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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. and give first perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wasn't planning on watching the men's final at the Australian Open in the middle of the night this weekend. The final, in my heart, was played days earlier between Serena and Osaka. But there I was, unable to sleep on a Saturday night.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what the heck? Tennis, Australia, fans in the stand. They're averaging like single-digit COVID cases every day. It's escapism, a cheap vacation, what life used to be like. So I turned it on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to the 2021 Australian Open men's singles final. Novak Djokovic, Serbia, number one seed versus Danil Medvedev, Russia, number four seed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Djokovic is part of the big three men's tennis players who have won 57 of the last 69 Grand Slam tournaments in the sport. It's this insane, unprecedented dominance that doesn't really have an obvious comparison.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Medvedev is part of a new class of younger dudes who threaten to creep in and upset that dominance, but so far so bad. and Sunday's final didn't help matters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Djokovic wins the match in straight sets. The winning shot is this insane over-the-head volley twirl thing that doesn't really make any physical sense and it wins the entire tournament.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After that, it's all the formalities. The suits come out to thank the sponsors, thank the refs, thank the ball boys, hand out trophies. It's sort of perfunctory and nothing interesting ever really happens until the Australian Open in 2021.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jane Herdlicka, the president of Tennis Australia, is throwing all the pro forma thank yous out. And then she says something about the pandemic that's hardly affecting Australia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With vaccinations on the way, rolling out in many countries around the world, it's now a time for optimism and hope for the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The audience does not like it, but she persists. There are many other people to thank that enabled this great night to take place in the last couple of weeks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The top of that list is the Victorian government. Without you, we could not have done this. Again, the audience is angry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And all of a sudden, this isn't about tennis. Like everything else in life, this was about the pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So long, late night escapism. But maybe it was my fault for believing I could find an escape in the first place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Things are really rough out here. This was a week the United States hit 500,000 deaths. That's almost a number of Americans who died in both world wars combined.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The virus is mutating around the world and poor countries around the world, as we explained on the show a few weeks ago, will have to wait much longer for the vaccine than the rich ones.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's easy to surrender to this idea that life as we knew it is going to take many more years to return.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Herman Lopez says there are reasons to be optimistic about the end of all this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes. And I'm not known to be a very optimistic person. If you've ever worked for me, my Slack emoji is Eeyore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eeyore has been writing about the pandemic for Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've been feeling like as best as I have about the COVID pandemic these past few weeks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's really three reasons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is that new cases are just significantly down from the fall winter surge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Meanwhile, vaccination rates have been going up quite quickly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the other thing here is that in the next few weeks, next few months, the weather is going to start warming up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as we know, COVID tends to spread more quickly in like indoor environments and people are pushed to those indoor environments during the winter and fall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, I mean, if you look at all of those three factors, we're looking at a really optimistic time.
--:-- German Lopez: I think this is confusing to some people to see this precipitous drop in COVID cases.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, we got an email from a listener saying, you know, a lot of people where I live in Wisconsin are skeptical that, you know, Biden's inaugurated and all of a sudden the cases are dropping.
--:-- German Lopez: Is this really just as simple as a ton of people were traveling for the holidays and this thing just blew up and we saw a huge surge in cases?
--:-- German Lopez: That certainly was a big part of it.
--:-- German Lopez: The CDC was telling people to be careful over the holidays.
--:-- German Lopez: They advised people to not do Thanksgiving if they could.
--:-- German Lopez: The government's top health protection agency now says ignoring those warnings and holding gatherings could lead directly to family members dying from COVID-19.
--:-- German Lopez: But as we saw, people did do Thanksgiving.
--:-- German Lopez: They did do Christmas.
--:-- German Lopez: They did do other holiday celebrations.
--:-- German Lopez: As hospitals and hotspots struggle to manage COVID patients tonight that feared holiday surge is here and also not just in the U but around the world you saw this particularly countries that were celebrating like Christmas and those holidays
--:-- German Lopez: But since then, it seems like in the aftermath, people seem to have changed their behavior.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, just practically, they're not going to Christmas parties anymore, right?
--:-- German Lopez: So if that's been leading to cases dropping, then maybe we want to keep that going for a bit.
--:-- German Lopez: We are still in the middle of a pandemic.
--:-- German Lopez: Okay, so cases are down. Let's talk about vaccines.
--:-- German Lopez: We got even more good news this week.
--:-- German Lopez: The FDA is meeting to consider emergency approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which in theory will add even more supply to a vaccine effort that has really ramped up in the United States.
--:-- German Lopez: Yeah, it's certainly the case.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, there are a few ways to measure this, But one way to look at it is like last month in the middle of January, states weren't using even 50 percent of the doses they got.
--:-- German Lopez: Now it's pretty normal for them to be using 80 or 90 percent or even more than that.
--:-- German Lopez: So states have just really ramped up how much of the doses are getting.
--:-- German Lopez: And on top of that, they're getting just way more doses.
--:-- German Lopez: 14.5 million doses this week, up from 8.6 million doses per week when the president took office.
--:-- German Lopez: So right now we're about 1.7 million vaccines actually put in arms a day.
--:-- German Lopez: That can fluctuate a bit based on like the weather, as we've seen with the snowstorm recently.
--:-- German Lopez: But 1.7 million, that's a lot.
--:-- German Lopez: Like before Biden came into office late last month, he was aiming for a million a day.
--:-- German Lopez: And we're already getting to the point where we're talking about like getting double that a day.
--:-- German Lopez: So that's a pretty massive improvement.
--:-- German Lopez: So is it going to be like what I mentioned at the top of the show with the Australian Open, where things are getting back to normal, they can have this major international event, but there will be these COVID snags?
--:-- German Lopez: Is that what it's going to look like with March Madness coming back, or the NBA welcoming fans back in, or restaurants reopening for indoor dining?
--:-- German Lopez: Yeah, I mean, my guess is like, even though cases have dropped and things have gotten better, we're probably going to see spikes here and there.
--:-- German Lopez: Recently, we had the Super Bowl, right?
--:-- German Lopez: And we haven't seen this in the data just yet.
--:-- German Lopez: But if people were having like Super Bowl parties and getting together, they might have spread COVID.
--:-- German Lopez: That might lead to like a brief spike in the numbers.
--:-- German Lopez: And I'm going to guess that we'll probably have more of that in the future.
--:-- German Lopez: Hopefully, if this keeps up as it has, if we have like the vaccines still going out, if we have like people still obeying some social distancing and masking, then it'll still generally get better overall.
--:-- German Lopez: But we will probably have spikes and probably have to pull back a bit here and there.
--:-- German Lopez: And for a lot of people with kids especially, I know the big question will be schools.
--:-- German Lopez: When are they going to reopen?
--:-- German Lopez: I know Biden has been bullish on reopening schools, but there's been a lot of pushback from teachers unions, which, of course, are supportive of Biden otherwise.
--:-- German Lopez: How complex is that picture right now?
--:-- German Lopez: The CDC just put out a guidance essentially saying that, like, look, schools can open.
--:-- German Lopez: This, as a new CDC report says it's safe to reopen schools after months of COVID closures with or without vaccinating teachers.
--:-- German Lopez: They just had to follow these precautions.
--:-- German Lopez: And it's the kind of stuff that you would expect the CDC to be recommending at this point, masking, physical distancing, testing and tracing, like even stuff like just opening a door to improve ventilation in your building, like opening windows, that kind of thing.
--:-- German Lopez: But like you mentioned, teachers unions are really concerned about this.
--:-- German Lopez: What we've seen from schools so far is that they do not seem to be a big source of COVID, but teachers can still get sick, right?
--:-- German Lopez: They can be in the older population that is more susceptible to the disease.
--:-- German Lopez: So they're kind of worried about that.
--:-- German Lopez: The good news, though, is with these precautions, it seems like that even limits transmission around teachers.
--:-- German Lopez: So they can reopen.
--:-- German Lopez: And we're seeing some states, more and more states now, really push forward with reopening.
--:-- German Lopez: I think it'll take time.
--:-- German Lopez: Like, we're going to be seeing these hybrid models where you're still doing some in-person, but also still doing some, like, Zoom school.
--:-- German Lopez: And the hope is, look, if the vaccine rollout really, really goes forward throughout the summer, then maybe next school year it will be fully in-person.
--:-- German Lopez: Okay. I'm all about the optimism, and I'm not going to rain on the parade.
--:-- German Lopez: But I have to ask, how do the variants complicate this picture of reopening and finding some level of normalcy in this new year?
--:-- German Lopez: So this is definitely a big concern.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, we've heard this week concerns about like a California variant.
--:-- German Lopez: Now researchers are finding a variant here on the West Coast.
--:-- German Lopez: And it may also be easier to spread and possibly more deadly.
--:-- German Lopez: Before that, there were the British, South African, Brazil variants.
--:-- German Lopez: It's like all of these, they generally have different characteristics, but generally the concern is that they're more infectious.
--:-- German Lopez: They might evade immunity.
--:-- German Lopez: The good news here is like based on the research we've done so far, the vaccines are essentially so effective that they still manage to be effective against the variants.
--:-- German Lopez: So even if these variants are better at avoiding like some of the immune response than like original COVID, the vaccine is essentially fueling your body with such a strong immune response that it can still overcome that.
--:-- German Lopez: That's subject to change if there are more variants and they're even better at evading the immune response that can change.
--:-- German Lopez: But at least right now, there's really not much reason to panic yet.
--:-- German Lopez: And will that get in the way of herd immunity, which is the place we really need to get to to sort of move on from this pandemic?
--:-- German Lopez: Yeah, so generally herd immunity is estimated to be 70 to 80%, maybe higher, maybe lower.
--:-- German Lopez: But I think the biggest problem, right now we are really ironing out the supply concerns with vaccines.
--:-- German Lopez: They are actually getting out States are doing a better job distributing that kind of thing
--:-- German Lopez: But I think over time we going to see more and more hesitancy essentially pop up where people just do not want the vaccine
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, we've already seen some of that in the surveys.
--:-- German Lopez: And as that becomes a bigger problem, we're going to probably have to do something about that demand side rather than focusing as much on the supply side as we have been.
--:-- German Lopez: More with Herman in a minute.
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--:-- German Lopez: Hermann, the biggest barrier here to getting to herd immunity is vaccine hesitancy. Is that right?
--:-- German Lopez: It might not be the biggest barrier now, but over time it's going to become the biggest barrier just because eventually supply will probably outstrip demand.
--:-- German Lopez: And we know from surveys that about 30% of the population doesn't want a vaccine.
--:-- German Lopez: 30%? Yeah, it's quite a lot.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, if you go back to the numbers of herd immunity, 70% or 80%, 30% would be enough to essentially squash those dreams.
--:-- German Lopez: And it's especially bad because right now we only have vaccines authorized for adults, not children.
--:-- German Lopez: So since 20% of the population is kids, that means we basically need every adult or close to every adult getting a vaccine to really reach herd immunity.
--:-- German Lopez: And yeah, the polls suggest that is not the case right now.
--:-- German Lopez: Another wrench in this is that in general with polls, we know that the people who are less likely to answer them just have like lower trust in institutions.
--:-- German Lopez: and those populations are probably more likely to say they don't want a vaccine.
--:-- German Lopez: So if anything, that 30% might be an underestimate.
--:-- German Lopez: Why do people not want this vaccine? Do we have the reasons?
--:-- German Lopez: A lot of surveys have tried to dig into this.
--:-- German Lopez: On one hand, there is a small subgroup, and I think this is the one you hear the most about, but it's probably a minority.
--:-- German Lopez: And these are the conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxers.
--:-- German Lopez: Like you've probably seen somewhere online about like 5G or certain wealthy people.
--:-- German Lopez: That the vaccine will leave an invisible, digital, trackable tattoo.
--:-- German Lopez: That Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leader in the vaccine effort, is actually Satan.
--:-- German Lopez: That the vaccine is part of a CIA Illuminati conspiracy to control the world.
--:-- German Lopez: All that stuff, which is obviously false.
--:-- German Lopez: There's a group that believes in that.
--:-- German Lopez: And so they don't want a vaccine.
--:-- German Lopez: The bigger populations are just people who don't believe that COVID is a big threat.
--:-- German Lopez: And because they don't believe that COVID is a big threat, they don't want a vaccine.
--:-- German Lopez: You can probably make up a stereotype of this in your head, but it is like people who, particularly on the right, who supported Trump, who believed all what he was saying last year about how the coronavirus should not be affecting your life too much.
--:-- German Lopez: It will go away. You know it is going away. And it will go away. And we're going to have a great victory.
--:-- German Lopez: That's the kind of group we're talking about here.
--:-- German Lopez: There's also a group of people, and some of these can overlap, I should say, but there's also a group of people who just think the vaccine process was too fast.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, Operation Warp Speed was a very catchy name, but it also feeds into this idea that, like, we're going at warp speed, right?
--:-- German Lopez: So maybe some corners are being cut.
--:-- German Lopez: That's not necessarily true.
--:-- German Lopez: We still went through the FDA three-phase process for this, but a lot of people still hold that belief.
--:-- German Lopez: we've talked about the version of vaccine hesitancy that comes from sort of the conspiracy theory the misinformation the you know lackadaisical attitudes towards the pandemic to begin with
--:-- German Lopez: but there are legitimate reasons here that some communities in this country and across the world feel hesitant about trusting a vaccine right yeah that's certainly true
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, particularly the black community and minority communities in general, I should say, they have for years faced discrimination, outright discrimination in the healthcare system.
--:-- German Lopez: They've faced situations where they were literally being experimented on against their will.
--:-- German Lopez: This is something that you can look back in the history of the U.S. and it is stuff that has popped up repeatedly.
--:-- German Lopez: So if you're living in that environment, it's kind of reasonable for you to be a little skeptical of the healthcare system.
--:-- German Lopez: You don't believe it's set up to protect you.
--:-- German Lopez: You don't believe it's set up to make you healthier.
--:-- German Lopez: And unfortunately, some of that is translating to distrust in the vaccine as well
--:-- German Lopez: And it important to separate that out not just because it like a different group of people with different concerns but it also means we going to have to have different strategies for addressing vaccine hesitancy in this group than others
--:-- German Lopez: Are there strategies in place to do that?
--:-- German Lopez: Ideally, the government should have been doing this months ago.
--:-- German Lopez: The federal government in particular.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, I've been talking to experts about this for months.
--:-- German Lopez: And every single time they were like, we should have been doing this yesterday.
--:-- German Lopez: And I mean, what we have seen is like every once in a while, some public health official will jump on TV like Fauci or whatever and debunk some things.
--:-- German Lopez: The process of the speed did not compromise at all safety, nor did it compromise scientific integrity.
--:-- German Lopez: It was a reflection of the extraordinary scientific advances in these types of vaccines, which allowed us to do things in months that actually took years before.
--:-- German Lopez: But that's not really like a concerted federal campaign.
--:-- German Lopez: And the thing we really need here is like some sort of like national PSA would be great.
--:-- German Lopez: Like, let's get Taylor Swift to get her vaccine while being videotaped, like recorded, like encouraging other people to get vaccinated.
--:-- German Lopez: But it's not Taylor Swift, right? It's like Beyonce. Right. Okay.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, if we can Beyonce and Taylor Swift and just about every other celebrity to get vaccinated, that would be fantastic.
--:-- German Lopez: Do it live, stream it, put it on Instagram, whatever.
--:-- German Lopez: That kind of national campaign would help.
--:-- German Lopez: But like I mentioned, different places and different people are going to have different concerns about the vaccine and COVID.
--:-- German Lopez: So what works for, like, say, a Trump supporter who doesn't believe COVID is a big threat is not going to work for, say, a black person who just doesn't trust the health care system.
--:-- German Lopez: And so what the federal government and state and local governments need to do here is really, like, fund and fuel these, like, local efforts to communicate with people, target specific groups of people, and tell them, like, why their concerns might be off, like, what we know about the vaccine, like, what the research and evidence and all of that says both about the virus and the vaccine.
--:-- German Lopez: Beyond messaging to vaccine-hesitant communities better, has the vaccine messaging in total been lackluster?
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, this is a thing that could prevent you from getting this terrible disease, but you hear a lot of people talking about the downsides, talking about the fatigue, talking about the lines, talking about the pain to sign up.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, much more than I feel like you hear people talking about how great it is to not have to worry about COVID as much.
--:-- German Lopez: Yeah, I mean, this is like generally a medical miracle.
--:-- German Lopez: I think one thing here is in some cases we've been looking at the wrong numbers.
--:-- German Lopez: So we often talk about like when the Johnson & Johnson vaccine came out, the top line number, the one that everybody focused on was that it was 66% effective.
--:-- German Lopez: And a lot of people were like, oh, that's not as great as the Moderna and Pfizer ones, which were 90 plus percent effective.
--:-- German Lopez: But like that's underselling actually all three of the vaccines because that's only estimating like how many people get symptomatic disease, essentially like some sort of illness.
--:-- German Lopez: And what we've seen is that all these vaccines drive hospitalizations and deaths essentially to zero.
--:-- German Lopez: Like that's the number you should be focusing on.
--:-- German Lopez: Even if you get sick, like I don't know about most people, but personally, I could stand just like cold, cold like symptoms.
--:-- German Lopez: I could even stand a fever.
--:-- German Lopez: What I don't want to happen to me is getting hospitalized and dying.
--:-- German Lopez: And that's exactly what these vaccines prevent.
--:-- German Lopez: But because of the way this has been messaged, I think some of that has really been lost.
--:-- German Lopez: And what's the upshot of that? Are we never going to get to the level of herd immunity we need?
--:-- German Lopez: Are we always going to be watching the Australian Open and enjoying the tennis and then having it interrupted by COVID scares and lockdowns?
--:-- German Lopez: downs?
--:-- German Lopez: And is that going to be the case in our schools and at our restaurants and everything else?
--:-- German Lopez: You know, I think by the end of this year, at least in the U.S., we'll be looking at a much more optimistic time.
--:-- German Lopez: We won't be looking at those kinds of situations nearly as much anymore.
--:-- German Lopez: I mean, I've talked to experts about this, and they have said, like, look, once they get vaccinated, they're planning, like, barbecues.
--:-- German Lopez: They're planning, like, holiday trips again.
--:-- German Lopez: They will hug vaccinated family members once they're vaccinated, too.
--:-- German Lopez: So I think we're going to start getting back to normal.
--:-- German Lopez: The question really here is whether we hit that herd immunity threshold.
--:-- German Lopez: Like that's when we can really relax and say, okay, this is good.
--:-- German Lopez: But even if we get like 60% immunity among the population, that's still better.
--:-- German Lopez: So if we can get to that point, we're talking about a situation where life is much closer back to normal.
--:-- German Lopez: And look, we'll still get outbreaks.
--:-- German Lopez: Even vaccinated people make it a little sick.
--:-- German Lopez: It won't be the COVID that originally showed up that really terrified a lot of us, but they might get like cold-like symptoms.
--:-- German Lopez: Like it might be something more akin to like the flu.
--:-- German Lopez: But at the end of the day, with this vaccine rollout, if we really manage to vaccinate enough people, we're going to be in much better shape than we are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Herman Lopez is a senior correspondent at Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can read his work at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His Slack emoji is Eeyore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: End of the road. Nothing to do. And no hope of things getting better. Sounds like Saturday night at my house. Thank you.
