Bitchy History - September 11, 2023


2.1 – The History of Vaccine and the Anti-Vax Movement in America (and Britain)


Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

181.22

Word count

7,126

Sentence count

268

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome back to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that has a whole new intro song for a whole new season. 0.69
00:00:21.480 And we're back. During the break, I turned 33, started another semester at the university, and finished playing Horizon Zero Dawn for the second time,
00:00:29.300 which was a truly great use of my time. To start off the show, I'd like to give a shout out to our
00:00:34.360 two newest Patreon supporters, Kelly and Katrina, who are both supporters in our bitch slap category.
00:00:40.200 It means so much that you've decided to support the show. My summer break was less of a break than
00:00:45.320 even I anticipated, but it did give me some much needed time to kind of think about the podcast
00:00:50.460 and what direction I want to take it in. Recently on History TikTok, we've been talking a lot about
00:00:55.800 staying in our lane as historians and that gave me a chance to really assess what my lane is and
00:01:01.440 how that applies to what I'm doing with this podcast. The original concept for this show when
00:01:06.300 I started planning it a couple of years ago was for a show called American History 101, What You
00:01:11.420 Missed in Class, which is a pretty self-explanatory title really. But then I changed the name of the
00:01:16.780 series to Bitchy History and during season one I consistently realized that the vibe of the show
00:01:22.020 didn't always match up to the vibe of the name, and while teaching American History 101 is certainly
00:01:27.540 in my lane, I mean, I get paid to do it at a university after all, I'm not sure it's enough
00:01:33.000 my lane to make me comfortable doing it as a general podcast. So we're shifting things up a
00:01:38.720 bit here on the show. The episodes of the show that have been my favorite, and honestly listeners
00:01:43.580 favorites as well, have been the How Did America Get Here episodes, or the episodes like The Witch 0.71
00:01:48.920 trials where I end up delving into some of my weird historical hyper fixations like women's
00:01:53.460 history and cultural history. And I feel like that fits the title of bitchy history a lot better than 0.77
00:01:58.560 a basic chronological run through of American history. So this show is going to be going through
00:02:03.340 a bit of a transformation. I hope you'll all come along for the ride while we kind of organically
00:02:08.020 find our space in the history podcasting genre. This second season will definitely be a bit
00:02:13.220 different than the first one, especially since I'm freeing myself from the constraints of a
00:02:17.340 chronological take on American history, which is going to allow me to really delve into the areas
00:02:21.960 of history that I'm most passionate about. Look out for some episodes that may in fact cover things
00:02:27.300 like the topic of my master's thesis, Star Trek. That said, today's episode was planned far in
00:02:33.620 advance, and I still think it's a wildly important topic, so here we go. Let's talk about the history
00:02:38.440 of vaccines in America. So in case you haven't been watching the news lately, COVID-19 numbers
00:02:43.920 are spiking again with outbreaks centered around workplaces and schools especially because that's
00:02:49.200 what happens when there's a pandemic and you put lots of people into small areas in close contact
00:02:53.900 and then penalize them for not coming in when they're sick. Don't even get me started on the
00:02:58.780 professors I work with who specifically tell students that they can't have an excused absence
00:03:02.980 unless they have a doctor's note. No, I tell my students to stay home and attend my class via Zoom
00:03:09.120 if they have so much as a sniffle or a sore throat. The university doesn't give me health
00:03:13.380 insurance, and I am not paid enough to contract your plague, even if it isn't COVID. No thanks.
00:03:19.100 But why are we even still having these spikes? Surely once we had a vaccine, the problem would
00:03:23.460 be solved, right? Well, I don't have to be the one to tell you that people have been increasingly
00:03:27.600 moronic about vaccines in our generation. From the crunchy, all-natural moms who only feed their 0.99
00:03:33.060 kids organic snacks and think vaccines cause autism, to the conspiracy theorists who think
00:03:38.200 that the COVID vaccine was the mark of the beast and would make you emit 5G signals and let Bill
00:03:43.040 gate spy on you, anti-vaxxers have become more and more common and more and more unhinged over
00:03:48.740 the past few decades. I'm sure there's a sociological or psychological reason for that,
00:03:53.880 likely tied to the increasing popularity of other nutty conspiracy theories like flat earthers,
00:03:59.180 who shot JFK, and the fake moon landing folks. But while there's a lot to be said about the
00:04:03.880 ridiculousness of conspiracy theories, I just want to spend some time today talking about the
00:04:08.120 importance of vaccines in American history and the importance of the anti-vax movement.
00:04:13.040 Immunization, inoculation, vaccination
00:04:15.660 There's a lot of names this practice has gone by
00:04:18.440 And a very long history of it in America
00:04:20.460 In fact, the very first American immunization mandate
00:04:23.880 Was ordered by General George Washington
00:04:26.100 Smallpox was one of the most deadly diseases of the era
00:04:29.300 And caused the highest death rates of any disease in the Continental Army
00:04:32.640 Now, smallpox inoculations were not new
00:04:35.640 When Washington ordered all of the soldiers in the Army
00:04:38.120 To undergo inoculation via the variolation process
00:04:42.160 Colonial Boston had faced many smallpox outbreaks throughout the 1700s.
00:04:46.160 During the 1721 outbreak in Boston, a West African man named Onesimus, who was enslaved by Reverend Cotton Mather, an influential Puritan minister who you might remember from previous discussions of the Salem Witch Trials, he taught Mathers about the process of inoculation.
00:05:02.680 Mather then convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boyston, a Boston medical doctor, to begin inoculations in Boston to prevent further spread of the disease.
00:05:11.280 And thus, the beginnings of the controversies about inoculation and vaccination began.
00:05:16.200 In America, anyway.
00:05:17.860 Inoculation was seeing pretty wide acceptance in Europe by this time, but not so much in
00:05:22.780 the colonies, and people had some pretty mixed opinions about the process.
00:05:26.840 Many people believed that the procedure was more deadly than naturally contracting smallpox,
00:05:31.620 even though evidence said otherwise.
00:05:33.860 Also, the clergy claimed that smallpox was God's punishment for sin, and that inoculating
00:05:38.320 yourself against smallpox interfered with God's will. Boston newspapers published arguments for
00:05:43.900 and against inoculation, which polarized Bostonians on the subject even further.
00:05:49.060 The inoculations became so controversial that at one point an angry citizen threw a bomb at
00:05:54.040 Mather's house trying to intimidate both Mather and Boylston from continuing the inoculation
00:05:58.820 process. And unfortunately, all of this doesn't sound that far off from the way that some 21st 0.66
00:06:04.080 century Americans react to vaccines. It's also worth noting that the concept of inoculation
00:06:09.020 was introduced to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who had learned of the practice and
00:06:14.100 adopted it for her own children while living in Turkey with her husband, the ambassador to the
00:06:18.640 Ottoman Empire. It's interesting that if you consult the history of vaccines, either one or
00:06:23.440 both of these figures, Mary and Onesimus, is usually utterly ignored, with the bulk of credit
00:06:28.980 for the smallpox vaccine being given to Dr. Edward Jenner as the creator of the first successful
00:06:34.580 vaccine. Why? I'm sure it has nothing to do with him being a white man and the other two being black
00:06:40.340 and a woman respectively. That couldn't be it at all, I'm sure. But back to the 1721 outbreak in
00:06:46.360 Boston. Boylston used math to prove the benefits of the inoculation process, showing that during
00:06:51.800 the epidemic of 1721, the estimated fatality rate of those who naturally contracted smallpox was
00:06:58.080 14%, while the fatality rate of the inoculated was only 2%. Slowly, Bostonians and other colonists
00:07:05.820 began to accept the benefits of inoculation. During the 1760s, Dr. Joseph Warren operated
00:07:11.420 a smallpox inoculation clinic on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. It was there in 1764 that Dr.
00:07:18.180 Warren would inoculate John Adams against the disease. Dr. Warren would go on to inoculate
00:07:23.520 most of Boston until his death in 1775. Not from smallpox, by the way. He died from a musket ball
00:07:30.480 to the head at the Battle of Bunker Hill. And smallpox would continue to be a major part of
00:07:34.820 the revolution going forward. Another outbreak of the disease in 1775 dramatically impacted
00:07:40.540 General Howe's troops and the citizens of Boston at the time, and a stalemate between Washington
00:07:45.420 and Howe's forces occurred. Washington knew that Continental soldiers would be devastated by the
00:07:50.260 outbreak if it began to spread throughout his soldiers. The stalemate between Washington and
00:07:55.280 Howe continued until March 7, 1776, when General Howe announced to the British Army that they
00:08:01.560 would be evacuating Boston. Washington initially forbid his troops from entering the city even
00:08:06.920 after the British Army had evacuated because of the smallpox epidemic. He knew how dangerous it
00:08:12.960 would be to his troops even then. On March 17, 10 days after the evacuation, Washington finally
00:08:19.580 permitted 1,000 soldiers who had previously contracted smallpox to enter the city. In 1776,
00:08:26.920 Abigail Adams would inoculate herself and her children against the disease. In a letter to
00:08:31.340 John Adams, Abigail told him about her experience with the inoculation and the mood of Bostonians
00:08:36.540 in regards to inoculation at the time. Such a spirit of inoculation never before took place.
00:08:42.040 The town and every house in it are as full as they can hold. God grant that we may all go
00:08:47.300 comfortably through this distemper. And then in 1777, Washington would mandate the inoculation
00:08:53.160 of all of his troops. Quarantines had proven ineffective to stop the spread of disease among
00:08:57.880 the Continental Army, and Washington wrote that smallpox was more destructive than the sword.
00:09:03.280 In a letter to Dr. William Shippen Jr., director of the medical department of the Continental Army,
00:09:08.220 Washington wrote this, finding the smallpox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can
00:09:13.420 prevent it from running through the whole of our army, I have determined that the troops
00:09:17.100 should be inoculated this expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some
00:09:21.960 disadvantages but yet i trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects necessity not
00:09:28.040 only authorize authorizes but seems to require the measure for should the disorder infect the
00:09:33.580 army in the natural way and rage within with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from
00:09:38.820 it than from the sword of the enemy that said not everyone followed the orders to inoculate their
00:09:44.240 soldiers. Much like with COVID vaccines today, the distrust of the inoculation process led to
00:09:49.580 several generals and governors prohibiting inoculation, which of course meant that the
00:09:54.320 outbreaks of smallpox still caused shortages of troops anyway, at least at the beginning of the
00:09:59.120 war. Overall, however, the mandate paid off. Fewer than one percent of the soldiers died from being
00:10:05.280 inoculated, and the program was so successful in controlling smallpox outbreaks that George
00:10:10.400 Washington would repeat it at Valley Forge in the winter of 1778. But anti-vaccination rhetoric has
00:10:16.620 been around for as long as inoculation and vaccinations have existed. The first organized
00:10:22.100 anti-vaccine movement began in Britain in the 1850s when the British government made the smallpox
00:10:27.520 vaccine mandatory in 1853. Some opposed the vaccine on the grounds that the government had no business
00:10:33.680 telling people how to take care of their health, ignoring the clear necessity of protecting the
00:10:38.080 population at large very libertarian of them and even in the 1850s there were naturopaths those 0.93
00:10:44.540 crunchy almond moms who relied on treatments based on plants and water and essential oils
00:10:49.680 sorry susan tea tree and eucalyptus oil are not going to cure this one anti-vaccination protests
00:10:56.260 swept the united kingdom with activists waving signs with messages that said better a felon cell
00:11:02.220 than a poisoned babe, or distributing pamphlets with titles like vaccination, a curse, which,
00:11:08.920 you know, I'm pretty sure I saw those exact same signs and pamphlets at the last Trump rally.
00:11:13.620 History repeats itself with disturbing regularity. People even did the same things to avoid
00:11:19.000 vaccination in the 19th century that we saw people doing with COVID in the 21st.
00:11:23.940 Buying fake vaccination cards, pulling their children out of school or moving to avoid public
00:11:28.860 health officials enforcing the mandate, or trying to suck the vaccine out of their children's arm
00:11:34.040 after it was administered. Every single one of these anti-vaccination moves has been tried in
00:11:39.400 the post-COVID world as well, including people recommending increasingly unhinged ways to
00:11:44.340 detox from the COVID vaccine, like bathing in borax. Please, please do not do that.
00:11:50.960 British anti-vaccine activists then began to send representatives to the United States where cities
00:11:56.160 were beginning to introduce their own vaccine mandates. There, they would help launch a similar 0.87
00:12:00.780 movement. In the end, governments began to allow exemptions just to try to calm down the anti-vax
00:12:06.620 movement, and for a time, that worked just fine. The movement collapsed once the mandates became
00:12:11.760 full of exceptions, and trust in medicine and doctors would begin to improve throughout the
00:12:16.140 following decades, hitting the high water mark in the mid-20th century, as medicine found ways to
00:12:21.500 many dangerous diseases, not the least of which was Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine for polio.
00:12:27.060 With polio being as horrifying as it was, there was never really a need for any mandate with this
00:12:31.920 vaccine. Almost every parent was more than happy to risk it all on a relatively untested vaccine,
00:12:38.100 at least when compared to the vaccines of today or even the decades of in-the-field testing that
00:12:42.620 smallpox inoculation had seen. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for the polio vaccine didn't
00:12:47.920 necessarily translate to enthusiasm for all other vaccines. The measles vaccine, for instance, was
00:12:53.680 not nearly as widely adopted at the same rate, mostly because measles was something that you
00:12:59.080 could live through and you wouldn't have the life-altering complications of polio. So why
00:13:03.780 bother getting vaccinated for it? Middle class parents did tend to get it for their children
00:13:08.360 if their family doctor recommended it, but not all the doctors did. Infection rates began to
00:13:14.220 drastically increase in lower class families compared to middle and upper class families as
00:13:18.760 well. And eventually mandates and coercion were the only thing left to get people on board. 0.97
00:13:24.280 Health officials began to endorse mandates that required children to be vaccinated to enroll in
00:13:29.020 school. And as it had with the smallpox mandate in the 1800s, these new mandates made some people
00:13:34.960 mad. Now you won't see me saying, hey, we can always trust the government and doctors 100%
00:13:40.440 because A, the Tuskegee experiment, enough said,
00:13:44.520 and B, I've had too many doctors insist
00:13:46.900 that all my symptoms might be because I'm pregnant,
00:13:49.300 even after I've told them that I'm a lesbian
00:13:51.140 or that I need to lose weight
00:13:53.080 and that'll clear everything right up.
00:13:55.260 Doctors aren't always trustworthy
00:13:56.560 and neither are the government
00:13:58.100 and they don't always have our best interests at heart.
00:14:01.000 But as far as vaccines are concerned,
00:14:03.160 they can pump me full of them.
00:14:04.820 Give me all the vaccines.
00:14:06.140 You know why? 0.99
00:14:06.860 Because being sick sucks 0.96
00:14:08.260 and I don't want to be the reason that COVID or any other disease kills someone else. 0.99
00:14:13.680 But if you're the kind of person that thinks the COVID vaccine will make you sterile
00:14:17.140 and possibly turn you into a crocodile, then my words are largely lost on you.
00:14:22.100 If, however, you are still listening, enjoy the second half of the episode
00:14:25.900 in which I speak with journalist David Heath about his book, Long Shot,
00:14:29.920 the inside story of the race for a COVID-19 vaccine.
00:14:38.260 All right, so today's episode, we have David Heath as a special guest to talk with us about
00:14:46.980 his book, Long Shot, the inside story of the race for COVID-19 vaccine, which was published
00:14:52.700 just very recently in 2022. I feel incredibly honored that he's even considering popping
00:14:57.280 onto my little show, much less actually agreeing to do it. Look, I'm very proud of bitchy history, 0.99
00:15:02.200 don't get me wrong, but it's objectively not the biggest name show that an award-winning
00:15:06.000 investigative journalist could be coming on to talk about his book. So I am very pleased to have
00:15:11.300 David here. He's even been featured in a Netflix documentary series, Dirty Money. So I mean, I feel
00:15:17.700 like this is really upping my street cred as a podcaster having you here. So I'm going to let
00:15:22.760 you introduce yourself, David. Well, you've done a good job yourself. I mean, I'm a longtime
00:15:27.240 journalist. I did mostly investigative reporting, and I've worked at places that people would know
00:15:31.640 would be like CNN and USA Today. But then I was working on a story at USA Today about
00:15:36.340 as the vaccine was being created, I managed to get hold of the scientists who actually
00:15:42.940 had the scientific breakthroughs that led to the vaccines and interviewed them as the
00:15:49.840 vaccine was being created. So sort of in real time.
00:15:53.320 It's a fascinating book. I will admit I have not finished all of it because my reading
00:15:57.320 list is so so thick but i've done the typical academic thing of i've read the entire introduction
00:16:02.520 the entire epilogue that i've read little bits in between uh which i'm really looking forward
00:16:07.240 to reading the rest of it because you're fascinating you're a great writer uh is one
00:16:12.280 thing like it's a topic that doesn't really feel like it should be super interesting or engaging
00:16:17.880 but you've made it really engaging so uh you know i'm not i'm not a science person so i you know
00:16:24.680 you've made it easy to understand too so i do really highly recommend it you've worked a lot
00:16:30.520 on stories i was noticing looking up your your past you know past reporting and things like
00:16:35.000 that when getting ready for this interview uh you've done a lot of stuff dealing with the
00:16:38.680 medical field and with drug research and things like that in the past uh what what kind of drew
00:16:43.560 you into doing that kind of investigative journalism and and what inspired you to write
00:16:48.040 long shot really um yes i've been you're right i've been doing probably health care related
00:16:56.680 investigations going all the way back maybe 20 years i had a huge uh series with another reporter
00:17:02.160 named duff wilson where we looked at um some serious problems with a clinical trial at a
00:17:07.920 cancer center where everybody died and uh so i've been doing this a long time and um you know when
00:17:15.680 the pandemic hit um i was uh working on basically the you know the covet 19 and somebody came up
00:17:25.680 with the idea wasn't me actually that we tried to get a narrative account of how they're going
00:17:31.340 to create the vaccine at the time we thought it was unlikely you know we sort of assumed
00:17:36.300 not knowing what we were talking about i you know i didn't i did i was just thinking
00:17:41.960 vaccines are supposed to take 10 years to make. Yeah, at least. And so I want to know,
00:17:51.620 is it really possible that we're going to have a vaccine in a year? So I started reaching out
00:17:55.960 to all these scientists who were really the brains behind the vaccine. And in fact,
00:18:00.380 they had been working on this vaccine for 10 years. So it sort of fit the history of vaccines.
00:18:08.680 uh it was just a lucky it was really lucky that um that this particular virus was the one that
00:18:16.240 turned into a pandemic right and I know that they had been talking about like it this is COVID is
00:18:22.280 related to like the SARS it's it's part of the SARS epidemic we've seen a lot of SARS epidemics
00:18:27.660 you know in the last 20 or so years even further back around the world we just hadn't seen a
00:18:33.120 worldwide pandemic and i know that there that had been a a discussion of if you know if we're going
00:18:40.020 to get a world pan worldwide pandemic what is going to be the disease that hits and sars was
00:18:44.920 high up on the list of possibilities uh definitely and so it helped a lot that we we had people
00:18:51.520 behind the scenes the people that don't get their names mentioned very often the people who are
00:18:56.420 pretty much okay uh with with being behind the scenes and just doing their work um they'd already
00:19:02.840 they'd already thought this through and they were they were doing the research that needed to be
00:19:06.200 done which is remarkably uh remarkably timely it was just very very much luck basically as you said
00:19:13.100 right the the key scientist was really a guy named barney graham and he was at the national
00:19:17.740 institutes of health working under anthony fauci and um he was really looking for he had spent his
00:19:25.240 entire life looking for a vaccine for rsv which by the way he is now on the market his vaccine
00:19:32.580 the vaccine that he created just came on the market and you can get, you know, inoculated for
00:19:38.480 RSV now. So in doing that research, and then also in doing research, his he works at a place in
00:19:46.660 Bethesda, Maryland called the Vaccine Research Center. And it was set up by Clinton to find a
00:19:52.920 vaccine for HIV. And they haven't managed to do that yet. That was its only purpose. But in doing
00:19:59.760 in doing that research, HIV is such a difficult virus to create a vaccine for that there was a
00:20:08.860 lot of advancements in science. So there were all these things happening. And then separately,
00:20:14.180 there were a group of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who were playing around with
00:20:18.580 mRNA and figured out how to make mRNA actually work because many people had tried it and it
00:20:27.460 kept failing. And so a couple of scientists, Drew Wiseman and Caitlin Carrico at the University
00:20:32.880 of Pennsylvania, came up with a solution. And all of this happened sort of all at the same time.
00:20:40.840 And Barney Graham was the person who put all the pieces together and said, OK, we're going to use
00:20:46.620 these HIV advancements that we've learned and we're going to use mRNA and we're going to make
00:20:53.300 a vaccine. And he made the Moderna vaccine. That's the one I think that's the one I got.
00:20:59.360 Yeah, the Moderna vaccine is the one I got. Yeah. And I got all the vaccines. I was like,
00:21:04.520 you want to give it to me? Stick it in my arm. I'm good. Thank you. I will take it. I don't
00:21:08.900 understand people. I know you talk a lot about in this in the book about people's distrust of
00:21:13.940 the vaccine and things like that that have been going on. I just I don't get it. I guess maybe
00:21:18.920 I was raised by a generation that wind up to just take polio vaccines without having any, you know, knowledge of what was in them or any knowledge of how they've been developed just because, hey, better to have it than not.
00:21:30.960 Right. So very much grew up in a family that trusted, trusted science.
00:21:36.000 Right. Well, when you think about it, what people did to avoid smallpox, you know, back in the early days before it was really even a vaccine, it was it was a different process.
00:21:44.520 and the risk they took that may have saved their lives.
00:21:49.380 And then later on with polio, with the polio vaccine,
00:21:53.720 the polio vaccine is not as safe as the COVID-19 vaccines.
00:21:58.560 And when it first came out, there were some serious problems with it.
00:22:02.060 There was some contaminated doses.
00:22:04.620 So people ended up getting polio from the vaccine.
00:22:07.720 And you can still today get polio.
00:22:10.600 It's very rare, but you can still get polio from the polio vaccine.
00:22:14.520 And, um, so, but everybody accepted it and everybody accepted it. And as a result, polio
00:22:22.700 is almost wiped out on the planet. I mean, it's, it's still existed. It came back to the United
00:22:27.200 States not too long ago. Um, and that, that actually came back because somebody got polio
00:22:32.340 from a vaccine and then spread it. So, um, but it's almost wiped out, but you're right. The,
00:22:39.500 the anti-vax movement had just took off with COVID-19. I don't fully understand why.
00:22:47.880 Yeah, the anti-vax movement, before I went back into history, I was working in politics. And so
00:22:54.000 I dealt with some health policy stuff, education policy, things like that. And so there always was
00:23:00.680 this kind of small anti-vax movement in America of kind of the crunchy moms that don't want to
00:23:08.080 want their kids to be raised natural, all of that stuff. But those were extremely far left-wing
00:23:15.060 kind of people, generally speaking. So this was a very interesting change where you ended up with
00:23:20.180 a very right-wing element who became anti-vax during this period of time as well. You mentioned
00:23:27.760 in the book that there had been a definite shift in how the public trusts science, the vaccines,
00:23:32.080 you referenced the measles vaccine specifically at one point, you know, trust of it and things
00:23:37.360 like that. Why, why do you think there is this, this shift in trusting the science and trusting
00:23:43.000 vaccines? You know, I think that you, you're right. It kind of started off as a left wing
00:23:47.380 thing. It was sort of like, don't put that in my body kind of thing. And, and then I think during
00:23:54.220 COVID, but before COVID, and I don't know the full history, but I know during COVID, there was this
00:24:00.580 attitude that COVID-19 was not a real virus. It was, it was like the flu. We, we, we overreacted
00:24:07.260 to it. And there was sort of this anti COVID-19 attitude that somehow got extended to the
00:24:13.580 vaccines for whatever reason that didn't get extended to things like ivermectin, which,
00:24:18.300 you know, it doesn't work, but people started embracing drugs that were useless at the same
00:24:26.060 time they were rejecting these vaccines which had actually are the most effective most powerful
00:24:32.120 vaccines we've ever created i mean the the the science that went into them um is truly remarkable
00:24:38.680 and uh you know it's like probably the achievement so far of this century creating those vaccines
00:24:46.080 and yet people even now today i know you keep i just got in a booster the other day
00:24:51.400 having to get boosters. And so that has probably taken some of the, um, I don't know, some of the
00:24:59.600 allure off, even the people who are pro vaccine, it's that the vaccines don't last very long,
00:25:06.000 which is there's, I don't know if there's, they'll ever figure out a way to get around that.
00:25:10.660 They probably won't. And you know, when I think about it, I just think about the fact that I get
00:25:14.260 a new flu shot every year. I don't, I don't judge the booster for needing a booster or needing
00:25:19.760 something for a new variant because that's just the way that that's just the way that science
00:25:23.600 works that's the way viruses mutate it i would think that's common knowledge but i've realized
00:25:29.840 in the last few years when i finally started teaching history that things i think are common
00:25:33.520 knowledge are are not so uh like i i understand that viruses mutate that's the thing that happens
00:25:39.040 and i i don't judge science for not being able to give me a perfect vaccine but a lot of people
00:25:44.560 people do think it should be infallible, I guess, and, and not have any, you know, have any problems.
00:25:50.220 The first results we got, the first vaccine was so effective. It was like 95% effective.
00:25:55.360 And then you didn't even, if you got the vaccine, you are, we're unlikely to even get COVID period.
00:26:01.200 I mean, breakthrough cases were very rare. That sort of changed over time with new variants.
00:26:07.020 And so the vaccine was actually so effective initially that now everybody holds it to the
00:26:13.220 standard and saying, well, it doesn't do this. It doesn't do that. Well, you know, the flu shot
00:26:16.900 may some years may only be 40% effective, but nobody's going out there saying, oh, well,
00:26:23.040 this is like poison. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I get the flu every year. I just realized that because
00:26:29.520 I got the flu shot, my flu symptoms are not going to be as bad. I'm not going to be in as in, you
00:26:34.300 know, I'm not going to be sick as long. Like, fine. I don't mind if I get the flu every year
00:26:38.200 when I get the flu vaccine, just because I know it's going to, it is going to help me. It's going
00:26:41.760 to make it a little bit less, less bad. And I've gotten, I have gotten COVID. I've kept up with all
00:26:46.200 my boosters and everything like that. But when the Delta variant came out, when the Omicron variant
00:26:50.480 came out and started spreading, I did end up getting it. Because I was, you know, working in
00:26:56.580 fields where I was packed in with a lot of people and a lot of them who didn't trust vaccines,
00:27:01.680 to be honest. So herd immunity just wasn't going to cover me at that point, even with my vaccine.
00:27:07.540 But I never ended up in the hospital. I never ended up, you know, on a on any sort of breathing machine or anything like that. And I'm I'm happy with that. That's that's good. That's all. That's all I really need out of it.
00:27:20.280 what's another interesting thing that hardly anyone seems to know is that a lot of the
00:27:25.520 technology that vaccines has gone into treatments as well and diagnostics so you have like a range
00:27:31.640 of uh ways to treat covid now including pexlovid um and things like that and and a lot of
00:27:39.320 the success that we've had in treating it also kind of goes back to the science behind the
00:27:45.220 vaccines it's really interesting yeah absolutely you i you in part of the book you mentioned that
00:27:50.200 so much of the credit on this has gone to like operation warp drive it's it's gone to the that
00:27:55.660 idea and i i almost think that in a way that is one of the reasons why people mistrust it so much
00:28:00.640 because we put so much emphasis on the rapid creation of the vaccine without advertising the
00:28:07.420 fact that this is based on literal decades of research and work by so many by so many dedicated
00:28:13.720 scientists on this and i i wonder if maybe if we had changed the narrative flipped the narrative
00:28:19.820 a little bit more to basically the narrative that you've covered in your book. If maybe that people
00:28:26.200 might have trusted it a little bit more. Possibly. You know, I think that, so going back to Barney
00:28:31.820 Gramm, the whole time, so I was interviewing him in real time, you know, as things were happening.
00:28:37.620 And he, I think everybody, I thought he thought that this was all going to be settled once the
00:28:42.820 vaccine, if the vaccine came out and it was successful, they thought, well, we've conquered
00:28:47.760 COVID-19. And he even broke down and cried when he heard the first results. And I think what he,
00:28:55.120 the last time I interviewed him, the thing that he didn't anticipate was how many people were
00:29:00.260 going to reject the vaccine because they didn't trust it. And I think that that is, it's kind of
00:29:05.620 heartbreaking in a way. As somebody who kind of interacted with these scientists for months
00:29:10.340 and was rooting for them, you know, I wanted this vaccine to work too. I wanted us to get out of
00:29:16.800 this pandemic. I think also the other thing is that it is true that I got COVID, but I think that
00:29:23.980 because I've been, I've had probably six shots now and I don't, I no longer like think that
00:29:32.800 there's a chance that I'm going to die from COVID. Whereas, you know, that was a real likelihood
00:29:37.220 before the vaccines came out. So, so for those who do believe in science and those who do believe
00:29:43.860 in vaccines the vaccines even though they wane a little bit over time and so you can get sick
00:29:49.680 you might end up in the hospital you're still more you're still going to do better just like
00:29:55.340 you said with the like just like with the flu shot you're going to do a lot better if you've
00:29:59.640 been vaccinated yeah i think it's incredibly important and it it is so nice to like see the
00:30:06.120 stories of these scientists who worked on it to hear what they thought about it uh because i think
00:30:11.980 a lot of people do sometimes think that scientists are kind of like cold fish right dead fish they
00:30:15.960 don't really they don't really react to things and to hear like that he cried when hearing the
00:30:20.660 you know the results of the first vaccine or you know how much they care about people and how much
00:30:27.280 they care about about saving lives even if they're not going to get any recognition or or major
00:30:33.300 attention from it is it's incredibly just nice to see like i i think it may gives a bit for human
00:30:40.980 face to the entire process of science. It's true. I mean, Barney is a very genuine, I mean, he really
00:30:48.700 does. He's a very good person. And when people talk about the vaccines as though they were created
00:30:56.120 to make money, it's like, well, they weren't created by a pharmaceutical company. They were
00:31:01.760 created by government and academic scientists. And then pharmaceutical companies managed to
00:31:08.540 just sold them. So, but the people who actually, but I actually know, I know all the people who
00:31:14.840 were behind making the vaccines and, you know, it kind of hurts me a little bit when I hear people
00:31:21.420 act as though this is all about, you know, greed and, you know, just making a ton of money because
00:31:28.960 Barney Graham didn't make a lot of the vaccine. Exactly. Or thinking that it's about microchipping
00:31:35.020 people and turning us into 5g towers i i'm still mad that i wasn't turned into a 5g tower to be
00:31:40.680 honest i feel like that was i was i got some bad you know bad advertisement there i i feel like i
00:31:46.520 i got i got screwed on that because i would love to be my own walking 5g tower that was kind of
00:31:51.360 one of my main goals for getting the vaccine honestly yeah well maybe next time we have a
00:31:56.240 pandemic they'll get to that they'll figure that out we'll get we'll get the microchip like do you
00:32:00.960 understand how small needles are and how big microchips are that you can't inject somebody
00:32:05.000 with a microchip that's not a that's not a logical thing at all uh not with that kind of needle
00:32:09.420 anyway um so you said that you went into this researching it not really knowing much about the
00:32:15.680 background of the vaccine right you you kind of you know you were going into this under the
00:32:20.520 impression that this was kind of a they were starting from a dead stop uh on this research
00:32:25.900 and things like that uh so what was one of the most interesting things that you kind of discovered
00:32:30.440 like a jaw-dropping moment of information for you while you were, while you were working on
00:32:34.720 Longshot? So the very first interview I had that turned everything around was I did reach Barney
00:32:40.880 Graham and I was surprised he was willing to talk to me because, I mean, it was at the heart. We
00:32:46.180 were, we were in this pandemic. He was working night and day to, you know, to, to solve it.
00:32:53.200 And he's, you know, and I talked to him many times and he, he told me the very first thing
00:32:58.580 he said to me was, we've been working on this vaccine for a decade. And the reason that they'd
00:33:02.580 been working on it for a decade was because that's a long story. And I'll tell you the very
00:33:07.880 short version, which is after they had created the, they figured out how to RSV vaccine. It took
00:33:14.840 them, you know, 10 or 15 years to get from figuring out how to do the RSV vaccine, getting
00:33:21.400 it on the market when it's on the market right now. And so everything he learned from that,
00:33:27.040 he decided okay well let's use this on another virus and at that very moment there was a and
00:33:34.020 it still exists by the way there was a pandemic there was not a pandemic but there was a outbreak
00:33:39.580 of something called MERS which is another form of which is another version of the coronavirus
00:33:45.040 and so they decided well let's try making a vaccine for that and the reason they did it
00:33:52.260 had nothing to do so much with, well, they knew that there was going to be another coronavirus
00:33:57.000 outbreak, and there was. But they also thought it was a virus that not many people had studied,
00:34:08.720 so there was a lot of sort of opportunity for them to learn a lot from looking at it.
00:34:13.240 So basically, to make the story short, they've created essentially a MERS vaccine within about
00:34:20.720 three or four years and then when the COVID-19 came out and broke out in China in 2019
00:34:29.360 all they had to do essentially was tweak it they just had to tweak it based on
00:34:35.220 the composition of what's called the spike protein so they were defeating the spike protein
00:34:41.400 they already knew how to do that because they did it with a different coronavirus so they
00:34:47.120 literally created the the vaccine in about an hour or two that's amazing yeah i can see why
00:34:54.780 that would be jaw-dropping information to find out that it was it was you know i said it's not
00:34:59.200 just luck it's good timing and also just consistent consistent effort over the course
00:35:04.800 of decades of research where you know scientists have been putting in the effort knowing that
00:35:10.760 something like this was going to come and and and doing what they could to prepare us for it
00:35:16.020 essentially um and that's amazing yeah it is amazing there's a lot of there's a lot of viruses
00:35:22.280 that we could have there are other viruses that we could have had a pandemic with and um we kind
00:35:29.360 of got lucky because um mers has a 35 fatality rate but it's not very and it still exists by
00:35:37.960 the way, it's still out there. But it's not very contagious. COVID-19 is really contagious,
00:35:47.800 but it has a relatively low fatality rate, even compared to SARS-1. And so we really lucked out
00:35:56.920 that we had this terrible infectious disease that could have wiped out a lot of the population. It
00:36:07.440 it did kill millions of people. Um, but it could have been so much worse. And, um, you know, that's
00:36:15.220 just the luck of the draw. It is definitely. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about the
00:36:20.560 book. Uh, it, uh, the book is super, super good. I really recommend it to all of my listeners.
00:36:26.900 Definitely take a look at it. It's called long shot, the inside story of the race for a COVID-19
00:36:31.680 vaccine i will put a link up to it on the website so you'll be able to to access it uh and buy a
00:36:39.120 copy of it i'm gonna finish reading it probably in the next couple of weeks and then pass it on
00:36:43.120 pass my copy on to my mom because she's very interested in this she's in the medical field
00:36:46.480 as well so uh yeah so it was fascinating really great to talk with you and i'm so grateful for
00:36:53.120 you coming on the show thanks for having me and is there anywhere online that you could recommend
00:36:59.440 people to find you uh to follow you things like that yeah so i'm on all the social media but like
00:37:05.760 i have a website where you can find everything it's at www.david-heath.com okay great and i will
00:37:12.960 also put a link to that in the episode description for uh for this when the episode goes up so you
00:37:17.600 guys should be able to find it no problem uh and thank you guys so much for tuning in to hear about
00:37:23.520 the history of vaccines this week. And I'll see you back here next Monday.
00:37:36.780 And that's it for today. Thank you so much to David once again for coming on the show.
00:37:40.960 I highly recommend his book. I literally read the rest of it the night after I interviewed him and
00:37:45.060 finished it in one sitting. To close out the show, I'd like for everyone to know that I'm
00:37:49.800 working on some online courses. I may end up doing my whole American History 101 run through as an
00:37:55.100 online course, but I haven't really decided on that yet. But I am putting together a series on
00:37:59.760 TikTok for October, which will give you a rundown on the history of the witch trials in a far more
00:38:04.260 in-depth way than the podcast episode on it did earlier this summer. I'm also putting together a
00:38:09.420 course using music to teach the Cold War, and for any listeners with teenagers, I'm now putting
00:38:14.100 together classes for a secular homeschool group called OutSchool. The course I offer at the moment
00:38:19.020 is titled shattering glass ceilings a journey through women's history in the usa and a link to
00:38:24.260 it will be posted on bitchyhistory.com for those of you interested in signing up your teenagers for
00:38:28.800 it the other courses like the music and the cold war course aren't ready to launch yet but links
00:38:34.060 will be posted and i'll announce them on the show when they are ready thank you so much for coming
00:38:39.160 to listen to me bitch about history and i hope that you'll all continue to do so even with the
00:38:43.100 slightly new direction of the show i think it's going to be a lot of fun to talk about my personal 0.80
00:38:47.400 history passions more than being constrained by keeping a chronological order to my content.
00:38:52.540 To that end, I will be jumping forward in time a lot in our next episode, and we'll be talking
00:38:57.320 about a topic that's gotten me into no end of trouble on social media, and HR in one memorable
00:39:03.540 occasion, the American Civil War. So tune in for that next week.
00:39:17.400 Amen.