neither the el paso medical society its members nor pbs el paso shall be responsible for the views opinions or facts expressed by the panelists on this television program please consult your doctor in order to prevent the spread of the virus we all need to do our part one of the easiest ways to prevent that is by wearing a mask in order for a mask to do its job it needs to cover your nose your mouth and your chin first you should wash your hands with either sanitizer or soap and water before putting on a mask then pick up your mask by one of the ear loops to make sure that there's no tears or stains on the mask if it is dirty throw it away immediately if it's intact take both loops and put it over your ears like this and then press down on the bridge of the nose to make sure that it fits and there are no uh gaps once you are done with the mask please take it off the same way both ear loops pull it away and put it either in a ziploc bag or throw it away if it's a surgical mask if it's a cloth mask make sure to wash it with soap and water and keep it dry for the next use do not put your mask down at your chin or above on your forehead when you're starting to remove it as that just contaminates the mask thank you so much for doing your part to prevent the spread throughout this and thank you dr days and again there's one thing that i always like to say because i see it everywhere there's one thing that she didn't cover but if you find that your mask is doing this take your fingers on the bottom of your mask and bring it up don't touch your face as you're bringing your mask up i thought i would add that in there vaccines vaccines vaccines that's what we're hearing about an hour and a half ago there's more information about vaccines there's a light at the end of the tunnel yes there is but we're not there yet there's a lot of very very important things that we still need to do there's a vaccine that's been around for a very very long time but it's not getting a lot of love right now and that's the simple good old-fashioned flu vaccine you have to get it get it it's important we're going to talk a lot about that tonight because we don't want combined viruses going on with you you don't want to be that person who's infected with both covid and also has influenza the regular flu at the same time both are respiratory viruses however there's a lot of other organs that can be affected your heart can be affected drastically and we're going to talk about that this evening too we have differences between the covid and the flu and again there's questions to be asked give us a call to live program 881-013 again eight eight one zero zero one three this program is underwritten by the american heart association and we also want to thank texas tech paula foster school of medicine for providing our lone wolf this evening we have kirsten and she's here today she's going to answer your questions she's going to put her questions down text them our way and then we're going to answer them for you but give her some love give her a call again 8810013 and also a huge thank you to the el paso county medical society for bringing the show to you for 23 years good evening i'm catherine berg and you're watching the el paso position katherine berg once here again this is a special edition yet another special edition of the el paso position we're going to be talking about covet 19 and the flu avoiding the double trouble so we have two infectious disease docs with us this evening we have dr ogie ellosie you've probably seen him around he's again infectious disease specialist and man we've been seeing you everywhere dr armando mesa we've been seeing you everywhere so they're both here to talk about what covet is infectious disease also we're looking at the the regular flu and if i could just kind of stop there and dr lozy to say infectious disease specialist means something different now than it did a year ago um not that it means something different now it just there's so much going on so talk a little bit about your specialty and dr mess this is gonna be the same question to you in a moment too but talk about your specialty and talk about what's been going on in your world over the last 11 months so first of all thanks for having me um this is always a safe place amongst friends it's ironic that i'm here with dr mesa was actually my first boss when i first moved to el paso in 2010 and so no pressure yeah no no pressure at all and so i appreciate all the things he's done for me in my career i think in terms of infectious diseases this is the year to be an infectious disease physician right last year you and i talked about other things right hiv hepatitis c we never imagined that we would be in the middle of a global pandemic talk less of a global pandemic that hit our community as hard as it did when we went through july and august we assumed that we had seen the worst and we hoped we had seen the worst what happened to our community in october and november i think was unfortunate i think and i tell people this all the time and we'll talk about vaccines later but as we sort of figure out how we're going to get this bridge out of the pandemic which is vaccines we got to remember every single live that we've lost right and we have to pay them honor and respect by ensuring that our community gets to a place that we can return to whatever semblance of normality is next fall next winter and so we're not repeating these mistakes again absolutely and i do want to talk a little bit because as you i hear a lot of naysayers it's uh it's a hoax is this and that and the other dr mesa i would i would like for you to talk about what's happening with our hospital systems right now i mean the hospitals are full this is it's not an issue of oh well i haven't heard of it i don't know anybody that has it but just what's going on with our health care system and the reason i say that is that we're going to really ask people again to wear the mask if they're going to go out don't take the whole family with you stay away if you can don't go outside just for fun i know everybody wants to shop right now because it's time for the holidays but in general talk about the stress on our health care system well first of all thank you for the invitation it is interesting because when when in january december everything started i recall that one of the first questions that we all asked is how bad is it going to be there was a lot of concern that we were going to be in a situation that we have been in the past but i think a lot of people also felt that it was not going to be as bad as it it is now and i think the the framework that started with was one of the major issues that we are facing now so we started with the assumptions that it's going to be simple easy get rid of it and and we're done right that was the assumption did not occur yeah and that is the big surprise because then our expectations have changed so much and then we become a little bit skeptical of what is it that we're dealing with and unfortunately this skepticism became the major problem with hospitals why because even though yes there is a small percent of patients relatively speaking that end up in the hospital you multiply that small number by a big amount of people that are becoming infected it has really saturated the capacity and exceeded the capacity of our hospitals and that's what we're dealing with now so a small problem that apparently was not going to be bigger than just the usual flu mild became a much worse situation that we are now facing yeah and it's it's it's all about the numbers at that point you know people think well there's so many people sick but it's also the capacity of what a hospital should be taken on any normal regular day week month et cetera dr losey what i'd love for you to do is and i feel like it's almost too simplistic but for the audience at home that doesn't quite understand there's the flu the flu that we all know about which does morph a little bit every year it mutates a little bit every year and then there's covid in the beginning people like oh it's just like the flu if you could physiologically explain i know he giggles but i know it's complex and i get it um to the best of your ability to help explain to the audience yeah so definitely i think a couple of things i mean when i think about flu or influenza it's a respiratory virus it usually comes in the winter months when people are congregating more when their schools are in session closed quarters and it's not as if the flu isn't bad but the flu doesn't do the sort of what we call multi-system damage that chronovirus can do i think it's also important to understand that even if we're getting to let's say 50 or 60 percent of people that do get the flu vaccine every year that takes the edge off of what the flu could do in our hospitals and even then i mean i think people that are not in health care don't realize that consistently every january to february are actually december to february our hospitals are full because of flu now all the hospitals across this city have done an amazing and remarkable job of flexing into supply closets and hallways and the staffing that's happened but coronavirus being a very different sort of family of viruses attachment mechanism and a host of other sort of scientific things we can go into the reality is this our bodies haven't seen the coronavirus before right right and so that sort of cytokine storm that immune response that happens when a new virus hits us is really what has caused the issue and so again i mean we could there's all the politics of it but here's the reality we've lost more people from the coronavirus than we did from the flu in the last decade combined decades say that again and we've lost more people from the coronavirus in el paso than we've lost from the flu in the last decade right and i think that is staggering yeah that hits home and so for the deniers that say it's just like the flu i often say to people that call me and say hey well come visit our hospitals come to umc come to the hospitals of providence come to las palmas del sol and walk around right what you don't want to be is upside down on a ventilator right that's not how you want to end up and so again i think that's the easiest thing that you can sort of tell people so let's talk and dr messi i'm probably going to help you out here a little bit but let's talk about right now the importance of getting the flu vaccine if you haven't gotten your flu shot yet we're looking in the middle of december right now um where can we get it so what i have here if you can go to epstrom.org in that website you will see areas where you can get the flu shot for free um and on that note we were just if you can piggyback on what dr losey was saying how can the flu shot help guard you and in the way that i understand and please correct me if i'm wrong if you have a vaccination that's going into your body it does get all of your antibodies kind of going like you know what there's something going on there's inside of me and it kind of helps also with everything just warding everything off for a while is that something that you can explain like what does a flu shot do yeah well let's start with the concept of a vaccine a vaccine is a very simple process that allows your body to be exposed to a microbe in this case a virus the influenza virus and develop a protective response that is going to prevent you from becoming sick from the infection from the illness and vaccinations have been used and proven to work for many many decades and i know that there's people who always going to be skeptical who probably feel that vaccinations have a side effect profile that they don't understand and they don't like but what we know for sure is that and we have forgotten as a society that vaccines have saved lives and have saved us from the diseases that we have never many of us seen so if you compare poliomyelitis for example you know it's a disease that used to [ -_-_ ] a lot of people now we don't see those cases we sometimes see patients who have polio syndrome so vaccines influenza vaccine is the most important intervention you can make to prevent yourself in the winter especially from getting sick with this virus right and the protection that you're gonna get is going to be not only to that virus but potentially to other viruses now we know for sure that the kobe backseat is going to be the one that's really going to be helpful for that specific virus but there's always a little bit of cross immunity that is that there will be some partial protection we know that other interventions like the tuberculosis vaccination that is given in some countries also does that effect to your body so there's a little bit of that but definitely uh for the influence of the vaccine is the best intervention and the extra protection that you get in my view is that you're not going to get the influenza and cobalt exactly so you're really saving yourself from a double trouble that can and send you to the hospital absolutely and and while you were speaking i finally found what i was looking for so if you can call just on your telephone 2-1-1 for flu vaccination locations you can go to any of the drug stores that will do that most insurances in fact all insurance was we'll cover that and again go to epstrom.org to find out where there are free flu vaccination clinics and those are happening every weekend and it's great because you can stay in your car people are giving you the flu shot while you're in the car there's really no excuse to do it this will be the one and only time that i say yes pack the family in the car so that everybody can get their flu shot other than that don't pack everybody in the car go alone if you need to go out i mean really it's one of those situations um dr lozie we spoke just a little bit uh prior to the program of what's happening with the fda and actually dr messi you gave me the perfect wording here so fda gave the eua which is the emergency use authorization uh which happened just about two hours ago and now there's that process of the fda actually doing the stamp in the check mark on that for those of us that are not in the medical community how does that work what is that process and how does that work for example there was a vote that was 17 to four um and the four was just uh again there's not a lot of information on 17 and 18 year olds but we're looking at having that vaccine go forward is it 16 so however that works but the process i think is fascinating because you hear about it all the time but we don't know what it really means what's involved yeah so i think any drug that comes through actually goes to an fda independent advisory panel and they look at the data and so some of that data's been available there's a 92-page document that was released on tuesday i think i read it over last night there's a lot of data in it and those 17 experts be it paul offit that's at the children's hospital of philadelphia i think dr peter hotez who's in charge of sort of the global um public health school in houston a host of other experts like that across the country are looking at the data they'll run their own assessment of the data right so every company has to give the fda's panel their own data set and say okay you look at it so it's not just fun yeah it's not just fun and you bring a couple of powerpoints and you present and they vote off of that right they look at the data they're allowed to examine the data and i think we've sort of known not just from the press releases that have come out in the last couple of weeks but looking at this preliminary data that 95 is legit right when you look at the curves the curves start to splay after 10 days right and i think that really starts to form the crux of the efficacy that 95 percent and so again the fda will look at that review panel's information they'll sit tomorrow every expectation that the fda will approve this and from what i understand and talking to some people already they're already moving vaccines to distribution sites overnight yesterday today and so some places are actually planning to start giving vaccine by this weekend if they get vaccine and so this is an exciting time i mean in as much as 2020 has been um painful sort of tiring tedious for a host of people and i mean like i said the losses of lives the way science has sort of stepped up to the plate when it's been allowed to activate in its own space has been remarkable and breathtaking right but well i will say one other thing about vaccine a lot of people say well why am i gonna take the vaccine it just only has six or seven months what people don't realize and i think it's really important to tell people is that sars the original sars was 2002. the middle eastern respiratory syndrome virus was 2012 a cousin of sars right so they had all these cousins coming along and science found the spike protein the m spike protein almost a decade ago they knew that was the back door to stop these vaccines the scale of the pandemics pulled everything into hyperdrive right warp speed as his government said and so nothing was surprising here if you look back at some of the data from february or march we probably had the answer then but they took their time they were deliberate they were diligent and dedicated around the process to get it to where we are today and these are some exciting times going into 2021. agreed and dr mess i'd like you to kind of piggyback on that because there are if i understand the numbers right i heard today that there's about 40 percent of americans who are afraid to take the vaccine you know when it does come out so what i'd like to do here with two medical professionals two infectious disease docs specialists talk talk to the audience as to why they should actually take the covert vaccine when it comes out um this is it's a selling point but again they hear it on the news but they don't really get to hear it from el paso docs from our neighbors etc why should they take the vaccine or why should they not be afraid to take the vaccine you know it's interesting about about how we make decisions in life and a lot of the times when we make decisions there is a lot of emotion that comes from it and i think there will be a group of individuals that unfortunately no matter how much information we provide they're still not going to feel comfortable so those are going to be very difficult to persuade to get vaccinated and i understand the rationale there is there is such situation the other scenario is really looking at the data what the fda does and look at the evidence that we have that vaccines work and if you want to think about the pros and the cons i always say think about the disease itself first see think of it as a vaccine if you were to get a vaccine by getting the disease you know the mortality you know how many people are dying you know how many people are end up in the hospital compared to the information that is available from the studies well done in with a lot of budget uh into the development of this vaccine you have a much safer way of protecting yourself from this disease by getting vaccinated so vaccines are not going to be ever administered and given and approved because of um just the safety of these products so you have to make sure that when the vaccines are given they have the efficacy trial information but also the safety trial right and all the experts that they've been very vocal on on all the media they clearly have stated that the efficacy is important but the safety is more important because you cannot make a patient who's not sick you know feel better they need to be healthy when they get the vaccine and they're going to be protected with a minimum of side effects from getting vaccinated beautifully said um i have a question here from the audience and i do want to honor this um because it's about the idea of the vaccine so the question is if someone who is lot someone who has lots of allergies and is prone to anaphylactic shock what can they do to prevent an adverse reaction um so there were two healthcare workers in britain and great britain so that was kind of thing but these were people who had a lot of allergies anyway so it's kind of like those pre-existing conditions this and that and the other so let's i don't want to spend too much time on that but it is a question that some people have versus the right the regular absolutely and so i think again um forty four thousand one study thirty thousand another study we're seeing how the united kingdom is rolling it out how canada's rolling it out and so the reality is this they had those two people that had um unfortunate reaction to the vaccine they did well there they survived everything and so i think the recommendation right now is that if you know that you have known anaphylaxis you have known severe allergies and by me for me that definition is do you carry an epipen right if you're somebody that has an epipen and that is part of your life you probably want to take a pass on this first round right you're not that person let me sort of going back to what dr mesa said around the populations that are going to take it i think covid has had a tremendous burden on our long-term care facility population approximately 40 of all the depths in the united states have been in people in long-term care facilities we got to protect those people first right and so those are the people we're going to protect first our health care workers who are dealing with coveted patients day in and day out they have to be protected first tier one what they're calling tier one thereafter it becomes a sort of scale process what's available who wants to take it and i i don't fault anybody if they say i'm not ready right okay you're not ready physically distance wear a mask watch your symptoms and don't spread covet don't get covent don't share air with other people i think that's really what it boils down to bingo there may come a time when you will be ready right the modern is coming down the pike johnson and johnson there's some concerns about astrazeneca but we can figure those out later they're going to be multiple options around vaccines we need to probably get to a ballpark of 70 to 80 percent either that have been infected or that have been vaccinated for us to try to get our lives back and so we need people to get vaccinated but we need to protect those that are the highest risk of death first absolutely um i have another question here from the audience and i think this is the ongoing question i don't know if we have an answer but we hear often in our lives well flu season is coming uh covet 19 doesn't seem to have a season so far it is a seasonless and a persistent um virus that's happening sorry as you were talking about stars i don't think that was a season either but on on this thought process of and we don't know yet either how long is the vaccine going to last we just don't know yet um it could be a year flu vaccines you get that every year maybe it's a couple of years question from the audience though how how are what viruses are seasonal and which viruses are just persistent all season long and why is the question and if we don't have an answer we'll have an answer again i'm just trying to honor the question from the audience well we know that some viruses like the influenza virus tend to be more seasonal because there are some climate changes that happen in the winter obviously and there's been probably some increase of the transmission rates during that time period that makes that infection to be more prevalent now remember that influenza it really has not a high transmission rate as compared to covet and therefore the ability from one person to pass to another is going to be probably something related to being indoors so if the weather is a factor then you know some viruses will be more common in the winter now when you have a virus that can spread widespread without really not much else than just sharing a space even in a relatively open space then you're going to see it throughout the thing with the coronaviruses is that uh they have been around for a long time too so this is something new we've dealt with it in the past and there's already you know history of viruses in our community that we have dealt with so this new virus is probably going to stay in the community it's going to be like in the background and we that's why relaxing is going to be helpful because that will be protecting us and most likely even though we don't have the data it's not going to be a seasonal protection we're going to be protected for the longer run hopefully uh you with one dose or two doses which is the series right but we may need a booster and if that is the need i'm fine with it i don't have a problem with getting another shot so this virus will stay but we can prevent the damages that can cause to our system and to the community by getting vaccinated agreed agreed and again i want to uh give some shout outs to the american heart association who is underwriting the program today and if we can put up slide number one uh gracie is our rock star in the back but again some of the questions are if i had coveted 19 and antibodies and now i'm fine is it still okay for me to get the flu shot et cetera so those are some of the questions that are on the line right now protecting your kids and this is a great statistic getting your kids vaccinated reduces it reduces their chances of flu related hospitalizations by 74 so the big thing with kobit 19 is yes i know some people you know some people i got out i got a little sick but they weren't hospitalized and then there are those that are hospitalized and then there's icu then there's ventilators so there is a gamut out there and what we're trying to avoid is hospitalization that's the big thing that's where the stress is coming um i wanted to throw out another website it's heart h-e-a-r-t dot org slash flu you can go there too and go to the local area where you can figure out to get where to get a flu shot again there are free flu shot clinics going on all the time the el paso county medical society you can telephone them or go to their website also because it's super duper important to be able to do that people again high risk categories if you're 65 plus if you have diabetes absolutely go get the flu shot dr messo you you are right there not in your head so diabetes is another question i want to talk about and since i saw you nodding your head off the side of my eye he giggles because that's how it happens talk about diabetes and obesity because the last show that we did regarding uh covid19 had to do with asthma and in my head i thought well people who have asthma are at really high risk but diabetes and obesity are a big thing if you can kind of talk about that when it comes to covin 19 and be able to fight it off yeah i think that diabetes as we all know it's a condition that is called a metabolic disease that is that it affects not only your blood sugar levels but it affects your overall system and one of the areas that you see most affected is your ability to fight back infections especially for those diabetics who are not well controlled so the fact that you have diabetes by itself may not be necessarily a factor of prognosis other than that if you are uncontrolled and you have high glucose your immune system is not going to able to fight back infections now when we are exposed to any particular virus or bacteria the defense system if it acts right away if it is a rapid response you actually can contain the infection very easily and with minimal symptoms the problem happens when that doesn't occur and the virus or the bacteria can spread out into your system and that's what causes the problems that we see in the patient population talking about obesity one of the things that is being found that is associated is obesity is a metabolic problem as well so it's pretty related to diabetes in in a way and we know that the breathing problems that have surfaced in patients who end up in the hospital has been exacerbated made it worse by the fact that they were in a higher weight than their ideal body weight okay so there is a combination of the two diseases usually don't happen in isolation as i always mentioned there's always a combination of factors that make things worse so a overweight patient and diabetic with poor control will have a much worse clinical presentation and course if they get infected with either influenza or covate because of those two conditions so here is and again almost too simple of a question however the treatment i mean so we're looking at therapeutics that have progressed over the last 11 months or so when someone is hospitalized let's say last year two years ago and they're hospitalized with the flu what kind of treatment modalities would they have gotten then is that a loaded question it's not a question and then i laughed because there's a different reason and then also when you're looking now because 19 as as the time goes you will find that this is working a little bit better this is working a little bit better this is working a little bit better so because this is kind of a flu slash coved show i want to talk about flu how to get somebody out of the hospital how to prevent them from getting pneumonia you know if they have pneumonia how do you get them better etc and then kind of carry that over to what's going on with covid yeah so i think the important thing irrespective whether it's flu or covid is early detection and early treatment i think that's really the key it's going somewhere where you can get a test get that nasal swab to determine whether you have influenza strep throat or cova-19 right and then if you do there's a host of various treatments that you can get early and the earlier they are the better they are for you what you don't want to do is be ending up in a hospital with either entity and be sick have multi-lobe pneumonia have fever have organ failure it's too late at that point in time right right and so i think it's very important for people whether it's now whether it's a year from now a year prior to now if you're sick and it's that season go get checked right which is really where the power of the primary care doctors the urgent cares potentially the ers right the freestanding ers play their role because they're able to do a lot of these tests get you in and out um in terms of the treatment around covert i mean there's so many things right that have been thrown out oh i know you throw everything against the wall and see what sticks yeah um i mean the data's all over the place there are those that want to take ivermectin vitamin d vitamin c i don't i don't have a problem if you want to take those things in the hospital it's a different cocktail of medications some seem to reduce the days you're in none really seems to change how well whether you live or die except for interestingly enough one of the oldest medications we have which is dexamethasone simple steroids right they're not a thousand dollars or five thousand dollars twenty dollars will get you a course of steroids and so it's ironic and i think in the post-mortem of covid be it next year or two years from now we'll look back and really see how healthcare and science sort of collided right with the politics and the emotion that dr mesa talked about and hopefully we can learn some things for the next time that we have a global pandemic or crisis yeah for the next time let's hope there's not a next time for a really long time we we talk about this being this century you know we had the the big uh 1918. uh another question here from the audience um and this is not something that that we may have the answer to but the question is what is in the pfizer vaccine and i think that's going to when we talked about if you are allergic to certain things that might be in the vaccine what could that be like eggs um i feel like with the flu vaccine i always get asked hey are you allergic to eggs have you had any issues with that i don't know what's in there you guys may not know what's in there i don't know um but i'm honoring that question too from the audience and then i'm going to talk a little bit about antibodies that we are all still learning about too but uh in the the pfizer vaccine what might be what someone is allergic to in there and i'm throwing that to either one of you and if we don't know we don't know that's that's why we have a disclaimer at the beginning of the show sometimes we don't have the answer you guys can't get sued for giving the wrong answer because we're giving as much information like i said i read the the packet the other day and i'm blessed yeah i'm blacking on what i'm blocking on what's in there it didn't have any adjuvants that are egg related or specifically all the formaldehyde and a lot of things that other people talk about i can't remember exactly what the um the base of it is but it was actually intriguing to see that people had that bad of an anaphylactic reaction right and so it's unclear whether it was a random reaction whether it was emotionally driven whether it was actually the component of the vaccine i think the same conversation is about the bell's palsy right it was four people and again i think people have to understand that in a given year you probably have between 15 and 30 people per 100 000 that get bell's palsy anyway so that four is within the population distribution what was interesting is that it didn't happen in the placebo group right so that's where the concern is to happen in the vaccine group and not the other but dr mesa yeah i think well the the the formulation for the vaccine comes in a i would we call it like a dry component first and then it has to be reconstituted with some water and salt okay and obviously comes in a vial so potentially you can find something in the vial that is being prepared with that can be someone allergic too the component is actually it's just genetic material with a little bit of lipids coating it and it's pretty simple structure so you are not manipulating with egg or embryos or any kind of external cellular component that is foreign to your body right so from that point of view it is unlikely that that is the reason why this individual developed the reaction it could be very simple formulation packaging or something that may have you know in a way got into the vaccine and that's what caused it now we need to also account that could be it's just coincidence can we just just happen because you know it just happened to happen at the same time because it's very difficult to control exactly what's going on at the time that you get your vaccine so that's also a possibility but the safety is pretty good and the reactions have been really small and and very limited for most patients i'm going to honor this question too because it talks about exactly what we're talking about right now is it safe and that's such a hard way of talking about it but again these are people that have fibrosis in the lungs autoimmune different conditions that they have hepatitis cirrhosis a stent uh if there's any of those that ring true like hey we should talk about that let's do if not we can go on to the next question i think it's important to also understand right that if you look at the subgroups in this trial where there was men women um african-american hispanic caucasian older younger the breakdown yeah the breakdowns played across all sub-populations right the efficacy or the ability of the vaccine to protect against mild moderate and severe disease was consistent now there's a host of things that that person sort of mentioned with fibrosis liver disease hepatitis i mean as a as a primarily hiv physician and id i plan to recommend it for my patients that are sick or at risk and so we'll kind of go from there but none of the things that they called out are specifically called out in the packaging or the data so far okay um antibodies and this is probably not for this show but it is still something that's fascinating to me so there are people who were diagnosed with covid that may not have had any symptoms whatsoever or let's just say very mild symptoms and then there are people who really had a difficult time but they're recovered now the antibodies and the person who didn't show a lot of symptoms would they be the same as the person who really had a hard time in the hospital for a month it's a question that again if we don't have an answer at the end of the day this is a novel thing it's it's new we're figuring it out as we go i'm throwing out questions that people are throwing my way but i am in no way expecting to have a real answer on that question actually there's data that shows clearly that getting sick from covet the antibody response is not as good as the vaccine so if you again if you want to look into what is it that the vaccine is giving you as an advantage is that the amount of tires that you're developing actually are consistently higher which you get when you get the vaccination so you can get antibodies especially the ones that are commercially available but they don't really tell you the rest of the story the rest of the story is really when the vaccine that has been studied showed that the production of those antibodies is very strong and he's been demonstrated that it lasts for a significant amount of time so we right now do not know for sure what's if any the protection that we're going to get from getting sick with covet we know there's going to be some protection but also there's been a few cases of people getting reinfected et cetera et cetera right but again the data is very solid that these vaccines do protect much better than getting sick with sarcoid ii virus and therefore that's what you need to get vaccinated exactly and i think the other thing too right is sorry people always ask me should i go get my antibody test and i'm like i don't know how to answer that question because what is it going to tell you exactly if it's negative it doesn't mean that you didn't amount to response and if it's positive it doesn't mean that your response is long term right and again i think the commercially available antibody tests are no they use a research lab to actually determine if you have immunity there's also some natural killer cell immunity that's quiescent or sits in the background and so all of those things really determine your immunity picture and myself and dr mesa may get this at the same time have a very different response right and so that's why vaccines are going to be so important i have a question here from the audience and it's it's one that if you again if you're in the world of health it's different but when i get a shot i feel like i'm sick for the next day or two why is that i think that's such an important question because that is what is supposed to happen because your body's fighting off what you just put into it i would love for one of you doctor it's just your turn that's what how you know it's like a because some people like well when i get the flu shot then i get sick for a day or two so i don't i don't want to get it but there's a reason for that um please so let's start with the most important message okay vaccines or influenza are not going to give you influence let's start with that okay okay yes there is a reaction that is actually what you want to the stimulus that the vaccination is going to give to your body the reaction of the a little bit of pain maybe a little bit of fever um those are the findings that your body is telling you that you are going to be protected with fighting this exactly so when you get the vaccine for covet the same thing should be actually expected and what they have shown is that those side effects tend to last just a few days if any and they can be easily treated or managed with the medication like as you know acetaminophen things for fever or for pain so the side effect profile is so benign and so short limited that really should not be a problem now yes if you're gonna vaccinate you know all your staff well expect probably the next day that they're probably gonna call the day you know or something so you have to be careful with how you're gonna give those vaccines so you don't get into that kind of situation but that compared to again the non-getting the vaccination for influenza covet there's really no comparison i think this is very clear from that point of view and the most important thing is again is vaccines do not give you the disease there is no way because the way they are formulated do not allow you to get exposed to the repeat because that's something that people are so concerned about i hear about it all the time vaccines do not give you influenza do not give you i'm not going to give you cobalt because they are not the entire viral particles they are just pieces that your body is fighting or create an antibody against exactly protecting you from getting sick yay i'm glad that we got that out um another question here from the audience actually before i do that i'm going to make an announcement i want to say thanks to patsy slaughter with the el paso county medical society she texted in and said there are free flu shots christmas eve at the outlet shop so way way west side but free flu shots from 11 o'clock to 5 o'clock and again that is drive through and also for other places again go to el paso ep strong my apologies ep strong for el paso strong dot org uh super important uh question here from the audience um and i i don't know how we would even answer this but the question is i'm just going to read it called how can health care staff tell if someone has received the vaccine and maybe it's someone who is not responsive maybe that's what the question is here what will prevent people from getting vaccinated more than once well we did talk about at least with pfizer there is one vaccine and then you will need a booster i guess the question is can a healthcare worker tell if you've been vaccinated i don't know if there's an answer to that but again it's from the audience there's no good answer to that at the moment no it's sort of on the honor system i mean the cdc and the fda have talked about creating a digital card that can go on your phone or a vaccine card that shows right and again i think this is sort of a longer-term conversation but we're going to get to a point globally where the united states and certain countries have more access to vaccines than others and to protect various countries from a socio-economic standpoint a travel standpoint the olympics are supposed to be next year you're probably going to get to a point where to travel to certain places you're going to need to show a vaccine card that you've received a coveted vaccine and so i think from a sort of clinical standpoint you're not going to know you could do a blood test but again the blood tests are commercially available are not the things that we need to make that determination and so people are going to have to have their vaccine cards whether it's paper or electronic and i i think that's a great thing and i just have to say my my nephew from germany is sailing in the tokyo olympics oh wow oh my gosh yeah so he's all over it he's like trying to you know following this like crazy um i've been corrected on something which is even better so uh there are free flu shots being given out through december 24th not just on december 24th my apologies for that but it's a very very big correction so again from 11 o'clock to 5 o'clock every single day outlet shops of el paso free flu shots go get them done again that's the one time that i say take the whole family with you uh in the car don't go shopping no i'm just saying you shop but be very very careful um i wanted to actually what i want to do is stop the questions from the audience because i feel like there's so much that you've got inside of your head that you want to tell people there's so much that you have inside of your head that you want to tell people we can talk about like this psa that you and i were working on right it's it's not just about wash your hands wear a mask it's about not taking everybody with you it's it's all that good stuff but i'm gonna kind of hold off here for a second because you know the drill say whatever it is that you want to say um if we've hit base on it yet or if we haven't touched base on it yet if you just want to make a point and you're going to have the the same situation whatever you want to talk about yeah so i think i mean from a sort of community standpoint we are where we are right we can't sort of do revisionist history on how we got here and everything else i think our hospitals across the city are better today than there were two weeks ago the thanksgiving sort of surge on top of a surge hasn't yet hit from the numbers that we're seeing from the city county dashboard and that's a good thing i think people have to however remain diligent right it's not enough to say well oh it's great it's gone we can do whatever we want again right this wasn't the year to have the 20 person thanksgiving and it's not going to be the year to have the 20 person christmas and i get that people miss their families and miss um the socialization aspect of our community but we're we're getting closer to a point where we can come out of this safely and on the back end um organization multiple organizations across the city already signing waivers and consents to get vaccines in the next 30 to 60 days we'll get that sort of first tier hopefully out of the way modern will come on board there'll be a host more vaccines coming johnson johnson astrozenica next year and again i think if people understand that there's hope and that we have a pathway out of this and that pathway isn't the dreaded lockdowns or shutdowns and that's a whole different conversation where i think we sort of failed ourselves by terming them such a negative language right but i think if people are given that hope to say that we have a way out of this we have a way to get our community we got to get our kids back to school right right i mean if if nothing else and now i'm just going off on a tangent no but you need to because this is what people want to hear here's the thing if nothing else we got to get our kids back to school our kids form the foundation of everything else that we do in this community absolutely it allows parents to go to work it allows places to open up it allows people to move right and it allows our kids who have really suffered through this process right and i get it some people have access and a lot of don't right but it allows our kids to get back to school and socialize and learn and that allows our community as a whole to move forward so we're almost there we need to get there we need to continue to be diligent mascot physical distance but we have light at the end of the tunnel and i think that's exciting it is and you said that word hope it's such a big word and again what i said in the beginning we're not there yet so don't let the guard down that's so important christmas is coming up and this is what i did on the last show it's just me and my little pod at home you know sonny boy and the daughter what are you doing for christmas and when i want you to answer if you have people coming over don't tell me what are you doing for christmas well i'm going to be working not in christmas but before christmas i guess my question is are you having people come over um no good boy all right sorry good boy that was a terrible thing to say but that that's kind of my point uh it is uh i saw in my neighborhood we live in the same neighborhood but i saw it in my neighborhood there you know a couple of houses not many a couple of houses that had six seven eight cars outside and i was you know riding my bike i ate did a little bike ride i'm like what's going on i felt like going up to the door and saying what are you guys doing um so that's super duper important on uh the note that i gave to dr lozy talk to us about what you want people to hear your your spiel thank you i think this is the time for those individuals who ever thought that vaccinations were an issue that they had to deal with i'm going to put it in a way that is you know i have to make a decision this is the best time right to re-analyze what is it that you are getting with the vaccine and what is it that you're missing not getting a vaccine i i see the development of these vaccinations the very similar to the way that the influenza vaccine has developed over the years if you think about it there is now a one kind of vaccine for i'm going to say every excuse people have not to get a vaccine right because if you are allergic to egg products and you have there is a vaccine that doesn't happen there's an alternative if you don't like to have uh you know an injection there are even vaccines that are with a small needles but they are not like the big injection there's always some vaccine that is going to be good for you so if influenza vaccine has evolved to give you that option i think that you should get it because you're going to be able to get a vaccine with the protection that you need in the same kind of category of thinking you have to think that this vaccine that is coming maybe the one that is right now available may not be of your liking maybe you don't want to get it but there will be a vaccine that will be the one that you will benefit the most i think that all vaccines are going to be helpful maybe the one who has a side effect profile that will be more likely for you to be acceptable and get it but vaccinations are proven if anything to be the best interventions that science has developed that is only going to make us more protected and have a healthier community and not really go through this again i honestly it's fear that you know the situation that we have been through is going to be repeated especially in the past yeah because it is it's all about familia you know it's it's it's so cool it's really terrible has been bad and on that note too and i want to address this because it's i was tested so that means i'm allowed to go to grandma's house i was tested and i'm negative so that means i get to go hang out with tiantio i would love for one of you and dr losey is just your turn there's that time frame where you get tested you get the result back but it could be that you have covid you don't know it yet it hasn't been in your system long enough for a test to pick it up etc so there's that that false sense of security that so many people have like the people that are traveling and you you know matt on the street interviews in the airport oh i took my test yesterday i'm negative i'm fine i'm going to go see my grandma whatever address that if you could yeah i mean this is really simple to me a test is the test of the test right the test is the day of the test it's like somebody telling me well i had twenty dollars in my bank account yesterday and i spent it but i sell twenty dollars i mean this is fanta fantasy thinking right the day you do the test is the day that you know you're negative anything after that and potentially before that that's problematic right because you could be developing virus the virus doesn't go from zero to 100 real quick in under a day it develops over three five sometimes seven days so if you get tested on day three five and six you're negative day seven to fourteen you're positive and spreading at grandma's house and again i think one thing and this is sort of the you and i talked about right messaging one thing about the messaging of covet has been i feel as if we've given people only black and white answers there has to be nuance to human life right and i've said that abstinence didn't work for hiv in the 80s and 90s and abstinence isn't going to work for kovitch right that's why we have the fatigue we've got to give people the tools to do this rationally right if you get a test that's great for that day but not for tomorrow and not for the day after so continue to mask continue to try to physical distance i understand that people are making decisions that probably aren't the best societal decisions but they're the best for them and they need to understand that they shouldn't rationalize it just because they had a test and i think that's really what it boils down to and rationalizing too this is something that i talked about with another doctor just recently it's it's we all let our guard down around someone who we know we i was talking to you about our our neighbors the blooms right and i was on my bike right that's that's what i do for my exercise and i stop i'm talking to francis we're this close and all of a sudden it's like i realize oh i need to step back a little bit because we forget because there's someone that oh of course you don't have kovid because you got you of course you don't you're my neighbor you're my neighbor you know we see each other all the time but we do let our guard down and uh anything you'd like to add to that and then other than that i'm going to start giving out websites and phone numbers again but it's going to be it's going to be a new normal we're going to have to get used to it and it's going to take some time wearing a face mask is nothing something that i have never done until now in a consistent and to this degree in a comment about the test you know tests are not necessarily a way to make a diagnosis it's a way to confirm what you're already suspecting so that's why there's no 100 sensitive and specific test every test is going to have a margin of error right the way that you reduce the margin of error is when you apply it to the right patient population so if you have symptoms that are consistent with a disease influenza is a good example if you get a flu test a flu a influenza exam in the winter and it's positive there is a very good chance that that's what you have right so because the risk is very high and that's what happens with testing i think that probably we all felt that maybe the test was going to tell us the black and white answer right right and i think a lot of people got discouraged by saying well because i understand there's less testing now being done than before and people say well why are not people going and getting tested well because they wanted a black and white answer and that is not necessarily what tests do they help you but they are not the solution to and you need that's why you need a medical provider to help you exactly exactly and again don't don't rest on it uh again i want to say thank you to the american heart association if you get your flu shot um you are six times less likely to die of a heart attack if you have the flu so again the flu is like oh now now we look at the fluids like oh it's just the flu the flu is still a pretty big thing so again flu shots free flu shots at the outlet shops um 11 o'clock to 5 pm every single day through december 24th there is on your screen right there just thinking about skipping the flu shot don't um it does matter get it if you haven't gotten it yet it will continue helping you out through the rest of the spring as well and i also wanted to give out the website of e p strong dot org it's always a good website just to see what's happening in the world right now and there was a question here and i don't have an answer for it doctor orlos you were talking about tier one and tier two there was a gentleman that says uh bless you there is a co-bed sorry that's a joke in our house somebody coughs that we run away um but a question was here i am 69 years old uh wanted to know when i might be i guess he's asking what tier he's in i don't know if we can quickly talk about that i know frontline workers frontline workers healthcare workers long-term care facilities are all tier one that person would go into tier two okay um the sort of best sort of gestalt to go new york times opinion piece that was over the weekend it actually has you put in your age and what you do and they'll rank you oh look at that okay great website to go to new york times opinion on sunday okay new york time so that's that's beautiful because i didn't know exactly the tiers either um and also i know the show went really really fast if you want to watch this again if you want to get this information again there are several different places you can go to you can go to www.pbselpaso.org you can also go to the el paso county medical society's website and that's a com but that's www www.epcms.com so both of those places will have information going up and uh kristen you knocked it out of the park tonight so uh christian again we joke a little bit but hems i love saying her name uh really did a great job and so again as you know this is a live program we're going to have several more um and as things progress we're going to talk we're going to have both you guys back here and really talk about vaccines when the tier one you know when we start moving to tier two and tier three how that's going to be happening um how the distribution is going to be going on i know that walgreens and cvs's are already on board there's also going to be places where people do that so thank you for watching this has been a special edition of the el paso position i'm katherine berg good night [Music] [Music] you