Speaker 1: School of Humans. Fair warning, this episode starts with diarrhea. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from someone with the rare distinction
Speaker 1: of having a vaccine named after them because it's made
Speaker 1: from their cells. We'll also speak with a vaccine historian
Speaker 1: who also happens to be a vaccine inventor, and who
Speaker 1: also happens to have written a book about the world's
Speaker 1: greatest vaccine maker. From My Heart Radio and School of Humans,
Speaker 1: I'm Sean Revived and this is long shot. Just saying
Speaker 1: diarrhea or anything related to the butt gets a laugh
Speaker 1: from me or by two year old, but it's a killer.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of thousands of kids die from it every year.
Speaker 1: There's a really serious thing that causes diarrhea, and it's
Speaker 1: called rhodavirus. Rhodavirus can give infants and young kids nausea
Speaker 1: and fever. Can also give them days of watery diarrhea,
Speaker 1: and if those kids can't get rehydrated, they'll die. Almost
Speaker 1: every kid in the world under five gets rhodavirus at
Speaker 1: some point. It's everywhere. The question is how do you
Speaker 1: stop it. Historically, the answer has been a shit ton
Speaker 1: of research, years of trial and error, hits and missus
Speaker 1: in the nineties, a team at the US National Institutes
Speaker 1: of Health merged a human rhodavirus strain with a monkey
Speaker 1: rhodavirus strain to create a single vaccine called Rhoda Shield.
Speaker 1: It did clinical trials in a few countries. Those went
Speaker 1: really well. The FDA approved Rhoda Shield and the CDC
Speaker 1: recommended it for every infant born in the US. This
Speaker 1: was in August nineteen ninety eight. Over the next few months,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of American infants got at least one
Speaker 1: dose of Rhoda Shield, and it looked like we finally
Speaker 1: had a tool to take on this virus that was
Speaker 1: killing poor children all around the world. It was a
Speaker 1: huge deal. But then in late nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 1: CDC withdrew its recommendation of the vaccine. Rhoda Shield had
Speaker 1: only been used for about nine months. There was no
Speaker 1: question that the vaccine was effective in stopping rhodavirus, but
Speaker 1: some children who got Rhoda Shield were struck with a
Speaker 1: rare and dangerous condition called into susception. It's an intestinal
Speaker 1: disorder that can be fatal in infants if not treated.
Speaker 1: There weren't many cases, just a dozen at first, but
Speaker 1: that was higher than expected based on the clinical trials,
Speaker 1: and a deeper investigation found even more cases. Still, the
Speaker 1: risk of getting sick or dying from rhodavirus was far
Speaker 1: greater than the risks of into susception. But now American
Speaker 1: children couldn't even get Rhoda Shield. Even worse, when the
Speaker 1: CDC withdrew its recommendation, developing countries across the globe also
Speaker 1: didn't want to use Rhoda Shield. A vaccine that could
Speaker 1: save two thousand lives per day, mostly poor children's lives,
Speaker 1: just stopped being used, and for seven years rhodavirus vaccines disappeared.
Speaker 1: When we talk about rhodavirus, one of the names you
Speaker 1: have to know is Paul Offitt. True. I think any
Speaker 1: fan of professional roller Derby knows who I am. I'm
Speaker 1: just kidding, Yeah, I am Paul Offitt. I'm the director
Speaker 1: of the vaccin Education Center of Children's Hospital Philadelphia and
Speaker 1: a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School
Speaker 1: of Medicine. Paul wears many hats, doctor, researcher, advocate, writer.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's why he talks so damn fast. You could
Speaker 1: say the trajectory of his life was set when he
Speaker 1: was just five years old. Five years was rough year
Speaker 1: for me. I actually inadvertently cut off the tip of
Speaker 1: my finger, which caused me to go to the hospital.
Speaker 1: And I also ruptured my spleen after falling from a height.
Speaker 1: And actually, frankly, the pediatritician who took care of me
Speaker 1: saved my life. I mean he was willing to come
Speaker 1: there that night to examine me. I said there is
Speaker 1: no time and put me in his car to drive
Speaker 1: me to the hospital to perform an emergency surgery was
Speaker 1: performed where a court and a half of blood was
Speaker 1: taken out of my abdomens. And I also was born
Speaker 1: with club feet. My feet were casted as a child,
Speaker 1: and then invertently or unfortunately, a decision was made to
Speaker 1: operate on my foot, which should never have been done.
Speaker 1: I mean, the club foot surgery wasn't perfected till the
Speaker 1: mid nineties. This was the mid fifties, so we still
Speaker 1: forty years to go before we had perfected that operation,
Speaker 1: and so it was botched. Because it couldn't help it
Speaker 1: be botched. There was no way to do that surgery. Then,
Speaker 1: after the surgery went bad, five year old Paul ended
Speaker 1: up in a chronic care facility in Baltimore. Back then
Speaker 1: it was called the James Lawrence Current In Hospital and
Speaker 1: Industrial School of Maryland for Crippled Children. So I was
Speaker 1: in that war that chronic care facility for about six
Speaker 1: to eight weeks. But that was a poly award. I mean,
Speaker 1: chronic care facilities in the mid nineteen fifties were poly awards.
Speaker 1: His mother was sick and his father was always on
Speaker 1: the road for his work as a shirt salesman. So
Speaker 1: Paul spent that time when the poly award doing nothing.
Speaker 1: And I just remember sitting in that bed looking out
Speaker 1: the window which looked out onto the front door of
Speaker 1: that hospital, just waiting for somebody to come rescue me.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not like there were there was TVs there,
Speaker 1: there weren't iPads, there weren't play dogs or you know,
Speaker 1: pet therapy dogs and stuff. So you were just lying
Speaker 1: there for all day and it was it was grim,
Speaker 1: and I just remember all seeing those children as vulnerable,
Speaker 1: helpless and alone, and I think, I think that no
Speaker 1: doubt motivated me to go into pediatrics. Paul decided to
Speaker 1: become a pediatrician. He went to med school, started doing research,
Speaker 1: and then during his residency. Well, I was a resident,
Speaker 1: I saw a child die rodavirus, so it's um that
Speaker 1: was certainly another sort of motivator. He saw a child
Speaker 1: die of rhodavirus, so he started working on a way
Speaker 1: to stop it. Every year in the United States, before
Speaker 1: there was a roadavirus vaccine, there would be about seventy
Speaker 1: five thousand children that would be hospitalized with rhodavirus. Every year.
Speaker 1: There would be about sixty children would die of rotavirus.
Speaker 1: Everyone in this country would get rotavirus by the time
Speaker 1: at five they were five. It didn't matter the level
Speaker 1: of sanitation in the home or the label level of
Speaker 1: hygiene in the country. It didn't matter. Everybody was infected
Speaker 1: with that virus by age five. The virus kills two
Speaker 1: thousand children a day in the world. In the early eighties,
Speaker 1: Paul was part of a team that created a rotavirus
Speaker 1: vaccine with a cow strain, kind of like how Edward
Speaker 1: Jenner used cowpox to create a vaccine for smallpox two
Speaker 1: hundred years earlier. But after multiple trials, Paul's rotavirus vaccine
Speaker 1: didn't work well enough, and they shelved it. Over the
Speaker 1: next twenty six years, he continued working on a rotavirus vaccine,
Speaker 1: a competitor to Rhoda shield. It took ten years to
Speaker 1: do the research to figure out what parts of the
Speaker 1: virus made you sick, would parts of the virus induce
Speaker 1: immune ten years to mix and match, test and retest
Speaker 1: different rotavirus strains from humans and cows to narrow down
Speaker 1: which strains would induce strong immune responses without making a
Speaker 1: child sick. Paul and his team took a recipe to
Speaker 1: a few pharmaceutical companies to help pay to continue the
Speaker 1: research and test it. And it was a sixteen year
Speaker 1: research of development effort, meaning proved that each of those
Speaker 1: strange needed to be in there, proved that you had
Speaker 1: not too much or too little of each of those strains,
Speaker 1: have the right buffering agents through right stabilizing agent through
Speaker 1: right file to do all of that work, then it
Speaker 1: was phase one, Phase two, Phase three trials progressively larger
Speaker 1: and larger studies to prove that the vaccine is safe
Speaker 1: and effective. That's sixteen more years, and it ended in
Speaker 1: a so called phase three trial, a prospect the placebo
Speaker 1: controlled the eleven country four year, three hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: million dollars trial to prove that the vaccine worked and
Speaker 1: was safe twenty six years. The vaccine that resulted from
Speaker 1: those twenty six years is called Rhodotech. It's owned by
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical giant Murk. The Phase three trial for Rhodotech
Speaker 1: that Paul mentioned was the biggest clinical trial in the
Speaker 1: history of vaccine development or any drug development. They tested
Speaker 1: the vaccine in eleven countries on three continents and in
Speaker 1: nearly seventy thousand infants. In January two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: they published the results. The vaccines seemed to cause no
Speaker 1: additional risk of intosusception that rare intestinal disorder. Also, the
Speaker 1: vaccine worked and worked really well. It cut hospitalizations and
Speaker 1: r visits from rhodavirus by ninety five percent. A month later,
Speaker 1: both the CDC and FDA gave Rhototec the thumbs up.
Speaker 1: So the figure maybe at least three million children every
Speaker 1: year since two thousand and six, so certainly tens of millions,
Speaker 1: and in the world, hundreds of millions of children have
Speaker 1: received this vaccine, so it's not just in the US
Speaker 1: of getting it. All over the world, that's right. More
Speaker 1: than a hundred countries have licensed that product. Rhodavirus vaccine
Speaker 1: is one of more than a dozen vaccines that the
Speaker 1: CDC recommends for every American kid. And what about the
Speaker 1: other thirteen? Where did they come from? Believe it or not,
Speaker 1: most of them were made by one man. It was
Speaker 1: about one o'clock in the morning when Jeryl Lynn Hilleman
Speaker 1: woke up with a sore throat. She was five years old.
Speaker 1: You know. March nineteen sixty three was when I got MOMPS.
Speaker 1: And I do remember it, maybe because throughout my life
Speaker 1: it was made to be so important. But it was
Speaker 1: one of those moments where you wake up in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night and you go to your parents'
Speaker 1: room because you feel sick, and that's not really a
Speaker 1: big deal. But I remember waking Dad up and saying
Speaker 1: I feel sick, describing what was going on. He instantly
Speaker 1: turns on the light and grabs the Murk Manual. And
Speaker 1: the Murk Manual was a very large book, about three
Speaker 1: inches thick. It was kind of back then what Google
Speaker 1: is today. Anything you want to look up about disease, symptoms, treatments,
Speaker 1: and so forth was in the Murk Manual. So he
Speaker 1: looks it up and he's reading about MOMPS. Because he
Speaker 1: instantly suspects I had moms, and that was of course
Speaker 1: very exciting to him because he was working very hard
Speaker 1: to develop a vaccine. My name is Jerry Hilliman, also
Speaker 1: known as Jerald Lynn Hilleman, and I live in Palo Alto, California,
Speaker 1: and I am the daughter of Maurice Hilleman, who was
Speaker 1: a wonderful man but also particularly known for his work
Speaker 1: developing I think about forty vaccines. Gerlin's father, Maurice Hilleman,
Speaker 1: did develop more than forty vaccines. He's the greatest vaccine
Speaker 1: inventor in history. He played a part in where single
Speaker 1: handedly developed most of the vaccines that we get today, measles, rubella,
Speaker 1: hepatitis A, heppatitis B, Meninjacoccus hib strepped Aococcus, chickenpox. He
Speaker 1: made them all. Paul Offit crossed paths with Maurice Hillman
Speaker 1: during his work with vaccines, and he was in awe
Speaker 1: of the man and his accomplishments, which had gone relatively
Speaker 1: unrecognized considering their impact. So in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: Paul asked if he could sit down with Hilleman and
Speaker 1: take down his stories. In October of two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: he was diagnosed with disseminated cancer which was not operable,
Speaker 1: and he was given about six months to live and
Speaker 1: lived in fact six months. He died in April the
Speaker 1: following year. And I thought, you're hearing all this, this
Speaker 1: amazing man who has these amazing stories to tell, and
Speaker 1: all those stories were going to die with him. And
Speaker 1: I just asked him if he would be willing to
Speaker 1: let me come, you know, at least once a week
Speaker 1: and hopefully twice a week, to just interview him, to
Speaker 1: sit in his office and interview him. I knew how
Speaker 1: hard it was to do the research and development to
Speaker 1: on one vaccine. The notion that he had essentially done
Speaker 1: that for nine vaccines was like trying to imagine kind
Speaker 1: of a different dimension. Paul wrote a book about Hillman's
Speaker 1: life based on those conversations. It's called Vaccinated. He also
Speaker 1: worked on a documentary called Hilleman. It's directed by Donald Mitchell.
Speaker 1: Who's letting us use some clips from the many hours
Speaker 1: he spent interviewing Hilliman, who was eighty five years old
Speaker 1: at the time. So why don't we start there just
Speaker 1: to have me introduce yourself to me and just tell me,
Speaker 1: you know, briefly, you know what You've done well. I'm
Speaker 1: Maurice Halloman. I had a long career in science, about
Speaker 1: sixty years and Maurice Hilliman was born in nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: during the Spanish flu epidemic. He grew up working at
Speaker 1: the family farm in Montana. I think that was the
Speaker 1: luckiest thing that could happen to anyone to be born
Speaker 1: on a farm on the western frontier. We had a
Speaker 1: black smash shop, had a machine shop, plants, nursery, stock,
Speaker 1: and so forth. One of my jobs was to take
Speaker 1: care of the chickens. Lots of vaccines are grown in
Speaker 1: chicken eggs, including the annual flu shots and a bunch
Speaker 1: of Hilliman's vaccines, so his childhood experienced raising chickens helped
Speaker 1: bring several vaccines to the world, like the measles vaccine.
Speaker 1: And my career, chickens were my best friend because I
Speaker 1: used them for so many types of experimentation. Never break
Speaker 1: through the experiments. I grew to like chickens stupid, you know,
Speaker 1: But I felt that I owed them and that Hilliman
Speaker 1: had a twin sister who died during her birth. Two
Speaker 1: days later, his mother died from acclampsia, and Hillman told
Speaker 1: Paul that He nearly died many times as a kid
Speaker 1: from disease, drowning, dodging trains, but somehow he always recovered.
Speaker 1: In high school, he worked at a JC Penny. He
Speaker 1: thought that might end up being his career, but he
Speaker 1: was smart, and one of his brothers told him he
Speaker 1: should go to college. He got a scholarship from Montana
Speaker 1: State University and then a PhD in microbiology from the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago. But virology, the study of viruses, was
Speaker 1: still a brand new field with more questions than answers,
Speaker 1: and I gave the first course in virology given in
Speaker 1: the United States lamb and lecture, no textbook. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four he went to work for er Squibb and Sons.
Speaker 1: That's where he developed his first vaccine. It was for
Speaker 1: Japanese and cephalitis, a disease spread by mosquitoes that can
Speaker 1: cause brain inflammation. Hillman's work on Japanese and cephalitis was
Speaker 1: for the US military, which needed the work done right away.
Speaker 1: They converted a horse barn into a laboratory and production facility,
Speaker 1: and the process for creating the vaccine was pretty gross.
Speaker 1: Skip forward a couple of minutes if you don't want
Speaker 1: to hear descriptions of dead animals, but it really and
Speaker 1: amounted to was to inoculate mice with a needle into
Speaker 1: the head and to wait about three days before when
Speaker 1: they developed an acute and kephalitis and the virus was
Speaker 1: at its greatest level in the brain. Okay, here's where
Speaker 1: it gets really graphic. Anyway, to just take these mice
Speaker 1: and snap them around a forceps and cut the skin
Speaker 1: off and sterilize it, and pop off the sky and
Speaker 1: the scissors and scoop out the brains which then had
Speaker 1: to be chopped up. And that was done in the
Speaker 1: Fred Waring's blender. Remember he developed that for to mix
Speaker 1: his cocktails. Fred Waring was a famous singer from the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties to the nineteen to fifties. As a side gig,
Speaker 1: he backed and promoted the first electric blenders, Jonah Salk,
Speaker 1: famous for inventing a polio vaccine. He also used the
Speaker 1: wearing blender. Invariably, they would leak and the virus would
Speaker 1: come out through the bearing at the bottom. Thirty women
Speaker 1: spent three months blending thirty thousand mice brains a day. Altogether,
Speaker 1: they blended enough brains to vaccinate six hundred thousand American troops. Okay,
Speaker 1: no more on mice brains, but there is a bit
Speaker 1: more grossness ahead. After squib, Hillman went to work at
Speaker 1: Walter Reed Army Medical Center. One day he was sent
Speaker 1: out to an army base in Missouri to investigate a
Speaker 1: flu outbreak. For whatever reason, he couldn't get live throat samples,
Speaker 1: so he did the next best thing. He went to
Speaker 1: the morgue and I said, look, I got this all
Speaker 1: phone problem. And fellow said, well, he said, I have
Speaker 1: a body here from a soldier who died four hours ago.
Speaker 1: What do you want, I said, well, I'd like to
Speaker 1: have his trak. Yeah. So I went over to the
Speaker 1: morgue and waited for him to carve out the trachia,
Speaker 1: wrapped it up newspaper and brown back. The lab cut
Speaker 1: it open and started chopping on tissue. Some days, you know,
Speaker 1: everything just goes right. Hilliman cultured cells from the recently
Speaker 1: dead men's trachia and grew virus from them, and in
Speaker 1: the process he helped discover adnoviruses, a family of viruses
Speaker 1: that we all get and that have become very relevant today.
Speaker 1: Adnoviruses are used as a delivery system for some of
Speaker 1: the COVID vaccines like Astra Zeneca's and Johnson and Johnson's.
Speaker 1: After Walter read Hillman went to the re lab at Murk,
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical giant. When he arrived at Murk, a man
Speaker 1: named Vanavar Bush was a chairman of the board. He
Speaker 1: was one of the people who started the Manhattan projects.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, I got an idea that one
Speaker 1: day these things called viruses are going to be important.
Speaker 1: I really believe that. And he said, I wanted to
Speaker 1: set up a laboratory there will be second and none
Speaker 1: in the world to study of virology. And my vision
Speaker 1: was that, first of all, I wanted to conquer the
Speaker 1: pediatric diseases of children, measles, mumpster of vella, chicken pox,
Speaker 1: to discover the viruses of hepatitis, hepatitis A and Hepatatis B.
Speaker 1: And then I was interested in cancer for its cause
Speaker 1: and control. And there was a late entry of the
Speaker 1: bacterial diseases, vaccines against new Macoccus and nin Jaccacus hem
Speaker 1: offless influence. The years after World War Two are known
Speaker 1: as the Golden Age of vaccinology, but as one writer
Speaker 1: put it, and might be more accurate to call it
Speaker 1: the Hilliman period. Hillman's vaccines saved millions of lives every year.
Speaker 1: He also made vaccines for animals. Hilliman was amazing and
Speaker 1: making vaccines, particularly live attenuated vaccines. They're made by weakening
Speaker 1: a pathogen by passing it through chicken eggs or live
Speaker 1: animals or tissue culture. The idea is to give the
Speaker 1: virus to some other living thing and hope it comes
Speaker 1: out on the other end with less potency. Paul Offit,
Speaker 1: Hillman's biographer, explains, and it's not like there was a
Speaker 1: book on how to weaken viruses. You just kind of
Speaker 1: made it up. You tried to pass viruses in cells
Speaker 1: which the virus normally didn't grow in, so that that
Speaker 1: kind of introduced a series of blind genetic alterations in
Speaker 1: that virus, so to making it weaker and weaker to
Speaker 1: grow in the cells it normally grows in. So you
Speaker 1: would try it, you would pass it a certain number
Speaker 1: of time in these other cells where there was human
Speaker 1: kidney cells or monkey kidney cells or monkey testicular cells
Speaker 1: or whatever was being used chick embryo fiber blass cells
Speaker 1: or mouse embryo fiber blass cells, and then you would
Speaker 1: go back and put it into adults and then younger adults,
Speaker 1: and then older adolescents and then children to make sure
Speaker 1: that it was weak enough but not too weak. And
Speaker 1: there was always a just a trial and error thing.
Speaker 1: And he had a real green thumb for that. I
Speaker 1: mean to make the measles vaccine, to make the mumps vaccine,
Speaker 1: to make the first German measles vaccine, to make the
Speaker 1: chicken box vaccine. That was all Maurice, and he just
Speaker 1: had a green thumb for retenuating viruses. Maybe the most
Speaker 1: amazing green thumb story goes back to nineteen sixty three
Speaker 1: when Hillman's daughter Jeryl Lynn got sick. So he looks
Speaker 1: it up and he's reading about momps because he instantly
Speaker 1: suspects I had moms And that was of course very
Speaker 1: exciting to him because he was working very hard to
Speaker 1: develop a vaccine. You know, when you're going after to
Speaker 1: this attenuation or weakening of the virus, you go and
Speaker 1: you take a specimen from a patient. Now, those viruses
Speaker 1: that are traveling around in the human population are not
Speaker 1: all alike. There are many different what are called clades,
Speaker 1: and you have to find the right clade that is
Speaker 1: going to allow you to attenuate appropriately. The word clade
Speaker 1: can be a bit confusing, but it's basically one step
Speaker 1: down from a strain. Two clades of a virus come
Speaker 1: from the same ancestor, and the right virus was right
Speaker 1: in my house. My daughter, Gerald Lynne came in one
Speaker 1: night and she just looked at Oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wrote like this, So I said, get back into bed.
Speaker 1: I go up to the labs about one in the morning,
Speaker 1: got specimen collecting things, brought them back to throat swabs,
Speaker 1: took him back to the lab and froze them. So
Speaker 1: now I had specimens out of Jerlynne, my daughter. We
Speaker 1: isolated the virus and went into attenuation. By this one
Speaker 1: went just like that. So Hillaman created a vaccine for
Speaker 1: mumps using the swab from little Jeraln's th roat. Actually,
Speaker 1: my other daughter, Kirsten was about one year old at
Speaker 1: the time that we had the vaccine coming along, and
Speaker 1: a picture was taken of gerald convincing her sister that
Speaker 1: she ought to take the vaccine. Gerald says it won't hurt.
Speaker 1: She's like hill here's jeral Lynn again. The name of
Speaker 1: the vaccine is to jaral Lyn strain. It's on all
Speaker 1: of the boxes and package inserts that come out. So
Speaker 1: I have had the pleasure throughout my life of also
Speaker 1: being called miss momps and usually by pediatricians. Gerald Lynne
Speaker 1: never saw it herself, but she told me that even
Speaker 1: at the end of her father's life, he kept a
Speaker 1: list in his pocket of all the diseases he wanted
Speaker 1: to tackle. Well before vaccines, essentially one hundred percent of
Speaker 1: the children became infected with all of these measles, mumps,
Speaker 1: and essentially reubella were ubiquitous. These diseases have essentially disappeared.
Speaker 1: That must be for you very satisfied too, well, think
Speaker 1: about those that's numbers, Well, yes it is, but you know,
Speaker 1: for a scientist, it's the winning that counts. It's my
Speaker 1: climbing mountains. You know, you get up here, and you
Speaker 1: get up to the top of this one, you got
Speaker 1: a couple more that you're trying to climb up. At
Speaker 1: the same time, looking back on one's lifetime, you say, gee,
Speaker 1: what have I done? Have I done enough for the
Speaker 1: world to justify having been here? You know that's big worry.
Speaker 1: And I would say I'm kind of pleased about all this.
Speaker 1: I'm not smug about it, but I'm pleased I would
Speaker 1: do it over again because there's a great joy in
Speaker 1: being useful, and that's the satisfaction that you get out
Speaker 1: of it. Other than that, it's the quest of science
Speaker 1: and winning a battle over these damn bugs. You know,
Speaker 1: when Rotor Shield was pulled off shelves, it changed the
Speaker 1: way vaccine trials were run. Nobody wanted to see another
Speaker 1: rare adverse event like into susception slipped through the cracks.
Speaker 1: The later findings questioned whether Rodo shield even caused one
Speaker 1: in any case. Vaccine safety trials ever since have become
Speaker 1: larger and more informative. That includes the COVID vaccines. Johnson
Speaker 1: and Johnson, AstraZeneca, Fiser, Maderna, and others around the world
Speaker 1: have all been amongst the largest clinical trials in history.
Speaker 1: Vaccines have come a long way since Maurice Hilliman was
Speaker 1: somehow making them with blenders and corpses and saving millions
Speaker 1: of lives in the process. Paul Offitt, who worked with
Speaker 1: and wrote about Hillman and invented a vaccine, is also
Speaker 1: on the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee. That's the committee that
Speaker 1: recommended the approval of the current COVID vaccines for emergency use.
Speaker 1: Maurice Hilliman said it best. I never be the side
Speaker 1: of relief until the first three million dosars are out there. Well,
Speaker 1: the first one hundred million dosars are out there and
Speaker 1: it doesn't cause a serious side effect. It's amazing. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't. This is like one of the best vaccines
Speaker 1: ever made in terms of its effectiveness, in terms of
Speaker 1: its safety, and it was in terms of the speed
Speaker 1: with which it was made. It's just I keep way
Speaker 1: for the other shooted drop on these vaccines and it
Speaker 1: hasn't happened. On the next episode of Long Shot, we're
Speaker 1: going to hear from a scientist who figured out how
Speaker 1: to make a coronavirus vaccine two years before coronavirus struck,
Speaker 1: and in the process we'll learn what the hell of
Speaker 1: spike protein is. Long Shot is a production of School
Speaker 1: of Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode was produced, written, and
Speaker 1: narrated by me Sean Revive. My co producer is Gabby Watts.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and LC Crowley.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Noel Brown att iHeartRadio and to vaccine
Speaker 1: inventor Stanley Plotkin. An extra special thanks to Paul author
Speaker 1: of Vaccinated, One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases,
Speaker 1: and Donald rain Mitchell, director of Hilliman, A Perilous Quest
Speaker 1: Saved the World's Children. Fact Checking for this episode was
Speaker 1: done by Adam Schidou. Long Shot was scored by Jason Shannon.
Speaker 1: The score was mixed by Vic Stafford. Sound designed and
Speaker 1: audio mixed by Harper Harris with Tuonewelders School of Humans,