#1451 - Dr. Peter Hotez

The Centers for Disease Control came out with a very chilling document a few weeks ago, showing that about a third of the people in the hospital sick with COVID-19 are under the age of 44.

This is a very different situation than SARS or MERS or any of those other things. The entire U.S. economy is totally shut down. If anything's going to be a wake-up call for industry, if anything's going to be a wake-up call for people with money, this is going to be it, because this is devastating for everybody.

COVID-19 will peak in the U.S. in the middle of April. In certain states like Texas and California, its peak is expected to occur around May 2nd.

The longer you allow transmission to go on before you intervene with social distancing and other things, the worse the surge and epidemic, and therefore, as we talked about with Italy, the worse the mortality.

Even in years where there's not a good match between the flu vaccine and the flu, it could still reduce your likelihood of hospitalization and death.

If we had all the funding we needed for our coronavirus vaccine program, we would have had several coronavirus vaccines in clinical trials, and potentially, we could have combined them in a way to be ready to go now.

Smoking up-regulates the receptor in the lungs that SARS-CoV-2 binds to ... That may worsen the disease.

Between 12,000-50,000 people die every year of influenza, and the vast majority of those people aren't vaccinated.