Speaker 0 00:00:00 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:00:35 Disability and progress. We bring you insights into ideas about in discussions on disability topics. My name is Sam. I'm the host of this show, Charlene dolls, my research woman and Mason engineers. Thank you, Mason, tonight or today we're speaking with Dr. Joel fostered. Um, Dr. Foster is the director for the division of pediatric infectious disease at the university of Minnesota medical school. Thanks for joining us. And thank you for inviting me today. We're talking about vaccines and we're going to get a little bit of a taste of how they work, hopefully, and, and all the ins and outs about them. So can you give us a basic understanding of what a vaccine is? Okay.
Speaker 2 00:01:23 So a vaccine is a way to introduce your immune system to something. Um, and so when we got, you know, in general, we call pathogens any disease is a pathogen. Um, and then, so it could be polio. It could be, um, pneumonia, the pneumonia bacteria, or it could be COVID. Um, and then within each of those pathogens, there are things that your immune system reacts to. Those are the things we call antigens. So what we want to do is check with developing a vaccine is to figure out what antigen, what part of the pathogen that your body is going to build up immunity to. And then you figure out a way to deliver that antigen to the body in a way that the person doesn't also get the illness. So bacterial diseases, you wouldn't want to give the bacteria because then the person's going to get the, almost the same way with viruses. And so that vaccine is just a way to build your immunity without actually having to have the illness itself.
Speaker 1 00:02:30 So when they're creating a vaccine, you hear a little bit about live vaccines or non live vaccines. Am I saying that right? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 2 00:02:41 Yeah. So you think immune system is very, very fussy. Um, so there's certainly things that it's really easy that you can give, um, like hepatitis. So I have a little tiny piece of the virus, or even, you know, we, we make a piece of the, that the body very quickly, very easily makes antibodies to that hepatitis. And that's called the live vaccine. That's called a killed vaccine vaccine. Sometimes it's called an active, sometimes it's called killed. Sometimes they call it non-life. Um, so you take, you know, there's absolutely no chance that the person can get the illness from that. Okay. So then we have a live vaccine, which is something like the MMR vaccine, which is measles, mumps, and rubella. So the immune system was not fooled by those. So we tried giving just that antigen and the immune system. Um, and so the body wasn't able to build any immunity. So what we did is we took the virus, we grew it in eggs, and then we, we can get, and so we, we can get so weak that it hopefully couldn't cause any illness, but at the same time, we'd pull the immune system into building immunity for it.
Speaker 1 00:04:00 So it almost gives it a little bit of the real thing.
Speaker 2 00:04:04 Yeah, yeah, it is. And as long as you're giving it to a person with a good immune system, they're not going to develop it. Um, so they're not going to get measles chicken pox virus is a perfect example. Chickenpox vaccine is, is, uh, is a inactivated virus. It's, it's alive, it's alive. Attenuated is the full scientific term for it. Now, some people, when they get the vaccine for chicken pox, they develop a little bit of a rash and a little bit of a fever. Um, but they don't get the full blown chickenpox. And so we've kind of done a trade-off and says, well, it's still better to get that than it is to get chickenpox. And so, you know, we, we w we, we do that trade-off
Speaker 1 00:04:47 Right. Um, when you have a process of creating a vaccine, I realize, you know, when companies do this, it costs a lot of money. And so how do they know that how much of it's going to be purchased, or how do they have any guarantee that a country is going to buy it?
Speaker 2 00:05:08 So they don't, and that's the problem. That's the problem. The reason that we haven't had a lot of new vaccines visit, because it costs millions and millions and millions of dollars, because, you know, they'll try this and they'll try that. And then, you know, they may spend millions of dollars on developing something that doesn't even work, you know, kind of talking about the MMR, or like, let's try to get the killed version of it. Um, or they could develop like, um, people were working on, in a bowl of vaccine, um, which again, it cost just as much to Megan of Ebola vaccine, as it does to make a chickenpox vaccine, but only a few people in the world are going to get, are going to need their bowl of vaccine. And it's not places where people have private insurance, it's going to reimburse the full. And so there has to be an incentive then for companies to the vaccine, for the unusual diseases and places where people don't have a lot of money to pay for vaccines.
Speaker 1 00:06:04 And so what kind of incentives do they get?
Speaker 2 00:06:07 Well, hopefully you get, um, government funding to develop a lot of the early sort of science. Part of it is, is funded by the government, especially the national institutes of health. So, you know, the national institutes of health are, you know, some of these are called orphan diseases and that nobody really cares about them. Nobody has sort of adopted them
Speaker 1 00:06:28 For, until we all get them, then they care.
Speaker 2 00:06:31 Yup, yup. Yup. Um, and then, you know, things like this, like the COVID vaccine, it was so important to develop a COVID vaccine. A lot of government funding went into this, went into the NIH to develop the, to quickly get the developed vaccine developed it, then went into help pay for the clinical trials board, and then the vaccine, they come, the government guaranteed, these companies that we will buy the vaccine from you. Um, you know, so the, you know, think back to March in March, we all thought that COVID was going to be gone by the fall. And so they were telling these vaccine companies, we want you to spend, you know, potentially billions of dollars to develop these vaccines. And the vaccine companies are saying, you know, Hey, by the time we have this developed COVID will be gone. And the government said we will buy the vaccines from you. And so then that gave them the incentive to go ahead and continue developing it. And as we saw it did not go away.
Speaker 1 00:07:29 Uh, yeah, no, no, it didn't. Um, so I would just, so all those who may not know N a H stands for national Institute of health. So, um, and these people, is there a disincentive then? I mean, it seems to me if they don't know that it's going to be bought at this particular time, everyone's desperate, but yeah. If it's a time that they don't know, they kind of speculate.
Speaker 2 00:07:57 Right, right. Exactly, exactly. You know, for this, the government backed it. Um, but for, you know, other, other illnesses that are maybe not quite so many people, or it's not as fatal as this one, the companies have to sort of make a bet of, is it going to be worth it, to do it? And, you know, and the companies it's tricky because you know, they're not on non-profits and they have to be responsible to stockholders. And the end of the same time, they're trying to do a good thing. And they're trying to make something that will benefit people. Um, but they can't lose a lot of money on it or they get punished by the stock market.
Speaker 1 00:08:38 Ah, kind of a, uh, almost a double doom. Yeah. John, I'm curious. Let's can we talk about testing testing seems to be kind of a big deal now, as we get into, when we're talking about these current, uh, vaccines for the Corona virus, but in tech in general, how does testing work?
Speaker 3 00:09:02 So first testing occurs in animals. So you find an animal that you can infect with chicken pox. I'll go back to chickenpox. You need to find an animal that can get chickenpox. And then you come up with what you think is a good vaccine, and then you give it to the animals and then you infect try to infect the animals with the chicken pox. And then you see how successful the vaccine is. And you look for, do they have some, you know, bad side effect, you know, in the animals, because that's what you will always want to start first. Then the next stage of it is you start in a smaller number of humans that you look really closely at. But as opposed to humans, though, the humans, you're not then going to try to infect them and check a box that would not be at all ethical and not a good idea.
Speaker 3 00:09:48 So with humans, then what you do is you then draw their blood to look and see if they develop antibodies to the, to the Vera cell, to the chickenpox. And you also observe them, did they get any bad side effects from it? Um, did you know how many of them, you know, developed chickenpox from it? You know, how many of them had some, you know, unusual, you know, thing happened that they developed, you know, a neurologic disorder or, you know, something like that. So then if you pass that stage and all of these stages, the, um, the company making them has to present paperwork to the federal, um, drug, uh, the drug agency, the FDA. So after stage one, they say, these are our animal studies. Is it okay to go to humans? The FDA says yes or no. Then they say, well, okay, we tested it on a hundred humans, you know, based on our data, is it okay to go ahead, to do a large number of humans?
Speaker 3 00:10:41 And then the FDA says yes or no. So then they open up clinical trials and then this is when we're going to now test tens of thousands of people. Um, and at that stage, we're dependent on the places advertise and say, we're looking for volunteers to take this experimental vaccine and, you know, and then it's all based on who signs up. Um, and so then that is the based on those numbers. Then it goes to the FDA for, is the FDA going to approve it? Or is the FDA gonna say, now you got to go back to the drawing board. And either we don't like this vaccine at all, or you need to go back to the drawing board and you didn't do enough older people, or you didn't do enough, you know, women compared to men and sends them back to redo their trials.
Speaker 1 00:11:27 How much time in general, not in counting this, the vaccine that are currently being made, but generally how much time does it take to test a vaccine and get it through the FDA?
Speaker 3 00:11:42 Okay. So that first stage in animals could be decades. I suppose you're coming up with a totally brand new type of, of vaccine. If you're using kind of an old type of vaccine that we knew it worked in measles, but we don't know if it works in moms, that's not going to take as long. I, then you do your animals stage where most times that's probably going to take a year to 18 months. Cause you're kind of fine tuning it. And like how much of that do we put in the vial and that type of thing, then you get to the clinical trials part and back take another year or two, you know, assuming that all goes well, that could, you know, you probably all goes, well, you could probably do it in six months, but usually it doesn't go well. Um, cause you do have to go back and fine tune your data, or it takes a long time to get people to sign up for an experiment. Um, and so that usually takes between six and 18 months to do that part of it. Um, and then in between, remember I said, he had to put all this paperwork into the FDA that could fit on someone's desk for six months at the FDA. And then they have to wait for a committee to meet and then they all have to talk about it. And so that paperwork stage takes up an incredible amount of time in this process.
Speaker 1 00:12:58 So when they're taking, um, subjects for their testing, um, when they're asking people to come and test, they don't just, usually it seems like they don't always take anyone. They have kind of a protocol and they want you to be healthy. They want, how do they decide who they're going to take in to there?
Speaker 3 00:13:20 A lot of that is determined by the MTA. So usually when you're doing a vaccine trial, um, you don't want to include somebody who's horribly ill. Um, and you don't usually, um, children aren't included in the first round and also pregnant women. Aren't included in the person first round because we want it. And we're looking partly for, does it work? We're also looking for safety. So we want to, you know, we haven't, we haven't determined that it's safe and a large number of people. So generally we want healthy people. We also want a range of people that are going to be the same range of people who are going to get the vaccine. So we want to have, you know, some people in their twenties, but you also want to have some people in their seventies.
Speaker 1 00:13:59 Gotcha. So in general, and I think you might agree that most vaccines that we know, uh, there's really little to no side effects. You know, you might get a sore arm. Sometimes you, you know, babies get their vaccines. They might spike a little bit of a fever and be uncomfortable. But in general, there's no, there's not much side effects. What happens when somebody does have a side effect, how's that handled?
Speaker 3 00:14:26 So there's something called the vaccine adverse event reporting system called hubs, call it bears. Um, the, what is asked is anybody who's given a vaccine who the patient has sort of something funny that pops up, that they report it to this bears group. Um, one of the problems is that people don't always do that. Um, but certainly for something serious, people are usually going to do it. And then the people that are at the various agency at the party at the government, they're sifting through these things and they've got then a big map. So somebody pops up with some unusual, you know, we'll say something neurologic. So somebody pops up with something unusual neurologic in Maine and somebody in Texas and somebody in Washington state somebody in Minnesota, then they're going to say, wait a minute, like, let's look at this again. And then they can start digging into, you know, what happened in those folks.
Speaker 1 00:15:23 Gotcha. Um, and I, to, um, also talk a little bit about, um, the timelines now, because now it, there is obviously it's a much more desperate or meeting state to have something out, to have us get back to a more normal life. Although in my opinion, life will never totally go back to how it used to be. Right. Um, so now the, the testing and the FDA approval and things like that has been very much, you know, they've had to up the ante, they've had to go much quicker. What does this mean then for the vaccine?
Speaker 3 00:16:11 Okay. That's a great question. So the, that animal part had already been done, so that for the two vaccines that are already licensed there, an MRI and a vaccine, which is a totally different kind of vaccine. So it's, it's kind of an interesting vaccine because the vaccine has this sort of core of this MRI and a vaccine, and then you can kind of plug and play and put, it's sort of like, and I'm putting a cassette tape into a tape deck, which is showing my age. Um, you can all hear probably no at one is, or maybe your, I should call it a playlist, but you know, you've got this core vaccine and then you can plug in any pathogen you want, you could put in nibble LaVar. So you could put in the COVID virus or there's, you know, everybody's talking about all these mute mutations.
Speaker 3 00:16:59 You can put in a different mutation of the COVID that's, that's basically this plug and play into this vaccine. So the, the basic vaccine people have been working on for about 15 to 20 years and in that, you know, the animals part and in that part of that, you know, that first set of, of human human subjects. So then when, now that it's like, okay, now we've got, COVID like, okay, well, let's plug that, COVID back the COVID antigen into this. And then they were able to then move pretty quickly. Um, so the, all that development stuff where people talk about, Oh, it would take 20 years to develop a vaccine. All their part had happened already. So then they plugged in the COVID and the people at the FDA had a very high incentive to move this along quickly. So it didn't sit on people's desks. And the vaccine company are like, we gotta get this out by the fall. And so instead of enrolling, having like five different places that were doing clinical trials, they opened it up to 20 different places to do clinical trials and said, we need to enroll in this very quickly. And so, because of that urgency, they were able to get the tens of thousand people, you know, within only four or five months, rather than it normally taking 18 months to find, you know, 30, 40,000 people are willing to sign up for a vaccine trial.
Speaker 1 00:18:20 Oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 00:18:22 So in this we're highly motivated to get the vaccine. And so people, it was not that hard to convince people to join the clinical trial. I know a lot of people were like searching desperately for a clinical trial, which you don't find that normal.
Speaker 1 00:18:38 So people were, some people now are thinking, well, they didn't test it as thoroughly. They didn't test it as well. There's not as many people, but that's not true then with what you're saying, they do test it. There is, um, just as many, uh, subjects. It's just that it's much more open to people than it usually is. Is that what I'm understanding?
Speaker 3 00:19:03 Well, it's sort of like people went through the, um, the express lane rather than the, you know, the long line and the supermarket, you still end up with your groceries at the end, but people just did it much more efficiently.
Speaker 1 00:19:15 So I'd like to talk about the different vaccines that are out now for the Corona virus. Um, we know too, I think, um, there's one that's I think waiting approval. What, talk to us about what, you know, that's, that's out and the differences and what is on the edge of coming out. Okay.
Speaker 3 00:19:40 Right now we have the Pfizer vaccine and the Madrona vaccine, which are these MRI vaccines. And they're almost exactly the same. Um, so I wouldn't even try any, a lot of you like, Ooh, which one did you get? And all of that, I mean, maybe down the road, we'll find subtle differences in 'em, but for everything we know right now and for how people should think about it is they're almost exactly the same two shot vaccines, two shot vaccine
Speaker 1 00:20:08 Temperature sensitive. So you do need to make sure that, you know, the place that's giving them make needs to make sure they kept at the right temperature.
Speaker 3 00:20:18 That's right. That's very important.
Speaker 1 00:20:20 How would, you know, if they weren't,
Speaker 3 00:20:22 You wouldn't, I mean, this is, this is just a place where you have to trust God, which is hard for people. A lot of people don't trust vaccines in general, but this is a place that, you know, you want to try to in general, I mean, the only places that have those freezers tend to be sort of big institutions who know how to take care of stuff like this, because the freezers are, you know, very specialized that are negative a hundred degrees, um, which is even colder than a Minnesota winter, which I, this is my first Minnesota winner. Ah, congratulations. So the most of the places that have these freezers kind of know what to do with them, um, the problem becomes, you know, and so if you only gave at these big institutions that I worked for the university of Minnesota, we all honor these freezers around, but then you're going to have to have move people, you know, from the whole state down,
Speaker 1 00:21:18 It gets tricky
Speaker 3 00:21:20 And that gets tricky. So what we do is that we, you know, develop these other sites and especially the, the one difference in the maternal vaccine is you can take it out of that freezer and it's good for almost a month. So, whereas the Pfizer vaccine, I don't remember the exact thing. I bet it's like five to seven days. So once you take it out of that freezer, you pretty much got gotta, it's got to go. So the Madonna vaccine, then you could, you know, put in somebody, it has to be refrigerated still, but you know, you can put it in somebody who's, you know, ice chest and, you know, drive it to, you know, some other place in the state and, and transfer it to their refrigerator. And so it's a little bit easier to distribute it.
Speaker 1 00:22:02 So both are two shots and the ethicacy is, you know, how the shot works is basically the same. Yes,
Speaker 3 00:22:13 It's in the, you know, 94 to 96% range. Right.
Speaker 1 00:22:17 Um, and you want to get them approximately a month apart, three weeks apart.
Speaker 3 00:22:23 Yeah. The Pfizer vaccine is three weeks and the Madrona vaccine is four weeks. There's probably not magic in those numbers, but that's the way the clinical trial was done.
Speaker 1 00:22:34 So that's what they sell. That's the science that they know. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:22:38 It's a science. They know nobody did a clinical trial where they said, Hey, in one group, we'll give it in three weeks. The one group we'll give it in six weeks and see if they're both the same. Cause there was no time to do that. Whereas normally they would do like, well, let's try all these different variations of it.
Speaker 1 00:22:52 And um, I want to know, like if a person has their vaccine, let's say they've gotten both shots and they're going to visit somebody who doesn't have the vaccine. Can they still carry the virus?
Speaker 3 00:23:08 We don't know. Um, the, again, the clinical trial wasn't perfect in that what we would have liked to have done is brought everybody back, you know, like every two weeks swab their nose and see if they, you know, had virus in their nose. Um, what we did is we relied on people to say, I don't feel sick. I don't think I have COVID or I do. I did get sick, which was very few people. And, you know, I got a test for COVID. And so now the trials are going on for people who are looking to see if people could have the vaccine and then asymptomatically carry the, we don't know that my gut is, is that people aren't carrying the virus, but you know, I'm not gonna, you know, go visit my 86 year old mom without a mask. Uh, just on my belief that, that it's the, I'm probably fine. And she's probably fine.
Speaker 1 00:24:01 I want to jump back and talk about the testing because when they're doing all this and, um, they're testing, my understanding is that they only tested adults. So then how does the vaccine work when it comes to children and children are getting this? It's not like, I know they make a big deal about saying, they're not, they don't carry it as easily. They don't get it as easily, or they get maybe a, uh, uh, lighter, um, you know, strength of it, but they do get it. And I can't believe it. It would be hard for me to believe that they don't pass it. Um, how does, how does this work then?
Speaker 3 00:24:49 So well, and you're talking to a pediatrician, so yes, absolutely. I worry about it. Um, there's certain children that just, you know, out of bad luck and very, very serious. COVID the same reason it's serious. Do you have children that have problems with their immune system or children who have problems with their lungs, for bees? They all are at higher risk of having worse COVID so you do want to protect them. So now there's actually clinical trials going on. So like first we do the adults and now there's clinical trials where we're going back and we're doing clinical trials on pregnant women, and we're doing clinical trials on children to make sure that it works in them as well, because usually children need a little dose, lower dose of the vaccine. So we're doing it now in children where we try different doses of the vaccine to see how they do with it and to make sure that they don't have some, uh, you know, unusual reaction. I don't know if you've heard of there's something called a M I S C that children get that it's like that,
Speaker 1 00:25:52 That after thing, after
Speaker 3 00:25:54 Thing. So we want to make sure that M I S C from the vaccine, um, cause it's, it appears to be that that mic comes from an immune reaction to the COVID not from the COVID itself, that there's still not virus around, usually in those kids. So you want to make sure that people don't develop that these kids don't develop that. So people are gonna look very closely on that. We're doing the vaccine trials.
Speaker 1 00:26:19 So you would agree with me though, that kids definitely do get it and they can pass it. Yes. And, uh, so I'm not sure what the theory is for opening schools.
Speaker 3 00:26:32 Well, it's harder to get it from a kid. Um, when you think about, you know, take a deep breath and blow your breath out, you know, there's, you know, you think of sort of like how many teaspoons air did you just, you know, blow out. Kids are going to have fewer teaspoons of air. Plus kids tend to get the illness and then get over it really quickly. The majority of kids. So, you know, all of this is playing a, you know, kind of bring it home. Yes, they could. They could
Speaker 1 00:27:02 That's my thing is like, yes, they may be, you know, I always call them little German bombs because no, they don't, they don't have space. I bubbles, they, they get in each other's bubble and your bubble and, you know, everything, everything is their world. So, you know, everything goes in their mouth.
Speaker 3 00:27:22 Yeah. No, it's not, it's not totally safe. And if you would purely ask infectious disease doctors, whether it's okay for kids to go back to school, we don't say no. Even the ones that have kids and are trying to homeschool their kids and work full time, but it then becomes a question of society, um, of society making a decision of balancing risk with the benefit. And so, I mean, I think everybody would also agree that it's not the kid's benefit or the family's benefit to have all these kids home. Um, and so it becomes partly a, a society decision and partly a political decision of what can we do to get the kids back in schools. And the studies show that if you have a school that's very well ventilated and people follow all the rules and you can space kids out and you can ensure that you were there mass it's, you know, it's, it's pretty low risk. The problem is, is a lot of our schools don't can't do that. Don't do that. And then the African, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:28:27 It feels like a lot of ifs. Yes. A lot of it, um, I want to talk a little about, um, you know, every year we have this magical thing called the flu shot and tons of people don't get it, but, and, and they get the flu. Um, a lot of people do get it and they may get a minor version or, but theoretically it keeps them healthier. Do you see that? Um, we, I mean, the, the vaccine is so early now, I don't know that we know unless you have a magic answer of how long these, you know, immunities last in your blood. Um, do you see this becoming a yearly thing?
Speaker 3 00:29:08 I think it probably is going to be one thing I want to mention on that though, since you brought the flu up, we have hardly any flu season this year, because all of the things that people are doing to try to prevent COVID are also preventing the flu. If you wear a mask and wash your hands all the time, and people got really good rates of people did get the flu vaccine this year, that we're seeing almost no flu this year.
Speaker 1 00:29:29 Amazing. Do you think the role, the vaccine, the flu and the, um, Corona vaccine into each other, or is that to be able to
Speaker 3 00:29:39 Be able to that's vaccine technology that is going to have to be worked on a little bit, um, to figure out exactly how much flu C the tricky thing of the flu is if we had the exact same flu every year, we
Speaker 1 00:29:54 Have to alter it. That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:29:56 It keeps shifting. It has all of these different antigens on it. And that we have to, every year we have, every year, what we do is we look at what was in South America and then the Southern hemisphere. And then we tried to guess our flu vaccine based on what was down there.
Speaker 1 00:30:11 Of course now we've got a certain population that I dunno, for whatever reason, they're not taking the precautions and the VAT, uh, this, this virus, particular virus keeps altering. Can you talk a little bit about how this affects the vaccine?
Speaker 3 00:30:29 So vaccine or viruses, viruses, they just, mutate viruses are not alive, but they kind of act like they're alive. And they're really clever, um, that they are constantly actually making mistakes in their genetic code. And sometimes those mistakes make it be that they just, they can't live and other mistakes that they make in the genetic code, make them a lot easier to do something. So they might, you know, stick to the lungs better, or they might pass from somebody's nose and last in the air better. And so what happens is if you have lots and lots of people that have virus in them, those viruses are all making mistakes. And then those mistakes can get passed from one person to another. And then you end up with these sort of super viruses. If you can just shut down the number of people that have virus in their system, then you're going to get rid of the chance for the virus to be making these mistakes. Because now it's only in two people instead of a thousand people. And so it's not going to be, have as many chances to make mistakes. And it's just those two people just aren't going to be able, how many people can those two people actually, in fact, right?
Speaker 1 00:31:35 So hence why they're saying wear a mask. Don't, you know, stay stayed distanced don't party, don't have gatherings. Um, and theoretically, this should stop it from at least, um, making other different types of viruses.
Speaker 3 00:31:53 Yup. This is the time really to do it because you know, now it's like, the answer is if you do this and enough people do it and then enough people get vaccine, we can shut it down.
Speaker 1 00:32:09 Uh, so I have my own theories on if people will do this or not, but, uh, do you, can you give us both some myths and facts that people, you know, maybe some myths that people think about vaccines and some facts that people don't know about them?
Speaker 3 00:32:31 Well, you know, there's, there's stuff out there. That's I dunno. Some of the stuff that I think of is just kind of like the crazy stuff. So the crazy stuff is, is that there's a tracker in it it's being injected into you. So that bill Gates can, you know, track you instead of just it already being tracked by your cell phone.
Speaker 1 00:32:49 Yeah, that's right. That's what I tell people.
Speaker 3 00:32:52 That's kind of the crazy stuff. And then on the other side of it is stuff that, you know, people are just worried. So one of the myths that's out there right now is that you will become infertile from it. So that was something, those are the kinds of things that are the hardest, because somebody who sounded, who sounded trustworthy, came up with this idea that there's a protein that's in your, um, in a pregnant woman, forming a placenta. It's the same protein that is in your, um, that's in the, um, COVID virus. And if you develop immunity to the, this vaccine, you're also gonna have, you know, fight this protein in your placenta and you won't be able to get pregnant. And it sounded very reasonable. And then people hear it, who, you know, a lot of people are worried about, you know, I'm gonna lose my fertility.
Speaker 3 00:33:43 And so, you know, people like, okay, I'm not going to get the vaccine, uh, which it turned out that it was just totally not true. Right. And, and, but it sounded so reasonable so that one's not true. Um, a lot of people think it's a live virus and that therefore, if I'm getting a live virus, then there's a chance I'm going to get COVID from them vaccine. But back in that, when we were talking before, this is there's absolutely no live virus in this vaccine. So you can't get COVID from it. I mean, those are the two big ones I'm hearing right now out there is that you'll becoming fertile or that you'll actually get COVID from it.
Speaker 1 00:34:22 I hadn't actually heard that first one, but that doesn't mean anything. I don't get out much. Um, so the, but the AstraZeneca did have live virus, right?
Speaker 3 00:34:36 So the AstraZeneca,
Speaker 1 00:34:38 Which has been pulled, I believe,
Speaker 3 00:34:40 Um, the AstraZeneca has been, is still in clinical trials. The problem is not that it doesn't work, that it, the virus is going to give you some, because the virus that's in it is actually a different live virus. Uh, okay. So it's, it's one of the ways, you know, so the MRA is the one way to do the vaccine. Another one is there's this virus that's been knocked down and made very weak, who that virus delivers the antigen, because we don't want to use COVID. Right. Exactly. So we use this other virus that's been knocked down and that other virus delivers the antigen to yourself the same way that kind of it's very, actually very similar to the MRI vaccine. The problem is with the AstraZeneca. One is that the, the, the little cartridge with the antigen that they put in is probably not a good match to the virus. Um, especially
Speaker 2 00:35:38 For that mutation that came from South Africa. So they pulled it in South Africa because it wasn't working and it wasn't that it was causing anything harmful. It's just that all these people were getting a vaccine that didn't work. And then
Speaker 1 00:35:52 No, not really. My understanding is they don't really know how the new mutations of the virus will totally act with the Madonna and the fiber.
Speaker 2 00:36:05 That's right. That's right. The there's three different mutants out there right now. The main one is the one that was in the UK. Everyone calls a UK virus. It seems that the modern and the Pfizer worked pretty well with that because you make so much antibody by it, then it floods the virus and, and, and seems to be holding it down. The problem is that South Africa one was a really clever one and made a bunch of different changes to itself. And so it seems that even though you got a high levels of antibody, um, it may not work as well.
Speaker 1 00:36:43 Do you worry that it will, the virus could mutate enough or often enough that will just be really hard to catch?
Speaker 2 00:36:53 Absolutely. I worked at that. That's why I'm especially so nuts about why people need to, why do we need to shoot the virus knocked down so that there's only a few people having it so that it doesn't have a chance to keep mutating and spreading. We got it. We got to cut down the spread on it so that these, um, these mutations won't have any effect. Then
Speaker 1 00:37:13 This time people are still like having to go through things like surgeries and or maybe they have a heart attacks where they have to go and be under, you know, get higher doses of medication. How is the virus effective with this? Does it, if you've just gone through surgery, can you still get the shot?
Speaker 2 00:37:39 Yes. You can still get the shots, um, that the shots appear to not have a lot of side effects we're using that bear's system of really, really encouraging people. If you see anything. Um, and so far have not seen anything serious. And you know, that person who's just gone through surgery or is having health issues. That person is probably going to be more, all of these, you have to look at it, which is higher rings, the higher risk of getting COVID and doing poorly with the COVID or the, the, the theoretical small risk of having a problem for the vaccine. So better to get the vaccine, um, at this point with every, all the way, no, right now, better to get the vaccine and to take your chances for coping.
Speaker 1 00:38:23 So even if they're on pen pain meds after surgery, it should still be okay for them to go.
Speaker 2 00:38:29 Yes. Yes. I mean, anybody that has gone through something like surgery, something like that, you know, their immune system is, is stressed. I mean, anytime you have any stress, your immune system is stressed. And so then the immune system doesn't do as good a job at protecting you from things why, you know, often people that, you know, have had surgery. So then they get a cold or, you know, something like that. So, you know, it's, it's hard to measure. You could have somebody in draw their blood and you're not gonna find it, but it's, we know that people who underground physiologic stress their, their immune, system's a little bit weakened from that.
Speaker 1 00:39:09 So now I have heard of an, I don't know if they are reporting it correctly, but that there have been people who have gotten COVID like between the two shots. So I, my theories are maybe they didn't mask. Maybe they thought they got one shot and they were safe and they just went out and did whatever. Um, I mean, the, the guesses are endless, but if you do get COVID between the two shots, what happens with the rest of the protocol of what you should do?
Speaker 2 00:39:41 We don't like to get, they should still get, they should still complete the series, but even people that have had COVID, um, can get reinfected, especially now the virus is, you know, a little bit different than the one that people had in the spring. I find not to give the people the shot, right. When they still actively have COVID. So say they got the shot two weeks ago and they're due in a week. We want them to kind of get over their initial COVID infection. And then you also want to think about it is they're going to have to go someplace to give that vaccine to get that vaccine. And you really don't want these people with COVID, you know, standing in line to get the vaccine, because like, do you want to spend the line next to that person? No, I don't know exactly. So we're asking those people to stay home until the COVID has kind of passed and then get their second dose of vaccine, or at least go past the, you know, we ask people that have had COVID too. Um, cause either 10 days or 14 days coming out of the house right now, the thing, you know, most people after that 10 to 14 days, aren't going to be infectious anymore. So it's probably not worth it getting a second, a second test, but you know, at least 10 to 14 days from the time they were sick.
Speaker 1 00:40:53 So, um, as you know, when we, we discussed that the show is all about disability topics. So to me, this was, um, dear to my heart because you know, so many drive-through places are popping up to get vaccines, you know, places that just are not conducive to people with disabilities. Like some people don't drive those people with disabilities, but elderly, maybe they don't drive. Um, they can't wait outside, tell it's their turn, uh, because of temp, you know, the weather is not a temperate climate, it's freezing cold or whatever, how are they doing? You know, how are they going to, um, do right by these people?
Speaker 0 00:41:39 So what are they doing?
Speaker 2 00:41:40 I advise people to go through their primary care doctor and tell them, you know, talk to their primary care doctor about their specific, um, specific barriers, whether it's not driving or, you know, having a place that's not wheelchair accessible or big. And that a lot of the times, those places, especially if somebody is going to, you know, one of the big universities that have the freezers, um, you can make arrangements, you know, for a small number of people with a specific reason that they can go in and get the vaccine.
Speaker 0 00:42:13 Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:42:15 So theoretically, but right now there's not a lot of vaccines going out of these. I mean, they seems to be done in either drive through or are huge places where people are,
Speaker 2 00:42:30 It's really good question. I mean, the, one of the things that's happening right now with the vaccine is there's a shortage of it. I think everybody has heard of that and there's this urgency to get it into people's arms. Um, and so people are really looking at what's the easiest way to get it in the most arms possible. And so a lot of people are getting left behind, you know, people are getting left behind who don't have transportation because it's, you know, it's 30 miles away because they live in a rural community. People are getting left behind who don't have a car or don't have a ride, or, you know, can't wait outside the convention center where the mass vaccination site is because at this point there's just, and it's not right. I'm not agreeing with it. Um, but at this point there's just this, like what is the way that we are going to get the most people vaccinated most quickly to try to get this virus knocked down on the population.
Speaker 2 00:43:29 And so anybody who falls into that sort of an exception to the rule, which the disability community is probably always in that, or very frequently, at least in that exception to the rule, uh, group have to do, you know, the clamoring, the, you know, calling the health department and saying, what are you going to have a special time for this? The health, the Minnesota health department does have an advisory council, um, to try to think these issues through, I don't know if there's somebody from the disability community on it, but I know that they advise that they brought in a pretty wide group. So one of the questions that I would ask the health department, which in general, I really have to say is doing a great job with it. I'm gargantuan task. I would ask them if they have a disability rep on their, you know, ethics advisory group,
Speaker 1 00:44:21 You know, you mentioned something I'm glad you mentioned about the, the large areas, large places that they're giving the vaccines in it. So is it that a whole bunch of people show up and wait around to get their vaccines?
Speaker 2 00:44:37 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right next to each other, we'll say that to the thing that, you know, everything is, you know, what the devil's in the details. Yeah. So it's, it's the people that are planning. It need to plan for people to be able to socially distance. I I've seen some pictures of like, they have this huge convention hall and then they make people wait in chairs because the chairs are all placed 10 feet apart. And whereas, you know, as soon as you put people standing up in a line, then they all start fostering together. Um, so it's, you know, the people planning, these have to be responsible and kind of no, cause it makes no sense to have, you know, a whole bunch of people. I saw a picture in Florida of, you know, a whole bunch of senior citizens, you know, in lawn chairs, like two feet apart, you'll wait overnight together to get the happy COVID. Yeah, exactly. They had talk about a super spreader event.
Speaker 1 00:45:30 Yeah. So what, how do we find out, you know, what the rollout, what the next phase of the rollout will be? Do you have any sense of what that will be
Speaker 2 00:45:42 Good website and Minnesota health department, um, that talks exactly about what the plans are or, you know, there's lots of documents about how their planning is going and you know, who's getting the vaccine and where and all that. So I would use that. Um, yeah, it it's varies a lot state by state. Right.
Speaker 1 00:46:00 I was going to say, is there a place that people can go in each state? Cause we're pretty global now. So is there a place that people can go in each state and look up for their state?
Speaker 2 00:46:12 I wouldn't go to your health department. So go to your health department, whatever state that you're in. And then also go to the CDC what's going on as a transition at the federal level of trying to have this happen at a federal level of having the federal government has sort of not dictate, but guide who gets the patching next. So it's not, if you live in Michigan, it's one thing and you live in Minnesota, it's another thing. And in Florida it appears to be a free for all. Um, so yeah, so that it is that there are clear lines, but you know, some of those clear lines have gotten in trouble too, because one of the things that happened in some places were very, very, I'm going to follow the rules. And even if I got 10 syringes here at the end of the day after I vaccinated everybody to show up, they throw out, um, instead of moving on to like, Hey, you're walking by, uh, let me give you this shot.
Speaker 2 00:47:08 And so this, this is a really hard thing to coordinate. Um, everything I have seen from the current administration is putting out they're using experts. Um, they're trying to come up with guidelines that people can agree upon, um, in a very fractured environment. Um, what has been kind of a free for all up until now, there was, there was one place that was giving vaccine and what you can remember what state it was, where people were waiting in line for four hours to give her a vaccine and their cars. And they, somebody brought in a manager from Chick-fil-A who came and said, well, if you're doing it all wrong and reorganized how they were doing it, and then people only wait 15 minutes. Wow. It shouldn't take getting a fast food guy in.
Speaker 1 00:47:59 How long do you think it will take till we start knowing how long the vaccine is going to last?
Speaker 2 00:48:06 I think we will know a lot more by June, July. I think we will have a lot more information in June, July, cause we'll have had, um, a lot more people get the vaccine, we'll have had a chance to see how it, how the mutations affect it. Um, and, and those, and also have a chance of seeing sort of, you know, those one-offs I think, I think we'll know by June, July, we'll have a lot more information by then also the CDC wasn't studying the effect of mutations and now I started doing that. Um, and so we're also going to have a lot more information.
Speaker 1 00:48:44 I, I talked to people and they're like, well, I think I'm going to wait to get my vaccine. I'm like, Oh, there are so many more people who've gotten it before us the weightings done, you know, there's no tell them why they should get their vaccine.
Speaker 2 00:49:01 At this point. The risk of getting COVID is so much higher. Um, it, and you know, it varies by state by state, but you know, you might be one of the lucky people who only gets a mild case, but even if you get a mild case, you can still give other people the illness and they might not have the mild case. So don't do it for yourself. Absolutely. Cause you might be one of those unlucky fees, but also do it for everyone you're around so that they don't also have to do play Russian roulette with us when they didn't make the choice to.
Speaker 1 00:49:33 Right. Um, and it feels like I want you to confirm this, but that there is no sense of how you're going to do. You might be perfectly healthy but die. Um, and, or you might be overweight, very heavy, very whatever. But you do find, I mean, you, you get sick, you get flu like symptoms, but you, you come through it and um, it feels like it's hitting various people in different ways. Is this correct?
Speaker 2 00:50:03 Yeah. I mean, if you look at a thousand people, the people that are on the heavier side are in general going to do poor, but there's going to be some people in the heavier side, they're going to do great, um, diabetes, hypertension. Those seem to be the things that you're real, you know, you're playing Russian roulette with, you know, four of the barrels. Um, whereas somebody else is going to get away with only one. Um, but yeah, yeah, it's you can't it. And especially, you know, and, but you know, the other part is like, you can't predict who you're going to give it to and you don't know their risk factors.
Speaker 1 00:50:34 Is there anyone who should not get the vaccine
Speaker 2 00:50:38 At this point? I there's. No, not what there is, is with caution. So if somebody has had a severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis to something, even like a bee sting or an antibiotic, they, if they get the vaccine, they need to tell the people at the vaccine place that they have had anaphylaxis because they need to make sure that there's a small number of people. It's like a couple per million, but there's a small number of people who have had anaphylaxis from this vaccine and that the people at the vaccine center need to know that and be ready that in case you do get the anaphylaxis, nobody has died from that.
Speaker 1 00:51:15 Okay, good. That's an excellent thing to point out because people like, well, people are, are, are reacting to this and I'm like, yeah, but it's so, so few. And they seem to be catching them. They're not dying. They're just, they catch up and they do what they need to do to get them back. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:51:34 They're all set up. They're all set up for it being probably the person who is doing anaphylaxis. They shouldn't go to one of these sites in like a stadium. They should probably go to one of the sites that's, you know, near an emergency room.
Speaker 1 00:51:46 And so for the, um, people who said, well, I've already had it, but you can still get reinfected. I want you to, to that. That's still a reason to get it. And you may not get it if you were not asymptomatic the first time you might not be the second time. Is that right?
Speaker 2 00:52:06 That's right. That's absolutely right.
Speaker 1 00:52:09 And you could get one of the other strains, presumably that's correct. But you can get reinfected from the same strain more than once, correct?
Speaker 2 00:52:17 Yep. Again, it's the quirky thing of the immune system. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:52:22 Can you do anything after you get the vaccine that makes it work better or worse?
Speaker 2 00:52:27 Yes. You need to hydrate really well. So drink lots of fluids. Like sort of all the things that if you actually get a flu type thing, so drink lots of fluids and take Tylenol or something like Motrin. Um, I found that, um, about 24 to 48 hours of just taking Bogin round the clock rather than waiting for symptoms, um, it appears that people are doing a lot better than the vaccine, especially the second dose people tend to do really well with their first dose. And the second does that tend to get a little bit more of a, a fever, a little bit of ch feels chills and kind of all over me, the second dose.
Speaker 1 00:53:02 Gotcha. Well, Jill, I really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything more you'd like to leave us with in regards to vaccines?
Speaker 2 00:53:11 Yeah, I don't think so. I think, I think, you know, you asked all the right questions. What made you choose
Speaker 1 00:53:16 This field of medicine?
Speaker 2 00:53:19 Um, I have always been very interested in taking care of the individual people, but also looking at things of having an impact on a bigger scale and vaccines are one of the miracles of modern medicine of that. You know, I grew up with a farm family that talked about all the children that died of things like theory and things like that. And so this is, this is vaccines are a miracle.
Speaker 1 00:53:47 Thank you so much for coming on. I greatly appreciate your time. And um, I guess, uh, hopefully we'll have bigger and better things to talk about in the future.
Speaker 2 00:53:59 Okay. Well, thank you.
Speaker 1 00:54:01 This has been disability and progress. The views expressed on the show are not necessarily those of cafe or its board of directors. My name is Sam. I'm the host of this show. Thank you so much for tuning in. We've been speaking with Dr. Jill foster director of the division of pediatric infectious disease at the university of Minnesota medical school. We were talking about vaccines. My name is Sam, the host of this show, showing dolls, my research assistant and Mason engineers. If you'd like to be on my email list, you may email me at disability and progress at Sam, jasmine.com again, disability and
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