Thanks for doing this, and I had a similar experience of being deeply affected by this story.
I’m by no means a biosecurity expert (I do have a bio background and forecasting experience related to COVID). Overall, I was also impressed and I have no especially strong criticisms of the content here except to say that his bullishness on UVC light and the BCG vaccine as important parts of “hardening society against future pandemics” seems unwarranted.
UVC light: even if you could somehow get the technology to work and get regulatory approval, this would almost only work against fomite transmission — and fomite transmission only constitutes a very small percentage of transmission events for SARS-CoV-2, which is also likely the case with other respiratory viruses we have reason to worry about
BCG vaccine: there was a lot of talk in early 2020 that it might confer some protection against SARS-CoV-2 by providing general non-specific protection against respiratory disease, and this was largely based on the observation that countries that mandate the BCG vaccine as part of their childhood immunization programs seemed to be far less hard-hit. But given epidemiological trajectories since then, e.g. India experiencing a huge COVID wave in spring 2021, this observation no longer seems to hold (or, at the very least, the correlation is far weaker). The jury is still out on whether the BCG vaccine provides at least some limited protection against COVID, but the evidence in favor of it almost certainly isn’t strong enough to advise spending billions on vaccinating everyone with it as opposed to, say, investing more in universal flu vaccine programs and building additional vaccine manufacturing capabilities
Thanks for doing this, and I had a similar experience of being deeply affected by this story.
I’m by no means a biosecurity expert (I do have a bio background and forecasting experience related to COVID). Overall, I was also impressed and I have no especially strong criticisms of the content here except to say that his bullishness on UVC light and the BCG vaccine as important parts of “hardening society against future pandemics” seems unwarranted.
UVC light: even if you could somehow get the technology to work and get regulatory approval, this would almost only work against fomite transmission — and fomite transmission only constitutes a very small percentage of transmission events for SARS-CoV-2, which is also likely the case with other respiratory viruses we have reason to worry about
BCG vaccine: there was a lot of talk in early 2020 that it might confer some protection against SARS-CoV-2 by providing general non-specific protection against respiratory disease, and this was largely based on the observation that countries that mandate the BCG vaccine as part of their childhood immunization programs seemed to be far less hard-hit. But given epidemiological trajectories since then, e.g. India experiencing a huge COVID wave in spring 2021, this observation no longer seems to hold (or, at the very least, the correlation is far weaker). The jury is still out on whether the BCG vaccine provides at least some limited protection against COVID, but the evidence in favor of it almost certainly isn’t strong enough to advise spending billions on vaccinating everyone with it as opposed to, say, investing more in universal flu vaccine programs and building additional vaccine manufacturing capabilities