Johnson and Johnson Stocks – Former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Officer

Dr. Rishi Desai, Osmosis Chief Medical Officer &Former Center for Disease Control and Prevention Epidemic Intelligence Officer, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss the latest on the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: We want to continue this conversation. For that, we want to bring in Dr. Rishi Desai. He’s the Chief Medical Officer at Osmosis, also former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Officer.

And Dr. Desai, great to have you back on the show. Let’s just start where Anjalee ended there, and that’s talking about this J&J vaccine, the fact that we could potentially see this on the market by March. How big of a deal is this? And how helpful will this be in just getting the pandemic under control here in the US?

RISHI DESAI: It’s a great question. It’s a one-dose vaccine, and the ones that are out there right now, Moderna and Pfizer, are two-dose vaccines. And so I think this has important implications for the US, but really even bigger implications for the rest of the world, where many, many countries haven’t even started rolling out COVID vaccine.

And in many settings where it’s hard to get people to come back for a second dose, having a one-dose vaccine is a game changer. So logistically, it’s much nicer, obviously, to have to deal with just one versus two doses. So I think it’s really important, and it will help, again, also in the US in places where we’re having trouble getting as much vaccine as there is demand.

ADAM SHAPIRO: I certainly don’t want anyone to get harmed by rushing a vaccine to approval, but why does it take, say, three weeks when they’ve already had a blind panel reviewing the data from the study?

RISHI DESAI: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that one of the things that they try to do is their due diligence in making sure that they review all the primary data. It’s a lot of information to go through. Why it takes till February 26, I’m not sure. Could they have done it a couple of days quicker? I’m not really privy to say.

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One of the things that we do know is that when they want this vaccine out there, they’re going to want to make sure the following happens– that there’s no side effect, there’s no untoward kind of adverse reaction that’s happening once the vaccine is out in the community that they didn’t already know about, that they didn’t already kind of expect and– and kind of prepare for. So that’s probably a big part of why it takes the number of days it does is that they want to go back and talk to J&J and say, hey, you know what? We noticed this. Can tell us a little bit more about that or how did you investigate that? So that’s a big part of it.

And we also know that there are recommendations in the deployment, like 15-minute waiting time after you get a vaccine or 30 minutes if you’ve had a previous reaction, like anaphylaxis, that’s part of this deployment as well. All of those kinds of requirements are going to be coming from this investigation period. So they’re looking really hard to understand what happened in phase III, what did they see, and make sure that when it hits the market that it’s safe and that no one has anything unexpected.

SEANA SMITH: So Dr. Desai, at this time over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen more and more states ease some of their stay-at-home restrictions. New York state, for example, rolling back some of their restrictions. New Jersey this week announcing that they’re upping their capacity inside restaurants. I’m curious whether you think that some of these actions are being taken too soon, especially when we take into account the fact that these new variants are much more contagious?

RISHI DESAI: Yeah, I do think that they’re being taken too soon. We are– if you look at the number of cases, we’re still in the highest peak. And I think a lot of times we get complacent, because it feels like the same old thing day after day. But if you look at circulating disease, it’s pretty high in most parts of the country.

And as you just pointed out, there are variants coming across. There’s the UK variant, the Brazil variant, the South Africa variant. Tomorrow, there’ll be a new variant. And so we have to keep thinking about that. And remember, these variants happen only because the virus is replicating in people.

The more cases you have, the more chances for a new variant to pop up. And so with these high, high levels of disease, it’s a double whammy, because A, you’ve got disease and you’ve got hospitalizations and deaths, and that’s terrible. But B, you have a higher chance for a variant, and that’s going to throw everything off. And so I think right now we need to be much, much more respectful of the fact that we’re still in the woods and that the vast majority of Americans don’t have vaccine. And so we’re not nearly where we should be in terms of kind of laying our foot off the gas pedal, and that’s what you’re seeing right now.

ADAM SHAPIRO: So when your friends ask you what’s going to happen next, what do you tell them?

RISHI DESAI: I tell them the following. I say, look, you know, we are vaccinating, so that part is great. I think we can expect to see vaccine continue to deploy. Biden has said, I’d like– he’d like to see 90% of Americans vaccinated through the end of summer.

To get there, we need 3 million doses per day, or thereabout. We’re roughly at, like, 1.3 million right now per day. So we’re not even halfway to where we need to be to average getting to that goal. So what I tell my friends is watch two graphs, our daily case graph, which is actually getting a little bit better, last couple of weeks a little bit better, which is good, thumbs up on that, and watch the other graph of how many vaccines we’re deploying per day, and that’s going up.

So when those two graphs start to get really where we need them to be, again, 3 million per day, not 1.3, and when that case count, which you have kind of showing right now on the sides– on the split screen, when that really kind of dips down to maybe a quarter of where it is today, that’s when I think we start kind of laying off in terms of the restrictions a little bit. But until then, I don’t think we should be doing that.

SEANA SMITH: Dr. Rishi Desai, always great to speak with you, Chief Medical Officer at Osmosis. We look forward to having you back again soon.