“There’s no vaccine against stupidity.”–Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

PART 2: THE VACCINE

Vaccine denial, anti-vaccine hesitancy, or outright anti-science belief, whatever you want to call it, is nothing new.

Way before the COVID vaccine, even before polio, there was Smallpox.  The disease was horrible.

The skin broke out in pus-filled blisters, the body shook with fever, and over 30% of those infected died (well, a lot more than 30%, if we’re talking about children).  And if you survived?  There was still a high likelihood you’d end up blind.  The disease was known and feared the world over.

Well, not entirely the world over.  Most indigenous peoples on this side of the Atlantic had never been exposed.  Once Smallpox hit native American tribes, it slaughtered them by the thousands.

In 1721, as Boston, Massachusetts braced for an approaching outbreak, the preacher Cotton Mather was startled by the news he heard from a slave.

We also have this disease in Africa, the slave told him.  But it’s not nearly as deadly.  We take a small knife and make a shallow cut into the arm of a healthy person.  Then we rub some of the pus from an infected person into the wound.  The person with the cut experiences swelling and the formation of pustules, but only on the arm.  The pustules heal, and the person never gets infected with the disease itself, even if others around him are dying.

Yes, sorry to disappoint any white supremacists out there, but the first successful vaccination was pioneered in Africa.  Today, we also know that similar procedures were also practiced in India and China.

Years later the British physician Edward Jenner discovered that women who worked milking cows would frequently contract “Cowpox,” a similar but much milder disease than Smallpox.  Reasoning that a procedure to introduce Cowpox into the skin would be less painful, but still prevent the dreaded full-blown Smallpox, Jenner began vaccinating his patients with Cowpox.

Over the next 200 years, his vaccine saved millions of lives and wiped Smallpox off the face of the earth.

But it wasn’t easy.

The notion of a vaccine was initially met with shock, scorn, and outrage.  Preachers thundered that  introducing something of animal origin into the human body was an affront to God!  The vaccine will turn you into a cow, others said!  Well, maybe not a cow specifically, but it will make you grow horns and start producing milk by the gallon, if you’re a woman.

The political cartoon from an English publication (pictured above) pretty much says it all.

Jenner and others were threatened with death.  But eventually, they persevered.  Within 50 years, Smallpox vaccines were mandatory for children in England.  Smallpox rates plummeted. 

Over the ensuing years, other vaccines were developed, primarily for children, making it much more likely for young people to survive to adulthood. Polio, pertussis (whooping cough), diphtheria (which killed my Mother’s sister at age 9), and tetanus vaccines followed.  Others came later.  And through it all, anti-vaccine zealots fumed.  But with each successive vaccine, death rates declined.

Despite this, vaccine opponents still didn’t let up.  In the United Kingdom (UK) in the early 1970s, they zeroed in on the triple-valent diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus (DPT) shot.  Allegations that the DPT vaccine caused neurological disorders in children began to make the rounds.  Parents started suing vaccine manufactures.  No study ever showed a link between DPT and such disorders.  But the lawsuits caused vaccine prices to skyrocket. 

However, the continued protests took their toll.  By 1974, DPT administration in the UK had fallen 78%.  No surprise, then, when 5 years later, the biggest pertussis epidemic in 20 years slammed Britain. 

And during the time of decreased vaccine use?  There was no decrease in the incidence of neurological disorders the vaccine supposedly caused.

Administration of DPT in the UK and around the world began to rise once again, despite the sentiments of anti-vaccination zealots.  Preventable diseases fell.    

Then along came Andrew Wakefield.

A relatively unknown British surgeon, Dr. Andrew Wakefield shook the world in 1998 when he published his study of 12 children in the renowned medical journal, The Lancet. The widely used measles vaccine MMR, Wakefield claimed, caused autism.

Autism is a heartbreaking condition that begins early in life.  In its more severe form, it robs a child of its ability to communicate verbally with the outside world.  Even in milder forms, it distorts relationships and makes everyday activities into obstacles.

The article and its ensuing publicity carried a horrifying message.  Give your child an MMR shot and you could be giving them autism.  MMR vaccine refusal went through the ceiling.

Immediately, other researchers tried to confirm Wakefield’s finding.  None of them could.

It turned out, after years of investigation, that Wakefield’s paper was fraudulent.  He ignored data that didn’t support his thesis, and fabricated data to make his case.

In blunt terms, he lied.  Further investigation also showed that a group suing vaccine manufactures had  paid Wakefield over a half million dollars two years before his paper was even published.

The Lancet retracted the article, and Wakefield had his medical license revoked.  He moved to the U.S., and went on the payroll of anti-vaccination campaigners here.

In over twenty years, despite enormous research, no one has found a credible link between MMR and autism.

But Wakefield had an impact.  MMR administration has never returned to its pre-1998 levels. Measles epidemics on college campuses among unvaccinated students have cause colleges to suspend classes.  And internationally, 144,000 children die of the disease each year.

Which brings us to COVID.  When scientists understood that the disease was a member of the coronavirus family, they immediately were concerned.  Although years of research had produced anti-viral medications that can diminish (but not cure) HIV, herpes, and a few others, no treatment had ever been developed that could actually eliminate a virus.  And for coronaviruses, nothing was even on the drawing board.

As soon as the infectivity of the virus became apparent, everyone understood there was going to be no miracle cure, and that our best hope was to get to a vaccine as quickly as possible.  In the meantime, we would have to use common sense initiatives like masks and distancing to bob and weave while the virus punched away at us.

To say that our nation-wide response to COVID was pretty half-assed would be an understatement.  I’ll talk more about that in upcoming posts, but suffice it to say that false information from America’s highest leader caused the virus to spread far more rapidly than it ever should have.  By the time the first vaccine was released in the U.S., 375,000 Americans were already dead.

A rapid dissemination of the vaccine, similar to the release of the polio vaccine in the 1950’s, should have slowed transmission to a crawl.  Of course, that didn’t happen.

Why?  Enter once again the anti-vaxxers.

The number of allegations that have been made against the COVID vaccine could fill a book, so I’ll just hit some of the more common misconceptions.  The vaccine alters your DNA.  It turns you into a magnet.  It implants a microchip somewhere in your body (I had a patient once tell me that I must have a microchip somewhere in my own body because I had smallpox vaccine when I was younger.  I tried to explain microchips weren’t even invented then, but it didn’t seem to do much good).  It poisons your immune system.  It causes massive inflammation.

First, let’s talk about how the vaccine works.  A shot of RNA enters your body, and travels to your cells.  It does not enter the important nucleus of the cell (where your DNA is stored) but it remains in the cell’s outer region and causes the cell to do one thing and one thing only.  Make spike protein.

Why is this important?  Because the surface of a COVID virus is covered with spike protein.  It’s what allows the virus to attach to a human cell, inject its own genetic material into the cell, and cause the human cells to reproduce the virus like mad.  The body’s immune system, having never seen the virus before, is caught off guard.  By the time it responds effectively, the patient may already be dead.

But what if the body’s immune system is already primed against the spike proteins, and when the virus strikes, immediately attacks the virus before it’s had a chance to infect a critical number of cells?  The virus is stopped in its tracks.

In a nutshell, that’s how the most basic COVID vaccines work.  Inject some RNA that makes spike proteins and thus prime the immune system to destroy the spike protein-covered COVID virus as soon as it hits your bloodstream.

And with a second exposure to the spike protein?  The immune response may strengthen even further.  Hence, the concept of booster shots.

But wait.  What happens to that RNA that was injected, and what about all those spike proteins?

The vaccine’s RNA strand doesn’t replicate itself.  It just makes some spike protein and then falls apart, like everything else in our bodies that doesn’t replicate.  Remember, the RNA is just a strand of bases—it isn’t even alive.

And ditto the spike proteins.  They’re just a strand of amino acids, and get disassembled like every other protein that’s metabolized in the body.   They aren’t alive, either.  And they certainly aren’t magic, despite what some people would have you believe.

The spike protein part is important, because it seems to be at the heart of the most recent conspiracy theories making the rounds.  Previous claims that the vaccine causes cancer, Alzheimer’s, infertility, altered DNA, is made from aborted human fetal cells, and causes COVID virus to be shed from the body of the vaccine recipient (remember, the vaccine doesn’t even contain the virus) have previously been shown to be total B.S.

That leaves the spike protein as about the only scapegoat left, if you’re desperate to find anything to discredit the vaccine’s use.  And anti-vaxxers have seized on a scientific paper that proposes that spike proteins in large enough quantities could be harmful.

But here’s the part of the paper they ignore.  The quantities produced by a COVID vaccine aren’t nearly large enough to cause the side effects the paper proposes.

Is the quantity important?  Sure.  Do you take vitamin A?  Of course you do.  It’s in our food—whether you take vitamin supplements or not.

But in large enough doses, Vitamin A can be lethal.  So should you therefore avoid all foods that contain Vitamin A?  No, because without it, human life wouldn’t be possible.

No study has shown that spike protein induced at the level of a COVID vaccine is harmful.  Plenty of studies have shown that the COVID virus very well might kill you. If it’s the spike protein you’re worried about, and not the virus, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

So get the vaccine.  It’s safe, and it works.  It won’t give you cancer, alter your genome, make your hair turn green, cause your teeth to rot out, cause your boobs to shrink, or make your penis fall off (if you’re one of those people who worry about that sort of thing).

But at this point some may say, “wait a minute.  All this science stuff is fine.  But you can’t MAKE me get this!  All this mandate stuff is dictatorship and un-American!  And you haven’t even mentioned masks!  Why do I need them?  And why should I have to wear one!”

Important questions and we’re out of space.  But trust me, I’ll have plenty to say about all of that in my next post.  See you then.

In the meantime, any thoughts or questions, feel free to contact me.