U.S. Officials Say Vaccine Decisions Will Be Based on Science
BRUNHUBER: The United States is quickly approaching 7 million coronavirus cases. But now an influential model is predicting fewer deaths than originally anticipated. JHU for health metrics and evaluation project says there will be more than 371,000 deaths by January 1st. Now of course that is a massive number but it's 7,000 fewer deaths than the model predicted just a few weeks ago. Here's CNN's Erica Hill with all the days' coronavirus news from the U.S.</s>DR. STEPHEN HAHN, COMMISSIONER, U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION: The science will guide our decisions. FDA will not permit any pressure from anyone to change that.</s>ERICA HILL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A straightforward pledge as the FDA works to boost confidence in a vaccine, even considering tougher standards for Emergency Use Authorization. The President's reaction?</s>TRUMP: You made it sound extremely political. Why would they do this when we come back with these great results? And ultimately, the White House has to prove it.</s>HILL: Dr. Fauci noting that's not the traditional route.</s>DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE: The scientist in the FDA have put this fourth as what their proposal for the criteria for EUA. Under normal circumstances that decision is theirs, the secretary approves it and that's it. Something that comes from without that is not a scientific consideration would be troublesome.</s>HILL: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar batting cleanup.</s>ALEXANDER AZAR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: Politics will play no role whatsoever in the approval of a vaccine. The President's been clear, I've been clear, FDA has been clear, science will drive this. FDA is going to make the call on whether a vaccine is safe and effective.</s>HILL: An antibody test can be administered in a doctor's office just granted Emergency Use Authorization. As new information suggests the virus is becoming more contagious, though not more lethal. The CDC reports more than 20 percent of confirmed cases between June and August were people in their 20s.</s>FAUCI: The only way we're going to end this is if everybody pulls together.</s>HILL: Officials in Colorado just banned all gatherings, even outdoors for anyone age 18 to 22 in Boulder. Colorado is among 21 states seeing new cases rise over the past week.</s>DR. ALI KHAN, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA MEDICAL CENTER: As you look at that map, what you're seeing is an inconvenient truth. Which is that many states allowed schools and colleges to reopen when they had not gotten the disease under control.</s>HILL: Some of the highest spikes in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Better news in Ohio and Indiana.</s>GOV. ERIC HOLCOMB (R) INDIANA: We are moving in the right direction.</s>HILL: Masks still required in the Hoosier state through mid-October but restaurants, bars and nightclubs can open at full capacity this weekend. Meantime, new signs the economic recovery is slowing. Another 870,000 Americans filed for first time unemployment benefits last week.</s>AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, ECONOMICS PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO BUSINESS SCHOOL: You've got the K-shaped recovery with some people doing very well and millions of people really struggling. We're going to -- we're going to live with that for some time.</s>HILL: Tennessee out with a sobering look at the pandemic's impact on children, estimating a 50 percent decrease in reading proficiency, a 65 percent dip in math skills for third graders since schools moved online last March. (on camera): Here in New York state Governor Cuomo has announced a coronavirus vaccine task force he's putting together. Stating concerns that the federal government's response is too politicized. This on the same day at the head of the FDA, Dr. Steven Hahn, said in an interview that he pledges experts will determine what happens with that vaccine, scientists will follow the data. In New York, I'm Erica Hill, CNN.</s>BRUNHUBER: All right, let's dig deeper into all of this. We're joined now by Dr. Peter Drobac in Oxford, England. He's an infectious disease and global health expert at the University of Oxford. Doctor, thank you very much for joining us. Let's start where we have to all too often these days even when discussing COVID, and that's with the politics. We heard there the President said the White House can override the FDA's vaccine standards. Confidence in a vaccine already seems very low in this country. What do you make of the further politicization of this both on the possible effect on safety and also on public confidence?</s>DR. PETER DROBAC, DISEASE AND GLOBAL HEALTH EXPERT, OXFORD UNIVERSITY: Well, it's very dangerous. Throughout this process, of course, we're trying to work with unprecedented speed to develop vaccines but do that without compromising safety. And that's why these big clinical trials are so important. You know, a lot of the problems with vaccines, even those that are effective, can be rare, bad events. And you can really only see that through these large scale trials. The real risk here, of course, as this gets politicized is that if, you know, number one, if we rush a vaccine out, it may only be partially effective. That hurts our ability to study other vaccines. And of course, there could be consequences. The second problem is that while there's already a lot of people for various reasons who might be skeptical of vaccines, this just further undermines trust. And what we really need if we want vaccines to be a tool to help us control this pandemic, of course, is to get a lot of people vaccinated as quickly as possible and it is ready. I think it's important right now, where we are with the political situation. Because we can't really trust the White House on the science, is that the pharmaceutical companies that are developing these vaccines need to stick to their own pledges and not apply for an emergency authorization until the evidence is there of safety and efficacy.</s>BRUNHUBER: But then what about also perhaps making the vaccine clinical research data publicly available so outside experts can weigh in? Because at this point it seems, you know, the public doesn't know who to trust.</s>DROBAC: Yes, that's extremely important. One of the, you know, features of all of the research and scientific effort that's been happening right now is that there's been great sharing of information. Papers are being published before they go through peer review and that's allowing for greater kind of public scrutiny. But there's a downside to that as well and sometimes we, you know, press releases are kind of the leading edge of scientific communication and that's a problem. Most of the companies that are running the large scale trials have published their protocols. So we can already see exactly how they're designing the trial protocols and that's really helpful. Absolutely will be important for those data to be publicly available for scientific scrutiny.</s>BRUNHUBER: So what do you make of the human challenge vaccine trials in which volunteers are injected with the actual virus? The U.K. seems to be going down that route. The W.H.O. says it's a faster way to test vaccines, the NIH here disagrees. It sounds enormously risky. Is it worth it?</s>DROBAC: This is a really tough one. So humans challenge trials have a lot of promise in that because each person who's getting the vaccine is actually being exposed to the virus in a controlled way. You get a lot of events. The problem with the big phase 3 trials is that you have to vaccinate tens of thousands of people partially in order to have enough that people just randomly might get exposed to the virus. And that can really take time, especially when infection rates are not high. So the benefit of human challenge trials is that it gives us a lot of critical information very quickly. The downsides are few from a scientific standpoint because you're only testing young, healthy volunteers. You don't get any information about how the vaccine performs with the elderly, with folks with medical co-morbidities, with children. These are all important populations and vaccines typically don't always act the same in everybody. The other big challenge really is one around ethics. There's so much we don't know about this virus, right? So normally when we do challenge trials for vaccines, we've done this with things like typhoid and cholera in the past, we have an effective rescue treatment. So that if someone does get infected, we can treat them and make sure that they don't get sick. We do not have an effective rescue treatment for this coronavirus yet. The second thing is that we know that a lot of people, including young, healthy people who get infections, suffer from long-term chronic complications. Up to one in ten people. This is a phenomenon we don't understand very well yet. So the problem is we can't give an adequate assessment of risk to those who are volunteering. And to me that's really not an ethical thing to do at this time.</s>BRUNHUBER: It makes sense, all right, thank you so much. We'll have to leave it there. Dr. Peter Drobac, the University of Oxford, we appreciate you talking to us about this.</s>DROBAC: Thank you.</s>BRUNHUBER: Coming up on CNN NEWSROOM --</s>DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN REPORTER: Do you guys seriously think that Joe Biden is a pedophile?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I do.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I feel he is. I feel he's part of the game.</s>BRUNHUBER: We'll explain how social media is allowing the most absurd and slanderous gossip to be peddled as truth in the run up to the U.S. election. Stay with us.