The Slim Chance of a Cure

impetus to the discussions. Republicans and Democrats both are testing a risky strategy that the public and voters will blame the other side for failing to deliver help to millions

of households and companies. Among the unlikely events that could now break the deadlock, President Donald Trump changing tech amid alarm about poll numbers, a sudden reversal of economic indicators that have recently trended upward, and Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell facing a revolt by their own vulnerable moderate members. Israel's cabinet voted to impose a second nationwide

lockdown starting Friday amid a raging coronavirus outbreak. The move defies business leaders who warn of economic strangulation, as well as the powerful ultra Orthodox Jewish community. Ministers voted Sunday to strictly limit movement, gatherings and economic activity for at least three weeks, which coincides with a major Jewish holiday season. Finally finds our Chief executive officer Albert Borla said it's likely the US will deploy a COVID nineteen vaccine to

the public before the end of the year. Borla said the company is prepared for that scenario, even though health authorities have more cautious expectations. Borla said Sunday on CBSS Face the Nation that he's quote quite comfortable that the vaccine the company is developing in partnership with bio n Tech is safe. He said it could be available to Americans before one depending on whether the US Food and

Drug Administration approves it. And now for today's main story, even after a vaccine is developed, the coronavirus is likely to remain with US for years. That means researchers must pursue efforts to find a cure for those who still fall sick. Viruses are tricky to fight, and prevention with vaccines has been far more successful than treatment with drugs. In fact, modern medicine has come up with a true

cure for only one viral infection. For many serious infections, the best approaches are a cocktail of drugs that throws speed bumps in front of the infection. I spoke with Michelle Fake Cortez who reports that the best solution for fighting viruses is often letting our own bodies attack them. Viruses have been getting human sick for millennia, really, and even with the advances of modern medicine, viruses are clearly still causing millions of deaths each year. So what makes

viruses so hard to defeat? A virus is a very unique thing, and it is not a living organism. It has to be inside a cell in order to survive and thrive and reproduce. You can actually kill a virus very easily if it's outside of a cell. In fact, it can't even survive outside of a cell. And if you can get anything onto it, like disinfectant, like sunlight, like almost anything, it can't exist without being inside of

a cell. So in order to kill a virus, or destroy a virus, or slow down a virus, you have to actually be operating inside a cell. And when you're talking about something like coronavirus, that virus has gotten into very important cells that we all need in order to survive ourselves, so trying to slow it down is tricky.

It's not just ronavirus. We actually only have medicine that can cure a virus for one condition, and that's hepatitis C. It took an awfully long time to come up with that medicine and we just haven't had that much time when it comes to coronavirus now. In terms of what our bodies are able to do naturally, I mean, how do our immune systems, without the help of a vaccine or other drugs, how does it naturally try to fight off a virus. The human immune system is an amazing thing.

It produces millions upon millions of what are essentially infection fighting drugs. Every day, one of the millions of antibodies that we have out there launches onto a foreign invader, which is called an antigen, and once it identifies that the immune system is like all in, it sends everybody to that spot and starts reproducing and multiplying and creating more and more antibodies to shut down whatever that attacker is.

Once that's happened, everything recedes, but not to the level that it was before, because now the body is aware that that threat is out there, so those antigens keep circulating and patrolling so that if they see that virus again, it can just go straight into attack mode. That's why we don't have to worry about infections over and over again. That's how our body primes itself to keep us healthy,

and it does that naturally. It's one of the amazing things that our body knows how to breathe, It knows how to regulate our blood sugar and our insulin levels, and it keeps us healthy for us trying to do that outside of the body. We are getting better at it, but it's still not anywhere near as efficient. And so let's talk about those tools that we use to fight viruses. So how do drugs or vaccines mimic what our immune

system is already doing with antibodies? That is solutely what research is built on across almost every plane that we're talking about. When you talk about convalescent plasma for example. That is literally just trying to take those antibodies out of someone who's already fought the infection and put it into someone new. But there are more efficient ways to do that. There are researchers who have been able to

actually create monoclonal antibodies. That means they're building those antibodies outside of the body, directly targeted for the antigen that's of interest in this case, the one that causes coronavirus. Those monoclonal antibodies can be infused into the patient and go directly to killing that antigen, to directly killing that that attacker. Now, what a vaccine does is it tries to build on that underlying process of how the immune

system works. It introduces just a tiny piece of that virus to give the heads up to the immune system that hey, this guy could be coming and it could cause problems for you, so you should ratchet up your production of antibodies against this target. So it's just a shortcut. Not only that, because it's only a piece of the virus, or an inactivated part of the virus, you get the benefit without having had the harm. Why are we often talking about a combination of drugs versus a single vaccine.

When we're talking about drugs or therapeutics for a virus, coronavirus, or any other virus, as we discussed, we can't go in there and just blow them up, because then we would be blowing up the human cells. So what they do, what these medicines do, is they look for weaknesses in the virus, and generally that's around the replication, how the

virus causes itself to multiply. In order to do that, you can attack it in more than one different way, and as you're hitting it from all these various sides, you have a better result. Not only that, viruses are very good at mutating, so if you're hitting it from just one direction, it's just going to move. So hitting it with more than one approach generally leads to a

better effect. There's often also a lot of discussion about the role of a vaccine in creating herd immunity, and that's more of a population discussion, and I was wondering if you might just touch on that, how a vaccine can play a role in not just helping to fight off a virus within an individual, but also within a population.

The way that we stop an outbreak is by creating immunity to that virus, so that the virus as it's going from one person to the next literally can't catch on to the next person and as a result dies out. That's what happens with herd immunity, and that is the goal of vaccination. Think about it. The IRUs gets into your body, it repopulates, repopulates, repopulates, and then goes to the next person and does the same thing. They're taking over everyone's body as it moves to the next person.

If you have been infected and now your immune system is protecting you, you are no longer a host. It can't take hold in your body and get to the next person. That's the same way that the vaccine works, and so if you vaccinate enough people, the vaccine won't be able to continue on and it will essentially die where where it lives. If you think about it. With measles, we do still have measles, and we have outbreaks, but they don't generally last. That's because there's enough people in

the world who have been vaccinated against measles. So you might get into a small pocket of people who haven't gotten vaccinated, and then you'll see an outbreak there, but before it can get to broader population, it starts running into these fire breaks essentially, and it dies out. I mean, we've had coronavirus in various forms for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Why don't we have a vaccine already? I suppose it's the simple question. It's a great question,

and it's a complicated question. We do have a lot of coronavirus is out there, but generally they're pretty benign. If you're gonna have a common cold, which is what most coronaviruses cause, that's something that the body can handle pretty efficiently. So how much time or researcher is going to spend trying to cure something that your body cures almost all the time with pretty minimal damage when they

could be working on something more significant. How much money are people willing to spend if they have a shot at maybe recovering from a cold one day faster. The other thing is is that there are thousands and thousands of viruses, so you don't know exactly the one that you have, So you don't even know if there was a treatment, if it was going to work against that one, or if it would mutate if you if it was

faced with some kind of of a therapeutic. But there have been other coronaviruses that were really significant, most specifically STARS and MERS. Those are the two new outbreaks that occurred within the last twenty years, and they did cause some pretty major devastation. They were very deadly. The thing is is that they did burn out pretty quickly. When it comes to STARS and MERS is still spreading in

the Middle East. Now, had we continued the work that we started when those two diseases emerged, then we might be further along when it comes to this coronavirus. And this is not something that is going to stop. Just like we had STARS in two thousand and three, just like we had MERRS subsequent to that. Just like we have this new coronavirus, there will be another one coming.

So we are hoping that the money and the effort and the attention put on this coronavirus will can tinue once we're past this, so that we're better equipped for the next outbreak. That was Michelle Fake Wortez and that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com, slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more

listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Toph for foreheads Jordan Gaspore, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Michelle fake Cortez. Original music by Leo Sedrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks to listening m