Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Operation Warp Speed

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

Yes friends, that's the actual name of the U.S. government's race to creation a coronavirus vaccine. It's either radical or a huge embarrassment, depending on which Sawbones co-host you are. This week, we'll talk about the progress so far and what work still remains.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm your co-host just to make a for the mouth. Wow. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Saul Bones, a marital tour of Miss Guy, at Medicine.

I'm your co-host, Shes to Macaroid. And I'm Sydney Macaroid. Before we get rolling, I just wanted to remind everybody that it is the maximum fun drive 2020. That's right. We put it off, but now here it is. Now, here it is. This is the time when we come to you and say,

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If you are a member already, thank you. If you're considering joining, thank you, thank you. We so appreciate any support you can give. Absolutely. So, vaccines, the final frontier. Well, I don't think they're the final. These are the voyages. No.

Of the Starship, sobons, is continuing mission to seek out new life, new medications. Or to protect life with vaccines. And to boldly cure what no one has cured before. Okay, that's, it's pretty good. On the, no, our podcast doesn't. Our podcast doesn't do any of that, but I should hold on, you said cure,

vaccine still cure, vaccine prevent. You know, it's better than getting, then the curing an illness is never getting the illness to start with. I am trying to talk about Operation Warp Speed. The most stoked I've ever been about the name of a thing that we're talking about on solbons. I was offering people, I was bringing both a Captain Kirk and a Captain Jean-Loup Picard.

So here's, see if we can tell the difference, okay? Because this is a war story. I never watched Star Trek, so there's no way I'm going to know. Okay, number one, engage. There's no way I'm gonna know. Okay, number one, engage. There's no way I'm gonna know. Take a nap, Mr. LeForge, that kind of thing. And then Kirk's more like, engage. That's William Shadner.

Right? It was actually me. I can understand how you'd be fooled, but your ears have deceived you. I mean, I have Osmos' some of this stuff from our culture. Like, cause I... Osmosis Jones, is that what we're doing? Yeah, that's not what we're doing.

I live with you and I am, you know, there's a deluge of nerdiness that comes my way at all times, but I did not ever watch Star Trek, so I don't get these exact references. Okay. Justin, I have to disagree with you about the name of Operation Warp Speed. I think it is rare for me to be in a position where I'm going to criticize something that has to do with vaccines because as everyone listening knows, I love vaccines.

I'm very, very in favor of vaccines because you know science, they work, they're great, they save lives. The name Operation Warp Speed is so embarrassing to me, as like a scientist, as a member of the medical community to say, like, don't worry, we've got it covered. Science is working on Operation Warp Speed.

I don't like the one thing. It's a name that a child comes up with, honey. The only thing I don't like about it and it's radical in every regard except those is that we are going to move at warp speed and then at the end of it, we'll inject it in the end of it. It's like, this is good. I like the idea, but like maybe operation, just taking a little more time to make sure everything's good and then injecting it into

people's speed. I have no, I think this is, I want to say this at the front of the episode in case somebody, I don't know, decides to stop listening halfway through. I believe that at the end of this process, however ridiculously named it is, we will have a safe effective, or maybe more than one, safe and effective vaccines against coronavirus COVID. And I will happily roll up my sleeve and be first in line to receive one. I want to make that statement, and I will say it again throughout the show, but I want to say that now,

this is not a criticism of these individual vaccines or of the process by which we are expediting the vaccine manufacturing. I really don't have a scientific issue with those things. I think though that when you have something like vaccines, the more you understand about the process, the more transparent you are, and the more openly you can discuss these things, the more you can onboard everyone else who doesn't necessarily speak the language of science and might have fears or hesitancy, the more you can get people on board with the program. And you would think that in the midst of a pandemic, when you have the government,

the world, not just the United States government, the whole world, saying, we can come together and make a vaccine that can save our lives and return things to some sense of normalcy once again, you would think that it would do a lot to fight the anti-vax movement. And if the messaging is wrong, unfortunately, it doesn't. And I feel like Operation Warp Speed is a bad name. That's all I'm saying. Okay, agree to disagree.

Now you probably, if you've been following the news about coronavirus, you've seen, especially very recently, a lot of stuff about vaccines making headway and moving forward with clinical trials. What do you have just in kind of an understanding? Where would you say your understanding is at this point, from the media, the reports you've read, not from me, of where the vaccines are and what's happening? Um, my, uh, you just asked me to so you could drink some coffee, but that's fine. I'm not even mad.

Uh, my understanding is that we are, we basically have the vaccine done and they just need to test it on humans and then make sure it's all good, but we think we have one that works. More than one. Wow, that's great news. Yeah, and I know some of it gets filtered through my lens, which is relatively positive, I would say, on this end of things.

I feel like I've been realistic about a lot of the projections of the spread of the, you know, illness and what reopening would do. I don't like to be right about that, but I feel like a lot of us in the scientific community said we're reopening too soon. This is going to be bad. And then it was and is and I wish I wish people listened to science. But anyway, with vaccines, I do feel more positive about it.

And I think there's good reason to. So as we go through this, one thing, if you live in the US, you know this, if you live outside of the US, and you listen to the show, you probably know this now. But anytime we have some sort of scientific innovation, process occurring in this country. The idea that it would be purely for, you know, humanist reasons would be false. Right. Of course, these companies are not making these vaccines just to save lives. That's great. I am sure there are many scientists in labs who went into this field specifically to save lives. Just like I feel like I went into medicine specifically to help people. I believe that there are a lot of scientists who have that motivation, but there are also people who's job it is to make money. And this race for a vaccine is also about making money for the people in charge, probably not the scientists and the lab coats and the labs who

are doing the actual work, but the people in charge are going to make a lot of money. And nobody is, there is no sock who is refusing to pat in the sun in this story. Everybody's gone pat in the sun. Yes. And I think that this can undercut your concept of the vaccines. Like, well then can we trust them if people are trying to make money and we're moving at warp speed? And I don't think it should. So this whole process in terms of where we are

with these different vaccines starts in January of this year. So this history is relatively short. Because before you make a vaccine, you have to have the genome of whatever you're making the vaccine against. Okay. Or at least that's the way we do it now. Back in the old days, we've covered that on this show.

Back when we had the smallpox vaccine, we just gave people cowpox. That's a whole other thing. We're not doing that. Now we start with, in January, Chinese scientists isolated the genome from this coronavirus. When I say coronavirus in the show, I'm just talking about this.

I know there are many coronaviruses. We've talked about that. That's right. But I don't want to have to say the whole SARS-CoV-2 novel, but it's coronavirus. This one. So they isolated the genome. Why do we have to do that to make a vaccine?

I don't know. Okay. What is a vaccine? A vaccine is a dead version of a bad pathogen. A vaccine is a dead version of a bad pathogen. It's a dead version of a pathogen that you inject in your body, that your body then fights, and then learns how to fight that pathogen from the dead thing. That is one type of vaccine. So that's good. That's good. That is accurate. That is one type of vaccine. So that's good, that's good.

That is accurate. That is not wholly representative. Pull my head on the table. So the different ways we can trigger, what we want is for your body to already know about the virus or bacteria before it gets exposed. We want your body to be prepared, much like we were not for the pandemic.

We want you to, much like we were not for the pandemic. We want you to when the coronavirus comes not going to your body door to go, oh, I know who that guy is, and we're not letting him in. That is the whole idea of a vaccine is to prep you ahead of time. We can... There's a good one, a good metaphor that I have now that just came to me in racing games, you can race the ghosts of your friends and race their spectral form. You can race against them until you learn how to beat them. And then when you actually race them, you're very beaten or ghosts, so you know how to beat them.

That is a good metaphor. That's a very good metaphor. Yes. Very good. So you can put in, you said a dead or attenuated. We would say version of a virus. We could put in a dead virus. We could put in a live virus that has been attenuated. It's still alive, but it can't harm you.

We could put in a dead one. We could put in pieces of the virus or bacteria, right, that will stimulate immune response. We could maybe even put in just the instructions to make the virus into your body. Which I'm gonna get into. That's the really cool stuff, I think. Once we have the code, what we can do is look through

the genetic code and find, okay, this part of the code makes the pieces of the virus that your body recognizes. Because each part of your genetic code makes something different. So we find this gene and this encodes for, and we're going to talk about a lot with the coronavirus, the spike protein, which is a protein that sits on the surface of the virus that our body is very good at recognizing. When our body sees that, it goes immune response, engage. Engage. Right.

Engage. And we attack it. So if we can find the piece of the virus code that makes the spike protein, that's the piece that's important. So once we can do all that, we can make a vaccine that triggers an immune response without making you sick. That's why having the code is important. Now, we, like you said, we could either do a killed virus like flu, hepatitis A, polio, the one we use, they're two polio, one's live,

one's killed, rabies, these are killed viruses. The response from these is not quite as robust, your immune response, but it is, but it is effective. You do need boosters a lot. They're a little easier to give as opposed to like a live virus vaccine, which is like measles, mantra, Bella, road virus, the smallpox vaccine, chickenpox, yellow fever. These have very good immune responses to these.

They're a little trickier in terms of like storage and stuff, but very good. There are also things like I said where we use pieces of the illness to trigger the response, the hyb hepatitis B, pertussis, HPV. There's more, but these are good. Again, you need boosters. And then there are a couple that just are aimed at like inactivated toxins, like diphtheria and tetanus, which we just take the toxin part of it and inactivate it and then inject that in you. Okay. Okay. Now here is, these are the vaccines that are in use.

I just kind of gave you the general landscape of what's out there that we get injected into us already. Here's what's really cool. We have been working on in the scientific timeline for a very short period of time, not really, I mean, in the way humans measure time, but from a science standpoint, this is really more recent stuff. We've been working on cutting out the middleman.

If we start the process of vaccine development with isolating the DNA or the RNA from the germ, okay? It either has DNA or RNA. So we isolate that code. And we figure out all the parts. We assemble from them some sort of like undercover soldier who looks like the germ, but isn't really the germ. And it's really there to be an informant and tell your immune system

how to fight it. right? And that's how we've always done it. What if we skip that part and just sent the instruction manual itself straight into our bodies? So now where we're getting to is the matrix. Instead of him jacking in and all of a sudden, shh, I know kung fu, then it's him jacking in and be like, shh, I know how to be coronavirus. Like he sort of, sort of fight it just has the instructions pre-programmed into his head.

I guess that's true, because he's not actually going in. It's the code for him going in. Yes, or like Chuck, who downloaded the entire internet into his brain and knows all fighting skills, but I feel like Matrix is a little more hip. It's, think about it this way.

Your body already knows how to take DNA and RNA and turn it into proteins and turn it into... How could you try again? Let me start over for you. Okay. Your body... My body, my body... You know, if I can't help.

My watch is confused by what you're saying, Sidney. You need to slow it down. Make more watch metaphors or things about wrists that it'll get it. Okay. Your body already has the tools and the parts to take RNA and DNA instructions and turn them into things, okay?

Does that make sense? Yes. So all you need is the recipe. Okay. Think about it like animal crossing. I will think about it like animal crossing. You've got, you want to make an iron wood chair. You've got the iron in the wood in your pockets.

You've already made your work bench. So all you need is the recipe. Okay, and this is the recipe. That is the idea now. Let's just send the recipe in now. This is why you didn't like my matrix analogy very much because you were more excited about your animal crossing analogy to come. Yes, exactly.

Do I know you were more excited? I know that that. It's more precise. Charming. Now, you don't want to send the entire genetic code of a virus into yourselves to make that, right? That seems to be a bad name for that. It's an infection.

That's a bad thing. You just want to send the piece. That was a very bad, a collision, a reaction or speed. Yes. No, no, no one's doing that. And everyone has it. That's what's called you get infected and then you get an immune

response and we don't want to do it that way. So what we just want to send in is the recipe for the pieces that will trigger the immune response. You just make that spike protein, and your body goes, ah, coronavirus, and stimulates a big immune response, even though you haven't actually gotten infected. That's a vaccine.

So that is what we've been trying to do. Just send in the recipe for the spike protein, let yourselves make the protein on their own, and then you will stimulate an immune response to it. It's pretty cool, right? I know, it sounds very cool. Now, there are other ways that people are trying to do this, like to get the spike protein in there.

You could send in the recipe for it, like I just described. You could just inject the protein itself, right? Now, you still have to make it. You can be a little more cumbersome, but you've got to make it. But you could send the protein in there, except protein's kind of bent and fold and do their own thing in the body. So, like, there's one vaccine where they've created a molecular clamp, which is a way of

holding the protein in a certain form that makes it very vulnerable to immune response, which is very cool to think about. I mean, I'm freaking out. So, there are all kinds of DNA and RNA vaccines that are basically trying to either send some DNA into your cells in a little circle called a plasma, it's a little piece of DNA in a circle. You can send the DNA in, which has to like, then be turned into RNA,

and then you can make the protein from it, or even skip that, just in the RNA in, make the protein, right? Right. And these, specifically, when we talk about the Moderna vaccine, we are talking about an RNA vaccine. The reason that it's made a lot of headlines is one, because it's pretty far along in

the process. When you have a vaccine, you have an exploratory phase where you're just kind of looking around, trying to figure out what the heck could we do to fight this. You have preclinical stages where you're kind of making the vaccine and coming up with the way it would work and in animal trials and things like that. You have the clinical phase, which is where these vaccines that are farthest along are what that's what we're talking about, the clinical phase. And that's the phase one, phase two, phase three.

You've seen that in the news a lot. And that basically means one, how many humans are getting the vaccine, how many subjects you have in each trial. And two, what exactly are you looking for? At first, we're looking for safety. We want it to be effective, but we need to make sure it's safe. So you focus more on safety at first, and then as you see that it's safe, you can move through the phases, give it to more people and start measuring a response to make sure that it's actually triggering an immune response. The other thing that you do through those phases is dosing.

You start with like, we want the smallest effective dose, right? We don't want to put any more in you than we have to. So we start with like a couple different levels of dosing and then we see like, okay, this is the lowest one that still worked. So that's the one we'll go with. So the Moderna vaccine is moving into phase three trials, which is great. That's the last of the clinical phase. And that's very exciting. And it is an RNA vaccine, which would be our first one that we would regularly use, which is pretty cool. There's also one from Pfizer that is an RNA vaccine. There is a DNA vaccine from an OVO that is pretty far along as well, not quite as far as

these other ones, but right now they're trying to figure out it's harder to get DNA into the cell than it is RNA. So that's one of the things that you have to like use an electric pulse with it to get it into your cells. Whoa. Yeah. And there are other things. There are other, you've probably heard a lot

about the Oxford vaccine, the AstraZeneca slash Oxford vaccine. I've been paying like super, super close attention, but I probably have heard of them. So this one does not, it does not use this method we just described. It actually uses another virus, an ad, a form of adenovirus, which is a cold virus basically. It uses that to deliver the code for the spike protein to the cells. And this is a whole other way of making vaccines that we haven't used widely in the public yet, but has been, again, the science of it is more recent.

But you take a harmless virus or one that can't replicate, so it can't cause an infection, and you use it to deliver. Like, it's like a spy. It comes in and delivers the payload of RNA, and then goes away. And then you make spy protein. So that one's pretty far along too. The only other one is a NovaVax vaccine,

which I think just recently got some money because it was further along, and it's got a protein subunit. So it's just, it's more similar to what we've talked about before, a piece of a virus that you want to send in and trigger an immune response with. So not as exciting, but a tried and true method. We know the vaccines work that way because we have some that already worked that way. I've asked you a question.

Why is it, if this is that, this is a very dire situation, right? And we need stuff to happen now. Why are we getting creative with this vaccine? Why now, why not do something that we know works? That is exactly the question I was hoping you would ask. Oh, wow. That is perfect. That is exactly the question I was hoping you would ask. Oh, wow. That is perfect.

That is perfect. Because there are many, many vaccines in various preclinical and clinical phases that are using the old sort of quote unquote tried and true methods, right? The reason that RNA would be used for something this serious is, and we've known this for a while, an RNA vaccine,

one, we can make the vaccine a lot faster. The Moderna vaccine was like created really quickly in the grand scheme of vaccine making. The time from isolating the genome to Moderna saying, we have something we want to start testing was incredibly fast, matter of weeks. saying we have something we want to start testing was incredibly fast, matter of weeks. That is not the way vaccines usually work. But because you're just using pieces of the code itself, you can make it a lot faster. The other thing is because you're just using pieces of the code itself, you can actually manufacture these in mass quantities a lot faster. So it's been known for a while that in the case of a theoretical

pandemic in which we would need to deploy a vaccine to the entire world as safely and quickly as possible, RNA vaccine, somewhat argued DNA, but one of the two are probably our best bet. We've known this for a while. So this is not, this is not like a wild idea that we would use this. Scientists have thought this is probably now in a perfect world, we would be further along with that research, right? We would have already made RNA vaccines before we would already have some in use. But coronavirus didn't ask us if we were ready. It just showed up. So, but that, that using these types of vaccines actually makes perfect sense in this situation.

All right. Now, I want to get into a little bit of who's getting money and why one over the other because that's the other part of this story. But before we do that, yeah, let's go to the building. Well, this ironic, isn't it? No, who's getting money? Well, right now, hopefully, it's us. Unless you hear silence after this, in which case, we got no money and you're stealing this episode. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines,

that ask you make my car before the mouth. Okay, Sid, I'm ready. I got my money shoes on. I've got a money colored magnifying glass and I'm ready to follow the money. Let me get those green bread grums, all of them I'm all ready. Now, I think this is why people start to get anxious.

And, you know, it's weird. If we could all, no matter what side of this, of our current, strange political spectrum you're on, all of us start to get nervous when large amounts of money start getting thrown around in these things, right? Like, because you start wondering why did they get the money and order for that person.

We are. No matter what you believe. And if we could all just like take a breath and look at what's happening and really try to understand it, we could, this could unite us. We don't like when rich people start throwing money around and we don't understand why. Yes. I would say it also is a, when you start talking about the scope of this thing, that is also nerve-wracking.

The idea that we're going to do something and everybody in the world is going to get injected with it is I know I'm not trying to fear monger. I know that this is not reality, but there are a lot of zombie movies that start that exact way, right? Like the idea that we're all going to do one thing, is just a little bit like, Oh boy, that's so many people, all people is like so many, so many people, it just makes me nervous. The possibility of, you know, something being off

is very nerve-wracking. Well, we've talked about this in general with the response to a pandemic, is that how well humans can respond really depends on how much we trust our leaders. And I think unfortunately we're in a moment where a lot of us don't. And so even as someone like myself who fully embraces the science behind this and the process and we'll get the vaccine. Yeah. I understand being nervous about it because I don't trust Trump or Pence or any of those things.

Yeah, I don't trust that Trump's not gonna come in to even be like, let's put some flex of 24 karat gold in there and make you really luxurious, and then take your bait with it. But he's not, and this is like, I know. That's not gonna happen. And what you have to remember,

and we get emails from these people sometimes, there are real beating heart scientists working on this stuff. Okay, there are people, I work in a hospital, I work in a system that is inherently greedy and manipulative, not my specific hospital, but like, oh, well, yes, I'm hoping you're hospital, because every hospital, every hospital, like the whole American healthcare system

is corrupt. Except for whatever page admins is doing. I haven't checked it on yet. There are scientists, and I hope you hear me. I know you're out there who work in these big pharmaceutical giants who believe in what they're doing to help humanity. They're doing it. And they're not going to let Trump come in and put 14-karat gold in their, in their

vaccines. Well, it's 24-karat gold. Oh, whatever. We're in Jenkins and our bodies. Let's have a little taste, okay? I'm low-run over here. Anyway, why one vaccine over another, over another? Who gets the money?

You know, a lot of it has to do with just who's the furthest along, right? Like we're trying to make this happen, obviously at warp speed. So who's furthest along? Now notably though, a lot of these places got money first from something called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

SEPI has been along, and I'm gonna call it SEPI from here on out, has been along since before, I've been around since before this. They day back to like, the idea was like 2015 and then I think 2016 it was realized. And the thought was, you know what? And I think 2016 with Ebola, this really brought this idea to the forefront. We should have a coalition, a worldwide coalition of government entities and private sector and donations from wealthy people, like we should all come together

and form an organization that can start working on the vaccine science against the World Health organizations like most wanted list of pathogens that we don't have vaccines for, plus what they considered like disease X, the unknown pandemic that lays in weight. Okay. Here we are.

Yes, it happened. It happened. It happened. So, Cepi was created, Cepi was created just for this. It was created to respond to this, okay? So as soon as we realized what was happening in January, CEPI started giving money to anybody who seemed to be on the right track, who science was sound.

I mean, and they have, yes, there are a lot of rich people involved, but there are also a lot of scientists running this organization who said, yes, Moderna has something that could work, give them some cash. And this is what CEPI has been doing through the entire process. When we have a vaccine, SEPI will be a large reason that we have a vaccine that works. And I think when you start getting into the weird conspiracy theories around all this, this is where it comes in. One of the large donors to CEPI is the Gates Foundation. And so I think a lot of people who, for whatever reason, don't trust anything, the Gates Foundation

is involved in. They still don't know how to work their computer. I mean, I think it comes down to that, right? If they could make the dank computer work, then they would have more faith in Bill Gates. But Bill Gates is one of the main to dank do not work. Bill Gates deleted all their pictures of their grandkids. And so Bill Gates is trying to kill them. Exactly. I know there is a for for whatever reasons, I don't know Bill Gates personally. I, you know, I know there is a lot of hatred thrown towards towards the gates, but like making

vaccines is a good thing. And putting your money towards making vaccines is in my book a good thing. And that is what CEPI was trying to do. And their original goals were very much in line with what I would say like my ideals were, are, still are, theirs have changed. But the original goals of CEPI were like, we just need to make these vaccines and we will work with private companies to help fund them. But then once they're available, once they've been made and we know they work and they're safe, then we will make them too. You can't keep the IP from us. We will

also make them so that everybody on earth can get them so that if these vaccines are made, it doesn't matter how remote or how impoverished an area is, it will get the vaccines if they need them. That was their original goal. It's a very humanist, very progressive. You can imagine the way that pharmaceutical companies reacted to that. No, no, no. Oh, no, we will have nothing to do with you if that is what you want. We want to make money. And so the current, I think the sentiment is there and the science is still solid, but I think all those arrangements, the idea that as soon as the vaccine comes out,

it's gonna be available for pennies to everyone on Earth. I think that still remains to be seen. But like those kind of lofty ideals, we're definitely behind the formation of SEPI. And that is a lot of the vaccines that we've just named are getting funding from SEPI to push them forward. There are other ways the vaccines are getting funding. Operation warp speed is our United States government's effort. Um, we got into this

on May 15th. We're actually, uh, shooting wads of $100 bills out of T shirt cannons. At vaccine companies, at vaccine companies right through their dang windows. No, we made them gather, um, very close together in an arena with no masks on. Just shoot the $100 bills at them. No, but they are also funding vaccine development. The same way that we've decided we wanted to do it to once the World Health Organization and CEPI and the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness and basically every other government on earth have been doing it. We decided we should too. So we set aside a bunch of money that we're going to also give to companies that are close to a vaccine and it's like it's made up

of a bunch of different. The Health and Human Services Department is in here CDC, the NIH, the FDA, Bardo, which is a biomedical advanced research and development authority, the DOD. All these different entities came together under this horrible title Operation Warp Speed. And the idea is, we're going to give a bunch of money to these companies so that we can get a vaccine made as quickly as possible. And they have given money to seven different companies so far. Many of these same ones that SEPI has funded Pfizer, Novavax, AstraZeneca, Moderna.

They've also given money to Sinofi, Merck, and Johnson and Johnson, which also is Janssen. Janssen is also Johnson and Johnson. You'll see him used interchangeably, I had to figure that out. They're all in preclinical, so they have not made it as far along as these other ones have.

And they're all different types of vaccines represented by these that I just named, like different, we've talked about RNA and all this, but these are all different styles of vaccine. I think, I think what's making it tricky is like, once you start having that much money being given in big chunks to these different companies, you start asking like, well, who's making money? Who's pockets are getting lined? And this is all gotten really sticky

because the guy who is kind of in charge of this whole process at Operation Warp Speed is a guy named Monsaf Slowey who has a ton of experience in the vaccine industry. So like he's a good choice in that sense, right? He has spent his whole career. I mean, for the Trump administration, that is a blue ribbon, gray and a paw.

I mean, you said the word experience and already taught 10% tile. It makes sense that he would be involved in trying to figure out which vaccine is closest and what should we fund, what should we accelerate, that kind of thing, because he has a career of doing that. Now, the flip side of that is because he does have that experience. He also has tons of connections.

He has set on a lot of boards. He has owned a lot of stocks in various companies. Specifically, he was on the board of Moderna. He still has ties to Johnson and Johnson. So like all of this starts to bring up questions of cronism, right? Like is he part of this because, or if he is part of this,

are the companies getting money, companies that will also benefit him? Or are there people who are friends, not just him personally, but you know what I mean? It's a bad look. I don't care., don't care. I don't care. That's where I'm at.

I don't, I should care. I don't care. Just make the syringe full of the group that makes the COVID go away. Please, I don't care who him and cronies get their beef. Here, here is. Well, I think, I think, Justin, you are saying the thing that everybody needs to start looking at themselves in the mirror and repeating as we move forward.

I have seen no evidence that, I mean, from the papers that have been published and the prepapers that are out there, which we have talked about, prepapers are, there are pluses and minuses, pre-publication stuff. But when you start looking at it, the vaccines that are further so long and that have received money, and again, these same places have gotten money from SEPI, which is working with the World Health Organization, which is working with like other countries, who are trying

to do the right thing, working with organizations that are trying to do the right thing, and actually help people. So if these same companies are getting money from them too, I think that's somewhat of an endorsement. But the stuff that's been published, the vaccines are eliciting immune responses, especially the most recent, I saw was the Moderna one, which it does take two doses to get the full immune response.

They were two doses a month apart. But afterwards, you had a more of an immune response than you would have if you had actually gotten coronavirus. It appeared. So, so far, the vaccine seemed to be effective. They have published results that show that. Also, the side effects seem pretty typical of a lot of vaccines. You might get some pain or a rash at the injection site. You might get some mild fevers, chills, body aches, that kind of thing for a day or so.

No major reaction so far. There was one guy who actually published an account of his reaction. I think it's important to address it because it made it out into mainstream media. A lot of people were like, look at that. See, this is what they're... One gentleman was in the Moderna vaccine trial. When he got his second injection, he developed a high fever and he vomited and he passed out. And this was within 24 hours getting the vaccine. After that, he felt better. He was not hospitalized and he was fine.

Fine. Chill. It is important to note though that he received one of the higher doses that they were still trialing that they actually aren't going with because the lower dose was effective. So the vaccine he got is not the vaccine anyone will get because we showed we could do it at a lower dose. And also when the guy was interviewed, he said he would still get the vaccine anyway. He still believed in this. He still endorsed the process.

It was still worth it because now he's not going to get coronavirus. Right. So I think when you start hearing about these reactions or side effects or whatever, remember, these are the same things we tell you with every vaccine. It's the reason we always, when we take our kids to get their vaccines, we always say like,

they might be a little fussy tonight. They might have a higher temperature. But at the end of the day, it's no big deal because then they don't get these terrible diseases that can kill you or cause a stroke or mean you spend the rest of your life on dialysis or whatever, right? So they're still worth it. We are so bad as a species with recognizing when we have choice and when we don't have choice. I've realized that a lot with the school's thing, you see, I see people in a lot of different forums like making these judgements, like weighing pluses and minuses when there's really not any pluses and minuses to way. Like on one side of it, you get a deadly virus

and give it to a bunch of people and maybe die. And some people will die. And some people will die. And on the other side of it, who cares? Like question mark question. My, my, like socialization, like come on. Like it's not, and this is the same thing, right? Like what if I pass out? question work question, socialization, come on. This is the same thing, right?

What if I pass out, okay, great. Make sure you have a bed near about who cares. We don't have an option, it's not a choice. People need to understand vaccines don't make it to widespread distribution if they kill people. That doesn't happen. They don't make it to clinical trials if they kill people. That doesn't happen. They don't make it to clinical trials if they kill people.

That's not, there's not gonna be a vaccine where it's like, well, take the vaccine, you got a 50-50 shot. That won't be out there. That's not how this process works. The process is designed specifically to only allow vaccines that work and are safe. And getting some body aches and a temperature is okay.

You will be okay. If you get coronavirus, you may well not. So there are no vaccines that are going to go through this process that will kill you. Right. So I think that it is important to know that the whole world is working together right now in vaccines. Not really us with them.

We are very specifically not trying to work with anybody. We seem to be as a country very concerned with just ourselves and not really with ourselves completely. Yeah. I don't know who we're worried about. White people probably. completely. I don't know who were worried about white people. Well, not even that because if you're a school teacher, we're not worried about you right now. If you're an essential worker, we're not worried about you. No teacher, non essential white people.

Anyway, the whole world is working together in this through the World Health Organization. This kind of thing takes a global effort. And thankfully, whatever you want to say about the gates, they were thinking about how to save our butts before we knew that our butts needed saving, along with SEPI and the governments of many, many countries other than ours. We're working on this and planning for this. And these same vaccines are getting funding

and have the scientists and the know-how and the real humanistic qualities to bring something to us that can save our lives and protect us. We don't seem to know how to play with others right now. Hopefully that will change. But in the meantime, whatever you think about the people involved in this process, the science is solid, the evidence so far is good. And when this vaccine comes out,

because what they're talking about with Operation Warp Speed, is that they would fast track a subset of vaccines for healthcare workers to get them vaccinated. Maybe, I mean, I've seen reports as early as October now. And then, you said you coughed in the middle. Did you say healthcare workers and their precious precious husbands? It will be very hard. If that is the case for me to get a vaccine that I know you and the girls can't get that would be very hard for me. But I also recognize that if I get it, I am protecting you and the girls

in a way that I can't right now. But then you start to think about the J-Man and maybe put a nose for engineer pocket bringing home to him. Trust me, I have had these, I have already been through this nightmare on my own, in my own head. Okay, well we won't re-litigate. No, I have already gone through these moral gymnastics, but my point is if that does happen, I will be there in line and I will roll up my sleeve

and I will get this vaccine. And when it is available for everybody, Justin, I will take you and I will take our children and I will take my parents and everybody I can think of, I will drag in and I will take our children and I will take my parents and everybody I can think of I will drag in there and get this vaccine. Folks, when there is a vaccine, we are, I will warn you now, this show will be insufferable for a few weeks with us banging the drum forcing people to go get vaccines. Like we will, it will be an inseparable period of cell phones

where we just talk about how much everybody needs to go get the vaccine right now. The science is solid. Fauci said it looks promising. And has he sugar coated anything for us? Not that I know of. No, he hasn't. So if he believes in it, I believe in it.

And, you know, again, I would urge you to remember that if you are part of the American healthcare system, there are people making money off of things that help you. And, and there are sometimes bad people or people with like nefarious goals. But that doesn't mean that the medicine you're taking or the surgery you got or the vaccine you got is bad. Because a somewhere, many scientists, made that. And I believe that for a lot of those people, they went into this for the reasons that I went into medicine, which is because I truly believe that if you use science along with humanism, you can

create things that can make people's lives better and save lives. And those are the people who are making these things for you. Don't worry about Trump. They wouldn't let him anywhere near the lab. Thank you so much for listening. One last reminder, it's slash play. If you like what we do here on this show, if it means something to you, we would urge you to go to maximumfund.org or forward slash join. We're only able to make the shows that we make because of your support. It is an uncertain time, which we fully recognize, and makes it uncertain for you in terms of your financial situation, advertising as a lot more uncertain than it used to be.

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Don't wait. I'm talking to you. If you can, you listen to show, you enjoy it. Just takes five minutes. Go join the Max Fun Network and we would so appreciate it. Max Fun Fun Network or Fortslash join. Also, thank you to the taxpayers for these third song medicines as the intro and outro of our program. That's a good, that's a good max fund drive point. We got that song medicines from a free musical library that was posted with Creative Commons. You can make the show and, you know, you can use this song however you like. But as the show became more popular and we started to make money from the show, we were able to pay the taxpayers.

I mean, they didn't ask for anything, but we were able to pay the taxpayers to say, like, hey, this show is making money now thanks to our support from our donors, like we would like to pass that on to you. And that's all thanks to, you know, the people. Thanks to you. Thanks to you, specifically. That is going to do it for us for this week. So until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. I always don't. Draw a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfun.org Comedy and culture Artists don't? Audience supported