Political Talks

Markham interviews Professor Raywat Deonandan, epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa and a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

What is Political Talks?

Smart people talking about the theory, analysis, and practice of Canadian politics. Guests include political scientists, pollsters, journalists, and insiders. More thoughtful journalism from Energi Media.

Markham:

Welcome to episode 3 of the political talks podcast. I'm journalist, Marcum Hyslop. During the 1st year of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, there was a great deal of confusion about and misunderstanding of the virus. I know very little about medical science and healthcare, but I put my interview skills to work, talking to approximately 70 healthcare professionals, scientists, and other experts from around the world. I have remained connected with many of them on social media.

Markham:

Consequently, I've had a front row seat to fascinating discussions about COVID research over the past 4 years. 1 of the experts I still follow closely is Professor Raywat Dyanandan, epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa and a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Today, he and I will discuss the current state of the COVID pandemic. Welcome to the interview, Ray.

Ray:

Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

Markham:

Well, it III apologize for mispronouncing your last name. We practice before we

Ray:

Not a problem, mister Haslip. That's, my pleasure. See, this is 1 of

Markham:

the reasons why you're 1 of my favorite, Twitter, Twitter connections. It's the as you describe yourself, you know, you you're an, you have, you're an expert in, in epidemiology and a teller of bad jokes, but I appreciate your bad jokes.

Ray:

Excellent hair though. Well, you

Markham:

and I are both kind of in the old guy with great hair flow.

Ray:

Yeah.

Markham:

No 1 can see this of course, so we can claim membership and no 1 can dispute it. But, I do appreciate you have a 4 year old, and you tell, toddler stories and 4 year old stories and your your 4 year old scares the hell out of me. I mean, that's a kid as good as precocious, man. I mean, unless of course you're making all that up.

Ray:

No. He's precocious, but I don't wanna put too many expectations on him. I fully expect him to be unemployed street mime when he's older. So whatever he goes is fine.

Markham:

Well, like, I wanna talk a little bit about your your background and how you became an epidemiologist. Kinda give us a a sketch if you don't mind.

Ray:

Yeah. So I was, you know, I was a poor immigrant kid in Toronto, and, I was really good at math and science, and I was really good at writing. And I wanted to be a writer, but my, you know, my passions included science. And I had to decide what to study, writing or science. And as a poor immigrant, the choice was obvious because my parents would never tolerate any studying literature.

Ray:

So I studied science. And, I always sort of kept my feet in both camps, hence the desire to communicate as well. I think that's an important aspect of being a professional scientist. But it's a story I tell my students about how I discovered epidemiology. I stumbled through my education.

Ray:

I ended up doing degrees in physics and physiology, and I chose to do a master's degree in neuroscience, which I really regretted because I'm not a experimental lab guy. And, I also am an animal rights guy, so I didn't want to experiment on animals. So I'm I'm doing experiments on myself, on my eyes. And late 1 night I was doing I was bouncing laser beams off my eyes and to maintain dark adaptation I had to be in the dark. When I'm not in the dark I have to wear red goggles.

Ray:

And this is really depressing. Around the same time my girlfriend dumped me. So I'm literally depressed and in the dark. What have I done with my life? And I sat down and said I gotta change things.

Ray:

And I went through reading the calendar and trying to figure out what I wanted out of life. And, I decided that it had to be something that was changed topic regularly, that didn't involve working with my hands, that was irrelevant to the world, and that was sexy. Meaning that if I mentioned it at a party, people would their ears would pick up, oh, what is that? I want to hear more about that. And I discovered epidemiology.

Ray:

And that's the only reason I chose it originally is it ticked off those boxes. And amazingly, it seemed to be something that I was marginally good at and I enjoyed. The beauty of epidemiology, is that at the time, no 1 knew what it was. Today, almost everyone thinks they know what it is. But because no 1 knew

Markham:

what If I may interrupt.

Ray:

For sure.

Markham:

And by the way, I very inter I very rarely interrupt my guests. But my next question was going to be what is epidemiology? Because I, I suppose if you asked me at a dinner party, Markham define it for us.

Ray:

Right.

Markham:

I'd stumble around and, and do what everybody does, but I would not get it. I would not be accurate. So let's Yeah. See the epidemiologist definition.

Ray:

Well, as I was saying, no 1 knows what it was, so it could be whatever I wanted it to be. And we still kinda think of it that way. Now, officially, it is the science of the determinants of health, meaning you you look at a variety of factors that will eventually impact someone's health and quantify them and determine which ones are the best ones. I think of it as medicine without icky things, without touching people and patients and blood samples. You deal with numbers mostly.

Ray:

And it goes back, to the Victorian era when a man named John Snow discovered what was causing the cholera epidemic at the time. And back then, we knew nothing about, you know, pathogens and viruses and bacteria. And he reasoned using mathematics that it came from the water supply, the Broad Street pump actually. And if you go to London today, you can go to the Broad Street pump. There's a little plaque that says, here's the site where epidemiology was invented.

Ray:

Fast forward to modern day, and it really is just using mathematics and logic to figure out what is making people sick and what could probably make them less sick. It's misunderstood today to be the science of infectious disease. That's not what it is. That is a subset of what we do. But it's it's I I think of it as a science of logic and the science of science.

Markham:

So is it fair to say that you have in your professional work, your research, and your teaching that you deal with pandemics. Can we, can I call you an expert on on pandemics?

Ray:

I have since become something of an expert on this pandemic. Originally, it was not something I focused on heavily. I was more of a communicator and a global health epidemiologist, being that I focus on a variety of health conditions, including infectious disease outbreaks.

Markham:

Okay. Then here's a big question that we need to tackle. Canadians need

Ray:

to tackle. Mhmm.

Markham:

And that is, is the COVID pandemic over?

Ray:

Technically, no. What is a pandemic? By definition, a pandemic is an epidemic that occurs all over the world at once. What's an epidemic? It's when the instance of a disease happens more commonly than would otherwise be expected.

Ray:

Very soft definition. There is administrative definition that the WHO uses that, you know, checks off some boxes about it must occur in a variety of WHO regions simultaneously, etc. When they define the pandemic, it's for administrative purposes. It's to release some funds. It's to demand some data sharing protocols, etcetera.

Ray:

Sometime last year, they said that that the emergency phase of the pandemic was over. That's an administrative delineation, meaning that we're going to reallocate some resources now to other issues. Because of vaccination and immunity, this is not the emergency it once was. But the pandemic continues because people are still getting sick regularly around the world.

Markham:

Yeah. I noticed in photos that you posted last year on your Twitter account, I can't get used to say calling it x. So my apologies if Elon Musk is in our audience today, but I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter, but you posted photos of, of yourself on Twitter at events, with a mask on. Yeah. And that is unusual even amongst the medical profession.

Markham:

And so what in the data lately led you to mask then, and do you mask now?

Ray:

So then I've masked all the time when I was in public indoor settings. And the reason for that is there is a lot of COVID going around, and the hospitals were overtaxed. So I felt it was responsible to reduce spread as much as I could to save our hospital system. Today, I don't mask as commonly. I will, if it's a large indoor setting, if I'm gonna be there for a long time.

Ray:

I don't mask if I go grocery shopping or pick up my kid from daycare or whatever. If the hospital, traffic increases dramatically, I will mask again because that's a responsible thing to do to contribute to the lessening traffic in our hospitals. So it's a combination of of, vectors and indicators that I look at. The the burden of cases in the community, the probability that I will be exposed and infected, and therefore the probability that I will contribute to the traffic in the hospital and how close that traffic is to being oversaturated.

Markham:

What you just told me are, what you just described are the oh, 0, I'm going to say 18 to 24 months ago, because there were a lot of professionals in my network who were calling for public health to not back away from COVID management, but to do more, know, to mandate health, sorry, mandate masking more often, or, you know, put more communications and education emphasis on vaccines, that that sort of thing. And the problem there is that particularly for people like me, who are maybe a little plugged in, but I don't have access to data. And the government was public health office, officials were, stopping testing and not publishing data anymore. How can I do a, and I had a little bit of a tiff with doctor, Goldman from CBC, white white lab, white lab coat, whatever? You know, the the fellow I'm talking about, he's got he's got a show.

Markham:

And he said, there's lot there's lots of evidence to to do your own personal health risk. You there's everything you need to know is out there. I said, no. There isn't. Not for people like me.

Markham:

I where do I go to get in infection, data, particularly locally, which was available? So, anyway, what what does the literature say about where we're at with COVID now?

Ray:

Well, who's we? Globally, locally, you know, nationally, wherever it might be. A few weeks ago, I was posting wastewater data from around the world showing that there seems to be a lull in cases. That's changed. There's a spike in cases now going up in key parts of the world, and that's because of a new variance called the FLIRT variance, k p 2, k p 3, etcetera, which show extraordinary immune escape characteristics, meaning that previous immunity guarded through vaccination and infection is no longer, strongly protecting us against infection and serious infection, symptomatic infection.

Ray:

So the cases are going up, and I expect a significant wave sometime in the fall unless the new vaccine comes out, for them. So that's where we are globally. Now, is it a mortal threat anymore? That's the other question. No, it's not a mortal threat.

Ray:

It's not an existential threat to civilization, as it might have been briefly in 2020. And the reason for that is the the waning effects of good vaccine based immunity and the waning effects of repeat infection that also causes immunity and the fact that there's some survivor bias. So people who are going to die in large part have already died. There's plenty more of us by the way who can die and will die. Let's be clear about that.

Ray:

So, will it be a challenge in our hospital system? That's the other big question. I think it can be. We we tend to forget that the the single biggest age group that is hospitalized by COVID is, of course, the elderly. The second biggest is kids under 6 months.

Ray:

And they continue to be vulnerable because they can't get vaccinated. So as the numbers rise, I'm my biggest concern is always for the young children. That's why I'm always advocating for people. When the numbers start going up, do your best to curtail transmission, get your vaccination, wear a mask when you need to to protect the small children. The elderly, you know, are are vulnerable, but at least they can get vaccinated.

Ray:

Kids can.

Markham:

1 of the things that I have discovered, is the, incidence of risk, in the various age groups. And so as a newly minted 65 year old, I now am in a high risk group. Anybody over 60 and then in the 70 to 80, it goes up again and and so on. But the, the leap in degree of risk from the group, the cohort below me and the jump to my cohort now is quite, quite startling. And, and that's 1 of the reasons why I still mask in every public place I go in.

Markham:

And on top of that, I lost my spleen 30 years ago in a car accident. And, you know, I have other, risk factors. And so that's me, but I have access to way more information. Thanks to my connection to people like you than the, the average Canadian does.

Ray:

Yeah.

Markham:

And the situation that you just described, I would, I never see it anywhere in the, in the media. I don't even see it on social media very much. So I see the logic of relaxing a little bit when incidents of infection is low, becoming more vigilant when the incidence of infection is high, but I can't, I don't have the data to tell. Yeah. And so what do we do?

Ray:

Really important question. And this is where government has failed us. If you're going to download responsibility for COVID management onto the individual, you must also provide the individual with the tools to do the appropriate risk management, and they've not done so. In fact, bit by bit, they take those tools away. Primary among those tools is wastewater data.

Ray:

And, of course, right now, there's a movement to upload all that to the federal system, and that makes a little bit of sense to have, you know, a coordinated federal wastewater data management so so that data is consistent, etcetera. The problem there is the federal system would have fewer sites, not more. And with fewer sites, you have less resolution, less local management capacity. So that worries me. We should be expanding wastewater management, not curtailing it.

Ray:

This is a gift from the science gods, wastewater management. Who knew that was coming? You know, it's relatively cheap, easily understood, passively done, can be built into infrastructure anywhere in the country, and just in the background does some public health work that can be largely automated. And yet we retreat from that, which is crazy. The testing, I mean, testing is difficult because for PCR testing, you need lab capacity.

Ray:

We need that lab capacity for other purposes. What we should be doing is rolling out improved and cheaper rapid tests so that people can again make day to day decisions that they need. Data from rapid tests was never going to be publicly available. It's just not conceivably shareable. But at least giving people the tool to decide for themselves if they're infectious or if their guests are infectious, that would be useful.

Ray:

And the the desire to develop better rapid tests has dwindled to almost nothing. The desire to develop even better vaccines has dwindled as well.

Markham:

It it, are you talking about well, let's say we, there's a rapid, test available that's more, efficacious than the 1 we've got now. So, tomorrow, my brother and sister-in-law are coming over and while they're not as careful, not nearly as careful as we are, we're gonna have dinner together, out on our patio And we'll be, we'll be distanced, you know, a reasonable amount, but it's big. The patio is big enough that 4 people can sit out there and not be breathing on each other. So I, I think the, the risk from that is fairly low, but if there was a rapid test available that we could trust that they could take before they came over, that would be helpful. It would be just 1 more data point in our deciding how we're going to handle our social interactions.

Markham:

So your previous comments about why we're not doing this, we're not developing this test. We're cutting back on wastewater testing. What in the hell has happened to public health?

Ray:

Yes. Good question. It's a good question. My public health is busy all the time. They're doing other things, not just COVID.

Ray:

There's measles going on. There's H5N1 going on. There's obesity and diabetes. They're busy people and they're underfunded, more underfunded now than, you know, before COVID, I think, in many cases. So I don't wanna blame public health.

Ray:

I do wanna blame the larger political system for not emphasizing public health. If you give them more money, they'll spend it accordingly. Give them more resources, they'll spend it accordingly. Reorganize it too. We have broken public health in this country along several lines.

Ray:

Prime among them is the inability to coordinate and to share data. That could solve some problems. We're still at the height of COVID. We were sharing data via fax machine, 1990s technology. And this was something that was alerted during the the SARS epidemic of 2003.

Ray:

In fact, we learned very little. We we learned a lot from SARS. We didn't put into action a lot of the lessons from SARS. Among them, equity. Among them, protecting our long term care centers.

Ray:

Among them, data coordination, data sharing. I mean, the Public Health Agency of Canada was created because of SARS, and this was supposed to solve a lot of these problems. But in fact, the problems were just, more deeply ingrained.

Markham:

I want to talk about, because this is a podcast about politics. The 2 provinces I know best Alberta and British Columbia, where we have, we had, Doctor. Dena Hinshaw was the Chief Medical Officer in Alberta during the, you know, the first 3 years or so of, of, COVID and Doctor. Bonnie Henry, in, British Columbia. And Hinshaw in particular, there's been a an outcry, well, There's been some media stories and public discussion because how she defined her role in the Alberta public health act.

Markham:

And I've read it. It says very clearly that she has the responsibility to take measures through public health orders, to protect the health of the citizens of Alberta. The way she defined it, she was very clear in the media interviews. She said, I define that as being as being an adviser to the provincial cabinet, to the premier and his cabinet ministers. They will make the decisions.

Markham:

I will then implement those decisions in public health orders. And of course, what that means is then your COVID management then becomes politicized.

Ray:

Right.

Markham:

And, and because in Alberta, that is essentially where the convoy movement, the freedom move, and I'm doing scare quotes here around freedom. That's where it originated a lot of it in response to COVID measures. And that in part was, was premier Jason Kenny's constituency. He was facing a lot of pressure, from his some of his caucus members, many of his caucus members. And so, you know, in 2022, we have like, you know, the maybe it was 2021, sorry, the best summer ever, you know, where we're basically just gonna pretend that COVID doesn't exist.

Markham:

That wasn't, that wasn't a decision made by Henshaw. That was a decision made by the premier that she rubber stamped. And she's faced some, some serious criticism from legal scholars who have said she didn't do what she was supposed to do under the legislation. She was a dereliction of duty on her part. And I would say the same thing about Henry.

Markham:

Henry has been abysmal in my opinion, in BC and dealing with this. So it seems to me that what we've done, and this appears to be true in other provinces to greater or lesser degree, is we've politicized the implementation of public health around the pandemic. Is that a fair argument to make?

Ray:

Oh, 100%. There's no question. And not just in Canada. Pretty much every country has politicized it. Because you're you're balancing, public health, which is a public good, which costs money.

Ray:

It doesn't make money. It costs money against economic needs, against pleasure, recreational needs. And those are the 2 big things. I mean, the most I get a lot of hate mail as you know. Right?

Ray:

The most hate mail I got at the height of the pandemic was from people upset that they couldn't go on vacation. They they blame me for some reason. And so that shows their their recreational desire is so heightened and, and great that, of course, that's gonna be weaponized by a political quarter. Where we should be thinking about, the use of public health to protect the vulnerable so that they can go to work in the long term and have a sustained robust economy. I think the problem is our shortsighted political cycle.

Ray:

Everything's based on 4 year 4 to 5 year cycles. If you can't think beyond the next election, you're never going to do long term planning. You're not going to invest in clean air in schools that cost money now and won't show it's worth another 10, 20 years, at least numerically. So our inability to plan long term is always going to be the Achilles heel in public health management.

Markham:

But did we not plan for the long term in public health in previous decades? I think of the vaccination movement that started in the fifties. And, you know, as a school child in the sixties, I can't tell you how many times I lined up to get a shot or I get a sugar cube laced with some vaccine. And, and nobody batted an eye. They were thankful.

Markham:

They did, you know, parents were worried about their kids getting polio or getting some other, you know, infectious disease, and, either disabling them or killing them. And today, now we've got this anti vaccine movement. We've got an anti science movement. I know. I see, you know, I read some of your threads where you get, you know, I get the same thing on my threads about energy, but I mean, these are cuckoo for cocoa puff, puffs, these, these people, but it's become a huge issue, misinformation and disinformation.

Markham:

Yeah. And from your point of view as an epidemiologist, how do we combat the spread of all of this anti science information.

Ray:

You know, we can solve almost all the world's problems by turning off the Internet for 1 year. That's not going to happen.

Markham:

Good luck to you that, doing that.

Ray:

But, you know, there was a moment during the initial weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine when Twitter had banned certain accounts from Russia and Belarus that were thought to be purveying Russian disinformation. An amazing thing happened for public health communicators. Suddenly, we weren't getting attacked. Suddenly, we weren't being harassed. It's almost as if a lot of this is coming from disinformation, organized, politicized, different information merchants from largely foreign, accounts.

Ray:

So, clearly, it's possible. It's possible to quell a lot of this with some political will.

Markham:

The I'm interested in this because on the energy side, we've seen the acts of tax campaign that started out with the was coined by, Canadian conservative party leader, Pierre Poliev. And it lasts this spring, it spread all over Canada and there were rallies and it was, you know, reminiscent of 2022 when the convoy movement got out of control and occupied Ottawa for 3 weeks. And 1 of the things that we, pledged to do at, at, at energy media is to do some public events and, and push back against it. We were too late by the time we got around, we were able to do it in may, The the it was out of the the news cycle and it it had died had died down. But it seems to me that the ability of the convoy crowd to be, to, to be extreme, to make threats, to have, you know, throw gravel at the prime minister, with impunity.

Markham:

Nobody gets there. There are no consequences for it, which is boggles the mind to set up as they did, in Alberta for for weeks on end on highways and in the ditches, and in part, you know, parking lots of disrupt we we we seem to be afraid to confront the purveyors of misinformation and disinformation. And I don't understand why.

Ray:

Well, I think it's, a lot of it's fatigue. I mean, who is supposed to confront disinformation? I don't know whose responsibility is it. Is it private citizens? I don't get paid for this.

Ray:

People think scientists like me, this is our it's not our job. We do this in our free time. Is it my job? No. Is it government's job?

Ray:

Maybe. But then if if the government responds, no 1 believes the government because they're the government. So I don't know whose responsibility is it, and and who's responsible, and who can do it in a meaningful fashion. I think the common citizens have to rise up as 1 and say, just tell us actual facts, and do so politely in a civil manner. We will not tolerate uncivil behavior anymore.

Ray:

And politicians need to grow backbones also and pass legislation to protect people, healthcare workers, media, etc. Who have been attacked endlessly. And that's in their best interests. If you look at why do not the best people want to seek public office anymore? Because it's dangerous.

Ray:

Who wants to see that kind of harassment? Past legislation guaranteeing the safety and protection of public servants, and a lot of this will stop, I think.

Markham:

I would argue that, in fact, the legislation is already on the books. All it takes is the Enforcement. Enforcement. And you can all you have to do is look at Alberta. They've been called ditch billies by some people on, and I think I may have used the term myself a few times.

Markham:

And there's essentially, in my opinion, coddled by the RCMP who are willing to come out and basically almost it seems to protect the people in these camps. And at the same time, you know, police in Edmonton and elsewhere are roasting, homeless people in, in, in tent encampments. And it seems to be a tremendous double standard, that no 1 seems to be willing to address. But if we've, we've arrived at this place in the, in the pandemic, where there almost is nothing you can call for. You can't call for new legislation.

Markham:

You can't call for greater public health resources. You can't call for for even, vaccines or or masking, because, you know, there's no 1 to enforce it. There's no 1 to implement it. There's no 1 to provide the resources for it. And people like myself and my family who are very concerned and take precautions, feel abandoned.

Markham:

Right. And, and there are plenty of me, people like me across the country, and I don't know what to do about that.

Ray:

Well, you're a good leader, and we need people like you to have a voice for the majority because I think you are in the majority. We are in the majority, but we're we're busy going to work and raising our kids. We haven't got time to drive trucks to Ottawa and be nonsense class calls about it. You know? So, again, the silent majority to steal a line from particular, fringe group need to speak up and organize and to not step down anymore.

Ray:

I think, weirdly, 1 of the things that might save public health is another public health crisis, like a truly scary 1. Like, if H5N1 makes the leap into a sustained human transmission, that's terrifying. And that will wake up some people to realize, you know what? Maybe maybe the science thing is worthwhile looking into because I saw my neighbors die last week. The problem with COVID is it was a a deathly pandemic that was invisible to most people.

Ray:

You know, like that 1% of infected people died in hospitals, and most people didn't know someone who died. We weren't cording off cording off bodies in wheelbarrows on the streets. That might happen with an H5N1 genuine pandemic. So that would, I think, shock people back into reality.

Markham:

Oh, dear. We have to have another crisis in order to figure out what to do about it. Yeah. So, Ray, going forward, what would you recommend to well, actually, that's not what I wanna ask you a different question. You have posted on social media, about advances in, in science around COVID, particularly, thinking of, different types of vaccines, a nasal vaccine perhaps for COVID.

Markham:

Are are you encouraged by the developments on that front?

Ray:

I'm by nature an optimist, so I am encouraged. I I think it's a solvable problem with sufficient money and attention. There are some good animal studies suggesting that you can get good neutralizing immunity from a nasal vaccine. So people don't realize that the beauty of a nasal mucosal vaccine is that it's kind of like a bouncer keeping troublemakers out of the nightclub. That's better than having to pull them out when they're already in the nightclub.

Ray:

So the current vaccines no longer keep the troublemakers up, but they're pretty good at keeping the troublemakers once they're in causing too much trouble. I mean, the COVID vaccine has the promise of stopping transmission in debt to rights, and that would stop the pandemic right away. It's also not as problematic as an injection. You can give it to kids, you can transport easily. That will solve a lot of problems.

Ray:

And I think we're almost there, maybe a couple of years. Knock on wood. And other therapeutics are coming down the pipeline also. There's also a good chance that you know in decades decades covid becomes the common cold. Not now but decades.

Ray:

So this is not the existential slow moving, human extinction event that some people claim, except that some immunologists suspect that it's impairing our immune systems.

Markham:

Therein lies the problem. I have, many, public health doctors, ER docs, in my social media network and I can think of a number of them that are saying, look, I'm seeing, far more, people with heart problems and younger people with heart problems. We're seeing people who have been, you know, infected, more than once, maybe repeatedly, that are having immune issue system issues and long COVID is continues to be, be a problem. 1 of the questions I wanna ask you is it comes out of a conversation I had with my, son-in-law who is determined, to believe that immunity, debt, sorry, Immunity debt is a thing. Yeah.

Markham:

And can you address that?

Ray:

So the original idea behind immunity debt was that because of the weeks spent in quote unquote lockdown, people weren't being exposed to a variety of pathogens. And then when the lockdown ended, suddenly a rush of pathogens attacked us all and we're all getting sick because we didn't spend that time walling our immune systems with sufficient exposure. I don't think it's a valid theory, mostly because we're seeing waves and waves of these new infections now, and the lockdowns ended 4 years ago. So if there's any debt to be paid off, it's been paid off in full multiple times by now. It strikes me it makes far more sense that we're seeing just, the effects of repeat infection on people having somehow affected our our ability to fight off infection.

Ray:

I'm not an immunologist. I don't wanna express any expertise on that front. Epidemiologically, there seems to be a signal in the population suggesting that is the case. Something that is suggestive is not conclusive. It requires further investigation.

Ray:

But because it is suggestive, I will always weigh it as a strong possibility.

Markham:

Ray, let's close out the interview with, the top 3 things my audience needs to know about current COVID research.

Ray:

Interesting. Interesting question. K. Current COVID research suggests that, 1, it's not the mortal threat to society that it once was, and guarantee it was once a mortal threat. The fatality rate has come down due to vaccination and to repeat infection.

Ray:

Number 2, that doesn't mean it's safe. Avoid it if you can. I avoid it. I've never had COVID as far as I know, and I hope I never have to because getting any kind of infection is not fun. It's not good.

Ray:

And does some kind of damage to your body. Do not seek infection. Number 3 is be optimistic. Be hopeful. Because I I do have a lot of hope for the next generation of vaccines.

Ray:

They are getting better. Even the next booster scheduled in the fall, which targets the the FLRT variants, probably has some strong neutralizing capacity. Vaccines actually do diminish your probability of getting infection despite what people on social media say. And the new ones are even better at it. And beyond the new updated boosters in the fall, hope to see the mucosal vaccines in the next 1, 2, 3 years, and that will be game changing.

Ray:

So be hopeful.

Markham:

So my takeaway from your your 3 things is, be cautious, take reasonable precautions in whatever way you do your personal risk assessment. I think for a lot of people, that's just, they don't do any, they've just moved on with their lives and, and be optimistic because, we're making progress how even though it is slow progress, and that bodes well for the for the future. But in the meantime, exercise some caution.

Ray:

Absolutely. Don't get why get sick? There's no reason to get sick. Do not seek out sickness. It's a simple message that probably your grandmother should have told you when you're a kid.

Ray:

Do not seek out sickness.

Markham:

Okay. So no so no COVID parties for kids is what you're saying. I get it. Okay. Ray, thank you very much for this.

Markham:

This has been very enlightening. And, I I hope that out of our conversation, it will maybe spark some discussion amongst people who otherwise might not have been as cautious. And maybe we can have a little bit of a a positive impact, influence on their behavior. So thank you very much for this.

Ray:

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.