December 8, 2020 • 40 mins
What happens when a world-renowned scientist, vaccine expert and “OG Villain” (according to RFK Jr.) Dr. Peter Hotez, is allowed to speak his mind on issues surrounding a highly politicized and unprecedented pandemic? Join our hosts Justin Beck, Catherine Delcin and Deepti Pahwa as they explore the hot-button issues surrounding COVID-19 and other public health issues of our time. In this first episode of Contakt World, our hosts talk with Dr. Hotez, and explore his thoughts on the pandemic, as well as how it’s affecting marginalized communities, driving misinformation and straining departments – and even how the biggest e-tailers can be leading promoters of anti-science attitudes. They also speak with Robert Ellington of HALOS - a nonprofit organization in Charleston, S.C., about kinship care, and how COVID has uprooted family structures of all kinds. So, tune in, listen up, and get informed.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
There was no federally coordinated response for COVID nineteen control
and suppression, and that's why we have this horrible situation
now where more than two hundred fifty thousand Americans have
lost their lives, with projections that another hundred fifty thousand
will lose their lives between now and a week or
two after the inauguration. That's Dr Peter Hotel speaking, an
(00:28):
American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccines,
and neglected tropical diseases. Most recently, Hotez, professor and co
director at Texas Children's Hospital, has emerged as one of
the most trusted voices for the pandemic. With cases surging
across the US and talk of multiple vaccines, we turned
to him for answers. There is this very aggressive anti vaccine,
(00:52):
anti science movement that started around and it was just
what they called health freedom medical freedom movement that government
can't tell us what to do. Government is spying on us. Um,
you can't tell us to vaccinate our kids. So up
to half of Americans will refused COVID nineteen vaccine scene
if they're made available. When you see some of the
(01:14):
lead anti vaccine groups in the country already gearing up.
I'm Justin Beck, founder and CEO of Contact World. I'm
here with my co host, Katherine Nelson and DP Pava,
and over the coming months, we'll be talking to scientists, researchers, celebrities, experts,
(01:36):
anyone who's been affected by COVID and getting to the
bottom of how we can improve public health. Together. We
may not have all the answers, but you deserve to
understand what goes on in your neighborhood and the decisions
that will affect you and your family's health. So while
this might be our first time recording together, it's not
our first time talking about these very important issues. I
(01:58):
think it would be super helpful for our listeners to
understand why the three of us have come together for
this show. Katherine, you want to get us started, sure,
So you know, in my work as a lawyer, I've
seen a lot of disparities between the representation of certain communities.
A lot of them are underserved, underrepresented, and you would
think as a business attorney the disparity wouldn't be so great,
(02:20):
but there is a disparity. There, there is a gap,
and I try to fill in the gap to the
extent that I can and provide the services that they need.
Being a part of Contact World is a chance for
me to further do my part and give a voice
of the marginalized, give them access to the public health
they deserve, the access that they really have the right to.
How about you, GT, Like you know, I have a
(02:44):
background in human centered design and bottom up innovations, and
I have been working on privacy preserving technology solutions for
public health. I would say almost since the start of
the Spinific. What I saw was a huge need for
the solution that put people first and really inclusion and
(03:04):
accessibility at all levels of public health. And that is
why I'm so excited to be part of Contact World,
where we design solutions with empathy for people and for systems.
And this is exactly why we designed this podcast as
well right as a way to invite discussions on these
topics and hopefully empower people with honest conversations about health systems.
(03:27):
So t T. One hot topic we'll hear about consistently
is vaccines. I'm worried about trust and people taking them
in the United States. What are people's impressions about vaccines
in Europe? I mean I believe the vaccines are coming
in and you can really see a huge excitement as well.
There is already some distribution centers being built up specifically
(03:48):
in Germany at the moment. But there's a huge question
out there as well, how will that distribution and administration
of these vaccines would happen? And I believe this is
the same. So they're in the States, right, Catherine, how
about you? What do you think about this in the US? Well,
I think we're wearing in the bell a little too
(04:09):
soon for the most part, where people are thinking, hey,
this is it, we can go on party now, So
we want to exercise a bit of caution. Yes, there
are vaccines out there, but again the important point is
how is it going to be distributed and how safe
and effective those vaccines are going to be for everyone involved.
The biggest thing from my perspective is are people leaving
going to take them? In the United States? I guess,
(04:32):
you know, forty or fifty percent of people at this
time may not even trust taking them whatsoever. There's so
much misinformation out there about it, right, I mean, who
to trust? What people to trust? I mean, there's so
much new data research and I think one thing we
haven't thought about is how are we actually empowering our
public health agencies to communicate this right kind of information
(04:52):
right for the benefit of all. Dr Hotess mentioned there
was no coordinated federal response right, which was really needed
around COVID nineteen. And this is certainly not the last
pandemic or the epidemic that we see, and there are
going to be more and we need to learn from
what has happened. I'm really worried that the world is
going to go back to disregarding public health and public
(05:15):
health agencies the way that we have for so long.
Now that we have a new administration is the perfect
time to really equal to playing fields somewhat for public
health agencies and entities. I definitely think that we want
to push for the changes that we want right now
and not wait and look back and wonder what could
have been done instead of doing something right now. Right.
(05:35):
On one hand, you have technology companies that are trying
to solve these problems of humanity, and then there's a
matter of actually having people use the technology, and it
seems like so many companies are failing on actually having
people use technology, and I think that that's something that
we're here to solve exactly. I mean, the adoption is
(05:56):
the biggest problem. You've seen so many solutions out there,
but nobody is able to get and adopted. And one
of the reasons being is that people are not really
understanding the human centric city that is required to design
such solutions, and that's where we're really trying to solve
these issues here. Yeah, we're really excited about how Contact World,
the podcast, really fits into all this because this is
(06:17):
the voice of the people. Our listeners are also people
that are affected by the pandemic and also other social
and racial issues that you know, plague society. So we're
really excited this is the voice of the people exactly, Alright.
So in this first episode of Contact World, we're exploring
the impact of COVID on our local communities and how
(06:39):
families navigate the immense stress the pandemic is created. So
today we're talking to Robert Ellington in Charleston, South Carolina,
somebody that's in the trenches. Katherine, why don't you tell
us more about your conversation with Robert? Absolutely justin it
was such an eye opener. Robert is such a servant,
He works with halos an organization that really helps people
(07:00):
kinship care, and Robert really does a great job with
helping his community, connecting them with the resources that they
need so that they can help the children and also
help the adults through this hard situation with COVID nineteen.
(07:21):
So tell me a little bit about your role in
the Charleston community as an educator, community organizer. I come
from a family of people who have done service in
some way. My father's a retired police officer, my mom's
a nurse, my sister is a social worker. So service
has always been a part of what I've done, and
(07:43):
I've always weaved it into educating people and I've been
doing that for several years and now working with Halo's.
I've been with Halos for two years and I'm a
success coach. Okay, before you even tell me about what
you do as a success coach, tell me about what
Halo's is. Halo started out by Dr Eves Spratt, and
(08:07):
it started because she was trying to do things for
foster care kids. But around two thousand and seven they
realized we've got more kids and kinship care than foster care.
So the mission is to assist kinship families sometimes agencies
just assume that they have everything they need to do it,
(08:27):
and they're not necessarily equipped to do all of that.
They're financially, it's a strain. Emotionally, it's a strain because
now they're encountering things that they didn't have to deal
with with their own children. This is a whole new
world for some grandparents. So our job is to make
resources available to those families, and my job is to
(08:47):
provide emotional support as well as helping them with resources,
because sometimes they just want event and I'm here to listen.
So when you think about kinship care, what should people
all about that? I mean, we we might be introducing
this concept to people for the very first time. Kinship
is any family that's composed of people taking care of
(09:09):
children that aren't necessarily there is. It could be fictive
kin which could be a family friend, or it could
be uncle, Auntie, granny, just relatives that are taking care
of children that aren't theirs, and they're overlooked. Because we've
been doing kinship forever, we just didn't have a name
for it. We always had somebody who stayed with Grandma,
(09:30):
or grew up with the grandparents, or grew up with
aunties or even with older siblings. And in popular culture,
there are many people that became famous. There are celebrities
that are politicians and whatnot that come from kinship situations.
President Obama is a perfect example. He grew up with
his grandparents, right L. L. Cool Ja, Oprah Winfrey. You know,
(09:53):
there's tons of people all over the world that have
grown up in that situation. I wanted to understand what
success looked like for Robert in a pre COVID world,
so we could intern understand how deep the impact the
pandemic has had on his community. If I've got ten
(10:14):
caregivers I'm talking to, success means ten different things. So
before COVID, I would do home visits. So I'd go
and i'd i'd sit down, and I talked to a
caregiver a couple of times a month. But during COVID
it changed everything. Obviously there's no more home visits. The
goals are still the same, but now here's the different challenge.
(10:37):
Now we have a caregiver who's in her seventies, who
isn't necessarily tech savvy, who now has grandchildren doing virtual learning,
so walking them through that or linking them with resources
with people who could help them walk them through those
things for the virtual learning. Sometimes the goal might be
(10:58):
I need some time for myself, I need some self care,
and finding those resources in a pandemic it's a lot
harder than before. What is success It depends on who
you're asking. When COVID shut everything down, I was working
with care givers that I had already met physically, right,
so they knew who I was. I knew with their
(11:19):
tone inflection that I had an idea about where they
were as far as their moods and whatnot. Let's say
you've got the person who's really upset, but they hide it,
they mask it. They can mask it with their voice,
but if they're sitting in front of you, you could
see tears welling up, you could see the knee moving
back and forth, you can see the uneasy like there's
(11:41):
so many things. So it's changed how I'm trying to
figure out how to help people. Instead of saying are
you okay? And this transcends kinship care or what the
work I'm doing, This is like just for humans instead
of just saying are you okay? Because that gives a
person an easy out. They can say, yeah, I'm fine,
(12:01):
that's easy to say, what can I help you with?
What do you need? You get specific if I say
what do you need? Now they're like, oh, okay, what
do I need? I need some diapers, I need somebody
to listen to me, I need daycare. It changes the
(12:21):
dynamic because just forming those relationships with those people, they
know that they can still call Robert or call somebody
at Halo's and I know that they'll step in and
do something. How can I help you? What do you need?
I'm going to use that. What are the long term
impacts that you're seeing on the families as far as
the pandemic, I'm seeing a lot more stress. I'm seeing
(12:50):
a lot more dips in mood, depression, seeing a lot
more of that. I mean, I worked with caregivers before
covid IT who were depressed because you know, they were
in this new situation and it was overwhelming. But now
it's a whole other level of overwhelming for them. So yeah,
(13:10):
it's exacerbated things to another level. Thankfully, Halos has support
groups and virtual support groups. That happened like twice a month,
and we encourage caregivers to talk to each other because
you know, I'm a parent, But I'm not a kinship caregiver.
If it's coming from granny, the granny, the great granny,
(13:33):
the uncle, that these people that are doing the work themselves,
it's different. I feel like it's more of a positive impact.
In a recent article published as part of the COVID
nineteen Resources on Health Equity, it shared how marginalized and
minoritized communities have and will suffer more acutely during this
COVID nineteen crisis. In Chicago, for example, seven in temptations
(13:56):
who died from COVID nineteen in the city where African
American despite the group only representing the population. I asked
Robert about the communities he serves and what he sees
in terms of health equity. The majority of the people
we do work with our minority women, basically a marginalized
(14:21):
group who are underserved. When we do our intake, we
try to cover all the bases so we find out
what benefits they're already receiving. Do you get medicaid, the
kids on Medicaid? Are you snap? You get food stamps?
What do you have? And sometimes they're like the answer
(14:41):
to all of those is no, I have none of
that stuff. They may not have access to public health right,
so we are all trained to take them through something
they used to call the benefit bank, so we can
actually apply for benefits with them. So we don't allow
them to just kind of swing in the wind trying
to figure out what's going to happen next. We try
(15:03):
to make sure that there are fewer obstacles in their
way as far as the health care. You know, the
undeserved community does suffer a lot. How else are they
affected in terms of people needing more resources? Is there
a change there? Have you noticed a difference? Well, with
COVID shutting a lot of businesses down, a lot of
(15:26):
those people are working, right, so now if they can
get unemployment, then they're okay for a little while. But
now there's other things happening at the same time. Luckily,
we're connected with other organizations that have grants, that have
funds available to help people with rent, with utilities, with food.
(15:50):
Think about the single grandparents or moms that have a
child or have children with special needs. As a matter
of fact, I'm working with a caregiver who has an
autistic child and she's currently out of work because of
the pandemic, so she had to come home, and her
grandson couldn't go to school, but he needs special attention,
(16:15):
and she can't work from home while he's at home.
So she's caring for a child who's autistic, who has
some behavioral challenges, and she's trying to figure out what
her next movie is like. In any other world, if
we weren't dealing with this pandemic, she could have him
stay with her cousin up the street during the day
(16:37):
and she could work. If we weren't in a pandemic,
he would be at school with the people who are
equipped to help him with learning and with his behavior
and everything else. That was very difficult for her, and
that's still very difficult for her. Absolutely. What kind of
help do you think they would need in order to
feel secure about reporting if they are in fact affected
(16:59):
by COVID nineteen. The way people talk about COVID, it's
almost like this plague, and so in their minds it's like,
I can't tell people because then it's gonna change how
people look at me or the perception. So it's like
the reframing of it and helping them understand how important
(17:20):
it is for them to let it be known for
the safety of the very children that they've taken in. Right,
you're doing this for the children. We need to raise
these people up that are doing this amazing work by
taking care of these children and making sure that these
children are in a safe place and nurturing these children
and providing everything that they need. Perfectly said, anyone who's
(17:45):
listening to this podcast, you know how do they reach out?
We are online. You can check out the website at
Charleston Halo's dot org. Great and I appreciate the work
that you do. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you,
Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
In contrast to Catherine's conversation with Robert Ellington and Charleston
(18:09):
shining an important light on our local communities, in my
conversation with Dr Hotez, we explore the science behind the
pandemic and what we need to understand about vaccines as
we look forward. Thanks again for your time today, Dr Hotez.
I was looking at my notes from our last conversation
in April or May, and you were right about literally
(18:32):
everything regarding the trajectory of the pandemic, from lockdown, fatigue
to ramp and spread. What has surprised you the most
about our nation during this pandemic, Well, certainly the most
disappointing part is our inability to launch a national COVID
nineteen response program control program. It was left to the
(18:52):
States and a sort of haphazard way. There was backup
support for supply chain management, providing ventilator and manufacturing and
female support and now of course vaccines, but there was
no federally coordinated response for a COVID nineteen control and suppression.
(19:12):
And that's why we have this horrible situation now where
more than two d fifty Americans have lost their lives,
with projections that another hundred and fifty thousand will lose
their lives between now and a week or two after
the inauguration. What would you say it surprised you about
the people of our nation? Well, you know, I brought
out the best and worst. Um. I think the healthcare
(19:35):
profession was absolutely heroic. So were the scientists, you know,
sharing data. You know, the healthcare professionals, nurses, p A,
S D O, S M D s slpiens, radiology texts,
people working the I c U hospital staff. You know,
I'll put their lives on the line to save lives,
(19:58):
and I think the numbers are sevent your healthcare professionals
lost their life in the US this year. And on
the other side was the lack of concerned by the
White House to protect those healthcare professional lives by allowing
surges on our intensive care units, which is now getting
to the worst ever across the country. So as bad
(20:19):
as New York City was in March and April, now
we're seeing this play out times dozens in cities and
rural areas across the US. And that disinformation campaign that
came out of the White House that downplayed the severity
the epidemic and tried to attribute COVID desk to other
causes and fake concepts of her immunity and discrediting masks.
(20:43):
And then you saw those millions of Americans in an
effort to show allegiance to that disinformation to the White House,
you know, totally buying into it and also being defined
of masks and social distancing. And it just turned into
a monstrosity in terms of loss of life. So going forward,
(21:03):
other than having hopefully a much more favorable response as
a nation and a coordinated response with the Biden administration,
what do we learn from this for public health broadly,
and how can we better resource public health agencies? Well,
I think we have to get ready for the next
epidemic pandemic, because we know at least there's new coronavirus
(21:24):
is every decade. So first of all, a careful assessment
of what we're horribly wrong. Clearly the concept of a
coronavirus task Force was a flawed one, and letting it
run out of Washington d C it was too politicized
from the outset and the quality was not what it
needed to be. And so figuring out how to move
(21:46):
that to Atlanta, letting c d C run at Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, putting them in charge, I
think it's going to be absolutely imperative. Having said that,
there were clearly some marked deficiencies within c d see right,
They failed to detect the entry of the virus from
Europe into New York City, the disaster with the diagnostic tests,
(22:08):
which we still never totally got right, failing to be
more assertive in mounting that national response. Why did all
those things happen? So having a frank assessment of that
in order to fix it, that's going to be important
as well. That makes sense. So a lot of your
work you mentioned more coronavirus is for instance, a lot
of your work centers on marginalized populations throughout the world.
(22:32):
Can you explain to our listeners what a neglected tropical diseases?
It's a term that we help coin In the early
two thousands in response to the Millennium Development Goals, there
was recognition, in part through the work of Jeoffrey Sax
and Dean Jamison and others, that infectious diseases both occur
in the setting up poverty and cause poverty, and infectious
(22:54):
disease reduction itself is a anti poverty measure. In fact,
we call our neglect of disease vaccines anti poverty vaccines.
And so we got together and rebranded some of the
most common parasitic infections like hookworm ands just a samisis
and leashmanisis and shock because disease has neglected tropical diseases
(23:15):
to establish a new framework, including a package of medicines
that's not been delivered to a billion people annually, which
is really exciting. So why do COVID nineteen and neglected
tropical diseases disproportionately affect marginalized communities? Can you explain your
thoughts on that well with neglected tropical disease in general,
(23:35):
Why is poverty such a major risk factor. I mean
it has to do with all of the things that
go associated with a lack of access to healthcare, lack
of access to clean water and sanitation, hygiene, lack of
adequate housing which allows insect vectors and others to enter.
I think all of those are factors. But you know,
(23:57):
the truth is, we don't really fully understand that link
between poverty and also why these diseases caused poverty. We
think it's probably because of their long term effects on
child development and worker productivity, and the health of girls
and women is important. And then there's that COVID nineteen
link also because one of the things that we noticed
(24:18):
was high rates of COVID nineteen in our low income communities,
for instance here in Houston. COVID nineteen has caused historic
decimation of Hispanic communities across the Southern States, and I
think a lot of it has to do with the
fact that they represent essential workers and family owned businesses.
And then also multigenerational dwellings where you have you know,
(24:42):
the twenty year old out on construction sites and family
owned businesses and the parents, but then the grandparents lived there,
and I think that created a lot of disease exposure
as well. But Night testified to the Congressional in Hispanic
caucus about this too, really drum home the fact that
this is one of the hidden parts of the COVID
epidemic in the US and also among low income populations everywhere.
(25:05):
There's this concept out there that I call blue Marble health.
The poor living among the wealthy or disproportionately account for
a lot of the world's poverty related diseases. And when
you actually add up things like leprosy and leashmaniasis and
it's just a semiosis and shagas disease, it's overwhelming. At
least the poor living among the G twenty countries that
(25:27):
accounts for the highest rates of these diseases and COVID nineteens.
Going by that same playbook, our guests during our Human
Interest segment works to support kinship caregivers, extended family who
(25:47):
raised children on their own. And you mentioned how it's
disproportionately affecting multigenerational families. What have you witnessed with COVID
nineteen affecting the family structure. Well, it's highly disruptive, right,
I mean, if you know, especially in the low income
neighborhoods where people don't have the opportunity to work via
Skype and zoom and at home remotely, they have to
(26:09):
physically be at the workplace they're exposed. And even though
often young people handle the virus, well, we know that
about half of the COVID nineteen cases that are asymptomatic
are responsible for the lines share the transmission of this virus.
And then you know, unfortunately, people who are susceptible at home,
(26:30):
either because of age or because of underlying comorbidity such
as obesity or diabetes, or heart disease or renal disease,
they're the ones really getting hit hard. And so you
see this every day. I mean the Houston Health Department
where I am, they put out a list every day
of the people who've lost their lives the day before
from COVID nineteen, and it provides sex, age, and race
(26:54):
or ethnicity, and every day it's Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic, Black, Black,
Hispanic Hispanic. Just decimated these communities. It's really just heartbreaking,
you know. Speaking of Harris County Public Health, I had
some good conversations with them earlier this year and trying
to improve the technology for the local health agency there.
I was shocked to learn that the health agency actually
(27:16):
receives inbound faxes of COVID cases. And it seems to
me the more I learned that local health agencies are
just a dearth of modern technologies. And unfortunately it feels
like we have under resource health agencies and expect them
to move mountains and actually prevent things like this from happening,
(27:37):
but we don't provide them with any resources. Do you
have any thoughts on that. I mean, not only our
health departments under resource, the pay the stability is really
inadequately politicized health departments, so that people who work and
health departments don't feel comfortable speaking out when they see
social injustices or if they see that important healthy issues
(28:00):
are not being addressed or silenced by political leaders and
elected leaders. We certainly saw that throughout the United States
that people felt they were going to lose their job
if they pointed out things that weren't getting done to
come back COVID nineteen, We don't invest in in our
health care infrastructure. We have a highly fragmented system and
(28:23):
of course it's incredibly expensive as well in terms of hospitalizations.
It needs a massive overhaul, whether or not anybody has
the political will to do that, and not only at
the hospital level, but also at the public health agency level.
I learned a startling statistic kind of makes my blood boil.
It seems that our public health system gets as little
(28:43):
as two of the funding of provider care. And it
makes sense where we are today when they don't have
any funding, inadequate resources, lack of funding, but also that
political suppression which we hear about, you know, on the
big cable news networks, like in an MSNBC with regards
to c DC. But what we don't here is all
the suppression that's going on the state, county, and city level,
(29:07):
particularly in the middle part of the country, particularly in
a lot of our red states. Unfortunately, including where I
am in Texas. It's been highly politicized and people are
fearful about speaking out because remember, the narrative is COVID
nineteen is a hoax and deaths are due to other comorbidities,
and all you need to do is reach herd immunity
(29:29):
and it's going to go away. And when our healthcare
providers and our public health experts point out the inconvenient
truth that that's all bs. Then they get targeted and
it looks like I get targeted and have been targeted
all year. It's really unfortunate. Speaking of the rural locations
you introduced me to nature earlier this year, and I've
(29:50):
learned that more than half of local health agencies in
the US literally only have two or three staff members,
no contact tracing capacity, and they may even be relied
upon an vaccine distribution. So you mentioned political will. What
would you say to state and federal decision makers about
resourcing health agencies? Well, you know, and there was some
(30:11):
effort to higher contact tracers eventually in the state of Texas,
for instance, but it's a fraction of what we needed
and not in time. So for instance, you know, we
had that big summer search across the southern states Florida,
the Gulf Coast states, Texas, then going into the Southwest
(30:32):
all during July and August, and the problems were twofold one.
They opened prematurely before we really got down to containment levels,
so we started out at a pretty high level, and
then they still hadn't even had the public health infrastructure
in place to allow you to do that safely. Eventually,
(30:52):
we slowly got up to speed in terms of contact racing,
but there was not that guidance from the federal government
to say, hey, this is what you need to do.
It was left to the states, and the states never
had the epidemiological course powered and the models to know
exactly what to do when, the timing of when to
do it. And then they also could have used the
(31:14):
political cover of the CDC and federal government because you know,
the governors themselves were being buffeted by all these political forces,
especially from political extremists on the far right, you know,
who just wanted to open her up and thought it
was a hoax and they needed the political cover of
the c d C. Say, hey, I understand what you're saying,
(31:34):
but Centers for Disease Controls is saying, if we do
this now, x number of fluorid Ians or Georgians or
Texans or Oklahoma's are going to lose their lives. And
that conversation never took place because there was never that
federal guidance you mentioned contact tracing. Another thing that really
shocked me about our country is people are comfortable with
(31:56):
doing just about anything from their phone. You know, you
can order door Dash and Minute and you know next
day shipping. Why is it that contact tracing is too
far of a bridge to cross where people don't trust
it or it's been difficult to reach people. Well, I
think there's the practical matter, the fact that people get
so much spam now on their phone phone calls. I mean,
(32:17):
I don't know about you, but I often don't answer
a strange phone number I've never seen before. So I
think that's clearly a component of it. But the other
is there is this very aggressive anti vaccine, anti science
movement that started around initially out of Orange County in California,
but then really amplified in Texas. And it was this
(32:41):
what they called health freedom medical freedom movement that government
can't tell us what to do, government is spying on us,
you can't tell us to vaccinate our kids. So that
was the form the anti vaccine movement took starting in
around and it got linked to again political extremism, got
funded by groups that support the Tea Party and others,
(33:02):
and they became well funded, well organized movements that resulted
in huge numbers of kids in Texas, Oklahoma, elsewhere being
denied access to their vaccines. And then what happened in
those same health freedom medical freedom groups started gloming on
protest against masks and social distancing and contact tracing, seeing
(33:25):
it as interference. And then then of course the conspiracy
theories followed, right that Bill Gates or me or Tony
Fauci were gonna try to implant chips by vaccinating into people,
and somehow it got all tied up with five G
and so you know, you start trying to explain and
(33:46):
trying to implement things like contact tracing apps just made
it all the more difficult. And the other piece to this,
and I tend to be an outlier on it compared
to my colleagues, is to say, it's not just a
matter of fine tuning the message. You're improving the message.
We even amplifying the message, because the message is still
floating in bottles in the Atlantic Ocean, because they're inundated
(34:08):
with this vast anti science, anti vaccine media empire now
that now dominates the internet. You know, four hundred and
eighty fake anti vaccine websites all ripped up on social media.
If you go to Amazon dot com website put books
up at the top press return, you get a scrolled
down menu at the left that includes health, fitness, and dieting.
(34:28):
You click on that, you get vaccinations, and you click
on that it's all fake anti vaccine books and fake
COVID books. So Amazon is one of the leading promoters
of anti science. And then on top of that you
have the Russians with their weaponized health communications and bots
and trolls flooding our internet with disinformation. We're seeing now
(34:51):
those health freedom groups have been now going to Western
Europe this summer and assisting in protests against masks and
vaccine means in Berlin, Germany, and Paris and London. And
in Berlin, you know the CBS news report it was
linked to Q and On and even neo Nazi groups.
So it's taken on this very dark turn. And as
(35:13):
I hear myself saying this, you have to be really
careful how you explain it, because you know, you start
talking about far right wing extremist groups and Q and
On and neo Nazis and the Russians, and it's and
it all sounds very unhinged, even though there's definitely evidence
for it. Also, how we dismantle the anti vaccine anti
(35:36):
science confederacy or empires is a big question, and so
far nobody's shown much appetite for doing it. The federal
government has not shown any interest in doing the necessary
things like creating an inter agency task force around this.
So these things continue to grow and um and it's
gotten massive. Now what threat do you think that this
(35:57):
poses for the vaccination of our country surrounding COVID nineteen. Well,
we've got the surveys from Reuters and Associated Press and
Pure Research saying that up to half of Americans will
refuse COVID nineteen vaccines even if they're made available. And
I think some of that will go away. It's just
a normal response to all the politicization of vaccines that
(36:19):
we've had over this past year. And as people start
getting vaccinated without any end toward reaction, I think people
will start adopting vaccines, especially if we start launching a
communications plan, which Operation Warp Speed is not done. But
we still have this anti vaccine aggression, particularly on COVID
nineteen vaccines, and you see some of the lead anti
(36:41):
vaccine groups UH in the country already gearing up. You
have national groups like Children's Health Defense led by Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. You know, if you go to their Twitter side,
it's conspiracies around me. He calls me the original gangster villain,
the o gen villain. So that's what you're talking to today.
Believable and people believe it. So there's actually targeting of
(37:03):
scientists as well. This is a big problem. How can
our listeners in our show support the public health narrative? Well,
I think just getting educated is a big piece, and
you know, talking about on social media when you see
friends put crazy stuff out there on whatever form of
social media you use. And also I think, you know,
(37:24):
as scientists, we need to be better informed about what
these anti science movements are. And I've been pushing hard
to implement programs of science communication and public engagement in
our doctoral and postdoctoral training. It's not even encouraged by
universities very much, so I think building that into the
DNA of scientific training will help a lot as well. Right, So,
(37:47):
what recommendations do you have for our listeners about staying safe? Well,
just remember this is the worst part of the epidemic.
COVID transmission is at a screaming high rate now in
the country. We're getting up to two new cases a day.
And remember that's an underrestment by three or four or five,
so we may be up to a million new cases
(38:08):
a day. So anytime you bring people together, if in
large enough numbers, you will have people with COVID nineteen
in your house or certainly in airports and bus stations.
Georgia Tech just put out sort of a nice assessment
tool to basically say, based on level of transmission, what
happens if you bring nine people together, ten people together,
(38:31):
fifty people together. You know, it's pretty sobering how much
COVID nineteen there is. So you know this is the
time to identify your social distancing unit and keep that
to a small group. And remember it's not forever. We
have vaccines coming. Just don't be reckless and avoid ice
use surges in your community and we'll get through this.
(38:52):
But unfortunately the numbers are still looking awful. What would
you to say to somebody that's afraid to take the vaccine? Men,
if they're not necessarily an anti vax or. The only
thing that we know can keep you out of your
ice to you if you're exposed to COVID nineteen is
having virus neutralizing antibodies in your system and they all
work that way, and don't overthink it. Save your life,
(39:13):
in your family's life. So that was the first episode
of the Contact World podcast. So what is Contact World?
Why do we make this podcast? We made this podcast
because we're on a mission to improve public health and
health equity and to have a positive impact on society,
especially in marginalized communities who suffer the weight of our
(39:35):
country's prior decisions. But we're here to change that one
episode at a time. Over the coming weeks, we'll hear
from health experts, scientists, real people with real stories. So
make sure you join us for the next episode of
Contact World. I'm justin back and I'll see you next time.
(39:56):
Listen to Contact World the podcast on the I Heart
Radio app or where every to get your podcasts.
There was no federally coordinated response for COVID nineteen control
and suppression, and that's why we have this horrible situation
now where more than two hundred fifty thousand Americans have
lost their lives, with projections that another hundred fifty thousand
will lose their lives between now and a week or
two after the inauguration. That's Dr Peter Hotel speaking, an
(00:28):
American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccines,
and neglected tropical diseases. Most recently, Hotez, professor and co
director at Texas Children's Hospital, has emerged as one of
the most trusted voices for the pandemic. With cases surging
across the US and talk of multiple vaccines, we turned
to him for answers. There is this very aggressive anti vaccine,
(00:52):
anti science movement that started around and it was just
what they called health freedom medical freedom movement that government
can't tell us what to do. Government is spying on us. Um,
you can't tell us to vaccinate our kids. So up
to half of Americans will refused COVID nineteen vaccine scene
if they're made available. When you see some of the
(01:14):
lead anti vaccine groups in the country already gearing up.
I'm Justin Beck, founder and CEO of Contact World. I'm
here with my co host, Katherine Nelson and DP Pava,
and over the coming months, we'll be talking to scientists, researchers, celebrities, experts,
(01:36):
anyone who's been affected by COVID and getting to the
bottom of how we can improve public health. Together. We
may not have all the answers, but you deserve to
understand what goes on in your neighborhood and the decisions
that will affect you and your family's health. So while
this might be our first time recording together, it's not
our first time talking about these very important issues. I
(01:58):
think it would be super helpful for our listeners to
understand why the three of us have come together for
this show. Katherine, you want to get us started, sure,
So you know, in my work as a lawyer, I've
seen a lot of disparities between the representation of certain communities.
A lot of them are underserved, underrepresented, and you would
think as a business attorney the disparity wouldn't be so great,
(02:20):
but there is a disparity. There, there is a gap,
and I try to fill in the gap to the
extent that I can and provide the services that they need.
Being a part of Contact World is a chance for
me to further do my part and give a voice
of the marginalized, give them access to the public health
they deserve, the access that they really have the right to.
How about you, GT, Like you know, I have a
(02:44):
background in human centered design and bottom up innovations, and
I have been working on privacy preserving technology solutions for
public health. I would say almost since the start of
the Spinific. What I saw was a huge need for
the solution that put people first and really inclusion and
(03:04):
accessibility at all levels of public health. And that is
why I'm so excited to be part of Contact World,
where we design solutions with empathy for people and for systems.
And this is exactly why we designed this podcast as
well right as a way to invite discussions on these
topics and hopefully empower people with honest conversations about health systems.
(03:27):
So t T. One hot topic we'll hear about consistently
is vaccines. I'm worried about trust and people taking them
in the United States. What are people's impressions about vaccines
in Europe? I mean I believe the vaccines are coming
in and you can really see a huge excitement as well.
There is already some distribution centers being built up specifically
(03:48):
in Germany at the moment. But there's a huge question
out there as well, how will that distribution and administration
of these vaccines would happen? And I believe this is
the same. So they're in the States, right, Catherine, how
about you? What do you think about this in the US? Well,
I think we're wearing in the bell a little too
(04:09):
soon for the most part, where people are thinking, hey,
this is it, we can go on party now, So
we want to exercise a bit of caution. Yes, there
are vaccines out there, but again the important point is
how is it going to be distributed and how safe
and effective those vaccines are going to be for everyone involved.
The biggest thing from my perspective is are people leaving
going to take them? In the United States? I guess,
(04:32):
you know, forty or fifty percent of people at this
time may not even trust taking them whatsoever. There's so
much misinformation out there about it, right, I mean, who
to trust? What people to trust? I mean, there's so
much new data research and I think one thing we
haven't thought about is how are we actually empowering our
public health agencies to communicate this right kind of information
(04:52):
right for the benefit of all. Dr Hotess mentioned there
was no coordinated federal response right, which was really needed
around COVID nineteen. And this is certainly not the last
pandemic or the epidemic that we see, and there are
going to be more and we need to learn from
what has happened. I'm really worried that the world is
going to go back to disregarding public health and public
(05:15):
health agencies the way that we have for so long.
Now that we have a new administration is the perfect
time to really equal to playing fields somewhat for public
health agencies and entities. I definitely think that we want
to push for the changes that we want right now
and not wait and look back and wonder what could
have been done instead of doing something right now. Right.
(05:35):
On one hand, you have technology companies that are trying
to solve these problems of humanity, and then there's a
matter of actually having people use the technology, and it
seems like so many companies are failing on actually having
people use technology, and I think that that's something that
we're here to solve exactly. I mean, the adoption is
(05:56):
the biggest problem. You've seen so many solutions out there,
but nobody is able to get and adopted. And one
of the reasons being is that people are not really
understanding the human centric city that is required to design
such solutions, and that's where we're really trying to solve
these issues here. Yeah, we're really excited about how Contact World,
the podcast, really fits into all this because this is
(06:17):
the voice of the people. Our listeners are also people
that are affected by the pandemic and also other social
and racial issues that you know, plague society. So we're
really excited this is the voice of the people exactly, Alright.
So in this first episode of Contact World, we're exploring
the impact of COVID on our local communities and how
(06:39):
families navigate the immense stress the pandemic is created. So
today we're talking to Robert Ellington in Charleston, South Carolina,
somebody that's in the trenches. Katherine, why don't you tell
us more about your conversation with Robert? Absolutely justin it
was such an eye opener. Robert is such a servant,
He works with halos an organization that really helps people
(07:00):
kinship care, and Robert really does a great job with
helping his community, connecting them with the resources that they
need so that they can help the children and also
help the adults through this hard situation with COVID nineteen.
(07:21):
So tell me a little bit about your role in
the Charleston community as an educator, community organizer. I come
from a family of people who have done service in
some way. My father's a retired police officer, my mom's
a nurse, my sister is a social worker. So service
has always been a part of what I've done, and
(07:43):
I've always weaved it into educating people and I've been
doing that for several years and now working with Halo's.
I've been with Halos for two years and I'm a
success coach. Okay, before you even tell me about what
you do as a success coach, tell me about what
Halo's is. Halo started out by Dr Eves Spratt, and
(08:07):
it started because she was trying to do things for
foster care kids. But around two thousand and seven they
realized we've got more kids and kinship care than foster care.
So the mission is to assist kinship families sometimes agencies
just assume that they have everything they need to do it,
(08:27):
and they're not necessarily equipped to do all of that.
They're financially, it's a strain. Emotionally, it's a strain because
now they're encountering things that they didn't have to deal
with with their own children. This is a whole new
world for some grandparents. So our job is to make
resources available to those families, and my job is to
(08:47):
provide emotional support as well as helping them with resources,
because sometimes they just want event and I'm here to listen.
So when you think about kinship care, what should people
all about that? I mean, we we might be introducing
this concept to people for the very first time. Kinship
is any family that's composed of people taking care of
(09:09):
children that aren't necessarily there is. It could be fictive
kin which could be a family friend, or it could
be uncle, Auntie, granny, just relatives that are taking care
of children that aren't theirs, and they're overlooked. Because we've
been doing kinship forever, we just didn't have a name
for it. We always had somebody who stayed with Grandma,
(09:30):
or grew up with the grandparents, or grew up with
aunties or even with older siblings. And in popular culture,
there are many people that became famous. There are celebrities
that are politicians and whatnot that come from kinship situations.
President Obama is a perfect example. He grew up with
his grandparents, right L. L. Cool Ja, Oprah Winfrey. You know,
(09:53):
there's tons of people all over the world that have
grown up in that situation. I wanted to understand what
success looked like for Robert in a pre COVID world,
so we could intern understand how deep the impact the
pandemic has had on his community. If I've got ten
(10:14):
caregivers I'm talking to, success means ten different things. So
before COVID, I would do home visits. So I'd go
and i'd i'd sit down, and I talked to a
caregiver a couple of times a month. But during COVID
it changed everything. Obviously there's no more home visits. The
goals are still the same, but now here's the different challenge.
(10:37):
Now we have a caregiver who's in her seventies, who
isn't necessarily tech savvy, who now has grandchildren doing virtual learning,
so walking them through that or linking them with resources
with people who could help them walk them through those
things for the virtual learning. Sometimes the goal might be
(10:58):
I need some time for myself, I need some self care,
and finding those resources in a pandemic it's a lot
harder than before. What is success It depends on who
you're asking. When COVID shut everything down, I was working
with care givers that I had already met physically, right,
so they knew who I was. I knew with their
(11:19):
tone inflection that I had an idea about where they
were as far as their moods and whatnot. Let's say
you've got the person who's really upset, but they hide it,
they mask it. They can mask it with their voice,
but if they're sitting in front of you, you could
see tears welling up, you could see the knee moving
back and forth, you can see the uneasy like there's
(11:41):
so many things. So it's changed how I'm trying to
figure out how to help people. Instead of saying are
you okay? And this transcends kinship care or what the
work I'm doing, This is like just for humans instead
of just saying are you okay? Because that gives a
person an easy out. They can say, yeah, I'm fine,
(12:01):
that's easy to say, what can I help you with?
What do you need? You get specific if I say
what do you need? Now they're like, oh, okay, what
do I need? I need some diapers, I need somebody
to listen to me, I need daycare. It changes the
(12:21):
dynamic because just forming those relationships with those people, they
know that they can still call Robert or call somebody
at Halo's and I know that they'll step in and
do something. How can I help you? What do you need?
I'm going to use that. What are the long term
impacts that you're seeing on the families as far as
the pandemic, I'm seeing a lot more stress. I'm seeing
(12:50):
a lot more dips in mood, depression, seeing a lot
more of that. I mean, I worked with caregivers before
covid IT who were depressed because you know, they were
in this new situation and it was overwhelming. But now
it's a whole other level of overwhelming for them. So yeah,
(13:10):
it's exacerbated things to another level. Thankfully, Halos has support
groups and virtual support groups. That happened like twice a month,
and we encourage caregivers to talk to each other because
you know, I'm a parent, But I'm not a kinship caregiver.
If it's coming from granny, the granny, the great granny,
(13:33):
the uncle, that these people that are doing the work themselves,
it's different. I feel like it's more of a positive impact.
In a recent article published as part of the COVID
nineteen Resources on Health Equity, it shared how marginalized and
minoritized communities have and will suffer more acutely during this
COVID nineteen crisis. In Chicago, for example, seven in temptations
(13:56):
who died from COVID nineteen in the city where African
American despite the group only representing the population. I asked
Robert about the communities he serves and what he sees
in terms of health equity. The majority of the people
we do work with our minority women, basically a marginalized
(14:21):
group who are underserved. When we do our intake, we
try to cover all the bases so we find out
what benefits they're already receiving. Do you get medicaid, the
kids on Medicaid? Are you snap? You get food stamps?
What do you have? And sometimes they're like the answer
(14:41):
to all of those is no, I have none of
that stuff. They may not have access to public health right,
so we are all trained to take them through something
they used to call the benefit bank, so we can
actually apply for benefits with them. So we don't allow
them to just kind of swing in the wind trying
to figure out what's going to happen next. We try
(15:03):
to make sure that there are fewer obstacles in their
way as far as the health care. You know, the
undeserved community does suffer a lot. How else are they
affected in terms of people needing more resources? Is there
a change there? Have you noticed a difference? Well, with
COVID shutting a lot of businesses down, a lot of
(15:26):
those people are working, right, so now if they can
get unemployment, then they're okay for a little while. But
now there's other things happening at the same time. Luckily,
we're connected with other organizations that have grants, that have
funds available to help people with rent, with utilities, with food.
(15:50):
Think about the single grandparents or moms that have a
child or have children with special needs. As a matter
of fact, I'm working with a caregiver who has an
autistic child and she's currently out of work because of
the pandemic, so she had to come home, and her
grandson couldn't go to school, but he needs special attention,
(16:15):
and she can't work from home while he's at home.
So she's caring for a child who's autistic, who has
some behavioral challenges, and she's trying to figure out what
her next movie is like. In any other world, if
we weren't dealing with this pandemic, she could have him
stay with her cousin up the street during the day
(16:37):
and she could work. If we weren't in a pandemic,
he would be at school with the people who are
equipped to help him with learning and with his behavior
and everything else. That was very difficult for her, and
that's still very difficult for her. Absolutely. What kind of
help do you think they would need in order to
feel secure about reporting if they are in fact affected
(16:59):
by COVID nineteen. The way people talk about COVID, it's
almost like this plague, and so in their minds it's like,
I can't tell people because then it's gonna change how
people look at me or the perception. So it's like
the reframing of it and helping them understand how important
(17:20):
it is for them to let it be known for
the safety of the very children that they've taken in. Right,
you're doing this for the children. We need to raise
these people up that are doing this amazing work by
taking care of these children and making sure that these
children are in a safe place and nurturing these children
and providing everything that they need. Perfectly said, anyone who's
(17:45):
listening to this podcast, you know how do they reach out?
We are online. You can check out the website at
Charleston Halo's dot org. Great and I appreciate the work
that you do. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you,
Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
In contrast to Catherine's conversation with Robert Ellington and Charleston
(18:09):
shining an important light on our local communities, in my
conversation with Dr Hotez, we explore the science behind the
pandemic and what we need to understand about vaccines as
we look forward. Thanks again for your time today, Dr Hotez.
I was looking at my notes from our last conversation
in April or May, and you were right about literally
(18:32):
everything regarding the trajectory of the pandemic, from lockdown, fatigue
to ramp and spread. What has surprised you the most
about our nation during this pandemic, Well, certainly the most
disappointing part is our inability to launch a national COVID
nineteen response program control program. It was left to the
(18:52):
States and a sort of haphazard way. There was backup
support for supply chain management, providing ventilator and manufacturing and
female support and now of course vaccines, but there was
no federally coordinated response for a COVID nineteen control and suppression.
(19:12):
And that's why we have this horrible situation now where
more than two d fifty Americans have lost their lives,
with projections that another hundred and fifty thousand will lose
their lives between now and a week or two after
the inauguration. What would you say it surprised you about
the people of our nation? Well, you know, I brought
out the best and worst. Um. I think the healthcare
(19:35):
profession was absolutely heroic. So were the scientists, you know,
sharing data. You know, the healthcare professionals, nurses, p A,
S D O, S M D s slpiens, radiology texts,
people working the I c U hospital staff. You know,
I'll put their lives on the line to save lives,
(19:58):
and I think the numbers are sevent your healthcare professionals
lost their life in the US this year. And on
the other side was the lack of concerned by the
White House to protect those healthcare professional lives by allowing
surges on our intensive care units, which is now getting
to the worst ever across the country. So as bad
(20:19):
as New York City was in March and April, now
we're seeing this play out times dozens in cities and
rural areas across the US. And that disinformation campaign that
came out of the White House that downplayed the severity
the epidemic and tried to attribute COVID desk to other
causes and fake concepts of her immunity and discrediting masks.
(20:43):
And then you saw those millions of Americans in an
effort to show allegiance to that disinformation to the White House,
you know, totally buying into it and also being defined
of masks and social distancing. And it just turned into
a monstrosity in terms of loss of life. So going forward,
(21:03):
other than having hopefully a much more favorable response as
a nation and a coordinated response with the Biden administration,
what do we learn from this for public health broadly,
and how can we better resource public health agencies? Well,
I think we have to get ready for the next
epidemic pandemic, because we know at least there's new coronavirus
(21:24):
is every decade. So first of all, a careful assessment
of what we're horribly wrong. Clearly the concept of a
coronavirus task Force was a flawed one, and letting it
run out of Washington d C it was too politicized
from the outset and the quality was not what it
needed to be. And so figuring out how to move
(21:46):
that to Atlanta, letting c d C run at Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, putting them in charge, I
think it's going to be absolutely imperative. Having said that,
there were clearly some marked deficiencies within c d see right,
They failed to detect the entry of the virus from
Europe into New York City, the disaster with the diagnostic tests,
(22:08):
which we still never totally got right, failing to be
more assertive in mounting that national response. Why did all
those things happen? So having a frank assessment of that
in order to fix it, that's going to be important
as well. That makes sense. So a lot of your
work you mentioned more coronavirus is for instance, a lot
of your work centers on marginalized populations throughout the world.
(22:32):
Can you explain to our listeners what a neglected tropical diseases?
It's a term that we help coin In the early
two thousands in response to the Millennium Development Goals, there
was recognition, in part through the work of Jeoffrey Sax
and Dean Jamison and others, that infectious diseases both occur
in the setting up poverty and cause poverty, and infectious
(22:54):
disease reduction itself is a anti poverty measure. In fact,
we call our neglect of disease vaccines anti poverty vaccines.
And so we got together and rebranded some of the
most common parasitic infections like hookworm ands just a samisis
and leashmanisis and shock because disease has neglected tropical diseases
(23:15):
to establish a new framework, including a package of medicines
that's not been delivered to a billion people annually, which
is really exciting. So why do COVID nineteen and neglected
tropical diseases disproportionately affect marginalized communities? Can you explain your
thoughts on that well with neglected tropical disease in general,
(23:35):
Why is poverty such a major risk factor. I mean
it has to do with all of the things that
go associated with a lack of access to healthcare, lack
of access to clean water and sanitation, hygiene, lack of
adequate housing which allows insect vectors and others to enter.
I think all of those are factors. But you know,
(23:57):
the truth is, we don't really fully understand that link
between poverty and also why these diseases caused poverty. We
think it's probably because of their long term effects on
child development and worker productivity, and the health of girls
and women is important. And then there's that COVID nineteen
link also because one of the things that we noticed
(24:18):
was high rates of COVID nineteen in our low income communities,
for instance here in Houston. COVID nineteen has caused historic
decimation of Hispanic communities across the Southern States, and I
think a lot of it has to do with the
fact that they represent essential workers and family owned businesses.
And then also multigenerational dwellings where you have you know,
(24:42):
the twenty year old out on construction sites and family
owned businesses and the parents, but then the grandparents lived there,
and I think that created a lot of disease exposure
as well. But Night testified to the Congressional in Hispanic
caucus about this too, really drum home the fact that
this is one of the hidden parts of the COVID
epidemic in the US and also among low income populations everywhere.
(25:05):
There's this concept out there that I call blue Marble health.
The poor living among the wealthy or disproportionately account for
a lot of the world's poverty related diseases. And when
you actually add up things like leprosy and leashmaniasis and
it's just a semiosis and shagas disease, it's overwhelming. At
least the poor living among the G twenty countries that
(25:27):
accounts for the highest rates of these diseases and COVID nineteens.
Going by that same playbook, our guests during our Human
Interest segment works to support kinship caregivers, extended family who
(25:47):
raised children on their own. And you mentioned how it's
disproportionately affecting multigenerational families. What have you witnessed with COVID
nineteen affecting the family structure. Well, it's highly disruptive, right,
I mean, if you know, especially in the low income
neighborhoods where people don't have the opportunity to work via
Skype and zoom and at home remotely, they have to
(26:09):
physically be at the workplace they're exposed. And even though
often young people handle the virus, well, we know that
about half of the COVID nineteen cases that are asymptomatic
are responsible for the lines share the transmission of this virus.
And then you know, unfortunately, people who are susceptible at home,
(26:30):
either because of age or because of underlying comorbidity such
as obesity or diabetes, or heart disease or renal disease,
they're the ones really getting hit hard. And so you
see this every day. I mean the Houston Health Department
where I am, they put out a list every day
of the people who've lost their lives the day before
from COVID nineteen, and it provides sex, age, and race
(26:54):
or ethnicity, and every day it's Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic, Black, Black,
Hispanic Hispanic. Just decimated these communities. It's really just heartbreaking,
you know. Speaking of Harris County Public Health, I had
some good conversations with them earlier this year and trying
to improve the technology for the local health agency there.
I was shocked to learn that the health agency actually
(27:16):
receives inbound faxes of COVID cases. And it seems to
me the more I learned that local health agencies are
just a dearth of modern technologies. And unfortunately it feels
like we have under resource health agencies and expect them
to move mountains and actually prevent things like this from happening,
(27:37):
but we don't provide them with any resources. Do you
have any thoughts on that. I mean, not only our
health departments under resource, the pay the stability is really
inadequately politicized health departments, so that people who work and
health departments don't feel comfortable speaking out when they see
social injustices or if they see that important healthy issues
(28:00):
are not being addressed or silenced by political leaders and
elected leaders. We certainly saw that throughout the United States
that people felt they were going to lose their job
if they pointed out things that weren't getting done to
come back COVID nineteen, We don't invest in in our
health care infrastructure. We have a highly fragmented system and
(28:23):
of course it's incredibly expensive as well in terms of hospitalizations.
It needs a massive overhaul, whether or not anybody has
the political will to do that, and not only at
the hospital level, but also at the public health agency level.
I learned a startling statistic kind of makes my blood boil.
It seems that our public health system gets as little
(28:43):
as two of the funding of provider care. And it
makes sense where we are today when they don't have
any funding, inadequate resources, lack of funding, but also that
political suppression which we hear about, you know, on the
big cable news networks, like in an MSNBC with regards
to c DC. But what we don't here is all
the suppression that's going on the state, county, and city level,
(29:07):
particularly in the middle part of the country, particularly in
a lot of our red states. Unfortunately, including where I
am in Texas. It's been highly politicized and people are
fearful about speaking out because remember, the narrative is COVID
nineteen is a hoax and deaths are due to other comorbidities,
and all you need to do is reach herd immunity
(29:29):
and it's going to go away. And when our healthcare
providers and our public health experts point out the inconvenient
truth that that's all bs. Then they get targeted and
it looks like I get targeted and have been targeted
all year. It's really unfortunate. Speaking of the rural locations
you introduced me to nature earlier this year, and I've
(29:50):
learned that more than half of local health agencies in
the US literally only have two or three staff members,
no contact tracing capacity, and they may even be relied
upon an vaccine distribution. So you mentioned political will. What
would you say to state and federal decision makers about
resourcing health agencies? Well, you know, and there was some
(30:11):
effort to higher contact tracers eventually in the state of Texas,
for instance, but it's a fraction of what we needed
and not in time. So for instance, you know, we
had that big summer search across the southern states Florida,
the Gulf Coast states, Texas, then going into the Southwest
(30:32):
all during July and August, and the problems were twofold one.
They opened prematurely before we really got down to containment levels,
so we started out at a pretty high level, and
then they still hadn't even had the public health infrastructure
in place to allow you to do that safely. Eventually,
(30:52):
we slowly got up to speed in terms of contact racing,
but there was not that guidance from the federal government
to say, hey, this is what you need to do.
It was left to the states, and the states never
had the epidemiological course powered and the models to know
exactly what to do when, the timing of when to
do it. And then they also could have used the
(31:14):
political cover of the CDC and federal government because you know,
the governors themselves were being buffeted by all these political forces,
especially from political extremists on the far right, you know,
who just wanted to open her up and thought it
was a hoax and they needed the political cover of
the c d C. Say, hey, I understand what you're saying,
(31:34):
but Centers for Disease Controls is saying, if we do
this now, x number of fluorid Ians or Georgians or
Texans or Oklahoma's are going to lose their lives. And
that conversation never took place because there was never that
federal guidance you mentioned contact tracing. Another thing that really
shocked me about our country is people are comfortable with
(31:56):
doing just about anything from their phone. You know, you
can order door Dash and Minute and you know next
day shipping. Why is it that contact tracing is too
far of a bridge to cross where people don't trust
it or it's been difficult to reach people. Well, I
think there's the practical matter, the fact that people get
so much spam now on their phone phone calls. I mean,
(32:17):
I don't know about you, but I often don't answer
a strange phone number I've never seen before. So I
think that's clearly a component of it. But the other
is there is this very aggressive anti vaccine, anti science
movement that started around initially out of Orange County in California,
but then really amplified in Texas. And it was this
(32:41):
what they called health freedom medical freedom movement that government
can't tell us what to do, government is spying on us,
you can't tell us to vaccinate our kids. So that
was the form the anti vaccine movement took starting in
around and it got linked to again political extremism, got
funded by groups that support the Tea Party and others,
(33:02):
and they became well funded, well organized movements that resulted
in huge numbers of kids in Texas, Oklahoma, elsewhere being
denied access to their vaccines. And then what happened in
those same health freedom medical freedom groups started gloming on
protest against masks and social distancing and contact tracing, seeing
(33:25):
it as interference. And then then of course the conspiracy
theories followed, right that Bill Gates or me or Tony
Fauci were gonna try to implant chips by vaccinating into people,
and somehow it got all tied up with five G
and so you know, you start trying to explain and
(33:46):
trying to implement things like contact tracing apps just made
it all the more difficult. And the other piece to this,
and I tend to be an outlier on it compared
to my colleagues, is to say, it's not just a
matter of fine tuning the message. You're improving the message.
We even amplifying the message, because the message is still
floating in bottles in the Atlantic Ocean, because they're inundated
(34:08):
with this vast anti science, anti vaccine media empire now
that now dominates the internet. You know, four hundred and
eighty fake anti vaccine websites all ripped up on social media.
If you go to Amazon dot com website put books
up at the top press return, you get a scrolled
down menu at the left that includes health, fitness, and dieting.
(34:28):
You click on that, you get vaccinations, and you click
on that it's all fake anti vaccine books and fake
COVID books. So Amazon is one of the leading promoters
of anti science. And then on top of that you
have the Russians with their weaponized health communications and bots
and trolls flooding our internet with disinformation. We're seeing now
(34:51):
those health freedom groups have been now going to Western
Europe this summer and assisting in protests against masks and
vaccine means in Berlin, Germany, and Paris and London. And
in Berlin, you know the CBS news report it was
linked to Q and On and even neo Nazi groups.
So it's taken on this very dark turn. And as
(35:13):
I hear myself saying this, you have to be really
careful how you explain it, because you know, you start
talking about far right wing extremist groups and Q and
On and neo Nazis and the Russians, and it's and
it all sounds very unhinged, even though there's definitely evidence
for it. Also, how we dismantle the anti vaccine anti
(35:36):
science confederacy or empires is a big question, and so
far nobody's shown much appetite for doing it. The federal
government has not shown any interest in doing the necessary
things like creating an inter agency task force around this.
So these things continue to grow and um and it's
gotten massive. Now what threat do you think that this
(35:57):
poses for the vaccination of our country surrounding COVID nineteen. Well,
we've got the surveys from Reuters and Associated Press and
Pure Research saying that up to half of Americans will
refuse COVID nineteen vaccines even if they're made available. And
I think some of that will go away. It's just
a normal response to all the politicization of vaccines that
(36:19):
we've had over this past year. And as people start
getting vaccinated without any end toward reaction, I think people
will start adopting vaccines, especially if we start launching a
communications plan, which Operation Warp Speed is not done. But
we still have this anti vaccine aggression, particularly on COVID
nineteen vaccines, and you see some of the lead anti
(36:41):
vaccine groups UH in the country already gearing up. You
have national groups like Children's Health Defense led by Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. You know, if you go to their Twitter side,
it's conspiracies around me. He calls me the original gangster villain,
the o gen villain. So that's what you're talking to today.
Believable and people believe it. So there's actually targeting of
(37:03):
scientists as well. This is a big problem. How can
our listeners in our show support the public health narrative? Well,
I think just getting educated is a big piece, and
you know, talking about on social media when you see
friends put crazy stuff out there on whatever form of
social media you use. And also I think, you know,
(37:24):
as scientists, we need to be better informed about what
these anti science movements are. And I've been pushing hard
to implement programs of science communication and public engagement in
our doctoral and postdoctoral training. It's not even encouraged by
universities very much, so I think building that into the
DNA of scientific training will help a lot as well. Right, So,
(37:47):
what recommendations do you have for our listeners about staying safe? Well,
just remember this is the worst part of the epidemic.
COVID transmission is at a screaming high rate now in
the country. We're getting up to two new cases a day.
And remember that's an underrestment by three or four or five,
so we may be up to a million new cases
(38:08):
a day. So anytime you bring people together, if in
large enough numbers, you will have people with COVID nineteen
in your house or certainly in airports and bus stations.
Georgia Tech just put out sort of a nice assessment
tool to basically say, based on level of transmission, what
happens if you bring nine people together, ten people together,
(38:31):
fifty people together. You know, it's pretty sobering how much
COVID nineteen there is. So you know this is the
time to identify your social distancing unit and keep that
to a small group. And remember it's not forever. We
have vaccines coming. Just don't be reckless and avoid ice
use surges in your community and we'll get through this.
(38:52):
But unfortunately the numbers are still looking awful. What would
you to say to somebody that's afraid to take the vaccine? Men,
if they're not necessarily an anti vax or. The only
thing that we know can keep you out of your
ice to you if you're exposed to COVID nineteen is
having virus neutralizing antibodies in your system and they all
work that way, and don't overthink it. Save your life,
(39:13):
in your family's life. So that was the first episode
of the Contact World podcast. So what is Contact World?
Why do we make this podcast? We made this podcast
because we're on a mission to improve public health and
health equity and to have a positive impact on society,
especially in marginalized communities who suffer the weight of our
(39:35):
country's prior decisions. But we're here to change that one
episode at a time. Over the coming weeks, we'll hear
from health experts, scientists, real people with real stories. So
make sure you join us for the next episode of
Contact World. I'm justin back and I'll see you next time.
(39:56):
Listen to Contact World the podcast on the I Heart
Radio app or where every to get your podcasts.
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