Speaker 1: School of Humans. This is the tenth and final episode
Speaker 1: of Long Shot, and this time around, I want to
Speaker 1: do something different. We've covered a lot of vaccine ground
Speaker 1: in this series, starting thousands, even millions of years ago
Speaker 1: and bringing it forward to the pandemic days we're still
Speaker 1: living in. In this super episode of Long Shot, we'll
Speaker 1: go over all the coolest things from the series and
Speaker 1: fill in a few gaps along the way. It's gonna
Speaker 1: move pretty fast, but if you're listening to this series,
Speaker 1: your brain probably moves pretty fast too. From School of
Speaker 1: Humans and iHeartRadio, I'm Sean Revive and this is Long Shot.
Speaker 1: Let's get this party started two ninety three million years ago.
Speaker 1: That's when Joel Wertheim, an associate professor of Medicine at
Speaker 1: UC San Diego, estimates coronavirus has first appeared. Our estimates
Speaker 1: put the incestor of all coronaviruses at hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of years old, which actually would line up with the
Speaker 1: split between bats and birds or their divergence. Now, as
Speaker 1: much as I'd like to think, in all of that
Speaker 1: noise and all of that uncertainty, we managed to hit
Speaker 1: the nail on the head going back hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of years and identifying the split between bats and birds.
Speaker 1: I just think that that's a lucky happenstance, and nobody
Speaker 1: knows how old they are. Okay, so he's not really
Speaker 1: sure about that number, but it's probably safe to say
Speaker 1: that coronavirus has first appeared millions of years ago. But
Speaker 1: the practice of innoculation, the prevention of disease through contraction
Speaker 1: of that disease, doesn't start with coronaviruses. It starts with smallpox. Yep.
Speaker 1: Smallpox one of the deadliest diseases in human history, killer
Speaker 1: of hundreds of millions of people. Smallpox probably predates written history,
Speaker 1: but some Egyptian mummies were found with signs of smallpox.
Speaker 1: There are written descriptions of smallpox from seventh century India,
Speaker 1: so we know it goes back many hundreds of years
Speaker 1: at least. But what about smallpox inoculation. There's a legend
Speaker 1: about smallpox inoculators living unmountain in China about the millennium ago.
Speaker 1: The son of a local governor got very sick from smallpox,
Speaker 1: which by len had to plague the China for at
Speaker 1: least a thousand the years. The governor offered the piles
Speaker 1: of gold to anyone who could help. He's his son.
Speaker 1: Real documentation of inoculation comes about five hundred years later
Speaker 1: in a fifteen forty nine medical text by a Ming
Speaker 1: dynasty physician. Things start getting less hazy in the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: In sixteen eighty, in an ooculator named fushang Lin is
Speaker 1: chosen by an emperor in China to protect his children.
Speaker 1: Lo the Conci emperor, survived the smallpox, he did not
Speaker 1: escape it to trauma. Every time there was an outbreak
Speaker 1: of small pox, he was haunted both by his fallest
Speaker 1: death and by the isolation, and so when he grew
Speaker 1: into an adult, the county emperor searched far and wide
Speaker 1: for the umpire's best inoculators. Thirty five years later, in
Speaker 1: seventeen fifteen, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, a talented British poet
Speaker 1: and young aristocrat, gets smallpox, which is probably the single
Speaker 1: deadliest disease in England at the time. Her symptoms are horrible,
Speaker 1: a wicked fever, a rapid pulse, trouble breathing due to
Speaker 1: the swelling of her nose and throat, liquid filled pustules
Speaker 1: that eventually cover her entire body and face. Lady Mary
Speaker 1: survives the pox, but her face is scarred for life.
Speaker 1: The next year, she moves from London to Constantinople with
Speaker 1: her ambassador husband. There she hears the Turkish have a
Speaker 1: way of protecting against pox. What they do is purposefully
Speaker 1: inject a patient with a little smallpox matter, and that
Speaker 1: gives the patient lifelong protection from full blown smallpox. Two
Speaker 1: years later, in seventeen eighteen, Mary has her five year
Speaker 1: old son inoculated. He may be the first english person
Speaker 1: ever to be inoculated. And when she returns to London,
Speaker 1: she has her daughter inoculated by a surgeon named Charles Maitland.
Speaker 1: He'd go on to perform an innoculation experiment on prisoners
Speaker 1: in seventeen twenty two. Here's historian Arthur Boylson. So six
Speaker 1: of them, all of them quite young, late teens, early twenties,
Speaker 1: and they were all inoculated with a big public spectacle.
Speaker 1: They had all been sentenced to hang from various crimes.
Speaker 1: And the King agreed that he would allow Maitland to
Speaker 1: inoculate some prisoners. And at one point somebody complained to
Speaker 1: the King and said, even that's a fairly nasty thing.
Speaker 1: To do. McKey said, well, it's better than they preferred
Speaker 1: it to hang. Regardless of the ethics of this experiment,
Speaker 1: all six prisoners live and are pardoned. Meanwhile, around this time,
Speaker 1: an enslaved African brings anoculation to the United States. His
Speaker 1: name is One Samous and he's owned by a Puritan
Speaker 1: minister in Boston named Cotton Mather. And One Samous changes
Speaker 1: the course of inoculation history in the US. When Mather
Speaker 1: asks One Samius if he's ever had smallpox, on Samius
Speaker 1: replies both yes and no. He shows Mather a scar
Speaker 1: and says it's from an operation where he got a
Speaker 1: small mountain of smallpox in order to protect him from
Speaker 1: the disease. Years later, when a smallpox outbreak comes to Boston,
Speaker 1: Mather becomes the strongest voice in favor of anoculation, and
Speaker 1: by the time of the American Revolution, General George Washington
Speaker 1: makes an oculation standard practice for soldiers, so he inoculates
Speaker 1: the entire continent alarmy over a period of weeks. Within
Speaker 1: the army, it prevented smallpox, and thereafter inoculation became part
Speaker 1: of the enrollment ritual for new soldiers. They were given
Speaker 1: a shirt and gun shoes and inoculated. It's the reason
Speaker 1: the United States exists. A few decades after Lady Mary
Speaker 1: in the UK and once Amiss in the US, a
Speaker 1: family by the name of Sutton starts at innoculation business
Speaker 1: in rural England, traveling around and inoculating entire towns. They're
Speaker 1: the first inoculation entrepreneurs. It was explosive. There were villages
Speaker 1: all over the country that adopted the Suttonian system. They
Speaker 1: hire a preacher to speak of God's support for the practice.
Speaker 1: This is the way for our escape. Reason directs us
Speaker 1: to it. Experience proves the utility and safety. This sickness,
Speaker 1: as caused by innoculation, is not unto death. The Sutton's
Speaker 1: helped make anoculation to mainstream practice, and by the time
Speaker 1: their work is finished, a new type of smallpox prevention
Speaker 1: is discovered by Edward Jenner. The legend goes that he
Speaker 1: meets a milkmaid with perfect skin and she tells him
Speaker 1: about being exposed to cow pox, which gives her protection
Speaker 1: from smallpox. We all know and believe that beautiful story
Speaker 1: of the milk Maide and how she was gorgeous, but
Speaker 1: it's not true. It's made up. Even if the story
Speaker 1: isn't true, Jenner does pretty much invent vaccination with his
Speaker 1: use of cowpox to fight smallpox. In seventeen ninety six,
Speaker 1: Dinner makes history by testing his vaccine on his Gardner's son,
Speaker 1: eight year old James Phipps, and the boy lives. In
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties, Louis Pasteur creates vaccines for anthrax and
Speaker 1: then rabies, using the practice of attenuation, weakening the virus
Speaker 1: before injecting it into the body. In nineteen eighteen, the
Speaker 1: Spanish flu arrives and sort of takes over the entire
Speaker 1: world for a couple of years, killing somewhere around fifty
Speaker 1: million people. The next year, Maurice Hilleman is born. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm Marie's Haliman. I had a long career in science,
Speaker 1: about sixty years. Hilleman is the goat of vaccine invention.
Speaker 1: He helps develop most of the vaccines that we get today, measles, rubella,
Speaker 1: hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Beninjacoccus, hib streptococcus, chicken pox. That's
Speaker 1: all him. He also accidentally helps discover ad no viruses
Speaker 1: while culturing the cells of a dead man's trachea. And
Speaker 1: I said, well, I'd like to have his trachia. So
Speaker 1: I went over to the morgue and waited for him
Speaker 1: to carve out the trachea, wrapped it up newspaper and
Speaker 1: brown back the lab, cut dope and start chopping on tissue.
Speaker 1: Some days, you know, everything just goes right. Ad No
Speaker 1: viruses are used today as a delivery system for some
Speaker 1: of the COVID vaccines, like Astra's ENCAS and Johnson and Johnson's.
Speaker 1: Hillman even creates a vaccine from his own daughter's cells
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three. The name of the vaccine is
Speaker 1: the Journal and Strain. It's on all of the boxes
Speaker 1: and package inserts that come out. I have had the
Speaker 1: pleasure throughout my life of also being called Miss Mumps,
Speaker 1: and usually by pediatricians. And while Maurice Hillman is doing
Speaker 1: his thing, some other cool things are happening with vaccines.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen forties, we've got new vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus,
Speaker 1: and pertussis. In nineteen fifty five, Jonah Saut comes out
Speaker 1: with his vaccine for polio. There's also some not so
Speaker 1: cool stuff happening when the polio vaccine comes out. One
Speaker 1: of the company's mass producing it cut her laboratory messes
Speaker 1: up and creates tens of thousands of doses containing live poliovirus.
Speaker 1: Fifty one people are paralyzed and five die after getting
Speaker 1: the vaccine meant to prevent polio. And in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: a vaccine trial for respiratories and scial virus and DC
Speaker 1: goes bad. Eighteen babies, mostly from poor black families, end
Speaker 1: up in the hospital and two of them die. RSV
Speaker 1: can be deadly in children, and there is still no
Speaker 1: FDA proof vaccine today. We'll get back to RSP in
Speaker 1: a sec In nineteen eighty, smallpox returns to the news
Speaker 1: when the World Health Assembly officially declares the virus eradicated. Yes,
Speaker 1: after thousands of years, vaccines have ridded the world of
Speaker 1: one of humanity's greatest killers. But HIV and AIDS appear
Speaker 1: around that time. They spread throughout the eighties, at first
Speaker 1: primarily in gay men, but also in intravenous drug users
Speaker 1: and later in countries in Africa. Virologist named Eddie Holmes
Speaker 1: goes to Edinburgh, Scotland to study HIV spread in the
Speaker 1: early nineties. What we were trying to do was trying
Speaker 1: to work out how the virus was spreading through that population,
Speaker 1: how it diffused, and how it got into city, and
Speaker 1: how it spreading. In the nineties, a team at the
Speaker 1: US National Institutes of Health creates a vaccine called rhoda
Speaker 1: Shield to fight a deadly childhood disease called rhodavirus. Rhoda
Speaker 1: Shield gets the nod from the CDC, but within months
Speaker 1: some cases of a rare intestinal disorder pop up and
Speaker 1: the CDC withdraws its recommendation. But all throughout the eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties, another team of researchers is working on a
Speaker 1: rival vaccine for rhodavirus called Rhodotech. That one gets low
Speaker 1: from the FDA and CDC in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: but not before the biggest clinical trial in the history
Speaker 1: of medicine eleven countries and nearly seventy thousand infants. Here's
Speaker 1: Paul Offitt, one of the developers of Rhodotech, and it
Speaker 1: ended in so called Phase three trial, a prospect the
Speaker 1: placebo control, the eleven country four year, three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars trial to prove that the vaccine worked.
Speaker 1: The size of that enormous trial leads to the similarly
Speaker 1: giant trials we have in twenty twenty for the COVID vaccines.
Speaker 1: Johnson and Johnson, Astra, Zeneca, Fizer, Maderna, and others around
Speaker 1: the world are all amongst the largest clinical trials ever.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and two, we get an outbreak of
Speaker 1: severe acute respiratory syndrome the first stars. More than eight
Speaker 1: thousand people in twenty nine countries get it, but by
Speaker 1: two thousand and four it mostly dies out thanks to
Speaker 1: people like Maurice Hilleman. We've got tons of vaccines at
Speaker 1: this point. But in two thousand and six, a new
Speaker 1: discovery leads to all sorts of advances in medicine, including
Speaker 1: the way we make vaccines. That year, Shinya Yamanaka, a
Speaker 1: Japanese researcher, discovers a way to reprogram mature mouse cells
Speaker 1: into immature cells. They can then be turned to whatever
Speaker 1: type of cells he wants. Here's Derek Rossi who's in
Speaker 1: the audience when Yamanaka announces his discovery. So what he
Speaker 1: demonstrated was that he could take any cell type, any
Speaker 1: differentiated cell which would normally we had thought been sort
Speaker 1: of fixed in its identity, but he discovered a way
Speaker 1: by introducing four genes to turn back the developmental time
Speaker 1: on what was differentiated cell type and reverted back to
Speaker 1: an embryonic stem cell like state. Derek is at Harvard
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven and he wants to build
Speaker 1: upon Yamanaka's work changing mature cells to immature cells. Yamanaka
Speaker 1: is inserting strands of DNA into cells in order to
Speaker 1: change them, but this is dangerous for humans. It could
Speaker 1: give you cancer. So Derek decides to use mRNA instead,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like skipping a step in the
Speaker 1: way that life is made. I call it the trifect
Speaker 1: of life. DNA makes mRNA, protein makes life. Postdoctor Othello.
Speaker 1: In my lab, doctor Luigi Warren had the idea, very
Speaker 1: simple idea, just saying, hey, you know, we need to
Speaker 1: make these transcription factors. Let's just skip the whole DNA part.
Speaker 1: Let's just use m rna. That turns out to be
Speaker 1: a genius move, but he runs into another problem When
Speaker 1: he puts RNA into cells, the cells think they're being
Speaker 1: attacked by a virus, which caused the cell to respond
Speaker 1: by saying, looks like a virus is coming in. Let's
Speaker 1: shut down the protein production. And it really looks like
Speaker 1: a virus is coming in, so let's kill ourselves, you know,
Speaker 1: an altruistic suicide and cell death, which is a good
Speaker 1: thing for the cell to do, you know, rather than
Speaker 1: let it be hijacked by a virus and have it
Speaker 1: make hundreds of thousands of viral particles. He finds a
Speaker 1: workaround from a couple of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: The researchers are Catlin Corrico and Drew Weissman, and they
Speaker 1: figured about a cloaking method for tricking cells into not
Speaker 1: thinking they're being invaded. Derek integrates it into his own
Speaker 1: work and lo and behold, now we can change human
Speaker 1: cells without killing them or causing cancerous mutations. That was
Speaker 1: the sort of technological breakthrough that led to the development
Speaker 1: of modified mRNA. We called it in the lab mod RNA.
Speaker 1: He takes this work down the street to Bob Langer,
Speaker 1: a serial entrepreneur based at MT, and they start a
Speaker 1: company that they eventually name Maderna. By the way, just
Speaker 1: as a a fun fact, you know, Maderna. It comes
Speaker 1: from the term that we used in the lab describing
Speaker 1: the technology. We called it mad RNA. So mod RNA
Speaker 1: if you put any in there, you get Maderna. That's
Speaker 1: where the name came from. At its formation, Maderna has
Speaker 1: exactly zero full time employees and no products. They won't
Speaker 1: have one for ten more years. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: structural biologist Jason McClellan takes a job at the NIH
Speaker 1: where he meets Barney Graham. Graham wants to create a
Speaker 1: vaccine for RSV, which is that virus I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that can kill infants. The RSV vaccine that failed back
Speaker 1: in the sixties was made by weakening a strain of
Speaker 1: the virus by passing it through animal tissue or human cells.
Speaker 1: That's how Maurice Hilleman made a lot of his vaccines.
Speaker 1: But Jason and doctor Graham have a new method in mind.
Speaker 1: They want to mess with the F protein of RSV.
Speaker 1: That's the one the virus uses to infect human cells.
Speaker 1: Before the F protein attaches itself to a human cell,
Speaker 1: it is in its prefusion state. If you think of
Speaker 1: your immune system as a security guard, you want to
Speaker 1: train your immune system to recognize the form that might
Speaker 1: infect you, like the dangerous form, and that's the prefusion form.
Speaker 1: If you train it to recognize the postfusion form, the
Speaker 1: prefusion form can still sneak by you. Barney, Graham, and
Speaker 1: Jason want to figure out how to keep the F
Speaker 1: protein in this state, and in twenty thirteen they do.
Speaker 1: They figure out a way to sort of staypule the
Speaker 1: protein so it stays in that form. And when Barney
Speaker 1: immunized mice and compared postfusion versus prefusion, the mice receiving
Speaker 1: the prefusion form of the F protein elicited neutralizing antibodies
Speaker 1: about ten times higher than those that received the postfusion.
Speaker 1: This is the first time that structural biology, looking super
Speaker 1: closely at the structure of a virus helps discover a
Speaker 1: new way to stop it. But now they want to
Speaker 1: see what other viruses they can work on using this
Speaker 1: prefusion protein state. This is right around the time that
Speaker 1: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome is first reported in Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 1: MERS is a really bad coronavirus. Thirty five percent of
Speaker 1: people infected with it we're dying. It's a real lethal virus,
Speaker 1: and we thought that this would be a good target
Speaker 1: to try to take everything we had just learned about
Speaker 1: RSP and apply it to not just MERS, but coronaviruses
Speaker 1: in general, because we knew the Stars coronavirus had emerged
Speaker 1: in China in two thousand and two and it caused
Speaker 1: an epidemic. It turns out that MERS has a protein
Speaker 1: that works kind of like the rsv F protein. It's
Speaker 1: called the spike protein, and when the merge virus attacks
Speaker 1: human cells, the spike injects itself into them in order
Speaker 1: to spread throughout the body. But it's not easy to
Speaker 1: staple the spike protein. It takes tons of trial and error.
Speaker 1: Here's Nanchan Wang Jason's post doc to explain how hard
Speaker 1: it is to figure this out. We got to try
Speaker 1: again and again most of the time. It's got to feel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not so too easy actually to find their mutation
Speaker 1: that to stabilize as product, it's pretty italented. By twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: they figure out how to staple the spike protein in
Speaker 1: place and use that to teach the immune system to
Speaker 1: fight off a MERGS infection, but they don't have any
Speaker 1: people to test it on. Turns out MERS doesn't spread
Speaker 1: very easily and the outbreak is mostly over by then.
Speaker 1: No outbreak means no human trials, no human trials, means
Speaker 1: they can't be sure that stabilizing the spike protein really
Speaker 1: works as a vaccine candidate. Then in December twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: a new coronavirus appears. Here's Derek Rossing. You could see that.
Speaker 1: You know, it was really snowballing. I mean it had
Speaker 1: everything that a good pathogen would want. It was a respiratory.
Speaker 1: When it was first being reported, the fatality rates and
Speaker 1: the illness rates were very very high. We didn't, you know,
Speaker 1: it was a new virus. We didn't know how to
Speaker 1: respond to it. So the fatality rate was around two percent.
Speaker 1: That's pretty darn serious. In mid December twenty nineteen, a
Speaker 1: worker at the Huanan seafood wholesale market gets sick with
Speaker 1: theemmonia like symptoms. He's admitted to Central Hospital of Wuha
Speaker 1: and he's one of the first novel coronavirus patients in
Speaker 1: the world. Central hospital happens to be where British phiologist
Speaker 1: Eddie Holmes and it's Chinese colleague Jan Jang Jang are
Speaker 1: studying patients with acute respiratory symptoms around that time. But
Speaker 1: what that meant was we were kind of like on site,
Speaker 1: almost looking at the same Z syndrome in the right
Speaker 1: tissue samples with the right technology, and so we happen
Speaker 1: to be in the wrong place the wrong time. I
Speaker 1: feel like when it all kind of started, and that's
Speaker 1: gave us an open door to really to try and
Speaker 1: look at some of the early first cases to see
Speaker 1: what was going on. Late at night and January fifth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Jang finishes sequencing the virus, but Chinese authorities
Speaker 1: are trying to keep anything related to the virus from
Speaker 1: being made public. The Ministry of Health were controlling everything,
Speaker 1: and they wanted They wanted to control the message, they
Speaker 1: wanted to damp down on rumors, they wanted to be
Speaker 1: in control of the situation. On January eleventh, Jang gets
Speaker 1: on a plane in Shanghai and is about to take
Speaker 1: off when his phone buzzes. It's Eddie. I cooled jan
Speaker 1: very early, and I said we need to release he
Speaker 1: stay tonight. Jang agrees, has a post duct send the
Speaker 1: sequence to Eddie. Eddie tweets out a link. That moment
Speaker 1: kicks off development for the COVID nineteen vaccines, and that's
Speaker 1: exactly what Jason McClellan starts working on the reports were
Speaker 1: coming out of these pneumonia clusters in Wuhan. We could
Speaker 1: just see it following along on science Twitter and on
Speaker 1: the news. And then it was early in January when
Speaker 1: it was learned that, in fact, it is a coronavirus
Speaker 1: beta coronavirus that's similar to the first stars Kobe from
Speaker 1: two thousand and two. Jason's at the University of Texas. Now,
Speaker 1: I was a snowboarding with my family in Park City, Utah,
Speaker 1: and Barney Graham called me. He said he was in
Speaker 1: contact with the US CDC Chinese CDC and they were
Speaker 1: going to try and work quickly work with Maderna try
Speaker 1: and create a vaccine. Maderna is still considered an upstart
Speaker 1: company at best, and it's never brought a vaccine to market.
Speaker 1: Anyone to know if if we were interested in continuing
Speaker 1: our collaboration to determine the structure of the stars cope
Speaker 1: to spike protein and use that information to create the
Speaker 1: vaccine antigens, Jason texts has graduate student Daniel Rep. We
Speaker 1: were sort of ready to go, that's Daniel, because we've
Speaker 1: been studying these spike proteins for such a long time.
Speaker 1: We knew how to effectively stabilize spike in the prefusion
Speaker 1: confirmation and that acts as a really good vaccine candidate.
Speaker 1: Within a few weeks, they figure out how to stabilize
Speaker 1: the spike protein of the novel coronavirus. But to make
Speaker 1: a vaccine work, they need to make sure the mRNA
Speaker 1: gets where it needs to go to instruct the body
Speaker 1: to make stabilize spike proteins. What MADERNA does is encapsulate
Speaker 1: the mRNA in a lipid nanoparticle shell to protect the
Speaker 1: mRNA on its way to doing its things. Here's biochemist
Speaker 1: Thomas Madden of Acuteous Therapeutics in Vancouver to remind us
Speaker 1: what an l enp is and does. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to order a really fragile glass ornament online and you
Speaker 1: wanted it delivered to your to your home, if you
Speaker 1: used the equivalent of our delivery technology, then the ornament
Speaker 1: would be would be wrapped and packaged to protect it
Speaker 1: and noboutter how rough the journey was to your to
Speaker 1: your house. The package would would find your house, it
Speaker 1: would open the front deck door by itself and let
Speaker 1: itself in, and then it would unwrap itself. So the
Speaker 1: ornament is waiting for you to come along and pick
Speaker 1: up in your hallway, so the lipidano particle delivers the vaccine,
Speaker 1: kind of like how FedEx delivers a package. Around the
Speaker 1: same time that the Phase one trials from Aderna begin,
Speaker 1: the US starts shutting down. Rush to the grocery store
Speaker 1: like every single other person, and you know, the meat
Speaker 1: sections were empty, and that just kind of that was
Speaker 1: a little eerie to see. This is Nicola Pescarilli, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I just felt like everything was
Speaker 1: closed off, and I didn't like that feeling. And so
Speaker 1: it's like, what can I do to get everything to
Speaker 1: return back to normal as soon as possible? What can
Speaker 1: I do? What can I do to make things better?
Speaker 1: Because I felt just so hopeless. Tom Hanks has COVID,
Speaker 1: the NBA has shut down, entire cities and countries around
Speaker 1: the world shut down, and Nicola volunteers for the Phase
Speaker 1: one trial at the Hope Clinic in Atlanta. I'm in
Speaker 1: Phase one, like, I am one of fifteen people getting
Speaker 1: the highest dosage that no one else in this country,
Speaker 1: in this world has ever gotten. And I think for
Speaker 1: a moment, I thought, oh God, it might crazy, Like
Speaker 1: could I die? And then I was like, no, it's fine.
Speaker 1: Modern medicine is great, and it is great. The phase
Speaker 1: one trial is a success. It was a very small process,
Speaker 1: and I remember afterwards they wanted me to stay to
Speaker 1: observe me for a while after the vaccine, and it
Speaker 1: was still just like getting used to the whole new
Speaker 1: change in the world. Meanwhile, more than a hundred other
Speaker 1: vaccines are in the works around the world, all sorts
Speaker 1: of them spot Nick in Russia, Sino farm and Sino
Speaker 1: vac in China, Astra Zenica in the UK, Covaccine in India,
Speaker 1: Soberana two in Cuba. They are mr Anda vaccines, had
Speaker 1: no virus, vaccines, in activated vaccines. There are even vaccines
Speaker 1: grown and tobacco like plants. But in the meantime, before
Speaker 1: the vaccines are actually rolled out, lots of people are
Speaker 1: getting sick and lots of people are dying, and nearly
Speaker 1: everyone else is stuck at home, stuck caring for people,
Speaker 1: confused about what to do and how to live. So
Speaker 1: happy Halloween to me. Turns out I did have COVID.
Speaker 1: A lot of us are really lonely, unable to see
Speaker 1: friends or family, no office to go to. Some people
Speaker 1: get COVID pets. Like Marina in Sweden, I was having
Speaker 1: a really hard time sticking to any sort of schedule
Speaker 1: because the days were all the same and there was
Speaker 1: nothing to do. And then when COVID came around and
Speaker 1: I had been working from home for nine or ten months,
Speaker 1: I was just at my wits end, like so sick
Speaker 1: of just being by myself. So I decided, like, now
Speaker 1: is the time I'll get a dog. I can be
Speaker 1: at home and train the dog. It seemed like a
Speaker 1: good idea, but during COVID everything is more complicated and
Speaker 1: plans just continuously get fucked up for everyone all the time.
Speaker 1: In a slightly different world, I would have gone all
Speaker 1: those things I wanted, but in a COVID world, I
Speaker 1: didn't get any of them. Some people get sick and
Speaker 1: stay sick, like Dave Hockaday in Oxford. It's just getting
Speaker 1: worse each day. And then of course the fatigue was building,
Speaker 1: that was getting worse, and there was just generally feeling
Speaker 1: starting to feel really unwealth inflamed hot, was getting chills
Speaker 1: at night times and night sweats, insomnia, dreadful nightmares. My god,
Speaker 1: the nightmares were horrific. People like Dave have long COVID
Speaker 1: and even today it's unclear what exactly is causing it.
Speaker 1: Just seeing the numbers like them, an average number of
Speaker 1: symptoms that long COVID patients had. That's Athena Akramy, a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist at University College London. She got COVID in March
Speaker 1: twenty twenty and seventeen months later she's still sick. She
Speaker 1: now spends a lot of her time studying long COVID.
Speaker 1: The average number of symptoms is more than fifty. Just
Speaker 1: like seeing that number that like one person I can't
Speaker 1: experience fifty different symptoms was kind of, I don't know, shocking,
Speaker 1: and it seems like long COVID it will be a
Speaker 1: huge problem for years to come. We are just like
Speaker 1: accumulating so many long covides down like in a year,
Speaker 1: probably each country will have millions of people, most of
Speaker 1: them again previously young and faith that now they are
Speaker 1: just like really struggling to go back to semi normal life.
Speaker 1: That I really don't know what we'll how. It's a crisis,
Speaker 1: it's a health crisis. But on a positive note. By
Speaker 1: early twenty twenty one, three vaccines have gotten emergency authorization
Speaker 1: in the US and they start making their way to
Speaker 1: healthcare workers and the elderly. There are major hiccups at first.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's damn near impossible for some people to
Speaker 1: get appointments because there's no central system to do that.
Speaker 1: It's a goddamn free for all instead of an orderly line.
Speaker 1: At first, I was not successful at finding a vaccine.
Speaker 1: That's Stanley Plutkin, one of the world's top experts on vaccines.
Speaker 1: Even the guy who literally wrote the book on vaccines,
Speaker 1: has trouble getting an appointment at first. He's eighty eight
Speaker 1: years old and really vulnerable if he gets COVID. What
Speaker 1: do you mean you weren't successful, even like you were,
Speaker 1: You couldn't get an appointment at first? Yes, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think initially of finding it was not easy. Initially
Speaker 1: there was a lot of uncertainty about where vaccines were available,
Speaker 1: how much was available, etc. That's how chaotic it is
Speaker 1: in the beginning of twenty twenty one, and so it
Speaker 1: became a You still have to navigate systems that are
Speaker 1: largely fragmented and by the way, all online in order
Speaker 1: to secure an appointment. And guess what, the very populations
Speaker 1: that were favored is early beneficiaries of New York States
Speaker 1: vaccine program are precisely the populations who can't be on
Speaker 1: the internet all day or are not on the internet,
Speaker 1: so the elderly, restaurant workers, grocery store workers, taxi drivers.
Speaker 1: That's s Metro Khalita, whose organization Epicenter NYC helps get
Speaker 1: people vaccine appointments in Jackson Heights, Queens back when it's
Speaker 1: super hard to do it if you aren't really Internet savvy.
Speaker 1: But eventually there's so much vaccine out there in the
Speaker 1: US that anyone who wants a shot can get one.
Speaker 1: Of course, not everyone does. One way to get vaccines
Speaker 1: made and distributed faster for the next pandemic is to
Speaker 1: use human challenge trials. That's where people get a disease
Speaker 1: on purpose so that doctors and scientists can study it.
Speaker 1: The first human challenge trial for COVID begins in the
Speaker 1: UK in March twenty twenty one, and Jacob Hopkins is
Speaker 1: one of the participants. Speaks of getting and COVID is
Speaker 1: the most surreal thing in the world, Like it's intimidating.
Speaker 1: This is him describing how they infect him during the trial.
Speaker 1: It's like Jesus Christ, like this is like intense, and
Speaker 1: they get this huge p pair. It's like almost like
Speaker 1: a turkey basis, Like it's a massive pair they have.
Speaker 1: They pick it up, they start counting down, So they
Speaker 1: count down from twenty, which is adds to the suspense really,
Speaker 1: and then they kind of like drop up in each nostrils,
Speaker 1: so they kind of drop it around the outside of
Speaker 1: the one nostril and then did the other and then
Speaker 1: their way and they count not from twenty again and
Speaker 1: then they repeat. You're kind of just sit like you're
Speaker 1: kind of just laying there in silence, like just thinking,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I've just been infected with coronavirus, and
Speaker 1: like it kind of obviously kind of hits in at
Speaker 1: that point. And while the UK and US and other
Speaker 1: wealthy nations are overloaded with vaccines, poorer countries can't get
Speaker 1: enough to vaccinate even small portions of their people. Even
Speaker 1: with donations trickling in from miserly nations like the US,
Speaker 1: low incombinations are still only two percent vaccinated on average,
Speaker 1: And so a bunch of researchers get together and create
Speaker 1: a new vaccine that can be produced cheaply and easily.
Speaker 1: Here's Bruce Innis from the organization PATH. We're extremely interested
Speaker 1: in ensuring that countries where health budgets are not strong
Speaker 1: have access to world class vaccines that are life saving.
Speaker 1: On the proposition that everyone deserves to have access to
Speaker 1: life saving vaccines. PATH has helped coordinate the development of
Speaker 1: this new vaccine, which is called ndv HXPS. It uses
Speaker 1: a new stabilized spike protein called hexapro developed by Jason
Speaker 1: McClellan and his colleagues at UT and then also starting
Speaker 1: to make a second generation spike protein that was even
Speaker 1: more stable than the two protein form. The engineered protein
Speaker 1: is carried into the body by Newcastle disease by, which
Speaker 1: is an avian virus. Here's Peter Palaze, a microbiologist at
Speaker 1: Mount Sinai who helped develop the vaccine, and so we said, okay, right,
Speaker 1: don't we put the sous coronavirus spike protein into Newcastle
Speaker 1: disease bows and thens what we did, so we have
Speaker 1: a vector ven vaccine. The big difference between this vaccine
Speaker 1: and the ones we've gotten in the US is that
Speaker 1: it's cheaper to make because it's grown in chicken eggs
Speaker 1: just like most flu shots, and it's being piloted in Vietnam, Brazil,
Speaker 1: and Thailand. Already here's Bruce again. They've made multiple lots
Speaker 1: of vaccine, initially at pilot scale, which might involve a
Speaker 1: few thousand eggs, and we're getting typically about seven to
Speaker 1: eight finished vaccine doses per inoculated egg. You can think
Speaker 1: of the egg as a mini bioreactor, each one self
Speaker 1: contained bioreactor. And now they're in the process of manufacturing
Speaker 1: the investigational vaccine at full commercial scale. Some phase one
Speaker 1: clinical trials have already finished and the results are promising,
Speaker 1: but the new vaccine still needs to go through the
Speaker 1: big phase three trials. If they go well, ndv HXBS
Speaker 1: may end up being, at least for some countries, the
Speaker 1: future of coronavirus vaccines. That brings us to the end
Speaker 1: of this podcast. We started millions of years ago and
Speaker 1: finished still in a pandemic with no clear end. Variants
Speaker 1: are here, people are still getting sick and dying, and
Speaker 1: life is still weird and annoying even if you're healthy.
Speaker 1: I'm personally super impressed with all the incredible researchers and
Speaker 1: volunteers and historians we heard from and about. I mean,
Speaker 1: how the hell the first human being figured out that
Speaker 1: giving someone a little bit of a disease to protect
Speaker 1: from a lot of it hundreds, if not thousands of
Speaker 1: years go, is just mind blowing to me. But just
Speaker 1: a reminder. This is not the entire story. It's just
Speaker 1: what I've been able to cover in this relatively short
Speaker 1: ten parts series. There are a ton of people who
Speaker 1: have made important contributions to so many vaccines, lots of
Speaker 1: names that have gone unsaid by me and by others,
Speaker 1: lots of people whose work has helped save hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of lives, and also hundreds of millions of lives
Speaker 1: that have been lost along the way. As of today,
Speaker 1: four point seven seven million people have died of COVID,
Speaker 1: and they include, just to name a few, Darlene Ray, Rose,
Speaker 1: Marie Fazzio, Ron Kieran, Adel Cercelli, Kenny Cassina, Doctor Ferkin,
Speaker 1: Ali Sadiki, Patricia Francis Prescott, Mark Dvorschak, and my aunt Rifka.
Speaker 1: A COVID vaccine could have saved almost all of those
Speaker 1: four point seven seven million people, just like a smallpox
Speaker 1: vaccine has saved who the hell knows how many people.
Speaker 1: My hope is that when the next pandemic. Hits will
Speaker 1: be able to create a vaccine even faster and get
Speaker 1: it to more people faster, but that'll depend on more research,
Speaker 1: more domestic and international cooperation, and more agreement in the
Speaker 1: world in general. There's just no way to protect the
Speaker 1: world unless the whole world is protected. Now, let's end
Speaker 1: this thing with another dip into the recent past. March
Speaker 1: twenty seven, twenty one, the first Boutanese person is about
Speaker 1: to get her first shot of a COVID vaccine. Her
Speaker 1: name is Ninda, which roughly translates to the Sun and
Speaker 1: the Moon. She's thirty years old and was born in
Speaker 1: the Year of the Monkey. The nurse who will administer
Speaker 1: her shot is also thirty years old and also born
Speaker 1: in the Year of the Monkey. After being picked to
Speaker 1: be the first person in her country to be vaccinated,
Speaker 1: Ninda says, let the small step of mind today help
Speaker 1: us all prevail through this illness. She sits with her
Speaker 1: back to her room full of massed healthcare workers and monks,
Speaker 1: and they pray together until she gets her shot. Long
Speaker 1: Shot is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was produced, written and narrated by me Sean Ravie.
Speaker 1: A Co producer is Gabby Watts. Special thanks to Noel
Speaker 1: Brown and iHeartRadio. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,
Speaker 1: and Brandon Barr. Fact Checking for this episode is by
Speaker 1: Adam Shadow. Long Shot was scored by Jason Shannon. The
Speaker 1: score was mixed by Vick Stafford. Sound design and audio
Speaker 1: mixed was by Harber Harris with Tune Welders School of
Speaker 1: Humans