let's jump right in and bring in dr peter hotez a vaccine ologists at the baylor college of medicine in houston dr hotez stock markets are up sharply on the news that a 1st clinical trial for the vaccine has been successful but how optimistic should we be at this stage in the testing. well it's still pretty early on in the testing there we only are only seeing information about 8 individuals and remember this is through a press release from the company there's that's not even published data so so we don't actually have any doubt to look at all we have is the opinion of the company so it's not a lot to go on what they're saying is that the 8 individuals handled the vaccine pretty well there were no immediate serious reactions one individual had some severe redness at the side of injection and some of the ones with the really highest dose may have had them or more so what we call a systemic problems of. a sudden and and and malays and that sort of thing but overall they handled it pretty well so that's good news and they also report that they developed antibodies which we would expect

cash shah kimmel, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at baylor college of medicine. we'll get to dr. kimmel in just a moment. we start with our reporters covering states and businesses that are reopening literally as we speak. in fact, we're going to start with a giant industry opening its doors, the nation's largest shopping mall operator is reopening some 31 malls across eight states, but doing it with strict new guidelines. one of those malls is in greenville, south carolina, and that is where we find nbc's ellison barber at heywood mall which opened just moments ago, as i understand it, ellison. what's it look like there? what precautions are being taken to protect customers and workers? >> reporter: craig, i wish i could let you see closer to the door, but we aren't able to get all the way up onto the mall property to show you exactly what is happening. until ten minutes ago, i expected to stand here and tell you the only cars we had seen coming in and out of the parking lot seemed to be people who worked here. in the last ten minutes or so, more cars have drive

peter hotez, dean at baylor college of medicine. and dr. in gupta, pulmonologist at the university of washington medical center, and an msnbc medical contributocontributor. peter, you and i talked before i think -- this is really early on in this thing, it was in february, before we had any meaningful community contraction of this disease. let's talk about vaccines for a minute. there are lots of parts of vaccine production. some of which can actually be shortened because you can accelerate, you can bring all the researchers together. you can accelerate certain parts of it, there's the phase one, two and three clinical trials which are human trials which have to be conducted on a statistically important number of people who do not have antibodies who are likely to get the infection to see whether it works or not, and to see whether they develop any other reactions or illnesses. i don't know if we know how to speed that up to warp speed. >> congratulations, you learned vaccine 101, that's exactly right. this is what the problem is, we'll have

neglected diseases that we were working on at the texas children's hospital for vaccine ban baylor college of medicine. now we have one moving into clinical trials we hope in a few months for covid-19. so what you're seeing is, this is part of a much larger initiative, of course, across the united states with more than a dozen vaccines that will advance to the clinical development. they all pretty much work by the same way. induce a immune advance of the spike of the coronavirus and then it's a matter of which approach is going to be the best in terms of giving high levels of protective immunity and also that are safe, because we have to make certain that there is no untoward effects. and these are now starting to enter what are called phase three clinical trials. many of them towards the end of the summer ux a, and it will ta about year before we show any of these vaccines are actually safe, and actually work. so i don't see a path by which we'll have any of these vaccines before the middle of next year, and even then that would be a world speed record. >> that would be great. i think the important t

we -- we -- we have a group at texas children's hospital and baylor college of medicine. a center that actually makes vaccines for poverty-related, neglected diseases. and a lot of them are parasitic infections for the world's poor. moving those through product and clinical development. then, about a decade ago, we took on coronavirus vaccines because nobody cared about those, either. and so, we've been developing coronavirus vaccines for the last decade. and -- and one of those, now, we feel we can move into clinical trials. it was really interesting how we went from absolutely nobody caring about this, our vaccines. to, suddenly, something happened in january. and, all of a sudden, there was some interest. i'm not quite sure what happened there. but, now, we're -- we've been able to get some federal support and some private support. we've got this great partnership with this organization known as p.a.t.h. they're the ones that led the development of the vaccine for africa, the malaria vaccine, for africa. now, we're partnering with because one of the things we've learne

joined now from houston, texas by professor peter hotez, dean of the national school of tropical medicine at baylor college company. let us start off by asking you, talking about the vaccine being needed globally, how likely is it that everyone is going to have its fairshare of that everyone is going to have its fair share of the vaccine at the same time? that is a great question and it really depends on which vaccine seems to be working the best and safest and it really depends on the type of technology that is used and how easily it can be scaled up to make the necessary and what some people say 4 billion doses for 4 billion adults around and we will see about a paediatric vaccine after that. we are accelerating a protein vaccine that children's college of medicine, a vaccine that has the hepatitis b vaccine globally, the one that is made in brazil and india and indonesia and elsewhere, our hope is that we are designing to vaccine specifically for global health we are doing this jointly with an organisation that led to the development of the vaccine for african malaria and that is something that needs to

texas is professor peter hotez, an expert in molecular virology and microbiology from the baylor college of medicinehe president's announcement that they are going to go" warp speed" in the effort to come up with a vaccine by the end of the year. i think it is really important to distinguish between a vaccine that may be manufactured at scale versus actually knowing you have a vaccine that actually works. and is safe. so i think a lot of the rhetoric we are hearing and a lot of the bluster about having a vaccine by the end of the year by the fall, has to do with the fact that they have agreed to ahead of time do large—scale manufacturing agreed to ahead of time do la rge—scale manufacturing of multiple vaccine candidates and the term they use is at risk, thatis the term they use is at risk, that is the term doctor anthony fauci uses, meaning that even though there is a chance some of these vaccines will be produce a large scale, they may not be safe and therefore they may not be used. but if you look at the real timelines for vaccine development, most of them will move into what are called phase thr

peter, dean of tropical medicine a at baylor college of medicine.octor, i really appreciate you joining us. let's talk about these numbers. i want to get to the bottom of what's accurate and what's not if it has anything to do with increased testing and so on and so forth. texas health officials say more than 700 of the new cases on saturday came from employees of meat plants in the texas panhandle. how critical is it to get this outbreak under control right now? >> it's a pretty serious outbreak. we heard about this in other parts of the west in nebraska and elsewhere. i think when covid-19 hits, it just races through them. it's devastating. and you worry about this now causing epidemics in amarillo and elsewhere in the panhandle. we have been holding steady around 1200 cases a day, been going up a little bit and then we had a big burst. and the last three days have been the worst in terms of deaths here's the situation. we have been doing pretty well compared to other parts of the country for a long time. we saw what was happening in new york and

peter hotez is a professor and dean of tropical medicine at the baylor college of medicine.hank you so much for joining us, doctor. i know you've seen the white house giving us a real-time example of how quickly and widely covid-19 can spread in the workplace, especially when you're not, i guess, using the proper measures that people would expect to be used in the workplace. what are you thinking as you watch this all go down? >> as i watch, i'm thinking, you know, if they are having this many issues in the white house, imagine routine places of work if such a thing exists? how are we doing this in law offices or target or walmart or other places of employment? this is going to be really hard to have a system in place where we can do that testing on a regular basis, then to have all of the contact tracers that we need to track down the cases. some estimates are saying for every sim positive case you may need to identify 15 contacts in order to adequately quarantine and isolate everybody. this is really tough. and we are starting to see some guidelines -- detailed guidelines.

joining me is a professor of pediatrics at baylor college of medicine. ctor, thanks for joining us. the cdc notes that the dropoff started a week after the declaration of this national emergency. what do you take away from the timing of this drop off and what's the significance? >> yeah, it was clearly in response to social distancing and calls for social distancing. and parents, essentially, stopped taking their kids into the pediatrician for their va vaccinations. and the hope is this is only going to be temporary and we're going to start to see an up tick, especially as some of the states begin opening up. we have to give parents reassurance that it's okay and safe to bring their kids to get vaccinated. because we're all consumed with covid-19 right now, but measles is actually one of the most contagious and transmissable diseases we know about. when you see those declines we risk seeing measles on top of covid-19, which would be catastrophic. >> let's turn to the search for a vaccine for coronavirus. more than 100 vaccine candidates, potential vaccine

joining me now is the dean of the national school of tropical medicine at baylor college of medicine involved in vaccine development. doctor, you're like a human decoder ring for to us understand the terminology and understand how things really are proceeding. so when we talk about things in clinical trial, you say we should expect to see vaccines get through this level, but what does that mean exactly? >> well, what it means is if you really want a vaccine as fast as possible, you want to have as we call it many shots on goal as possible. and the actual principle of making a vaccine against covid-19 is not that complicated the what you need is an immune response against the spike protein. if you've ever looked at a car teen of a coronavirus and you've seen that donut with a piece of rna stuffed in the middle with a bunch of spikes sticking out all around it, that spike protein is what binds with our tissues, our host receptors. so if you make an immune response to it, you block the infection. the question is, how to best and most safely block that and create the immune response to b

let's bring in the dean of the national school of tropical medicine at the baylor college of medicine. otez, you've been our reality check on vaccines. this is another one of these and on one hand sounds too good to be true and as we learned it is never successfully worked. that said, should we have some hope this could be the answer? >> well, sure. i think it could be the answer. but i think what happening and it is taken me a little bit of time to get my arms around this and my colleagues as well, you're hearing all of the this talk about vaccines ready by the fall, ready by the fall and you hear that from the bioteches, you're hearing it from the big pharma companies and from the white house. and increasingly it dawned on me what they're talking about is the manufacturing ready so that the whole -- this is a whole exercise around -- it is the same attitude that we're seeing about having the ventilators ready and the diagnostic kits ready and having the vaccine ready which means a lot of doses produced but the truth is we're not going to know whether any of these vaccines are safe a

peter from baylor college of medicine. how are you doing? thank you for coming back here. to hear today with regards to testing? >> i think the issue around testing is we keep on talking about numbers of test. he is an old friend from texas. doing a great job scaling that, but the actual numbers of tests don't mean a lot to me. what i want to know is as people start going back to work, can they get tested in the workplace, and can they have some comfort level, knowing that the person sitting next to them does not have asymptomatic covid? that is really what it comes down to. people need to feel safe going back to work, knowing that there is some kind of testing going on in the workplace on a regular basis. then the contact tracing will come in. back into quarantine or isolate. and working out that system, putting that framework in place. surveillance, communicating all of this. that's what it's really all about. what can we do, not just to open up the economy but to sustain that economic recovery because of people are free to go back to work, then everything could fall apa

from baylor college of medicine, mice lie and monkeys exaggerate, doctor. that was a new one for me. explain what elizabeth cohen meant. >> there are a few takeaway points. first thing i want to say is these are two excellent studies in terms of the quality of the studies. these are published in "science" magazine by dan brushs' group and harvard and m.i.t. this is a big team of scientists. this is not easy to do this kind of work with all of the chaos going on with all of the covid-19 in the boston area. so i just want to make the point, first, it's a testament to the leadership of that team and also the leadership of beth israel deaconess and harvard medical school and the ragone institute to make it possible. that's a village to make that happen, point one. point two, very interesting studies about the reinfection studies in the chinese that shown back in march, that they infected them with covid-19 and could not reinfect them. that gave an early indication that maybe experience, infection with the virus could confer protective immunity and prevent you f

peter hotez founding dean of the national school of tropical medicine from the baylor college of medicinefirst for you, where will one find a doctor that doesn't combine both, understanding as you do every time you're on, of the great public pressure to get the economy back going, especially if you've lost your job and you're experiencing food insecurity and financial insecurity, but also to do so safely? where does one find doctors like the ones that the trump campaign just described who are simpatico with just what trump believes? >> yeah. we're in for a very difficult period in the united states. unfortunately a large number of states now have opened up the economy before the time when some of the models, like out of the institute for health metrics say when we're going back to containment mode, meaning one new case per million residents per day. so what that means is we're doing this faster -- we're doing this sooner than that so that we will start to see an increase in the number of cases. we've already learned how this works. we've seen this virus enough to know that it's not like y

taylor: joining us to discuss the results of the study, baylor college dean for the school of medicineo is currently working on developing a coronavirus vaccine at baylor. as you are sifting through the news of what could be a potential coronavirus vaccine from moderna, what do you like and what gives you cause for concern? the problem is that there is not a lot of information out there. the fact that there was no data in the press release. you are kind of left trying to of what isa leaves happening and trying to understand what is hype and what is real. good news that, of the eight individuals they injected, nothing bad happened in terms of adverse effects. of had a significant level redness at the injection site. differentking at two doses. it was showing that at least it was safe in the initial postinjection period. is other big question then whether it is an immune response that will protect against the virus. after eighted that, of the volunteers were immunized , they developed an immune response comprised of neutralizing antibody. that is good. the question is, how much? that is

joining me is the founding dean of the national school of tropical medicine at baylor college, dr. peter hotez. he's the co-director of the center for vaccine development at texas children's hospital and also worked on the vaccine for sars. dr. hotez, i don't want to present you as somebody who is an alarmist about how much -- but you do seem to be concerned that we may be presenting false hope, i guess. what is your concern about all this public talk about a fast vaccine? >> here's where we're at. i'm actually pretty confident we will eventually have a covid-19 vaccine. the theory behind it is not very complicated. you induce an immune response against the spike protein that binds with the host receptor. if you've ever seen a picture of the covid-19 picture or cartoon, you recognize the doughnut stuffed with rna and all around it are these spikes that bind to the receptor. if you make an immune response to the spike proteins you can most likely block the infection. and there's at least a dozen, we're hearing 14, probably going to be at least 20 vaccines that go into clinical trials