‘The pandemic isn’t over’ just because we have vaccines: Dr. Craig Spencer

Dr. Craig Spencer, Emergency Medicine Physician and Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss the latest vaccine news and his outlook for the distribution timeline.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: For more on this, we want to bring in Dr. Craig Spencer. He's an emergency medicine physician and also the director of Global Health and Emergency Medicine at Columbia University. And Dr. Spencer, it's great to have you on the program.

Let's start with what Anjalee just ended on, and that's the new guidance that we're getting from the CDC. They're now recommending quarantine between 7 and 10 days, down from the initial 14 days. Does this new guidance, does this make sense to you?

CRAIG SPENCER: Absolutely. 14 days is the overwhelming majority of time the maximum time that we'd have to worry about someone potentially being contagious if they've been exposed. Decreasing that down to 7 or 10 days is going to be helpful, because yes, there may be some people, a small percentage of people who could still be contagious after seven or ten days. That gets the vast majority of people. And it makes it a lot easier on people who have to go to work or who otherwise need to leave the house.

Now, it's important that we clarify it's seven days if you've been exposed and you were able to get a test in the last two days, so from day six or seven. And it's 10 days of quarantining if you don't have any symptoms. So if you have symptoms on day 9 or on day 10, you should still continue to quarantine. You should get a test. And you should still, up until day 14, obviously, take the same measures, limit your interactions, because you could still potentially be infectious.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Dr. Spencer, help us understand a couple of things. When Anjalee talked about the potential for 100 million doses by March, that's 50 million-- if it's 200 million doses, so if it's two doses that each individual needs, that's 100 million people that will be inoculated-- frontline workers, senior citizens, nursing homes, we saw the CDC proposal. Those people who were inoculated against the virus, they can still transmit it, though, or can they not once you have the vaccine in?

CRAIG SPENCER: That's a great question, because honestly, we just don't know. One thing we haven't seen, much more than just a press release on both the Pfizer, BioNTech, and the Moderna vaccine. We know that they're highly efficacious. But we haven't seen the actual studies.

So we don't know, and we may not get that information. We're going to have to assume that even if you're protected, which is great, and it seems like both these vaccines provide good protection, especially from getting severe illness, we don't know if it's going to mean that you can't get the virus in your body and potentially still pass it on to others, even if you've been vaccinated. That's why it will be important that people, even when they're vaccinated, continue to take a lot of the exact same steps we're taking now-- washing your hands, wearing a mask, socially distance, until the vast majority of the population is able to be vaccinated, because the virus can still potentially spread.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And the second part of this question comes from all of the investors who are talking about pent-up demand, money on the side that with a vaccine will come pouring back in. If you have been inoculated against the vaccine but you can still transmit it-- we don't know about that yet-- we could still have lockdown situations, we could still be wearing masks and restricted numbers of people in stores and in restaurants, because even though you yourself are protected, you could infect somebody else. This is a real problem, even after the vaccine. Is it not?

CRAIG SPENCER: Absolutely. The one thing that people need to recognize is that just because we have vaccines, the pandemic is not over. The majority of the people listening to this program right now may not get a vaccine until April, May, maybe even later. It's going to be prioritized for healthcare workers, people in long-term care facilities and in nursing homes. There are going to be people who, for other underlying health reasons, may not be able to get a vaccine, people who are pregnant, for example, or are immunocompromised.

And they're going to require all of us to continue to do the exact same thing we're doing now, which is wearing a mask, socially distancing, because the virus will still be spreading in our communities until, again, the vast, the overwhelming majority of people have been vaccinated. And that's still going to be a long way off.

SEANA SMITH: Dr. Spencer, when we talk about getting the vaccine here in the US, when we still look at the surveys and the results of them, it shows that a decent number of Americans are still hesitant to get a vaccine when it's ready. There's been the notion thrown out that maybe we should think about paying people who are willing to get vaccinated. Not to get political with you, but just from what you've heard from your patients and the conversations that you're having with your colleagues, is this something that would potentially make sense?

CRAIG SPENCER: You mean paying people to actually use this? I think this is difficult. I think what we need to be doing and what we should have been doing, really over the past few months, is we should have had a coordinated effort on behalf, led by our CDC, by the FDA, by our other long-trusted public health organizations, to reach out to these communities and let them know that yeah, we're doing this in record time, but that doesn't mean that we're cutting corners. We need to really be thinking about specific communities that have been disproportionately impacted in this pandemic and have reported that they're less likely to maybe trust or receive a vaccine.

I'm thinking of communities of color, Black and brown communities across the US. We need to reach out to them. We need to have been reaching out to them for some time. We've developed vaccines in record time. But we haven't been doing that good important community kind of trust-building activity that needs to set the stage, really, for people to feel comfortable and to trust that this vaccine is safe, effective, of high quality, and it's something that they should receive.

SEANA SMITH: Dr. Craig Spencer, great to have you on the show. We hope to have you back again soon. Emergency medicine physician, also director of Global Health and Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you.