for safety and immune
response again because the first phase in humans is just a few dozen people now we're talking hundreds
to thousands and you start looking at is it protecting against infection and you need to have
large numbers of infections going on to be able to know whether or not it's protecting
against that so that's why we anticipate potentially if there's a second wave we got to be ready
make it all the way through those first studies in the animals and the safety and the immune
response so actually he reminds me of Raymond we're ready in position and ready to go if this
comes back and there are a bunch of infections so we can know is it protecting
okay so you're planning to be of that second phase of humans by next winter just that's where
you are okay just wondering if there's anything I wanted to clarify as you said you've had a
candidate that was complimentary but not duplicative what exactly is the candidate I know you talked
about the spokes are you you two focusing on the spoke of the back of the virus yes but that's
just what NIH is also working on so everybody's working on the spoke right now just different
different ways different parts of the of the spoke or different versions of it and then different
ways now that's and that is interesting because actually if the messaging had already been sharp
enough he would have corrected her but it's actually not sharp enough yet in this in this video and he
rather than correcting her goes along with it to get the message across which is actually what you
would do if you were trying to communicate to a small group of people rather than the entire
nation but that's fine it's very cool to see I I would bet dollars to donuts that there isn't a
person in the world right now who isn't at least sufficiently brainwashed that if somebody
made the mistake that that blonde lady made in talking about the coronavirus that they would correct
them every teacher at my kid's school would correct me if I said yeah but the spokes of the
coronavirus are what they made the vaccine from I think you mean spikes so this is pretty impressive
to express it so different parts of the of the spoke or different versions of it and then
different ways to express it see so he's already teaching everybody that who this isn't going to
be a typical vaccine anymore but he's not actually saying that he's almost implying that other
vaccines do the same thing they express it no no no no he's preparing everybody to understand
that the methodology is wholly different and he's not calling it a transfection even though
that's really what he means when he says express it's extraordinary so as I said there's different
ways so there's a DNA platform where you can express it there's the mRNA that Moderna is doing
with the NIH there are just using the protein itself there it's using it putting it on a nanoparticle
protein the University of washing different versions of the vaccine and different ways
to present it actually there was a guy at the University of Pittsburgh who was working on
putting the spike protein on the outside of the measles virus I shit you not yes to the immune
system okay so I know we're right 10 after right now so we'll hit Haley we're probably gonna wrap
it up sir if you get so thank you and thank you all for doing this one question for you general
tally last year in the fall for due trick the research institute had to pause testing for some
safety concerns can you go into what has been done since then to sort of make that a non-issue
and then it's also I know that rare has gone over you said different SARS and the different
strains of this what makes this different from the previous strains that you've been looking at
and how have you kind of noticed the differences and and how that will affect the vaccine that
you're developing yeah absolutely I appreciate the question yes so United States Army Medical
Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and that's the the BSL for biosafety level four lab
that I that I mentioned but on the 18th of July of 2019 they were issued a cease and desist order
by the CDC violations because of improper practices all resulting from a number of structural defects
they develop workarounds that just just were not safe there was never any any danger of risk to
the community or or breaking the containment which is what the labs are for since then proud to say
worked very hard to come back and meet CDC regulatory standards the CDC came back for a
reinspection after a about a 90 day plan of action in milestones very aggressively went after that
and the CDC restored the laboratory to a limited operational capability limited in that the same
volume that the laboratory had been become accustomed to through putting much much smaller levels
and then certain types of testing as I mentioned BSL for being the highest type biosafety laboratory
for being the highest level not to that level but probably a a smaller level or a level just shy
of that where the the most dangerous procedures weren't being done this is what this was in it
yeah I didn't see a Bavari after he left didn't he go like work for for the maker of Remdesivir
like didn't he go alert for Gulad I don't know he will stand up of capabilities after being down
for so long the CDC came back two weeks ago first two weeks actually three weeks ago now in February
came back for a second inspection this inspection was to allow even more capabilities more capacity
to be performed again proud to say night and day difference according to the CDC and we were
issued a letter to restore even higher level capabilities that letter was issued to us just
this past Friday and so with respect to coronavirus and coronavirus is not considered
a a safety level type of type of virus that that that falls into the same category some of the
other higher types so we have full authorization to perform at the highest levels of scientific
capacity at the laboratory for coronavirus other types of diseases that might meet some
of the CDC's criteria still having a gradual return to full operations but with coronavirus
we're going to be able to conduct laboratory research at the highest levels at the laboratory
and can perform so that's kind of where we are real proud it's been a work in progress
we took the advantage of the operational pause if you will to to really
refine our standard operating procedures and frankly the complete culture has changed at that
institution and they're they're back and certainly with coronavirus it's amazing to watch the entire
enterprise mobilize the way they have thank you
regarding your second question about how this virus differs from others and what we've learned
probably everybody's familiar now of some of the that there are seven human coronaviruses that we
know of and that they highly pathogenic ones the ones that tend to kill are SARS-1
Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus and then the current coronavirus and so we have been
working on those other very more dangerous and deadly viruses like MERS and the first SARS
what we've learned is really at the very basic atomic level when I mentioned that we first look
at the atomic level of these spokes these spikes that's where we've been focusing on because that's
the kind that's where the differences matter the most in terms of what kind of immune response you
get to it how efficiently it attaches to the cells in your lung and one of our chief scientists
Dr. Gordon Joyce has been doing a lot of the work on that in determining the structures in
collaboration again with our partners at the NIH National Institutes of Health the Vaccine
Research Center so Dr. Joyce myself we both came from the Vaccine Research Center working with
Dr. Graham and Dr. Kismekia Corbett under Dr. John Mascola and then one of the other
structures that came out is Dr. Jason McLennan at the University of Texas at Austin we've all
this should give you an idea also how this is a very tight knit family we're kind of spread
across different centers but we talk to each other all the time because we have that very close
public health and scientific community so there are similarities between this virus and
some of these other viruses but there are obviously very key differences between
MERS and this SARS-CoV-2 there's about 50% difference in the sequence with SARS-1 there's
about 20% difference but that that 20% matters obviously quite a bit and so that's the kind of
studying that we've been doing when we first got those sequences and the world got those
sequences back on January 10th we started looking down at the atomic level as to how they differ
and so please in general I know we've been going for a little bit so I want to be able to wrap this
up sir we're going to have folks standing by to do the follow-on questions but sir if you want
to do closing remarks well since there will be a vaccine already in time for this cycle of
coronavirus could you please give your best advice to the the force and the public in general
about how to kind of ride this out for now
well I you know it's really is I mean we are literally living in influenza season people are
getting infected and dying of this disease I like to remind people that during the Ebola outbreak
both the one that just happened in the democratic republic of Congo and in west Africa
you know somewhere between 16 to 19 000 people were still dying every week of HIV infection so
you know the the public the medical community's governments were really gotten very good at
managing how we deal with the scourges of infectious disease so like any respiratory virus
you know we're going to be getting ourselves into the habit of washing our hands much more
frequently if you could if there's one thing that you can do it's wash your hands much more frequently
height so I mean we're we're both clinicians as well we go into the hospital
a nurse will wrap you on the on the knuckles if you don't wash your hands coming into the room
or coming out even if you don't touch anything so that's critical the the things that we already
know how to do we do social distancing you know we're not going to be doing a lot of hugging
and kissing if people are sick they should stay home if they're you know if they really are
are very very ill then they can go into the hospital so um but hospitals now are
getting very good about about you know how they would approach making sure that they can
protect their staff as well as protecting other patients from someone who might be a risk so
you know I think people should should recognize at the end of the day this still remains on low risk
infection to not just our service members but to the american public and that we are really good
as a hospital system as a medical care system from both the EMT up to intensive care units that
taking care of these I'm not minimizing I'm just saying that even the absence of a vaccine we still
don't have a vaccine for HIV infection but we have very good drugs and we're beginning to develop
monoclonal antibodies so you know we will continue to to campaign against these infectious disease
threats as we would against enemies against the homeland and we're we're good at doing those
sorts of things but the american public should be reassured that that this is a threat that we're
used to from from the standpoint of influenza we are working on developing measures but
everyone can assist just by washing their hands well I hope uh hopefully you've been able to hear
that uh when you're talking to the different agencies that are out there and you're getting
different responses for what they're doing individually this is truly a whole of government
approach so certainly if if one uh one agency one organization if it's an industry partner if
it's academia I think we're well nested and we're sharing information and collaborating so that
we're able to leverage the right resources to bring a vaccination or vaccine candidate as we've
learned about today across the finish line so we're going to continue to collaborate in the fashion
that we that we have and we're going to work as hard as we can to find the right treatments
the right preventative measures and um it's certainly the right detection capabilities that
are out there those are our three focus areas within within the DoD um we really appreciate your time
today and um uh again thank you very much it's been a it's been a pleasure so everybody thanks
for coming today so we have some folks are going to stand by in this room to do follow up questions
for you thank you very much for being here tonight um this has been giga ohm biological high
resistance low noise information brief brought to you by a biologist you can support me at
giga ohm biological.com and you can share this stream from twitch and elsewhere i'm going to be
putting up a couple episodes on sub stack this week yet i apologize for not having up something
already i've got the subtitles on a couple videos but i haven't actually done the transcript yet so
i will very soon next couple days um tomorrow i'm going to be interviewed by uh the last american
vagabond which i believe is the one of the the websites and news sources that has Whitney
web on it i'm going to be interviewed by ryan christian tomorrow i'm not sure if i'm going to
put that live or if i'm going to let him record it and then make it an episode we'll probably
talk about that before i start so either it'll be right on there oh that's the old list sorry about
that um it will either be uh live at around noon or it will i will be live sometime in the
afternoon after that interview um but that's probably pretty fun um i'm excited about that
uh so anyway um that's been a show sorry it was late i need to go get a midnight snack and then
go to bed um and i will see you again tomorrow thank you very much for joining me
so
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