Transcript

Title: Tech and Pandemics – A Review

Author(s): Swinburne Marketing Services

Year: 2020

Adam Jacoby

Hello everybody, welcome to our session. My name's Adam Jacoby and I'm the Director of Global

and Strategic Innovation here at the Swinburne Innovation Precinct. In the spirit of reconciliation

Swinburne University of Technology acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout

Australia and their connections to land sea and community we pay our respects to their elders past

present and emerging and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

today. Welcome to the Tech and Pandemics Session – A Review, it's part of the Swinburne web

sessions series. Today we're going to be reviewing the way Tech has helped and hindered our efforts

to deal with COVID-19, the unpredicted consequences of the pandemic, what we've learned so far

and what it means for the industries involved and the people and careers within them. We have

some fabulous panellists for you this afternoon. First we have Jason But, Jason is the Deputy Chair

the Department of Telecommunications, Electrical Robotics and Biomedical Engineering and is an

expert in internet protocol and network security. We have Enzo Palombo Professor of Microbiology

in the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology who's an expert in infectious agents. And last but

not least we have Bruce Thompson Dean of the School of Health Sciences and the President of the

Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Before we commence with the questions and the chats let's do a little bit of housekeeping to kick

off. Thank you for your questions that have come in advance, we've used them to really shape what

the next hour is going to look like. In this session and we're going to go to about 4:45pm today and

then there'll be a 15-minute Q&A session. If you have questions throughout the session at the

bottom of your screen you'll see a Q&A box, type those questions in and the moderators will feed

those questions back to us for that final Q&A component. We have moderators also standing by to

answer any course related questions that you have and help with any tech issues that you might face

as well. The very last thing is throughout this session, three polls will pop up because we're super

interested in hearing your feedback about how we're doing and the quality of the conversation. As

those polls pop up onto your screen just take a moment, it’ll only take a few seconds to answer the

question, and then come back into the session. So let's kick off now, let's start with information and

misinformation. Alongside this health pandemic, we've also been facing an info-demic of false claims

about COVID-19. Some of the things we've heard about are, the dark net vendors selling blood of

recovered patients and we've seen inhaling hot air from the hairdryer will kill the virus. Why do we

think that there are so many false claims in this pandemic? Bruce, why don't you kick us off?

Bruce Thompson

Well I think people want hope, they want an answer and they want an answer right now. They are

basically sick and tired of being locked up in their house and think surely this is an easy fix, this

should be no problem at all, just take a tablet and it all goes away and it doesn't. It's a virus and

viruses are hard to actually fix and it's been a big problem because ultimately there's a whole lot of

misinformation out there which is actually blocking the important information that people need to

hear. I mean 5G causing the virus is just preposterous and unfortunately that takes all the air out of

the real information that we need to get across. But part of the reason is people want to hang on to

something because it's a great story. They want hope and they want an easy fix so they grab hold of

anything that they possibly can. However we need to focus on the actual information, the true

science and the true pathway of actually trying to get out of the pandemic that we're in.

Adam Jacoby

Fantastic. Enzo, Jason do you want to add something to that?

Enzo Palombo

I could add to that. It is a complex problem and people often look for simple solutions to complex

problems. But it's almost like again as Bruce said the hope that this cannot have been just a natural

cause and the conspiracies around some of the origins of the virus and the disease also fit into that

idea that we want a simple solution to a complex problem. Sometimes we have to just simply wait

and understand before we can really communicate that correctly. It’s also listening to the right

people and not thinking that we are all experts in this particular field, but there are certain levels of

understanding that we can provide that allow people to understand the complex problem and turn

into something which can be logical and understandable.

Adam Jacoby

Jason?

Jason But

It's an ongoing issue that the internet has done wonderful things to bring us together and give

everyone a voice and be able to speak. What it's also aided is the opportunity for people, who don't

know what they're saying, to communicate and get that message spread a lot more widely than

standing on a soapbox in the middle of the street like things used to happen. So there is a lot more

information out there and that doesn't necessarily mean it's all good information.

Adam Jacoby

So to that point, I mean it's said that nearly 30% of Americans think that COVID-19 was developed in

a lab. Why is that an unlikely scenario and why is it so hard to figure out where COVID-19 has come

from? Enzo?

Enzo Palombo

This is an ongoing question and again it comes down to some people's beliefs or misconceptions

about how these things arise. The people who study these types of events and people who study

viruses and have been looking at evolution, adaptation and the natural progress of these types of

infectious agents have been doing so for many years. It hasn't just happened now because we have a

current pandemic. And people may recall, or if they were around the time of the SARS epidemic or

pandemic, about 20 years ago and the similar virus called MERS which is a relative of these current

types of viruses. People are always looking at where do these things come from, where do they

evolve, and how are do they mutate into what they are now. The consensus seems to be that the

type of virus that SARS CoV2, the COVID 19 virus, evolved and mutated is only something which

could have happened naturally in an environment where you had mixing of things like the origins,

which is probably a bat species of virus, changing subtly into something which goes into an

intermediate host like another mammal and then finally into humans. The consensus is that this is

not something which has been manufactured or engineered, that it has happened naturally in the

real world so that's where science seems to sit right now.

Adam Jacoby

Bruce do you want to speak to that?

Bruce Thompson

Look it's one of these things, this is sort of the thing that movies are made of you know there's

someone sitting in a laboratory coming up with this fantastic virus. Well coronavirus is a umbrella

term for a whole lot of other viruses, the common cold sits in coronavirus, and so it would be

actually fantastic if someone did make that up because then we know how to fix it. That would have

been just such an easy thing to do. So if we're that smart that we could actually create this virus in

the first place then it would be really easy to just come up with the vaccine straight away to just do a

two in one package but it doesn't work that way. So clearly just even from the evolution point of

view and all the science that we know, this thing is just a mutation of the science from 20 years ago.

It’s basically a very similar virus to what we're dealing with now. We've known about these viruses,

we study them all the time and there's so much work going into trying to discover the cure for the

common cold, this is just yet another variant and it's just difficult. So another conspiracy theory is

raised that it was developed in a laboratory. I wish it was because then we can actually fix it but it's

not that easy.

Adam Jacoby

Indeed and Jason…

Enzo Palombo

Just a point, we’re discovering things about coronaviruses by studying this particular virus that

weren't known before so these could not have been predicted by someone sitting in a laboratory

and making this up. It's something that happens naturally and we're discovering a lot more about

these viruses today by studying this particular type of virus.

Adam Jacoby

Jason why do you think social media platforms are unable to stem the tide of fake news whether it's

bots or whether it's humans?

Jason But

It's truly amazing the faith that people have in what computers can actually do today. Computing

and processing power and what we can do has jumped ahead in leaps and bounds especially in new

technologies like machine learning and learning from prior experiences and feeding lots of

knowledge what we call big data type approaches. But it is still very difficult to make very clever

decisions and be correct all the time right. You cannot leave things purely to a computer to decide

because what you'll get is a lot of false negatives and you also get a lot of false positives as well.

You'll be blocking good information or you'll be blocking what you want to allow through and the

other way around you'll be letting through stuff that you should be blocking. So if you leave

everything to the computer it just cannot be done. Computers do a really good job of flagging things

for viewing but given the size of the internet today and you just look at how many people are on

Facebook and how many things are posted on Facebook and Twitter, you literally cannot have

enough people to go through all the flagged things, something is always going to slip through.

Adam Jacoby

On that point let's just shift gears slightly and let's talk about the apps that are being developed and

let's talk about contact tracing. Bruce, what is contract tracing and when do you need it?

Bruce Thompson

Well, the whole idea of contact tracing is if we know who has this virus it would be fantastic because

at the end of the day we can start isolating people. But we can't do that so what we need to do is

come up with another way. Now our little groovy phones that we have these days, they can do a hell

of a lot more than we actually use them for. So what the contact tracing does and especially the app

that the government came up with is basically we can use the GPS capability of the phone and the

Bluetooth capability of the phone to say ‘hey you're in proximity’, you're almost creating a geo-fence

around somebody. So you're in proximity of another phone and the phones can talk to each other

and they talk to all the towers and all that sort of stuff. If you know that you've got the virus and

you've put this in here then if you come into a sort of a geo space or a personal space of someone,

two phones can talk to each other and then we know ‘hey we can let you know you've been in

contact with someone with potentially the virus’. So it is extremely powerful and fabulous because

then you can actually work out where the problem is. It can actually control clusters, we can actually

use this for a lot of good, so it's a really important piece of tech. In Singapore when they introduced

this it works so well in terms of actually trying to stem the virus outbreak. Everyone must

understand a virus can only actually replicate if it gets given to another host, your body will kill it. So

it really needs to find somebody else to keep going. If we can actually stop that then basically the

virus dies out. Look in New Zealand, it doesn't exist there anymore.

Adam Jacoby

Interesting, Enzo do you want to add anything to that?

Enzo Palombo

I would like to see these types of technologies deployed in other areas of public health. When we

have things like food outbreaks, when we're trying to trace back to food contaminated, who was in

contact with a restaurant or some other common place where an infection/disease or an outbreak

occurred. I think these would be great to use in those situations because it would shorten the time

of identifying where the cause was and implementing some appropriate fixes to the problem

Adam Jacoby

And Jason, I guess from an internet perspective you know how is it different to the Singapore app?

How are these technically different and given Enzo's example of using it in other ways for other

purposes, what's the concern about the security of these sorts of things terms data that gets

provided?

Jason But

There's a lot of security issues but I think I personally I'm going to go against the other two. We're

living in a Western democracy I'm sorry I think regardless of what good we can get with an

application like this I think it's absolutely reprehensible idea for someone to propose an app that

tracks where everyone is and who they are in contact with. You will never find me downloading that

on my phone and if anyone asks me whether they should or shouldn't, regardless of whether the

app works or not, my answer to that is absolutely not. I think in our society and how it works I would

never do such a thing. I'll go even further if we were forced to do that I would leave my phone at

home and switch it off. I just wouldn't use it, simple as that. But there is another issue to that and

again it comes down to some of the issues we were talking about before. It is very difficult, you're

going to get a lot of false positives with this technology. Technology or Bluetooth can have very short

range connectivity. You're going to get your phone determining you're within range or someone. You

could be 10-15 metres away, it could be the person living next door to me who just happens to put

their phone next to the wall, that's next to my house and then all of a sudden my phone thinks that I

spent the night with that person. That's regardless of whether that is useful information to have or

not. You're going to get these false positives, you're not going to get very good data out of it, and I

don't think you can get very good data out of it. A lot of the location following that's used in internet

in phones today is great for general purpose but when you start getting it down to this I'm very

worried about where and how the security and privacy of this data is going to go. The government

says it's been tested and tried and true but just have to look at what happened previously. We found

our online census and what happened the last time with that, we did it and it was an absolute

disaster. I would not trust the government as far as I could throw them.

Adam Jacoby

So presumably Enzo and Bruce, as health experts, you might have a different perspective about

whether or not the app should be downloaded? I mean obviously it's a balance between privacy and

public health, how do you make the case against what Jason was saying in terms of you know Public

Health outweighing your own civil liberties as an example?

Bruce Thompson

So as a start, I don't believe it's outweighing our civil liberties at all. The cold hard reality is if you

look in the US this COVID virus has killed well in excess of a 100,000 people - killed them -stone-

dead. We're looking about 40,000 in the UK. If you look at the total number of people that have

actually been killed because this virus is transferred from one person to another person it's

horrifying. You only need to look at the fact that we have mass graves now in New York associated

with this particular virus. Now this virus is a mild virus by definition, so something like Ebola kills a

host before the host has that chance to actually transmit it to somebody else. I actually think what's

been demonstrated using this contact tracing and the social isolation has well and truly prevented

the death of numerous people. So I am actually a strong advocate of using this type of technology,

not only for corona, but also if we have a look at influenza in Australia. Influenza had 300,000 people

infected last year in this country and it killed 800 people in Australia. Now at this stage we have got

roughly about mid-hundreds of cases of influenza that's the laboratory confirmed in this country.

This time last year, we had 30,000 and we had 100 deaths (so far we've got zero deaths). So this is

extremely important technology, it's a very good debate to have and I can fully understand the

privacy concerns. I was very much involved with an app that we were going to use this contact

tracing, having heat maps and working out where the virus is. Because at the end of the day I'm

actually in the process of not allowing people to die from a situation where you just need to be

distanced from each other. That's all it is, you don’t get that and you won't die, it's pretty

straightforward.

Adam Jacoby

Enzo?

Enzo Palombo

I might bring another controversial topic to the discussion. Some things we do for the better of the

community and I bring vaccination into the discussion. We do that, perhaps we don't necessarily

understand the technology, but we hopefully trust it and it does provide a measure of security and

safety for the better of the whole community. Maybe I'm just a positive person I don't know, we do

things because it is the right thing to do for the community.

Adam Jacoby

I think the only difference I'll just add to that around vaccines. I think the counter-argument that

Jason was making, and people who believe what Jason believe, is that a vaccine doesn't have a

tracing agent and so you go to the doctor you get your vaccine and it helps you. Obviously there's a

medical benefit for doing it. This is slightly different because there's a question, and I'll get to a

question that relates to it in a moment. There's a question about whether or not the government

has done enough in building trust with the community to allow them access to our whereabouts, to

know where we are all the time and then what happens after the pandemic. What happens to the

app and that technology afterwards? To that point I guess, the question, let me throw it over to

Bruce first. Where did the 40% number come from in terms of the app when the Australian

Government was saying we need 40% of people to be using it? And are we leaving people behind if

they don't have smart apps, what do we do about members of the community who aren't

necessarily digitally connected in the same way that most of us are and does that pose a risk?

Jason But

I just want to break in quickly before Bruce gets here. I'm not against a lot of these things, I get the

concept of the social distancing and a lot of these things. I agree with a lot of the decisions that have

been made, that's not what I think is at issue here. I am just, in terms of privacy and civil rights and

all the things that go along with that, I just think that in this society, the sort of society that we run, I

just cannot agree and get on with the idea of tracing and figuring out where people are. That's the

defining line for me I think and for probably a lot of people.

Adam Jacoby

Thanks Jason. So Bruce, 40%, and are we leaving people behind?

Bruce Thompson

So basically as I just alluded to before, the virus has to find someone to hand it over to. If you have a

100 people in a room and only one person has the virus and 99 people don't, it's got a lot of people

that it can latch onto and it's got a really good chance of doing that. If it was the other way around,

99 people have the virus and they're basically been immunized to it or they carry antibodies for it

and then one person hasn't got the virus, it's going to be really hard for the virus to find that person.

So it ends up in a statistics issue. In this particular case they're basically saying we need to have 40%

of the people that we can actually contact trace. I think one thing that's also worth talking about it,

all it is that’s suggested is you have may have come in contact. It’s not going to tell you where or

when or how. It's just basically saying you've just passed into someone else's space that potentially

has this virus, so therefore what I'm going to do with you is test you. Then we're going to know

whether you've actually caught it because it might have transmitted or you're fine. So it's kind of

cool, but it doesn't necessarily say ‘hey you were just sitting down at the local pub and having a few

beers and you should have been at home with your wife’ all that sort of stuff. It's not saying that at

all, it's just saying that you have come into proximity with someone else who has the virus, doesn't

tell you necessarily where.

Jason But

No I'm sorry that's not how PC’s and Applications work. The data is there, it may not be programmed

to keep.

Bruce Thompson

Absolutely they have all the information but that's not what they're trying to achieve. So the

construct of the 40%, what they're trying to do is get a large enough sample of the people that we

know whether they have the virus or not and whether they're contacting each other to decrease of

statistics of unknowns. You're right, it is a problem the digital divide. Not everyone has smartphones,

not everyone has the internet and so that is the problem for that 60%. It would be great if 100% do

but based on statistics, and this is the sort of thing that we do in our courses and undergraduate

degrees in health science and what-have-you, is actually start looking at that sort of thing of how

many people do we need to have to actually see what the chances of virus spreading are.

Adam Jacoby

How did Australia compare to Singapore as an example? I think they were calling for a higher

percentage weren’t they?

Bruce Thompson

Yeah absolutely and I think Singapore has a slightly different society structure, government structure

and it's also culturally different. I think there was way more people signed up in Singapore. My

understanding is that Singapore basically also recorded the information of who they were so they

could give you a call to let you know ‘hey you need to go and get yourself’ tested. Where all it is that

we give in our app is you may have come in contact, so it's slightly watered down. These are the

exact questions that you know we as a society need to debate. This is the sort of thing we do in our

courses of what do we do for this this whole problem. This virus has cost billions of dollars so it's a

really huge economic cost for the actual country, we need to try limit this in an appropriate way.

Adam Jacoby

And Enzo, Enzo and Jason, what about leaving people behind what about people who don't have

digital phones?

Jason But

Well look I think there's a lot of people who don't have digital phones. I think anyone who is getting

above 80, I know a lot of people at that level, who either if they have a phone it's not one which is a

smartphone with touchscreen because they just can't get it.

Adam Jacoby

They're the people that most at risk and

Jason But

They are the people that are most at risk. Again I have a different issue with the actual app itself and

I would be looking at different ways hopefully to look after these people. I'm certainly not saying

that when people are at risk we should be looking the other way. I know that certainly in our school

we've got some researchers working on automated systems to detect when people fall over, when

they're not responding, when they're not behaving, when they stay in bed for too long and for the

elderly people so that we can track them. But these are people who we already know are at risk and

not necessarily have COVID19 but at other health risks and developing solutions which is specifically

targeted to them and localized between them and their families, or them and their health care

providers. It is certainly something that we teach them and we think it's a great solution, at least I

think it's a great solution as well. But we do have a problem with the technical divide, people, and a

lot of young people, just don't realize how hard it is for older people. Australia's got a very large

immigrant community and a lot of our older people don't speak English or speak English very poorly.

I know my parents and my parents in laws as well, their English is not that great. Trying to get them

to use some of these technologies is a lot of effort and a lot of work.

Adam Jacoby

Enzo?

Enzo Palombo

I don't have much doubt apart from the fact or the observation that no technology is 100% perfect

and this is just one part of what a health department would be using to help with the contact

tracing. We've done contact tracing for outbreaks in the past without any fancy apps or other tech

resources. It's just helping, it's adding another element, another layer, to the armoury of the people

who are doing this particular job.

Adam Jacoby

So before we move on to testing which we're doing in just a second. I just want to remind the

audience that there is that Q&A box at the bottom. If you have any questions by all means just pop

the question in for the moderated session in about 20 minutes. Let's move on to testing, only

because we have timing issues gentlemen we only have an hour. Can somebody explain for us, open

to everybody, how are these tests created, who creates them and what kind of skills and roles are

involved in creating a test to determine whether or not somebody has COVID?

Enzo Palombo

I'm happy to start because I've done this sort of work in my own scientific career and something that

we teach that's part of an undergraduate course. Anybody who passes a basic biochemistry or

biotechnology course who studied the DNA, will be able to do the sort of testing that is done in

commercial laboratories. It's based around the detection of what is called the nucleic acid, the

genome. What we have in our in our cells, we have chromosomes which are made up of DNA. In the

case of the virus that has a similar thing but it’s called RNA. This molecule, this chemical is detected

by a special technique which takes a small sample of a person's throat swab or nose swab and

essentially looks for that particular chemical by using a special technology which is used in forensic

science all the time. It's a way of taking a small amount of that material and in the laboratory we

amplify it, we multiply it, artificially to a point where we can see it using a special detection type of

technology. This is what the kits that we talked about in the early days of not having enough

reagent, that was all about having enough of these chemicals that we can use in laboratory to

perform the test. That's the test if somebody has the virus actively in their body. There are other

tests which haven't been as developed yet but these are the so called antibody tests where we take

a blood sample and we look for evidence that that person has been exposed to the virus and the

immune system has produced these molecules called antibodies.

Adam Jacoby

And antibody testing, is it working, is it not working?

Enzo Palombo

It's not as robust. It's still under development there's a few more what we call the false positives or

false negatives. In other words the test isn't as accurate as you want it to be to be useful in an

absolute way. But it can tell you something and it can tell you somebody who has had exposure. We

hear about what's called the asymptomatic person, the person who has the virus yet doesn't have

any symptoms. They are still infectious, so we need to be aware of that issue around who is carrying

the virus in the community and these tests can help identify those sort of carriers.

Adam Jacoby

Okay so just a question, as a non-medical layperson, one of the things we heard right from the

outset, I recall Donald Trump saying, that there'd be a vaccine and testing available imminently.

Then you hear experts like yourselves talk about the fact that vaccines and things like that take

months and months if not years to develop. So in terms of the tests that have been built, how long

do they take and are we getting better at producing them more quickly and in a more robust fashion

or is the technology getting better and is the medical expertise getting better? Where do we sit on

that for future challenges down the line?

Bruce Thompson

Look I might just chime in. For starters I don't tend to listen to what Donald Trump says a lot,

especially in the areas of medicine and science. He's gig maybe be better in other areas but not so

much in this one, I'll just sort of put it out there. This whole testing is critically important, it’s the sort

of thing that we teach at undergraduate level. The test Enzo was talking about it's got a PCR type

test and it does take quite a few days to do. If you go and get a blood test done in pathology or

whatever at the hospital, this is the sort of thing that they do. That's what scientists do in the labs

and actually take these measurements. But we've got to get faster at it because it is critical that

we’re actually able to do really quick testing on, not only this virus, but all the others, because I can't

see a vaccine being around till December 2021. So if we want to start opening our borders and all

that sort of stuff, we need to know who's got the virus and who's got it.

Adam Jacoby

So Bruce what part of the process is taking too long? Is it the analysis, is it the equipment, I mean

what is it?

Bruce Thompson

Yeah so PCR that takes a while to do that's just it. It's also part of the supply chain issue because we

go take the swab, they've got to basically get back to the laboratory, there's a process associated the

actual test takes a while, there is rapid PCR which is quicker but it just takes some time. We need a

point-of-care test like, I blow into a device and bang you got the virus. I'm working with a Melbourne

based company, who is also associated with University of Tasmania, and this is sort of standard

technique of electrophoresis, but really small and a rapid electrophoresis process, where we could

potentially just blow into a bit like alcohol breath testing. It's got a swab inside, pull the swab out

and bang, it can give you a measurement within 15-20 seconds. So now this would be critically

important with respiratory medicine in my area in terms of actually working out what virus

somebody has. But you could also imagine you're about to board a plane, blow into this device and

‘look mate you're not well’. Or you about to go into the MCG to watch a game of football, you're fed

it and well you’re positive for this virus ‘look here's a free pie and a beer, watch it at home’. So no

hard feelings but we are going to have to start thinking about doing this because we now have a

virus that we do not have a vaccine for. It's going to take quite some period of time and this is going

to happen again.

Adam Jacoby

And so presumably Bruce then, and this is for Bruce and Enzo I guess as health experts, presumably

if you go and get a test whether you're feeling ill or not, the best course of action is to take the test

and then spend the time at home over the 3 or 4 days until you get an answer. Because in the

intervening period theoretically you could be out, you could be carrying and not know and so that's

not a message I necessarily heard throughout this process.

Bruce Thompson

Enzo, can add to this. This is our problem, if it takes three or four days to incubate and then it's going

to take a few days to actually get a result, then that's why we need to wait for the two weeks in

isolation. If we can go from your measurement here/now in 30 seconds at this point in time, it may

mean that actually we're just going to measure you the next couple of times because we've got an

incubation period over that certain time. You might need to have daily measurements but they take

five seconds every time, that'll be kind of cool. So then we can basically start getting on with our

lives again.

Adam Jacoby

I'm mindful of time so I want push on to vaccines if that's okay. So you mentioned Bruce earlier that

you think it'll be the end of 2021 before we see a vaccine. And for some of you who are looking

there's another poll in progress so by all means do that. Who are the players, how many players are

in the race to build a vaccine, who are they and at what various stages of development are they?

Bruce Thompson

So I mean Enzo can help to this because you should know a little bit more about it than I do. But in

terms of the respiratory medicine side, the ones that I know about, there's two major compounds

floating around. One in Oxford, which we’ve seen a lot on television and one by a company called

Moderna, which the US governments poured a pile of money in to develop. The issue is when you do

these clinical trials you've got to go through these various phases. Phase one is sort of preclinical,

phase two is to make sure you don't kill anyone and then phase three is actually just really

demonstrating it's effective and safe in a very large group of people. So we're in the phase two stage

of both of those two compounds. Oxford seems to be a bit further ahead and even if they

demonstrated in October/November that it's efficacious, then we be going to phase three. Even if

they thought this is too important, it's safe or safe-ish we can get it out, we got to make billions of

samples and just the process of making billions of samples is going to take time. It's just not easy to

do. A vaccine is, even if we make them in large quantities, you just look at influenza. We're having

trouble getting enough actual drug, we keep on running out, we've got to keep on making more and

the supply chain falls over. This is going to be on top of that.

Adam Jacoby

So Enzo what's involved in developing a vaccine? What are the kind of people do it? What kind of

expertise is required? How big are those teams?

Enzo Palombo

It depends on what the vaccine is. If we go back to traditional vaccines which were based around

taking the agent, in this case of virus, and you do something to that virus in the laboratory to

weaken it so it doesn't cause infection but when you are injected with it or you take it orally (the

polio virus for example) it tricks the body into thinking it has been exposed to the real thing and

makes the protective molecules like the antibodies. So when you are exposed to it in the future,

your body is primed to respond and you don't become sick. That's the traditional way of making of

making vaccines in the current situation. I think they're about to the hundred or more vaccines

under development, some of those are involving technologies which haven't been yet developed

into a fully commercial form of vaccine. Some of those involved for example, taking that molecule I

mentioned earlier the RNA molecule that is the chromosome of the virus, and putting that into our

own body and then our body makes the proteins that the virus normally would make and that acts

as a way to stimulate our immune system. These are all great ways of making vaccines and they've

been tried and tested for many types of vaccine. We still have not produced an effective vaccine

against the corona virus and this is one of the big challenges that while some of the early trials are

showing great promise and they're very encouraging, there's no guarantee that these will end up

being a commercially viable effective vaccine. The other problem of course as Bruce alluded to is the

scale of production that we need to bring in to make this viable. Who gets the vaccine first? Do the

countries that develop the vaccine keep it for their own people or do we share it? Does it become an

altruistic global thing? That's why we're talking about you know 12-18 months before we will have

something in the market that we can take.

Adam Jacoby

So aside from the production component and then the distribution component, are there any other

significant challenges in getting everybody vaccinated, getting enough people vaccinated and what

role are the anti-vaxxers playing in this challenge in terms of trying to make sure that everybody's

safe if you have a group of people who are not prepared to be vaccinated?

Enzo Palombo

We've strayed into more the social sciences now I suppose. There are a body of people who believe

that vaccines not effective and that they in fact cause harm. There's some conspiracy theories that

this whole pandemic was all designed around getting Bill Gates to make a vaccine that would be

tagged with a molecule that you'd be able to track people with a sensor type of thing. Well okay

people are allowed to keep have their own beliefs but I think the evidence is there, vaccines are

effective and they work and they probably saved millions of lives. One of the really sad things about

the current pandemic is that many of the other health developments around the world, things like

routine vaccination programs, have been affected by the fact that people aren't going to clinics and

aren’t going to hospitals. Health staff can't get out to treat people and we've seen a resurgence in

Measles, Polio and Diphtheria and other diseases right now at the moment. So there will be

challenges around making sure those diseases are kept under control while we're dealing with a

whole new spectrum of disease caused by this current pandemic.

Adam Jacoby

We might just change gears for a moment as we're coming into our last ten minutes, let's talk a little

bit about data security. Jason I'm going throw to you, how is this new normal impacted data security

in general both for the users and then for the government?

Jason But

Well it's certainly brought a lot of things to the fore, because in the past people would be

predominantly working in the office it allowed security and principles around security to be

centralized and localized to where data was kept and data was protected within that space. We've

all been working from home, I have not left my home office basically for the last two and a half

months now I think I'm going to go crazy, I can't wait till we can get back on campus to be honest.

But businesses have been forced to look into a working from home scenario. Now all of a sudden

people have to start thinking about can we expand security out to encompass and cater everyone's

homes and can we make that part of the environment of our business. Really what that's done and

what we like to talk about in terms of cybersecurity, it's created a honey pot effect. Because where

there is data to steal, it's a honeypot and the data is more distributed and it's spread out to places

with slightly less security and it makes it more interesting for people to try and attack right. So we do

see a lot of attacks going on and they are continuing and surprisingly despite what you may hear a

lot most of the attacks in cybersecurity tend to be based around social principles, social engineering

and breaking in through non-technical means. So while technical security is absolutely important

that's usually not the obvious way to break in.

Adam Jacoby

So Jason, from a corporate perspective then, does it change what the expectation is around the

hardware and software that we use? So rather than it being a secondary layer of protection that's

required to bring experts in. It in fact puts a different level of responsibility back on the laptop

manufacturers, Microsoft with Windows Apple with iOS and so forth, to be able to actually say, it's

your responsibility given that people will be working differently, to ensure that those people are safe

without having to incur extra cost to protect themselves at home?

Jason But

It's amazing how much jobs that are coming up in cybersecurity. One recent panel that I was at with

some banking people they were saying ‘we don't worry, we get plenty of cybersecurity people, we

hire everyone with cybersecurity skills that comes out of university. What we're worried about is

after we hire them there's no one left for everybody else’. So we do need to hire more cybersecurity

people to help protect space, not just necessarily against things like COVID19, all that's done is

exacerbated and made more interesting avenues of attack for them. But what's particularly

interesting, and the hard thing to get across the people and what's becoming really common now is,

and this is where Microsoft's and the Apple’s are coming into it, is the focus behind cybersecurity is

shifting from let's build a system and then we're secure. It’s let's get the security people involved in

building the system so that it's designed securely to begin with and that involves a lot more

openness in terms of what's going on. It involves letting everybody see what you're actually writing

and developing and how you're developing it so that people can deliberately find the holes and tell

you about it so you can patch them up. This is certainly something that, in the security space, the

more someone tries to sell your security product and not tell you how it works or give you access to

all the underlying technologies, the more you should be a little bit careful and wary about what

they're trying to sell.

Adam Jacoby

Yeah interesting advice. We're going to move on to the last question for all of you. I'll give each of

you one minute and within your own area of expertise, what do you think has been the most

surprising consequence of COVID-19? Bruce, why don’t you start for us.

Bruce Thompson

Oh, there's a whole bunch of things really and where do you start?

Adam Jacoby

You start with the one most, that’s what we’re looking for!

Bruce Thompson

So, one of the biggest things in medicine at the moment, and I’m going to pick-up with what you've

just been talking about, is that the whole practice of medicine had to change. The concept of rolling

up to your doctor, sitting in front of them, coughing, spluttering and all that sort of stuff, infecting

every person in the waiting room – that had to change. So now the medical profession needed to go

and do this online. We do in our courses for example psychology and nursing and all of that sort of

stuff, we actually do telehealth and digital health, all through it. And that has huge security concerns,

so imagine I was having a little chat to you over this little thing called the internet and just saying,

‘look I've got suicidal thoughts and I've got all these problems, my husband's just left me he is a

major corporate adviser etc.’ Who's dialling and listening to all this? It made it a huge issue that all of

a sudden, in the telehealth space, we are now actively doing this as our primary mode of care. And

on top of that, there’s all that data security floating around, and I've just heard that Alfred Hospital

has actually had a cyber security alert. And when I was working in health care the only way to

actually get around this is to have air-to-air contact and we can't have that anymore. This is a

massive, massive issue in terms of the individual security of two people talking together, in terms of

the access and practice of medicine.

Adam Jacoby

That’s very interesting, thanks Bruce. Enzo?

Enzo Palombo

The biggest surprise for me is not the high-tech solutions, but how simple low-tech interventions

have been the most effective. I always say to my students, if you want to stop diseases, wash your

hands. And nowhere has this pandemic shown that more clearly, that if we just pay attention to

basic hygiene; washing hands, coughing into our sleeve, keeping a distance if you’re sick, not going

in to work when you're sick, you can control very well, these types of outbreaks. I'm astounded that

this works so well.

Adam Jacoby

Yeah fascinating, thank you. Jason – round us out.

Jason But

I'm going to come up and say that this has forced us to move to use the internet, in ways that hasn’t

been used by this amount of people in the past. We've had video conferencing solutions, we've had

online work solutions in the past, but we've still had the common, let's go to the office and work.

What this has actually caused is, it's forced a mass wholesale move, into using the internet. And I am

just like Enzo, I am just ridiculously surprised at how excellent a job all our computing engineers, our

software programming people and our internet engineers have managed to make the network as

robust as it is. As a networking person myself, there was always that feeling that yes, the internet is

robust, but is it robust and capable enough to cope? I think it's shown that, yes, it has. I don't think

we're going to stay in this sort of environment forever. There's a lot of things that work a lot better

face-to-face rather than through this remote online type environment. But it certainly opened up

the scope for a lot of businesses to make the decision now to move forwards and say, what parts of

our business can we move to this online virtual type space so that we don't need as much physical

infrastructure or a physical location work, in the future.

Adam Jacoby

Yeah fantastic, thank you. Well let's go to some of the audience questions, thank you all for your

participation thus far. We have an anonymous attendee who's provided a question. Why does the

influenza vaccine have low success rate and how can this be avoided with the coronavirus vaccine?

Enzo Palombo

I'll take that one. The influenza virus, just by its nature changes a lot and it changes year to year. It

has the capacity to really adapt quickly and evolve quickly. And like coronavirus, it also has the

problem of being found in animals, so we get this exchange between human and animal viruses all

the time. But, in the flu, it sort of happens on steroids, it happens much more rapidly and much

more effectively, it's just a quirk of that particular vaccine. It doesn't work as effectively as other

ones do, so even if everybody was immunized you probably will only ever achieve a 60% coverage of

the population. Other vaccines are much more effective like measles, polio and so on, which have

almost 99% effectiveness. So, we have to change the vaccine often and the vaccine itself isn’t the

best type of vaccine.

Adam Jacoby

Fascinating. Bruce, this one I think is for you, I'll throw it over to you.

Another anonymous attendee. Has integrating the COVID app with technology such as blockchain

and the use of smart contracts for privacy, been considered in the stuff that you've been working on

and seen?

Bruce Thompson

Look at it has, and I was involved in an app called COVID Care and basically that app was designed to

keep people out of hospitals. Right at the beginning in March we thought we were going to have

2,000 people roll up in the month of June, to Royal Melbourne Hospital. Royal Melbourne Hospital

has 400 beds. This is not going to work. We had to have some way of keeping them out of hospital,

we needed to be able to have a nurse that goes to the patient and measures their ‘obs’ – heart rate,

temperature, blood pressure, things like that. We needed to have a nurse to be able to do that and

the problem is we didn't have that. What do we have? We've got a phone. And what can we get a

phone to do? We can get it to ask a bunch of questions associated with it, get them to measure their

temperature, heart rate, we can do all that sort of stuff. So, we created that app. In the end, we

didn’t need to use that, but that whole story was going to actually be used as a bit of technology to

keep people out of hospital. If you start accelerating and all of a sudden, your temperature is hitting

39 or 40, you’re getting worse, your respiratory heart rate is going off, your respiratory rate is going

off, it will tell you to come into hospital, and by the way I’ll meet you there. So, that was a really nice

piece of technology of actually monitoring people, sitting in the community. That is as it's now been

developed, we potentially can use this now by keeping people out of hospital with significant

viruses. That would be a good thing to do.

Adam Jacoby

Thank you. A question from Adam, not me, unrelated. Why are there so many conspiracy theories

focused on Bill Gates? The last one I think I read is that Bill Gates knows that his COVID vaccine

might kill nearly 1 million people.

Bruce Thompson

Well where do you start? He is basically famous. He is highly influential, highly wealthy human being

and so as I said, people look to these people to get answers. And then also people like to bring other

people down sadly, so it just is what it is you know. Unfortunately, we have a president in the U.S

who’s basically making comments about, you know, drugs that you can take and sadly that killed

people. You know it really did. Keep your mouth shut. And then other people are saying, well hold

on there's an invested interest for someone to do this. I have way greater faith in humanity than

that.

Jason But

And look, I think this really comes back to something we mentioned earlier on. The Internet has

given the opportunity for people to speak now. If in the past, 1 person jumped up on the street box

and said something like this, 99 people would have walked past and everyone would have ignored

him except for 1 person. You wouldn't have had this groundswell of groups coming together to keep

reinforcing this thing. When you're on the internet, all of a sudden you haven't got a population of a

hundred or a thousand people anymore, you now have a population with tens of millions, hundreds

of millions. And even if you're only getting point one percent, you've now all of a sudden got a big

group, which allows these things to spread. And if I go back to the 5G thing, which was brought up

earlier. The 5G thing, while it wasn't COVID-19 in the past, 5G is the new one, it was 4G when 4G

came out, it was 3G when 3G came out and it was 2G when 2G came out. Conspiracy theories refuse

to die and the internet with an increasing population of who you can reach, just makes them live

that whole lot longer.

Adam Jacoby

Well it's interesting you say that Jason because there were questions about the 5G towers, but I'm

going to move to a different question. I'm going to ask Enzo. Should footy games be allowed live,

with audiences, and how many people should be allowed in footy stadiums? That's an anonymous

question.

Enzo Palombo

I think in the current situation that our community is in with very little or minimal community

transmission. If we adopt a reasonable spacing policy around who can go, where they're seated and

maximise the distance between the crowd. I mean, people who have been to a football crowd,

probably the most dangerous part of that is going by a packed train, to and from the ground. I think

in the ground, if we can minimise or maximise the distance, we should be pretty safe. It's a bit like

any place where we gather as a as a crowd.

Adam Jacoby

But Enzo, let me ask you as a regular football goer and member of the proud Melbourne Football

Club. I want to ask you, what about you know where you crowd up for food, where you crowd to get

into the bathrooms, where you're going in and out of the entrances, how do you manage all of that?

Enzo Palombo

Take the supermarket as an example I'm perplexed there's been no outbreak or no connection to

supermarkets. They were allowed to continue operating pretty openly during the major lockdown

period. So they practice the sort of things that you would recommend. If you go into buy your beer

at halftime, you would space people out and make sure you manage that that contact properly. Even

simple things like disinfectant, wiping down surfaces, contact surfaces, and using card rather than

cash transactions. All those things that are designed to stop people interacting directly would work

quite well in even a crowded venue like that I would imagine. I'm not a social scientist so I couldn't

give you an estimate maybe Bruce would like to chime in. But again the same sort of precaution that

we had at the height of time of our lockdown, it works.

Bruce Thompson

This is the low-lying fruit, it works and it’s something that was actually mentioned on Channel 7 the

other week especially when they wanted to open up the football is, again, the virus is trying to find

somebody to latch onto. However we only have about 340 cases in the whole country out of 25

million people and they're all in lockdown. So if you don't have a temperature, if you don't have any

symptoms, and you haven't been exposed, then it's really unlikely you've got it. But that doesn't

excuse you from being able to do the normal, safe, sensible things, the low-lying fruit, of washing

your hands and keeping a distance from each other.

Adam Jacoby

So Bruce if that's the case, that makes perfect sense and is entirely reasonable. One of the other

questions here from another anonymous audience member is why then are theatres and movies not

able to open if they are managing themselves in the same way that the football does and

supermarkets do? Why is there such an arbitrary decision around you can and you can't, if

everybody actually performs the appropriate safety measures?

Bruce Thompson

I think what they're doing is, only because we don't have a lot of data, but I think what they're doing

is just slowly rolling this out and seeing how it goes. Because the last thing we want to do is have

what’s in New York, like this will kill our country if that happened. So we need to just roll this out in a

fairly systematic way. It is frustrating as all get-out, there is no two ways about it. In fact, even my

daughter went to the supermarket the other day and she did social distancing and this guy probably

my age said to her ‘you know I'm not an alien’ and put a whole lot of words that were totally

inappropriate in there as well directly at her. That's totally not on, so we as a society need to

basically say actually we're going to have to change the way we go about it. It is fixing influenza,

fixing COVID, so you know I think we need to change a little bit. The problem is everyone likes a hug,

you know, what do you do.

Adam Jacoby

I'm here to hug you Bruce. This will be the last question, it's from Zoe in the audience, and open to

everybody I guess. Has the COVID safe app been successful in your opinion?

Jason But

I’ll start I think it depends a lot on what you define as success. They said 40% of people, I think

myself, hearing that not too many people are downloading and installing it and the fact that not too

many places are insisting that you have it, you got my view before, I think it's been successful

because it hasn't been deployed as widely as it otherwise might have. I think the fact that Australia

has had such, in the long term, such a low rate of actual infection has probably made a lot of people

think that they don't need to install it or there have been a lot less pressure and push than what was

originally put out with regards to the app. So again I don't know whether anyone's actually tested it

well enough security wise to see whether it actually does what it's supposed to do or protects your

data well enough. I certainly haven't seen any reports from people who have done those studies.

Bruce Thompson

I agree I just don't know the actual data. However one of the things that we've had in Australia,

which is fabulous, is that we didn't have a whole lot of the virus and we shut the thing down really

quickly. These sort of apps we know worked in Singapore, but it's not in the US or in the UK where

you have a lot of the virus, to start using its potential. I understand if it's basically tracing where

people are located, I've got a problem with that. But if it's basically just saying how you came into

the presence of somebody then get yourself tested, that's fine. So I don't know whether it's a

chicken-and the-egg if you know what I mean. Is it because we never had enough virus for things to

work properly or actually just downloading it actually made us more likely to socially distance? I

don't know.

Enzo Palombo

I agree I think we haven't had enough community transmission to really push the app to its limit. I

think I did recall, it may have been Professor Brett Sutton, investigating Cedar Meats, one of those

outbreaks where people had used the app and that did help with narrowing down the chain of

transmission. But again we haven't had enough widespread infection in the community to really

challenge the technology.

Adam Jacoby

Well gentlemen, I'd like to thank you very much for your time and your expertise this evening. Bruce,

Enzo and Jason we are indebted to you thank you very much. I'd also like to thank the audience who

were wonderful contributors with fantastic questions and thank you for the questions that came

before the session even started. Thank you for answering the polls which is terrific, it really helps us

out. If you missed parts of today's discussion if you had technical difficulties or you came in late, the

session has been recorded and everybody who is registered will be getting an email with the link to

the session so you can watch it back again if you'd like. I do remind you that there are two additional

webinar sessions on in the next few days. So there's one tomorrow which is Redesigning Melbourne,

it's on this time tomorrow, and then on the 18th of June we have one about helping you with fees

and places that you might not have thought of to look, to help you out with that. So that is the end

of our session today, I'd like to thank everybody very much and have a wonderful evening and we

look forward to seeing you again. Thank you.