Today, Explained - The vaccine, explained by Martin (who got it)

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Martin Kenyon was one of the first people to get the Covid-19 vaccine this week. He talks about his experience, and an epidemiologist explains how to talk to the “vaccine hesitant” people in your life. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600.

Visit connectsontario.ca. It's been a tough year, but at least Christmas came early this year. And by Christmas, I of course mean the vaccine. On Tuesday, the very first humans were vaccinated against COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. On Wednesday, I had the privilege of speaking to one of them. His name is Martin Kenyon. And I asked him to introduce himself. Well, there's not very much to tell, except that I've been around a very long time. I'm 91 years old. So I don't spend my time sort of measuring what my life's been like you know my daughters keep telling me i've got to write it you know i've written the first six years but that's not very much i get bored with trying to write it but they're very keen i should get it written down because i've been very lucky and done lots of

interesting things nothing important nothing but i was lucky. I spent 30 years running a very small charitable trust, which gave money away from the big national companies, spending it on improving what's done about people who come and study in this country. So I've met people from all over the world, and they've come to my house and my flat. So I've had a very mixed sort of interesting, varied life. And the latest chapter was written this week, Martin.

You became one of the first people on the planet to get this BioNTech Pfizer vaccine. How'd that happen? It said on the television some days ago that hospitals in this country, that were going to be the first ones, which were to produce people who they could put forward to be vaccinated. And Guy's Hospital was one of them. Do you know London?

Not as well as you do. No, of course not. But do you know Guy's Hospital? No, no. Tell us a bit about the hospital. Well, it's in the very middle of London. It's one of the great hospitals of this country. So I rang them up and said, are you vaccinating people? Yes. So after a brief conversation, I said, right, well, I'll come at half past twelve. That was lunchtime yesterday. And that took place, and it took no time. It was painless like injections are. And you may know it makes you immune

from being attacked by this bug that we've all talked about all over the world. And why did you want to be one of the first to get it? Why did you jump at the opportunity? I've got two small grandchildren who are able to carry it without telling anybody and give it to me. And being an old man, much more likely to be carried off to the next world if I catch it. And my family and I would rather like to remain together for a bit longer.

So I went to get the vaccine done. It has a second part to it, which I shall have to go back to Guy's Hospital for just after Christmas. And then the job is done. And that happened. And that was that. So you've had this vaccine now for about 24 hours, I imagine. Are you feeling any side effects? How do you feel now? No. They gave me a little booklet, which I've mislaid, of course. I did read it today. I forgot to read it before I went to bed last night. And I generally stay up till about, well, I'm generally up at one o'clock in the morning. I tend to get to bed if I can, because at one o'clock they play on the Radio 4, which is what I listen to. They play the British National Anthem, which is, of course, you know, God Save the Queen. And there's some band, some regimental band plays it.

And having listened to it, I don't stand to attention all the time. Get into bed, and then I go to sleep. I've had no reactions that anybody could notice particularly. I mean, I'm of a certain age, so I ache a certain amount and that sort of thing, you know. But I'm perfectly all right, as you can tell from my conversation. And how does it feel sort of mentally to have this vaccine now?

Well, I'm used to more exciting mental things. I don't find nothing. I'm totally unaware more exciting mental things. I don't find nothing. I'm totally unaware of having had it. Only in retrospect, because everybody says it's a good thing to have it. We all agree that. Well, I thought so. That's why I did it. Yeah.

Now, I have a young, funny enough, I've just come back from doing the minimum shopping, since I've got something for breakfast and before you rang, and to find a call while I was out from the young woman who lives in this house when I, which is here and she's a, she's a South African opera singer and she's, she's black.

Of course I prefer, I'm a very racist person. I prefer black women to white ones. Well, that's all right. Isn't it? Well, well not everyone is brave enough to come out with their racism so thank you for sharing that i spent most of my life trying something new i suppose i am rather in that sense somebody who doesn't wait for other people to do things i get on with it i mean i have started new things so i went to get the vaccine done, and I shall spend Christmas with my family. And before you spend Christmas with your family, you have to get one more shot. Is that correct? It's a two-part vaccine?

Actually, I'm getting it just after Christmas, so I won't have had it before that. But what I've had already will be quite enough. Honestly, I don't think I'm going to have to worry about it very much. Tell me, what will it mean to you to spend Christmas around your family? Very close to them. I get rung up every day by my two daughters, and that's lovely. And my grandchildren, we're very fond of each other. They know me very well, and they send me lovely cards with their paintings on them

and little poems. There was a time we made, rang up, they rang up every day and read me a poem on the telephone. There are a lot of people in the world who are hesitant about this vaccine, or at least in America, people who say no matter what, they won't get it. What would you say to those people? Well, I don't know why people... I mean, whatever it did, as long as it doesn't do any damage, I find it very baffling. Some people are frightened of needles. You have to know that.

But I'm not mechanical. I'm not scientific or anything like that. So I don't understand why people are opposed to it. And a lot of very good scientific people have done a lot of very fast work. And that's very much to be commended. One can raise one's hat and, you know, stand up and say, well done. Martin, I know you have the first shot of the vaccine, but I hope you will still stay safe because you seem to be something of a national treasure.

So please take care and thank you so much for your time. Very nice to talk to you. Okay, and I hope you have a happy Christmas with your family. I will, yes, and you too. I shall because I'm with all my lovely family.

We're all great friends. We bring each other up all the time. There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical of this vaccine. Or the other ones. For starters, they were developed in record time. Maybe that's why as much as a third of Americans say they're probably not going to get it. After the break, how to talk to those people. I'm Sean Ramos for them. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family.

And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday.

And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply.

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM,

a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The United States reported more than 3,100 COVID-19 deaths yesterday, on Wednesday. That's a record.

There were something like 220,000 new cases reported, and that's probably an undercount. We've proven incapable of containing this virus, which means vaccination is our great hope. And today's a big day for the vaccine in the United States. The FDA is meeting with its advisory panel to decide whether to approve the vaccine that Martin just received. The question is, will that FDA approval convince all the vaccine naysayers out there? There's a lot of them, as much as a quarter to a third of the country, according to polling. We wanted to talk about how to talk to those people.

So we got in touch with Dr. Maria Sundaram. She's an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto School of Public Health, which means she's been talking to people about the vaccines a lot lately. So I will say as a caveat, it's not possible to force anyone to change their mind if they don't want to change their mind. And if they've already made up their mind, they're not going to get it and no one can push them into it, then that's maybe a case of what we call in my family, my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts. So leaving that aside, I think there's a lot of people who just have maybe a few questions. They want to know a little more or they're slightly hesitant. They're slightly on the fence about some of these vaccines. And that is understandable.

This is a really new vaccine product. So I understand why people want to know more. And I also get the idea of asking questions. That's what I do all day for my job as a researcher. That's what I do all day for my job, too. Can I ask you some questions right now? Can I, like, pretend to be someone who's vaccine hesitant? Oh, yeah. And maybe you can, like, tell me why I shouldn't be or maybe you'll tell me that I should be hesitant. But can we kind of go through the motions of what this might sound like for people? Yeah, yeah. Let's definitely, let's do it. All right, here's the first one.

So, Maria, this vaccine was developed faster than any other vaccine of this kind in the history of the world. What if corners were cut here? What if this thing's half-baked? That's a very good question to be asking, and I totally get why you're asking it. And you're right, this vaccine production timeline has been super, super fast.

But I will say kind of just at the beginning that absolutely no corners were cut. So all of the different procedures that we take to identify that the vaccine is safe and the vaccine is effective, all of those have still happened, just like they would have happened if it had taken 10 years. They just happened way quicker. And the reason they happened way quicker is that we had a lot of interest in developing these vaccines. So a lot of money and a lot of political will went into developing these vaccines because we know how important they are for responding to this pandemic.

Another thing that's really important is that a lot of people, tens of thousands of people, agreed to participate. So the number of people that agreed to participate in these clinical trials really helped us find out a lot quicker that these vaccines are safe and they're effective. And then lastly, we actually have already seen coronaviruses that do cause severe disease. One of those was the original SARS. Another one is called MERS. Because those diseases were also really of high interest,

we already kind of went down the road of developing vaccines for those coronaviruses. So we weren't starting entirely from scratch, and we were able to hit the ground running here as well. In the United States, like everything else about this virus, the vaccine has been politicized. The president's out there bragging about it, but this is the same guy who said that maybe it'd be a good idea to use disinfectant to treat the virus. How can we be sure that this whole process hasn't been politicized? How can you be sure the FDA is on the level here when they approved hydroxychloroquine only to later reverse that approval?

So I hope this isn't too much of a nerd digression for everyone listening, but I always think about the story from the Odyssey where Odysseus asks his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship so that he doesn't dive overboard when he's listening to the sirens singing. So he kind of knows beforehand how tempting it's going to be, and he knows beforehand exactly what he has to do to make sure that he keeps himself safe

and his crew safe. And in a lot of ways, that's kind of what we do when we do a clinical trial. Obviously, we want this vaccine to be safe and effective, and we understand that we have a personal interest in saying that it is safe and effective. So before this trial starts, there was a group of statisticians, clinicians, physicians, and other scientists, epidemiologists like myself. They sit down at a table and they say, okay, here's the number of people we're going to enroll. Here's the number of cases we're going to be able to find. Here's exactly what percent effectiveness we're going to be statistically powered to find. And we're not going to stop the study until we see this outcome. Or if we see that the vaccine is more effective than we thought, we might stop it early. Or if we see that we're seeing more effective than we thought, we might stop it early. Or if we see

that we're seeing more safety outcomes than we thought, we might stop it early. They write those rules down and then they hand them to an independent safety monitoring committee, the Data Safety and Monitoring Board. And that DSMB then continually reviews the information that's coming in from the clinical trial. And they're the ones who make the decision about if it is safe, if it is effective. So in a lot of ways, we're trying to protect ourselves against making that sort of political decision or even, you know, deciding something that we really wish was true. But, you know, maybe the science doesn't support. I don't know. I saw something on Facebook that said that there's non-human DNA in this vaccine. Like, is there a chance I become some sort of human chimera?

Okay, so yes. No, there is no chance. I'm sorry. That's not how I should have responded. I usually say yes after people ask a question because I want them to know that I'm listening. But this is a bad question to respond yes to immediately. That was your first mistake. So it's a good question, and I understand why you're asking it.

But no, you will not become a chimera, and neither will you have the ability of Spider-Man or anything. So here's what's going to happen with the mRNA vaccine. Usually when you get a seasonal flu vaccine, for example, like Spider-Man or anything. So here's what's going to happen with the mRNA vaccine. Usually when you get a seasonal flu vaccine, for example, we're showing our immune system a killed copy of the virus and our immune system learns what it looks like and learns how to protect against it. With this mRNA vaccine, it's actually very similar. It's just maybe one or two steps removed. So instead of showing our immune system a full killed copy of the virus,

we're giving our cells the reading instructions to make one protein in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So it's really like a set of IKEA instructions. We're giving them to our cells. Our cells say, okay, I'm going to read this. I'm going to make this piece of furniture. And then I'm going to learn how to protect against this piece of furniture. The thing about mRNA is that it's a set of instructions that kind of degrades over time. So after you read it a certain number of times, it kind of goes away. It does not become incorporated into your DNA, just like me reading a book wouldn't make me into a pile of books.

It's just a new piece of information that your cells can use. But how do I know that this isn't just an attempt to track us all? I read that these vaccines contain nanoparticles that will act as biometric detectors, which are patented by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and we all know that they started this. And these biometric detectors are then traded for cryptocurrency to push a non-cash flow. I will tell you, I understood only some of those words. Get on my level. I'm sorry. I've been watching too much Great British Baking Show

and not enough documentaries about cryptocurrency. I haven't got any modern machinery, you see. I haven't got YouTube or Facebook or online or any of those things at all. In general, vaccines are not a material to track you. That would be a really poor use of a really great public health strategy and a really great success story.

And it also seems like technologically not possible. I think there's microchips in a lot of other things, but there's certainly not microchips in the vaccine. I'll take your word for it. I appreciate that. Maria, thank you for indulging the character of a hesitant vaccine getter there. Oh, it's my pleasure. That was a very nice character, actually. Thank you. My producer Amina hatched him in a lab. You can help answer questions,

obviously, pretty well, but there are only so many epidemiologists out there. Do you think regular people can help answer questions obviously pretty well, but there are only so many epidemiologists out there. Do you think regular people can help too? I really do think it is certainly our job. I don't think it's only our job. So I think other people can really help as well because just like with so many other things that we disagree about, there is a person in your life that only you can reach. And that might be about a COVID-19

vaccine. You might be able to have a really productive conversation with them about a vaccine if you can say, you know, I understand that you have some concerns and that really makes sense given everything that's been going on and given that so much of this is new. And let me try to sit down with you and talk about some of these concerns and kind of explain to you how we have this common ground. I want you to be safe and healthy. You want to be safe and healthy.

I want you to get this vaccine and you can protect me when you do. I think like the flip side of this coin of helping people who are hesitant to understand the vaccine and maybe quell some of their fears is to also caution people who are maybe overconfident in this moment. Like, great, there's a vaccine. It's over

because it is not over, right? No, I'm so sorry to say this, but no, it's not over. So vaccines are just one tool in the public health toolkit. And they're an important tool. They're so wonderful and they're a huge success story. But we know that the vaccine can prevent you from getting sick, but it might not be as good at preventing you from getting other people sick. But it's also really important to note that you won't be considered vaccinated until probably two weeks after you receive the second dose. So we have to wait until then, which is kind of a long time, and also make sure that you're doing everything else in the meantime, and you continue to do everything else sort of afterwards.

One thing that's really challenging and a really hard fact for me to process is that the transmission in the United States has been so high that a vaccine will be very effective in reducing some of that, but the number of cases will still be really high just because the baseline is so, so high. And so we really need to continue using all of the other tools that we have. You know, I think a lot of the conversation about COVID has been, you know, the virus, we're going to win against the virus. And we really feel like all of these decisions are being made because of the virus. And I think we may forget that we are the people who have the power. It's us who has the ability to make behavioral changes to prevent the spread. Maria Sundaram is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. And Martin Kenyon, who you heard from earlier in the show, is a Bossy fellow from the United Kingdom.

Tell me what your organization is. It's got a funny name. Oh yeah, the name of our program is Today Explained. Today Explained. Yes, it's quite difficult to hear that name, you know. I think somebody could invent something more easier to pick up. Do you have anything in mind? No, I haven't at the moment. I'm always rather bossy about that sort of thing.

I tell people how to speak. I tell people to pronounce their words better. I tell them to use their T's and their B's and their dentals and labules and things. I'm very bossy and interfering. Now, of course, I'm Shah, and Noam Hassenfeld, who contributes music, too. The rest of our music comes from Breakmaster Cylinder. It was Bird Pinkerton who got in touch with Martin for us. Thanks, Bird.

Thanks to Cecilia Lay for making sure the show is factual. Thanks to Afim Shapiro for making sure it sounds good. Golda Arthur is our supervising producer. And Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts. Something more easier to pick up is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.