Why flu/COVID-style vaccines keep falling behind mutation

1:36:26Okay? Let's do the efficacy test. >> Okay. Turns out, four intranasal doses on vaccinated mice and the mice were highly durable to SARS-CoV-2, this is COVID-19. Mouse-adapted SARS-CoV, which is the SARS virus. Um a coronavirus that was bat-derived. A gram-positive bacteria. And another gram-negative bacteria. So, like five different things that had nothing to do >> Yes. with what I showed the immune system. That's what's key. Usually, for

1:37:08the COVID-19 vaccine to work, I need to show our immune system the spike protein from the COVID-19 virus. It's going to learn that spike protein, and then it's going to learn to recognize it. >> keyhole of the lock that it needs to make keys for. Yeah, this is Yeah, this is literally just priming the immune system to be like, "Watch out." And so, for again, if I continue this annoying analogy, the primer is basically allowing the immune system to create several sets of keys before cats even show up. And it just so happens that because they created this preset of hundreds of thousands of keys, they already when it arrived, they can already be using those and >> Yeah, they already know like what is

1:37:50what is what is foreign. Right. There's a There's a signal like oh, okay, this is interesting. Um, this is actually so good because this goes back to what we've talked about before, which is to the extent that you instead of inserting something artificial into the body to solve the problem, if you can just instigate the body to use its existing machinery to better solve the problem, that is always the better solution. >> Yes. That's exactly right. And now let's think about what is exactly happening. Right. >> Right? Cuz you just like introduced like this very simple thing in the nasal tract and now all of a sudden it's just

1:38:30like working. Doesn't make any sense to me. >> It just got a huge defense system out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah. So So how is it actually working? So let's talk about the lungs, right? The respiratory tract is a really distinct immunological zone because it's kind of like the border between the outside and the inside of the human body, right? Um there's a direct interface between the outside world and the inside world. So there's its own rules of engagement. >> That's that's fair. It's like this is not the blood, right? Where the blood is shielded by the skin and the heart and and and the capillaries. The lung is like where the outside world is coming in and I need to get oxygen and release

1:39:10carbon dioxide, right? So there's a lot of stuff coming in. >> Yes. The rules of engagement are different. The battlefield is something like 480 million alveoli. Alveoli are these compartments inside the human lung that increase surface area such that there is a transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide from the blood to the outside world, okay? This is how blood Oh, sorry, this is how oxygen gets into our blood. >> Yep. Every single lung has 70 square meters of surface area, which is roughly half a tennis court. So, if you were to take our lungs and actually lay it out flat, that would be half a tennis court worth of surface area. >> That's really crazy, actually.

1:39:51>> I didn't know that. >> Right? That's that's pretty cool. >> It's massive. Now, the lung is naturally tolerogenic, meaning it tolerates a bunch of random stuff. It suppresses an immune response.