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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

With international travel resuming and our biggest states re-opening, life in Australia is - finally - returning to normal.

So, is this really the beginning of the end of the Covid-19 pandemic? And what have we learnt from the past 18 months?

Today - Nobel prize winning scientist Peter Doherty on what surprised him most about the pandemic, and the way we responded… and what we should expect in the months to come.

It’s Wednesday November 3

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RUBY:

Peter, hello.

PETER:

How are you going?

RUBY:

I’m good, how are you going?

PETER:

We're just doing audio, aren't we?

RUBY:

We are just audio.

PETER:

Yes, I don't need to dress nicely.

RUBY:

Well, you still can if you want to, but it's not necessary.

PETER:

Purely psychological then.

RUBY:

Hey, it's great to have you back on 7am. I loved talking to you last time, but it feels like a lifetime ago now.

PETER:

But then everything feels like a lifetime ago now.

RUBY:

It's true. I think it was back in April 2020 before we really had any idea. Well, you might have known I had no idea what was about to come, but you probably had some sense of it, more of a sense than me.

PETER:

Yeah, some sense of it. But I've seen a lot of surprises along the way. We've learnt a lot. We're still learning. And what a way to go. It is a very complicated disease.

RUBY:

Mmm - and Peter, how different has this past 18 months been for you, compared to your life as a scientist - a Nobel prize winning scientist - pre pandemic?

PETER:

Well, it's been different and a lot of ways over the last 18 months. And basically, you know, after the Nobel prize, I kept on being heavily involved in lab based research for, oh, another 10 or more years.

And also progressively got more involved in public science communication and started writing books and talking to people about other things, climate change. And so with where I started to talk a lot with people in that community.

And then COVID hit and suddenly I find I'm right back in it. And so I've been re-engaging. And we've all had to grapple with a disease which is not quite like anything we've seen before.

RUBY:

And you said earlier there have been a lot of surprises on the way? Can you tell me about that?

PETER:

I love the thing I didn't expect was I didn't understand the social consequence and the social implications and how that would work and the fact that it's been so much worse for people on lower incomes and people who have to go out and work every day just to keep their that keep themselves going.

What AIDS taught us all was that the behavioural dimension is enormously important. And then I sort of realised just how important the social sciences are. I'd learnt that lesson kind of about this disease with dealing with this has taught me much more about that. You know, I never thought I'd be seeing epidemiologists being the talking point of human society on TV. I never knew we had so many epidemiologists.

RUBY:

Me, either.

PETER:

They're all very nice and personable and some ferocious, and some are not. But I really enjoyed watching them.

And the economic cost to we'd calculated, economists told us, a major flu pandemic, which is the one we always expected, could cost us trillions of dollars as well. Now we've lived through that and we understand what that actually means in real terms.

RUBY:

And Peter, when we spoke last time, you were characterising this as the pandemic that we needed to have. And I just wonder, reflecting back what you meant by that and also whether you think we have learnt the lessons that we needed to do to better prepare us for the possibility of another pandemic.

PETER:

Well, clearly I was channelling Paul Keating and in those words, it was recession we had to have, as I recall with Keating. But yes, I mean, I think we all thought the pandemic was inevitable.

We all thought it might cause something of a reset. I mean, one of the things that's been happening across Western society, particularly is the constant cutting of publicly funded services, initiatives and roles. And I thought maybe this would cause us to rethink some of those things. If you keep cutting public health labs and public health services, you'll have a worst time of it.

We'll have undoubtedly learnt a lot, we will have adjusted some of our systems. Of course, I'm sort of being an academic. I always want to know really what did happen. And so I'd like to think that there would be resources there for people who are in universities and other situations like that to really go in depth and look at what happened here.
I think we need to look at it from the aspect of the medical science, of course, which we're pretty on top of. And that's a pretty, you know, it's a very evidence-based world. But then I'd like to think we can really look at it from the point of view of the sociological consequences, the mental health consequences, the economic consequences.

So I think it would be great if we could actually reflect on this, analyse carefully what's happened and then come up with some sort of broader principles about how we handle one of these things.

You know, it's not the first pandemic we had, but it's the first pandemic we've ever had in an era when we actually, in many cases, we're diagnosed, everyone has been infected with these. PCR tests.

So we'll know enormously more about this disease than we'll know about anything we've ever studied.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Peter, Australia is on its way to becoming one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. So I wonder what you think our responsibility is now to our neighbours who have lower vaccination rates, places like Papua New Guinea - where vaccination rates are very low - just over one percent of the population are fully vaccinated I believe. So what happens when places like PNG don’t reach the same targets as us?

PETER:

Well, we need to help where we can. Obviously, we I think we're going to stop making the AstraZeneca vaccine. It's a much cheaper vaccine. We could have kept making it and sending an effort to these countries and giving them a lot more vaccination opportunities.

We can't organise their health care systems though. I mean, that's up to their governments. We can't organise the distributions of vaccines and all the rest of it. We have been helping them through DFAT. DFAT has been, I know, commissioning, modelling and so forth from us to help with the Pacific nations and with so we have been helping and I think Australia does take some responsibility for what's happening in the Pacific.

But of course, it's not just that it's actually knowing that what you do is actually going to translate into real action in the actual country where you give the the product they are they able to get to? Are they well organised enough to actually use it properly?

We do know some of the Pacific islands and some of the very heavily vaccinated, and they've been very well organised and done extremely well with it. So we don't really know where this will go.

RUBY:

And Peter what is next with the virus? Are we likely to see further new variants emerge? Particularly if worldwide vaccination rates aren’t at that 80 - 90 percent mark?

PETER:

We haven't yet seen what we would think of as an immune escape there yet emerge. You know, with influenza, we have to make a different vaccine every year. That's because influenza viruses, which mutate a lot faster than Covid Covid doesn't mutate at anything like the rate of flu viruses. But we'll get a flu virus every year, which will jump the barrier of preceding immunity of antibodies to the virus.

So we have to make a new vaccine. We haven't yet seen that with Covid. The Delta variant, which is the one we've been so worried about, which is, you know, grows faster and grows to a higher level than previous variants and as a consequence transmits more and maybe causes a bit more severe disease.

Emerged in December 2020, when there was almost in India and there was almost no vaccine, there were a few vaccine trials starting there, but nothing happening much. And so it's actually just a virus that grows faster and spreads faster.

So whether we'll see immune escape variants, which would require a new vaccine, but possibly as with flu, we don't know and we don't know what's really been happening. A lot of these countries, anyway, because, you know, how much disease are they had? In some cases, the reporting is very poor.

RUBY:

And I know obviously, it's so hard to predict the future, and there is so much that we don't know. But at what point do you think we might be able to say that this particular pandemic is over? Is it ever going to be or is a things permanently different now as a result of COVID 19?

PETER:

No. I think basically if the virus doesn't change dramatically and we don't get an immune escape variant, which would require new vaccinations, but basically the companies are set up to do that much more quickly.

Now they've been making variant vaccines as sort of seed stocks, if you like against the variants we know are out there, and they could probably put those into production in a very limited trial fairly quickly. But then you'd have to get out there and vaccinate all those people again.

But I think at the moment, if you look at the Australian situation, if we say the virus is not going to change dramatically. We've got we may get over 90 per cent of the people vaccinated. A lot of the people aren't vaccinated will get infected, so they will also be protected because they'll be convalescent and and prior infection is actually a pretty good protection protection better than we thought it was initially actually when we first detected reinfection. You know, in a year or so, you might think, well, you know, we're actually close to 100 percent protected.

Now we do know that people who are vaccinated can be reinfected. They can get a breakthrough infection, but they don't transmit nearly as much, we think, as the ones that are unvaccinated.

I think, though, that next year, if the virus doesn't change, then we give booster shots to the more vulnerable. We'll be looking at something that's much more like normal influenza. And, you know, people will catch it. They'll get a bit sick, they won't die and and it'll just be part of the background. We don't normally shuts down human society for a virus infection.

RUBY:

And as the pandemic fades into the background, I wanted to ask you about something else I know you’re passionate about: climate change - because that is the next big challenge we’re all facing.

PETER:

Look, I mean, it is the next. It is the great challenge for humanity. And when you think tackling something like climate change, you need policy settings at work. Now the politicians are capable of acting effectively, as we seen through COVID. There have been flaws in the way they've operated. I've been told I've made mistakes, but everyone does.

They've listened to the medicos and the scientists and the epidemiologists and so forth. But it's for politicians to listen to expertise and then come to those conclusions that they think are politically appropriate, but basically try and get any politician in the federal government on on the current government side to actually talk to a climate scientist. They won't talk to them.

And by far, the greatest challenge is not Covid, it's climate change. You can make a vaccine against COVID, you can get drugs against COVID and you can declare it's over. It's not even like a war with climate change. You can't just declare peace and expect it to stop. I'm not going to be around to see what the consequences are, but I hope they're better than that but I think at the moment.

RUBY:

And Peter Melbourne, where you live, is hitting its vaccination targets and is beginning to reopen. Life is largely returning to normal. What are you most looking forward to?

PETER:

Well, I'm most looking forward to my booster shot.

RUBY:

Said like a true scientist.

PETER:

The vaccines have worked remarkably well in the elderly, and you know, they've protected a lot of people, some frail, elderly and others still dying, and that will continue to happen.

But I'd really like to get that booster shot before I fully engage back in human society because it pushes your antibody levels right up. So. So my psychological breakpoint point is not so much now. It's six months after my last vaccine shot, which is the end of the year, and I got a booster shot.

And then I basically think that basically the only thing to do is go back to relatively normal life, quite frankly.

RUBY:

Hmm. Well, Peter, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. First, at the beginning of the pandemic and now hopefully at the end of it...

PETER:

Well, as Churchill said, with the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, I think we're at the beginning of. The end, I hope so.

RUBY:

I hope so, too. Thanks, Peter.

PETER:

OK, bye.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today….

The diplomatic rift between Australia and France has widened, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison accused of leaking text messages sent between the two leaders.

After French President Emanuel Macron accused Morrison of lying over the cancelation of a submarine contract, text messages were published by several news outlets seemingly contradicting Macron’s version of events.

And Victoria’s Oppostion leader Matthew Guy has told Tim Smith, his former shadow attorney general to not contest the next state election, due next year.

Smith resigned his role after a drink driving incident over the weekend.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.