Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D.: COVID-19: transmissibility, vaccines, risk reduction, and treatment

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest today is Dr. Peter Hotez. Dr. Hotez is a renowned vaccine scientist, a pediatrician and an expert on the current coronavirus outbreak.
His titles are almost too numerous to get into at this point, but I'll make an attempt to do so. He's the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine, where he's also the Director of the Texas Children's Center for Vaccine Development and the Texas Children's Hospital endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics.
I learned of Peter a few months ago for unrelated reasons that pertained to microbiology, vaccination, et cetera, and had wanted to interview him at the time and kind of postponed it for a number of unrelated reasons. More recently, about three weeks ago, I saw him talking about coronavirus, which was really around the time I started to think I had miscalculated. This would have been mid February, the second week of February, and I started to realize at that point in time that this was going to be a much bigger deal than I had naively assumed in January. I reached back out to him and said, Peter, let's get on a podcast when the time is right, and assumed that that would mean when we had enough facts that it was worth talking about. But what I did not really anticipate was the past seven days until they were upon us, basically about a week ago. So if you're listening to this on the 14th of March, that would have been about the 6th of March. A lot of things really changed in my mind. And I reached back out to Peter and said, hey, we should probably talk at the end of next week, which gives you enough time to manage the very important responsibilities that you have, but also allows us to sort of fill in some pretty big gaps in knowledge. And we attempt to do that. And this podcast is actually quite short by the standards of our podcast. It's about an hour long. And I think what we'll probably do is shorter, more frequent podcasts at this point in time, because the information is changing at a very rapid rate, such that anything we talk about on this podcast is likely to be background information at best a week out.
So we do talk about a number of things. We talk obviously about the etiology of the virus, the difference between the virus, which is SARS-CoV-2, and the disease state that it causes, COVID-19. We talk about how it spread. We talk about where it came from, what we know about it, what we don't know about it, what some of the treatment options may be, may not be, why a vaccine is probably not likely in the near term.
We talk about something called convalescent serum, which is something that looks kind of promising. And at this point, anything promising, we want to put sort of all hands on deck with interpreting. So with that said, let's just get to this interview with Peter, and we'll be following this up with a number of other interviews. Also, I should point out on pretty much every day, I'm putting updates up on Instagram, where you can find me at peterattiamd.com is the website, and that'll point you to Instagram, or you can just go to Instagram at peterattiamd, and that'll be kind of daily updates. But as I said, expect to see podcasts at a slightly irregular cadence, just as a way that we can sort of communicate with you. This podcast and all podcasts pertaining to the coronavirus will have show notes available to all listeners. So these podcast show notes and the subsequent ones that pertain to this subject matter will not be behind the paywall for subscribers. So this will be available to everybody. We will attempt to provide show notes as quickly as we can. So hopefully that allows everyone to access this information without any bottleneck. Without further delay then, please enjoy my discussion today with Dr. Peter Hotez.