Morning. This morning, author of epidemic ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next outbreak. Also a National Reporter with the hill. Ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next killer outbreak, what was the scramble like . Guest the scramble has been going on for a couple decades. In the wake of the Ebola Outbreak in west africa that infected more than 128,000 people and killed more than 11,000, the world has undergone a change and they are understanding how pandemics have the potential to spread. We live in a different world than we did back in 1918 when the spanish flu struck or even the end of the 1960s when there were significant flu outbreaks. We are a globalized world. We travel all over the place. Americans travel to every continent in the world and people in every continent travel here. That sort of interconnectedness means something pops up in a wet a planen china is only flight away from the United States. Something that a reps in the jungles of south america is only a short way away from the United States. The american cdc funded a bunch cdcs in 49 countries around the world aiming to increase what they call surveillance, monitoring to make sure they are able to see when one of these novel viruses comes up and begins to spread. Ended inrt basically most of those countries last year and that is a key part of this timeline. We dont know exactly when this coronavirus began to circulate in china. The first case they had that scientists have identified goes back to november 17, about a month and a half before the World Health Organization spotted a cluster in wuhan, china. Mightpossible this virus have been circulating long before that. Done is thisd has sort of Surveillance Network to monitor for these diseases. We are not always funding it at the level it needs because as we have seen in the past and as we it this virus is controllable if it is spotted early, if the people who have it are contact traced and isolated and if authorities get their hands on the situation early before this becomes a mega outbreak. Thiss all but certain virus was in the United States at least three weeks before the first positive case. If we had the testing capability and the ability to find that virus, we might not be in the we certainly wouldnt be in the position we are in today. Host from your reporting, what happened with testing and the cdc . Guest it is not just the cdc that is involved. What the cdc does in a novel case like this, when they have a new virus is they will develop a diagnostic test quickly, and then it is up to the fda to bring that task to the private industries and the private industries that build their own the cbc test basically seeds the test laboratories. Precedento historical for the cdc building a test that then scales to the scope and size we need to control a virus and monitor it across the world. The disconnect here appears to be somewhere between the fda and the commercial companies that didnt race to fill that void and create these diagnostic tests that could be used by private laboratories across the country. That is going to be a big part of the investigating of how this went so wrong. Host do we know why these private companies did not race to fill that void as you said . Guest not yet. It is something of a mystery. Typically in the past it has fallen to senior officials of the fda and the department of health and Human Services to gather those companies together and light a fire under them and say it is time to ramp up building the testing capacity. Now we havee tons of diagnostic tests. The fda has factory fasttrack a number of them. Cdc made thise test that turned out to be corrupted. There were three elements and wasntthe elements properly working. There were a lot of false negatives and false positives. Basically the cdc testing didnt work but there was no back end fill from the private industry until the fda gave the emergency use authorization in late february. Basically we lost this month of time when we should have been testing as many people as possible so we could have found the virus when it was contained in tiny clusters as opposed to when it was turning to overwhelm our hospitals. Host we want to invite our viewers to join in on this conversation. Lessons learned from the Ebola Outbreak to the coronavirus pandemic we are seeing now. If you live in the eastern or central part of the country, 202 7488000. Mountain and pacific, 202 7488001. Reid wilson is our guest this morning. What was the response to the Ebola Outbreak . What were the Lessons Learned from it . Guest the response was overwhelming. This is an outbreak to hit three of the most impoverished countries in the world, liberia, sierra leone and guinea. The Life Expectancy in those countries is 25 years less than the u. S. And 30 years less than the most advanced countries in the world. The response was global, immediate and overwhelming. States sent 3000 troops to liberia which is not something we have ever done before in response to a virus. They deployed more than 1400 people from the cdc which had never happened before. The cdc wasnt that sort of organization. The french deployed to guinea. We saw this overwhelming response. I should not minimize this at all. We saw People Racing back to the countries and staying in their countries at times when they could have left to save their own people. The real heroes for the people who were walking towards the fire in their own countries to try and save them. A lot of them did not survive the virus. The lessons we learned were pretty monumental. To democratize information which is something we need to see more of. People are smart and if they are told how to protect themselves, they will take the steps, in some cases violating their own thousands of years of cultural tradition in the case of say, burying or washing a body after death. In the case of the ebola virus, that is how people that is how most cases were spreading, people washing the bodies in preparation for the burial. When Public Health officials in liberia told people to stop doing that and allow safe burial teams to handle dead bodies, that saved thousands of lives and it goes to show that if competent and reasonable information is presented in a calm and logical way, the public will understand and take the steps necessary to protect themselves and kill the virus. Host we will go to calls. Sergio in florida. Good morning to you. Your question or comment . Caller good morning. Good morning to you all, how are you . Host doing well. What is your question or comment . Caller how are you today reid . Guest im doing fine today. What have you got . Caller a couple questions. How do we learn from it and if ebola is more effective than the corona. And ebola coronavirus virus are from different families. The difference is a coronavirus is very easy to contract to contract very easy to contract but it is very less deadly. The mortality rate is somewhere between half a percent and 1 . The ebola virus by contrast if untreated, the mortality rate can be 80 or 90 . Coronavirus is easy to contract but will public not kill you. The ebola virus is very difficult to contract. You actually have to touch blood or bodily fluids of someone who has it but it is highly deadly if you do get infected. The prospects for a vaccine are interesting and i think this is thatt of the communication Public Health officials are struggling to convey. Are eight to 18 months away from a vaccine, which is probably what the more optimistic estimates are, it would be the fastest element of any vaccine in human history, the fast the fastest vaccine previously developed was for the moms over the course of about four years in the 1950s. The good news is we are significantly more advanced than we were in the 1950s but vaccines are not like treatment. They have a new bar they have to clear in order to get approved and become effective. For a treatment, you are treating something and somebody who already has the virus. You are not introducing them to anything new, any new threat. For a vaccine, you are introducing something new into somebodys body. That can be pretty dangerous. An improperly designed vaccine can do more harm than good, which means there are several more layers of testing a vaccine has to go through and of the 100 plus vaccines that are in design and develop it right now, the fast majority of them are going the majority of them are going to fail. When it shots on goal comes to the vaccine, and it would be great if we could have 10 or 15 different vaccines that work but they are all going to have different efficacy rates. There are vaccines will for things like the flu that only cover a third to half of us who get the vaccine in the first place. All of these things are going to have different efficacy rates. They will be available at different times and once they are approved, they then have to be developed. Just because you approve a vaccine does not mean you automatically created 7 million doses 7 billion doses we are going to need around the world. We are a ways away from a vaccine. If one thing is not being communicated effectively to the American People or to people around the world its the fact that we are not going to have a vaccine tomorrow or next week or next month or even by the end of the year and even if we did, it will still take a substantial a lot of time to develop and this tribute and basically get it and distribute and basically get it to all of us and into all of our Doctors Offices. We also have to hope the people he actually that people actually take it. It is a huge puzzle with a lot of different challenges and one we have to be realistic about. Host rosemary is next in west virginia. Caller hi. Host good morning. Go ahead. Welcome to the conversation. Caller my concern is that people are panicking. I am a dialysis patient. I have to go out. I have to survive. Nobody wants no one to die, but that is life. That is a part of life. People are dying from different things. And they told me to take a flu shot in 90 in 1996. I got the flu after i took the shot. I havent taken a flu shot since then. You cannot blame from for everything. The swinecame out fluke, ebola, all of these things come and they go. Some people survive, some dont. Children are dying, grown folks are dying. Everything from one thing or another. Host reid wilson, this is a comet that has come up throughout the show a comment that has come up throughout the show. Can you explain heard immunity . Guest herd immunity is a troubling concept, imagine a population of 100 people. If a new virus is introduced, 100 of those 100 people are susceptible to getting it. Once 20 of them get it and recover, that only 80 of those 100 people are susceptible to get it. Eventually the population of those who are susceptible become small enough that they wont come in to contact. The odds of one person coming into contact with somebody who has the virus who is susceptible shrinks until eventually the virus has nowhere else to go. Viruse like a fire in the has burned up all the wood. When there is no more wood to burn, the virus eventually burns out. Immunitypt of herd comes from herds of sheep and cattle. We are not sheep and cattle. The value of a life is substantially different as you can imagine. Thing that she brought up is this notion of dialysis and people having to go out. One troubling thing about this virus is that people are suddenly afraid to seek care. Not may be ok if you are going to your Doctors Office to check out your flu and you are recovering at home, but it is not ok when you may be suffering from a cardiac problem or a stroke. I was talking to an er doctor in new york. He said in the early days of this, he didnt understand where all the heart attacks had gone. It was as if people stopped having heart attacks and were only having coronavirus. Of course that is not the case. People are having these cardiac problems and they are afraid to go to the hospital. One thing we saw in west africa the more people former director of the cdc likes to say more people died because of the ebola virus than from the ebola virus. What that means is more people died from things like malaria or cholera or some of these common diseases people know how to treat but they werent seeking treatment because they were afraid to go to a hospital setting because they were worried that ebola was present. We may be seeing a significant amount of excess deaths coming from things like Heart Disease and hypertension, things that would be treatable if people sought treatment that they are not seeking treatment because of the coronavirus. That is a troubling thing, and it is why we are seeing a lot of rural communities, Hospital Systems having some real problems keeping their funding. Hospitals in boston are talking about losing 5 billion in lost Services Provided through the next couple of months. We had a caller talking about the henry ford clinic in detroit in the last hour, they just laid in the middle of a Public Health pandemic. Why are they doing that . Because nobody is seeking treatment for these other things. Nobody is having the elective surgeries that are the bread and butter of your typical Hospital Systems. There is a real risk that more people will die because of the coronavirus than from the coronavirus. Wouldntially more people die than would have otherwise because they are not seeking treatment for the stuff they need to seek treatment for. Host we will go to texas, lloyd. Caller good morning. I would say i agree with a lot but whateid was saying is really scary is all the miss all of the misinformation. Ask one of the callers where did she read something and she just talking to a point where she done she did not even address where she got her information. There is so much gross misinformation and people are just running rampant with the fact that this information is coming through social media, coming through wordofmouth but there is no fact of where the stuff is coming from and the information that is actually true and valid is not being recognized because of the abundance of misinformation being spewed. Host reid wilson, your thoughts on that . Guest that is a good point and something that Public Health officials know about and have been paying a lot of attention to. A very smart woman at the World Health Organization calls this the infodemic, it happens every time there is an epidemic. Mids misinformation gets out there as broadly as possible and in some cases it can be damaging but not deadly. Ebody seeking treatment seeking the wrong kind of medicine or Something Like that. Somebody here is that essential oils can solve something when they cant or Something Like that. In other cases, it can be massively destructive to the response, to Health Care Workers and things like that. Is an Ebola Outbreak that is winding down in the democratic republic of congo. They are beset by Ethnic Violence and have been for decades. Saw which was like six months ago, there have been 200 attacks on Health Care Workers and Health Facilities because there were rumors that they are bringing the ebola virus to congo. People have died because of these fake rumors. Example ofextreme this, but we have also seen the World Health Organization said last week they have seen more than 30 attacks in 11 countries around the world on Health Care Facilities and there have been dozens of attacks in the United States on asian andicans and hasidic choose hasidic jews and minorities being blamed for a virus that had nothing to do with their ethnicity. Misinformation can go from a minor annoyance to a lifethreatening disaster in just a short time. Has no agenda. It just is. Meanwhile a lie does have an agenda and can have a political advantage over truth. That is a scary thought. We need to be paying attention to the actual experts who are talking about what we know about the virus. Fauci orke Anthony Robert redfield in his top two lieutenants. And his top two lieutenants. Thing that i find fascinating about this. We are learning about this coronavirus at an unprecedented clip, faster than we have ever learned about any pathogen or virus in world history. As an example, in 2009 the new england journal of medicine published 54 articles on h1n1 that might have been a pandemic. It turned out not to be as bad as people feared but it could have been. April, the middle of new england journal of medicine had already published 64 items on the coronavirus. They published dozens more in the weeks since. Basically we are learning a ton about this virus. We are also learning how much we dont know. We started off by diagnosing people with a fever, a cough, fatigue. Cause know this virus can things that look like heart attacks and things that look like strokes or actual strokes. Pinkeye is a potential symptom as well. As if this it is virus is sitting at the intersection of every single one of our internal systems and just decides which one to attack at any given person. Foran be totally different two people who might otherwise be equally susceptible or equally resilient. Virus learning about this but it remains a complete mystery in a lot of respects. Host jackie in ohio, good morning. Caller good morning. Host go ahead with your comment or question. Is at thinkomment we should go back to work. Assistant and i make more on unemployment and i still believe the economy needs to go back to work. My big thing is i am sitting here and these people are whining about how the government is responsible for them. We were only off work for a month. Me youalways taught should be able to take care of yourself for at least three months. Say some buddy broke their arm or got sick, anything could happen. You could lose your job. You should be able to take care of yourself for a good three months. You should have enough money in the bank. Governmente the because they cant afford to be off work for a month . It is insane. Everybody needs to be responsible. If you have a business, you should have money in the bank. I also have some rentals. If something goes wrong, i cant blame anyone else. Host reid wilson. Guest one thing that has struck me about the downturn here, the economic downturn is how different it is from the last recession. , people recession hit at the top, first. Lehman brothers collapsing, things like that. Impact trickled down to everybody else in the workforce and it was those everyone else who took so long to recover. It was only in the last six months or so that we served to see those at the bottom experiencing real wage growth for the First Time Since the recession and basically the onus being on employers to provide higher salaries and better jobs because employees had so many options for where they could go. This downturn has targeted those very people who had just finished recovering from the last recession first and immediately. Something like 40 of lowwage workers are out of work. That is in the space of two months. To her point about people need to have money in the bank to take care of themselves, this targeted the people who are least likely to have that money in the bank in the first place and that is what makes this doubly tragic. Host sharon in oklahoma. Good morning. Caller good morning. Know wondering i everybody else has so much running through their heads these days. There are sosted many people out there like this. Those that are supposed to be in , everybody is fumbling the ball. Nobody can hang on to it. Nobody knows nothing. Facebook is just a hot mess. If you listen to all these people that are getting hysterical. Just use common sense and do the best you can. People do not apply discipline. It has long fell away. Host reid wilson, when ebola hit in these countries in africa, how did their governments respond . Did they have stayathome restrictions put in place . Guest responses in all three countries were different, primarily because the virus hit all three countries in different ways. In a lot of ways, the response from the liberia government in particular mirrors what we saw in the United States in the first couple of months when the federal government was downplaying the severity of this virus and at times denying it would infect a significant number of americans. In liberia, they were worried and tourismts dollars which was a growing part of their economy. There was a point earlier on in their outbreak where they basically denied that they had any ebola cases whatsoever despite the fact that it was clear and obvious that a fever was raging in several rural counties. Quarantines and locking people down come out there was a real trust deficit between the federal government and thehree countries more tribal regions elsewhere and that is sort of a legacy of colonialism and how those countries were founded. The governing classes in all three tend to be the descendents of slaves who went back to africa in the early part of the 1800s and they went back but there already People Living there, and so there has been this historic distrust between those who live on the coast, they sort of political elite and the more tribal regions in different parts of the country. That distrust got worse and worse the higher up you went. The president and the heads of the more traditional tribal clans barely spoke, and that hindered the response in a lot of ways and is sort of reminiscent of the relationship between the federal government here and state governors across the country who have had to struggle and scramble when they dont get the supplies they actually need. , ourhing we have seen leaders failing us but lets shining light on some of those getting it right. In places like New Hampshire, maryland, asked juice its in Washington State, governors have gone to significant lengths to secure the goods that they actually need. I told a story last week of the governor of New Hampshire who had sourced personal protective gear from china through a Company Based in New Hampshire. The guy who invented the segway has been flying plane loads of personal protective gear into New Hampshire and they have gotten so good at it that a couple weeks ago the state of New Hampshire sold 4. 5 Million Masks to the department of federal to the department of Veterans Affairs. Governor larry hogan in maryland secured Something Like half a million test kits from south korea. His wife is korean and she used business contacts to help import those test kits from a place that when maryland could not get any from the federal government themselves, so there are some leaders who got quite creative to protect their states and they deserve some shout outs. This is not a partisan sing. The governor of New Hampshire and maryland are both republicans. Californiawsom of and the governor of Washington State have done the same thing in sourcing personal protective gear from other countries as well. When the federal government has not always been there, the governors themselves have been a good job of stepping up and making sure their states have enough. Host what about the International Response . What is the World Health Organizations role during a pandemic like this and how have they responded . Guest that is the reverse of what we have seen what we saw during the Ebola Outbreak. When ebola broke out, the who was caught flatfooted. They were agency that was more reduced more used to keeping statistics on Heart Disease around the world. They really transformed themselves and they have created this Surveillance Network. I mentioned their First Sighting of a typical sighting of atypical pneumonia in wuhan. That was the first time anybody saw anything wrong in china. It was the World Health Organization that sounded the first alarm and forced china to release the genetic sequence of this virus so that we could create a diagnostic test and get it operating. They are moving millions of pounds for hundreds of tons of personal protective gear, testing equipment, all around the world. They just delivered more than one Million Pounds of personal protective gear to haiti which is in desperate need of medical supplies, not even when we are talking about a pandemic, so the World Health Organization has really stepped up their game and they have done so even as they have come under pressure from the United States. The Trump Administration is withholding funding from the who and that is interesting timing to say the least, but the fact is, they were the first ones to sound the alarm about this. They warned the United States about this earlier than we do about it and they have stepped up their game even as they have come under this intense scrutiny goingiticism and they are to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes and a highpressure situation like this and there are going to be postmortems and studies about what they could have done better and that is important because there is going to be annexed time. The next time might not be coronavirus. It could be a new strain of flu, it could be anything. The World Health Organization is always warning people about what they call disease x, the next big disease and we all have to be prepared and investing in global Public Health right now if we spend billions of dollars bolstering Global Health systems around the world it will pay off in trillions of dollars in the United States alone if we are able to spot and stop the next disease before it breaks out like this one has. Host the World Health Organization today held a world health assembly. Addressing the assembly is the chinese president. Here is through a translator, talking about the World Economy and supporting an investigation into the handling of the pandemic. [video clip] china supports the idea of a comprehensive review of the Global Response to covid19 after it is brought under control. To sum up the experience and address the deficiencies. This work should be based on science and professionalism conducted in objective and impartial manners. We must restore economic and social development while working on an ongoing basis to contain the virus. Countries where conditions permit may reopen businesses and schools in an orderly fashion in observance of professional recommendations. In the meantime, international micronet macroeconomic policy should be stepped back and the Global Industrial supply chain kept stable if we are to restore growth to the economy of the world. Host reid wilson, your reaction . Guest china is coming under pressure, not just from the United States but from the Australian Government and others over their initial handling. The first case that we know about likely happened in about midnovember in wuhan. There may be several months more that happenedn before that. We do know china did not bring this to the worlds attention until who sorted asking questions on december 31. They may have known something was wrong and the good news is they brought it up within a couple months, when asked. That is a pretty stark contrast to the sars outbreak in 2003 when they basically pretended nothing was wrong until about 6000 people were investigated when they raised their hand answered asking for help. That is the old way. The new way, the appropriate way of responding to an outbreak is to raise alarms immediately at the global level so that you can bring in Health Inspectors from across the globe. One thing that happened in west africa is the Obama Administration really pushed and sendget involved doctors and supplies and funding to these three west african nations. Their message was if you want to act like a superpower, you have to act superpower and that means helping the tiny countries when there is a need. The chinese equivalent to the cdc is one of the better run ones in the world. They know they have this problem of the wet markets and the interaction between inner interaction between humans and animals that causes a virus to jump and win a virus jumps species, they know they need to be surveilling these markets. They are Getting Better at it but clearly the transparency is not what the world wants or needs out of china and that is why they are facing calls for this investigation. Of course president xi once the investigation to be impartial and run through the who and the who has become this battleground between the United States and china just as the u. S. Froze funding, china announced they will increase funding to the who , which is going to be the next battlefield that the u. S. And china fight over. Host we will go to california. Michael is watching. Caller i would like to ask your question. What is the difference of having millions of americans shopping going backand people to work . I dont know the difference because we have people doing both. They want people around the country to not go back to work but to go shopping. It is a catch22. Is there a difference . Host reid wilson, are you tracking this . Guest one thing we have to Pay Attention to is that simply reopening the economy it is not like flipping a switch. Is not as if governor x Governor Newsom in california can say the economy is reopen, everything goes back to normal. Im going to be one of those people that sits at home for three weeks after that because i have no interest in going to eat at a restaurant right now. I will do the takeout thing but people are still scared of this virus and reasonably so. I understand that and i understand the urge to get back to work. There are a lot of people hurting. Jobs are going away. Simply reopening the economy doesnt mean the customers are going to flock back. Given the economy totally closed means there are going to be a lot of a lot more suffering. Neither of those is a good thing but those of the choices we now face. Host joe in massachusetts. Good morning. Caller good morning. And a question. I know you talked about particular states for the governor is doing a great job and you mentioned massachusetts. I think baker is doing a fantastic job. I have one comment for general americans. Country, keep it closed, it goes back and forth and the reality is there are 50 states and 50 different situations. I would recommend to all americans, turn off most of the media and just listen to your governors. The governors are the ones who have a horse in this race. They are the only ones who know the immediate situation in each state. New york city is a whole lot inferent than a rancher out wyoming. Just listen to your governors and forget about all the other stuff. A quick question, who had a thatne early on in america was faulty. We lost about eight weeks getting it going. Should we have used the existing vaccine or did we lose valuable time and the other one is, i heard you talking about who. Have they been scapegoated by this administration or have they done a pretty good job worldwide . Vaccine, the who didnt have a vaccine. There is a difference between a diagnostic test that basically tests whether or not you have that. Company whoman developed that pretty quickly and that has been the basis for the testing that has happened in most other countries around the world. South korea and even china and places like that have adopted that type of test. Decided ton cdc develop their own test. We still dont know why. Tohave our questions to ask figure out why that might be the case but the fact is they did not use the same type of test that the germans did. Different from a treatment or a vaccine, neither of which we have yet. Those are still in development and they will take quite a while to develop. Has the who been scapegoated . They have. They are an agency that has very little power and they have been painted as this sort of global overarching agency with a tremendous amount of power. They basically have two options. They have a carrot and a stick. They can see they can say to a country, you are doing really well and here is some incentive to continue and we will praise you publicly or they can shame you publicly. That is their only options. They dont have a huge budget. Toy dont have the ability place sanctions or kind one countries or anything like that sanctions on countries or anything like that. They can just determine what best practices are out there and they can shift personal protective gear. A lot of this effort, the whos effort against the coronavirus is being run by americans. The head of the technical side of the response, the person responsible for leading the global scientific efforts to discover this disease and understand it is an american. She is from upstate new york. We spent about an hour on the phone a couple days ago. She was telling me about her big italian family in upstate new york. Ofis not like a bunch faceless foreigners dictating to the u. S. What we ought to do. Americans onsome the emergencies program. It is a remarkably International Response being run by some really dedicated americans who are doing their best to stop this virus around the globe. Host reid wilsons book is out in paperback, epidemic ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next outbreak. You can also follow his reporting coming up Tuesday Morning center for law and social policy guest discusses the impact coronavirus is having a lowwage worker. About theh hill talks response to the covid19 pandemic and oversight of the federal funds allocated to do with it. A military times reporter on how the department of Veterans Affairs is handling coronavirus. Watch cspans washington at 7 a. M. Eastern Tuesday Morning. Join the discussion. Up next on cspan, we will hear from attorney general william barr and fbi director Christopher Wray at a News Conference earlier today. That is followed by President Trump holding a white house meeting at Economic Development efforts amid the coronavirus pandemic. Then, the World Health Organization has its annual assembly with chinese president secretary as hhs are among the speakers. Later former president barack obama gives a commencement address to the graduates of historically black colleges and universities