Things of Interest

#062

Vaccines

00:00:00 // 00:00:00
3 April 2021

You all saw this coming, right? We couldn’t have one of our hosts be a genetics PhD and not geek out about the new mRNA vaccines.

Sophia Frentz

[00:00:00] Hi gang! Room audio Sophia here with a quick disclaimer, that I am a PhD, not a medical doctor while I know a lot about medical stuff, nothing within this podcast is medical advice. So, if you’ve got questions, concerns, something you’re worried about: See a medical professional. Thanks! And stay safe.

[00:00:25] Hi! and welcome to Things of Interest. I’m Sophia Frentz

Serena Chen

[00:00:39] and I’m Serena Chen

Sophia Frentz

[00:00:42] And this week, we’re going to be talking to you about vaccines. Everyone’s chatting about vaccines. Again, it’s so exciting. We always have like a big uptick in vaccine chat every year when the flu vaccine comes out, certainly around our workplaces, but obviously with the current global pandemic and the vaccines that have come out from Pfizer and BioNTech and AstraZeneca, vaccines are on the tip of people’s tongues all over again.

[00:01:08] I personally had the wonderful experience of going on a date last year with a gentleman who said “the vaccine’s all well and good, but my problem is how they’re going to microchip us”.

[00:01:20] So that was,

[00:01:21] (laughter)

[00:01:21] I mean, honestly like the red flag was when he asked why I moved to Melbourne and I described my PhD and he said, “I don’t really believe in mainstream science.”

[00:01:31] So I don’t really know what else I expected from that conversation. So, what we’re going to do is I’m going to chat a bit about vaccines. It always feels weird, not throwing to you immediately, Serena, but this is just my field.

Serena Chen

[00:01:46] Yeah, please, this is the reason

Sophia Frentz

[00:01:48] I’m going to chat about vaccines and then I’m going to continue to talk.

[00:01:52]and every so often Serena will come in with questions or good viewpoints.

Serena Chen

[00:01:57] I’m going to relate, just a spoiler alert. I’m probably going to relate everything to computers and code because that’s the closest analogy that I can find to a field that I work in. and I’ve found that it, the analogies line-up, in my view, at least, pretty well, but yeah, please keep going.

Sophia Frentz

[00:02:18] Cool. So, vaccines and immunization now can kind of be used interchangeably the vaccine: when you’re vaccinated, that’s the experience of getting a shot, usually in your arm, when you’re a wee baby it’s in your butt. For certain diseases, like I think typhus you’ll take pills and those will immunize you against a disease.

[00:02:37] They used to mean different things in the lay sense. Like when people just say words, they don’t really, so I can’t be bothered with that.

[00:02:46] Basically like the first time that we kind of realized that, you know, sometimes if you had a disease, you didn’t get it again, and it didn’t even have to be the same disease, was when smallpox was a big deal.

[00:02:56] So smallpox used to be the disease, right? It was the thing that killed people. And if it didn’t kill you, it would typically scar you for life. So, like there are smallpox scars on mummies from ancient Egypt that were found.

[00:03:08] Smallpox is one of the very few diseases we’ve managed to completely eradicate, cause it was a virus that was only ever found in humans. and the first step on the pathway to doing this was, they’d try inoculation against smallpox, which is when you get smallpox scabs and you kind of grind them up really firm and you cut someone’s skin and put the smallpox scabs in it.

[00:03:28] And sometimes this inoculated people from smallpox. Sometimes they got a mild version of smallpox. Sometimes they just got smallpox. So, you know, sometimes you just get the disease, and then you might die. Okay. That’s not awesome.

[00:03:44] That’s been around for a really, really long time. So, smallpox inoculation, we have evidence from like the 1500s in China, in Europe probably, around the 1700s ish is when they started adopting the practice. but in the late 1700s, this guy, Edward Jenner, noticed that milkmaids, weren’t getting smallpox. They just like, did not get it at all. And he kind of put the bits together in that like milkmaids will typically get a separate and much less bad and deadly disease called cowpox, which would cause like sores on their hands, and it was kind of related to the work they did with the cows. I think they got it through milking or something. I dunno.

[00:04:28] So He started testing this, I think first on his own children and then on incarcerated criminals, who couldn’t meaningfully consent to it. So cool, good history of medicine we have there, shame if terrible things happen to it. That was kind of like the first inoculation.

[00:04:45] Like that was the beginning of vaccination, immunization, using things that weren’t the disease itself to help you not get the disease in the future. It’s generally the idea behind all of it. In the years following like the development of proper smallpox vaccines, a lot of other vaccines were developed.

[00:05:04] So smallpox was like, beginning of the 1800s. And then people were like, Hey, this could work for a bunch of other stuff. And so, they started trying to do this. this was also in the era that a lot of antibiotics were discovered. So, it was very exciting time to be in science because you were like, maybe we’ll cure all diseases! In hindsight that it didn’t work.

[00:05:25] So a lot of the time, what a vaccine does now is instead of giving you a related but different disease, and you just get to be sick with this other disease for a while, we’ll typically give you like dead bits of the disease, right? So, your measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, your flu vaccine, a lot of the time, that will include just like a bit on the outside of the thing that has given you a disease. So, if you think about viruses as like they’ve got an inside and an outside: the outside bit is what our cells see. You give that to a person and you kind of like indicate to the body that it’s a dangerous thing. Then the body goes, Oh, cool. Next time I see it. That’ll die real fast.

[00:06:08] I’m trying to organize my thoughts now. There’s a lot

Serena Chen

[00:06:11] it’s a huge field.

Sophia Frentz

[00:06:13] Yeah,

Serena Chen

[00:06:14] complexity as well. Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:06:16] The other way that we can, vaccinate people is by using an attenuated version of the disease. So instead of having just like a dead bit of a virus, you get like a virus, it’s just like, it can’t replicate, so you take out the bit that can replicate, and you’re like, here’s a virus. This is what it looks like. Next time it’s here. Like kill it,

Serena Chen

[00:06:34] Kill it real fast.

Sophia Frentz

[00:06:34] This occasionally backfires. So, there’s been like ongoing attempts to create a Dengue vaccine. Dengue fever is a disease carried by mosquitoes. It has the really horrible thing where if you get it once, you’re generally get pretty sick, you might die. If you get it additional times, you’re much, much more likely to get a form of Dengue fever that is called Dengue haemorrhagic fever, which is when you bleed and die. So That’s - and attempts to vaccinate have resulted in people’s infectious, subsequent infection with Dengue fever.

[00:07:07] This is typically done with American military, and that they just get the Dengue haemorrhagic fever. So essentially their body’s acting like it’s already been infected once. So not all vaccines work. Sometimes they go terribly wrong. So, when it comes to like vaccines today, we’re trying really hard to move away from having like an attenuated version of the virus, or virus or bacteria and more towards just having like dead bits of virus or bacteria.

[00:07:35] the idea behind that is, is that like, while it’s incredibly unlikely to make you sick, if you’re immunocompromised and that’s not known, for example, some people aren’t born with spleens or have damaged spleens that we don’t know about, particularly for vaccines that happen early on in childhood, may have an immunodeficiency that hasn’t been noticed yet. that can cause, still cause danger, right? Either in the sense that like they could develop a form of the disease, or their immune system could overreact.

[00:08:03] That’s also why when you get vaccines now, if you’re traveling or you’re getting your flu vaccine, or I presume when you’re getting the coronavirus vaccine, your doctors will be like, Hey, stick around for like 20 minutes.

[00:08:15] Yeah, just, just hang out for like 20 minutes. and that’s because like, if you’re going to have anaphylactic reaction, it will happen in that time period. and that’s the really, really dangerous response you can get to vaccines.

[00:08:27] Okay. Questions.

Serena Chen

[00:08:30] That was a perfect, and incredibly effective summary of the history and the general workings of how, how vaccines work. What I am.

Sophia Frentz

[00:08:45] Oh, oh one thing, sorry

Serena Chen

[00:08:46] Yeah, sorry, go for it.

Sophia Frentz

[00:08:47] So, in your, in your country of residence, of growing up-ness, you will have a vaccine schedule that will say, like have these particular vaccines at these particular times. Sometimes stuff’s added to that.

[00:08:59] I had chickenpox when I was sort of three or four and now kids will get a chickenpox vaccine and they don’t get chicken pox. And you might look at that and go like, well, chickenpox isn’t that bad. Like, I don’t really care.

Serena Chen

[00:09:11] Shingles, though.

Sophia Frentz

[00:09:12] Yeah. So similar to something like measles, where like measles generally like, does not kill people. They like get a rash and then they kind of get better. It’s bad enough for enough people that we don’t want them to get it.

[00:09:23] We don’t want anyone to get it. And it like, absolutely. will kill, like immunocompromised people.

Serena Chen

[00:09:28] Yeah. doesn’t measles like wipe out your immune system’s memory?

Sophia Frentz

[00:09:35] it can.

Serena Chen

[00:09:38] Yeah, that’s, that’s the scary thing about measles apart from, you know, killing babies

Sophia Frentz

[00:09:43] It’s something like around one in a thousand people will get like meningitis through measles, but like 6% will get like pneumonia relating to the measles, which can cause death, right?

Serena Chen

[00:09:57] Mm.

Sophia Frentz

[00:09:58] And it’s been a similar approach, right? There was enough burden on the healthcare system that like, you want to prevent people from getting it. Chickenpox, particularly if you don’t get it as a child can be really severe when you get it as an adult. And I am, I don’t know. Did you get chicken pox as a kid, Serena?

Serena Chen

[00:10:14] Yeah, I did

Sophia Frentz

[00:10:15] so we’ve now just got like chicken pox virus hanging out.

Serena Chen

[00:10:18] Forever

Sophia Frentz

[00:10:19] Yeah. Just in our spinal column, just having a good time. I think it’s Varicella zoster.

Serena Chen

[00:10:24] I’m so mad. I’m so mad that like the chickenpox vaccine didn’t come out and get added to the schedule when we were children,

Sophia Frentz

[00:10:31] There is now a vaccine, you can get, I think if you’re over 60 for shingles

Serena Chen

[00:10:36] Oh,

Sophia Frentz

[00:10:36] Which will like help prevent it from like breaking back out again because old people are most at risk of shingles as their immune system kind of gets old.

[00:10:46] All right, sorry, you had a question.

Serena Chen

[00:10:50] no, I’ve forgotten about it completely

Sophia Frentz

[00:10:53] too excited.

Serena Chen

[00:10:55] Let’s just keep, yeah, let’s just keep riffing.

Sophia Frentz

[00:10:57] the other thing with, vaccination schedules is over time, they’ll be adjusted, right? So, like measles, mumps, and rubella used to be separate vaccines, DPT, which is diphtheria, pertussis and typhoid I think, they used to be separate vaccines as well.

[00:11:15] As we get better at making vaccines, and better at understanding how different vaccines interact, at understanding how the body responds to them. Like what we need to do in order to like elicit memory in your immune system. we can start combining those and changing that schedule.

[00:11:31] So if you’re a bit older or even like, shit, our age, and you look at the schedule now you might be like, Oh, like they’re combining a few more than they did when I was a kid. And in my case be kind of mad because I hated needles. So, it’s like, Oh, I didn’t need to get that many shots? Well, get out of here.

Serena Chen

[00:11:50] Good for good for all the kids these days though.

Sophia Frentz

[00:11:53] Yeah. Like it’s, it’s fine. Right? Like it’s - medical research and medical science updates as we get more information and that is entirely how it should be. And it’s always nice to see that like flowing through to public health advice. God, I love vaccines. I always feel so powerful after I get my flu shot.

Serena Chen

[00:12:11] Oh, my gosh. we are, you know how, like tech bros talk about body hacking and they talk about like fucking putting RFID chips into, into their hands and stuff. Like vaccinations are literal body hacking. We are literally sending code to our immune system and being like execute this,

Sophia Frentz

[00:12:32] I think about it. Like if you go into like a dairy or a two four, or if you’re in Australia or a 7-11 and they have up those signs of like, these people have stolen from us and in like the photos, that’s basically what vaccines are doing. They’re just like showing your immune system a photo and being like no incorrect

Serena Chen

[00:12:50] Not this guy.

Sophia Frentz

[00:12:54] If you see them a risk them and kill them,

Serena Chen

[00:12:58] repress them immediately.

Sophia Frentz

[00:13:00] So then we now have, some really promising and, you know, approved in many countries, coronavirus vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines. there are a few different types that have been approved. They have different, sort of protection rates associated with them.

[00:13:13] So I believe the BioNTech is. 95% and AstraZeneca is 70 ish in current studies. Ninety five, God.

Serena Chen

[00:13:23] That’s so ridiculous.

Sophia Frentz

[00:13:26] If I had a 95% success rate with my life, like I would be a lot richer

Serena Chen

[00:13:31] Right? Like, yeah. I remember before they came out with these, Oh, like mid last year. And you were hearing about, about. like nation health organizations.

[00:13:43] And they would be like, look, we will accept a vaccine if it surpasses 50% efficacy. And you’re like, cool. if we can cut transmission or like severe disease down by 50%, that’s going to do a huge amount to, and then they just like swing on up, on the world stage and be like, Hey everybody, how’s ninety, how’s ninety for y’all.

[00:14:06] Hm.

Sophia Frentz

[00:14:08] Oh, so, anyway. I mean, obviously this is exciting because it’s going to help us curb like the current global pandemic. But the other reason it’s really exciting is that certainly the Pfizer BioNTech - I should check what’s in the Astra Zeneca good one.

Serena Chen

[00:14:23] No, I think it’s the Moderna and the BioNTech yeah, those are the mRNA ones. Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:14:27] Cool cool cool. It’s an entirely new type of vaccine, which is just like so cool. And I really.

[00:14:33] Keep listening. Don’t hear the words entirely new type of vaccine and be like, Oh, that’s scary. I’m hanging up. No, no, extremely fine. We’ve been, we’ve been trying, we’ve been working like to an extent on creating an mRNA vaccine for like 30 years right.

[00:14:48] Because what we currently do is, we take bits of the virus or bits of the bacteria, or sometimes if you’re really unlucky, bits of the like little worm that gives you an infection. Oh, I hate plasmodium. That’s stuff like malaria, ugh.

[00:15:04] Instead of doing that and like maybe causing an allergic response maybe causing, some other kinds of like immune response that isn’t technically an allergy, but it’s still really bad for you. Instead of that. We’re now giving your body a little bit of the code to make the thing that surrounds the virus and your body will just be like, not allergic to a thing it makes itself usually, unless you have an immune disorder, in which case, like we already know, because you’re allergic to yourself and we would have picked up on that by now.

[00:15:35] I have a lot of thoughts about the immune system and I want to say all of them.

Serena Chen

[00:15:37] Yeah. From like what I’m looking at it, how I understand it to be is that like giving a dead version of a virus. And like, we should probably emphasize that the vaccines that are using the, the current technology of giving you like a dead version of the virus is actually extremely safe and allergic reactions, are very, very, very rare.

[00:16:00]so you should totally still get your flu shots every single year. Boom.

[00:16:03] But I, I kind of see it as like shining a torch onto, I don’t know the, the wanted poster for the virus and like, you know, spotting the virus with the torch and the mRNA one is like shining a laser pointer. It is just, it is extremely, extremely, accurate, and it’s so frickin cool, please.

[00:16:26] Please keep going because I’m loving all of this

Sophia Frentz

[00:16:29] it’s specific. It’s easier to update.

Serena Chen

[00:16:32] it’s programmable.

Sophia Frentz

[00:16:33] You can patch your vaccines a lot more readily. Yeah,

Serena Chen

[00:16:35] That’s the thing that blows my mind- it is programmable. Like we can print off essentially these RNA.

[00:16:43] That’s so freaking cool.

Sophia Frentz

[00:16:46] I love how excited you are about this. Cause I’m like, of course you can print off, like it’s a pain in the ass, but of course you can.

[00:16:54] So, the way cells work is inside each of your cells you’ve got some stuff called DNA. That is your genome. It makes all the code that makes you who you are. Plus, your environment a little bit. Every living thing has that. Are viruses living, maybe, maybe not. some viruses don’t have DNA, so they have a different kind of like set of code called RNA.

[00:17:15] RNA is a little bit less stable. That’s why these vaccines need a super cool chain. So, you, might’ve heard people talking about like, you know, the fact that these guys need to be stored at minus 80. Like, it means they’re not super good for, I don’t know, all of Africa. Oh, we can’t transport it really far or like make it in heaps of places. Oh, whoops. Guess like the global poor is fucked.

[00:17:37] And so in our cells, in our little human cells, the DNA encodes lots of different things called proteins and proteins make up your hair and your nails and every little thing that like creates your body is a protein. Like it’s just a little building block of stuff.

[00:17:53] Like it’s what we actually use to form ourselves out of. whereas the DNA is like a plan for that. And the RNA is a bit in between there. And it goes to the DNA and goes like, Hey, what’s up? And the DNA goes, please build this. And the RNA goes out from where the DNA is, the nucleus, heads down to the cell and goes like, we’re going to build this now.

[00:18:10] The like quote-unquote reason for that, like, there’s a lot of evolutionary theory we could go into, but like generally the accepted reason for that is that. DNA’s like, we want it to be really accurate. Pretty important for the DNA to consistently be the same. And if we were like unlooping it and making proteins off it all the time, that would expose it to a lot of damage and a lot of risk for mutations.

[00:18:34] And so instead we have like this, sort of tracing paper version of RNA. Which can just kind of go between the DNA without like damaging it too much and kind of keeping it mostly spooled up and then go out and then make lots of copies of protein. If there needs to be lots of copies or only a few, if there only need to be a few and then it gets destroyed afterwards.

Serena Chen

[00:18:55] I think about this. Like, so with computers and computer programs, these like executable binaries, they sit in like your hard drive, right, in flash storage. And when you run a program, it doesn’t just run off the flash storage. You have to make a copy into RAM into working memory. And it’s like the exact same idea is that like, if you keep executing off of flash storage. It’s, it’s like hard to get to. It’s very stable, right?

[00:19:27] And it’s, it’s very good against protecting from errors, but it’s very slow, but then you make a copy, you put it into RAM and suddenly like everything and it becomes very accessible. It’s very fast, but it’s also very fragile and it’s prone to damage, which is fine if you’re just like, you know, it’s in, it’s in working memory.

Sophia Frentz

[00:19:46] Hmm.

Serena Chen

[00:19:46] And this blows my mind so much because computers are a thing that like we built and we thought about, you know, that we like reasoned through, and in our bodies every single day we have these mechanisms, like we have error correcting in our DNA.

[00:20:03] That’s mind blowing to me like, you know, the DNA two strand thing and how one base always connects to one other base. And, not just like any other base. So, you basically have like two copies in one stran- in one bit of DNA, which means that you have, inherent error correction. So, if one of those bases gets changed, you can tell that it doesn’t match with the other one.

[00:20:27] And then like the thing reading the DNA can be like, Whoa, nah, I don’t like this. Delete this, get rid of this.

[00:20:36] That is fricking mind blowing to me. This is like in our bodies. I’m sorry. I’m just having a moment. I’m going to have a lot of moments.

Sophia Frentz

[00:20:43] When DNA is being replicated. There’s like specific proteins that like go across and like check for errors.

Serena Chen

[00:20:49] So cool.

Sophia Frentz

[00:20:50] Yeah.

Serena Chen

[00:20:51] Just- And like the fact that, that these, these processes, these like, these copiers, that the proteins, that check for errors, the fact that these are all folded up molecules that, essentially swimming in this molecule soup, bumping around each other, randomly in Brownian motion. And that’s not necessarily true, but like, you know how it’s mostly a random process.

[00:21:23] And then they, by the sheer affinity of the different molecules, they like latch on in the right places. And then like, Carry out their process. That’s

Sophia Frentz

[00:21:32] yeah. I mean, your cells, I would be very hesitant to say a huge amount of things on a biological level happen randomly,

[00:21:39] like, we usually say that things are random or stochastic when we don’t know what’s causing them, but there’s probably something causing them.

Serena Chen

[00:21:44] Right.

Sophia Frentz

[00:21:45] So there’ll be things like chemical gradients or, acid-base gradients. And there’s a lot of like your cells all have like a little skeleton holding them up. That’s why your body has a shape.

[00:21:54] There’s really no other way to put that. and those skeletons help arrange everything and like make sure the proteins that need to be in one place or in a particular place.

[00:22:03] there’s some proteins that have like one side that’s hydrophobic. So, it doesn’t like water on one side that’s hydrophilic, so, likes watery stuff. and that’s what your cell membranes are made off. There’s like one end is like, heck yeah, water. And the other end is like, no, no, no. let’s find a safe place.

[00:22:17]and they kinda like snapped together like that. So really, like, I think a good analogy for things like that is just like, they’re like magnets. You know how magnets just kind of snap together when you put them near each other. Just kind of what a bunch of stuff in our cells does.

Serena Chen

[00:22:32] So cool. So, so fricking cool anyway, so we were talking about, about how RNA is like a working copy that gets sent out of the nucleus, to be then

Sophia Frentz

[00:22:43] Made into proteins.

Serena Chen

[00:22:44] Executed, essentially, executed in the program way, not in the kill way,

Sophia Frentz

[00:22:50] Yeah yeah, I got you

[00:22:52]and so like using RNA to sort of make cells make stuff has happened a bit in molecular biology. RNA is like quite, because it’s quite fragile, it usually needs to be stored very cold. it’s kind of just a pain in the ass.

[00:23:06] a lot of the time, like in my lab work and in a lot of people’s lab work. They’ll probably use DNA. So, they’ll just like temporarily give a cell a little bit of extra DNA and just be like, go for gold. Problem is when you like, want something to work in human subjects. You can’t just be like, I don’t know, have some extra DNA, like, let’s see how it goes.

[00:23:23] Cause that can cancer that can cancer very easily. When it comes to just like putting DNA in your blood, not a huge amount of risk associated with that. When it comes to putting DNA in your blood that’s specifically tagged to be taken up by cells and then transcribed. There is a lot of risk associated with that.

[00:23:42] So, you know, if you’re getting, a vaccine and the vaccine is DNA based, which it may be for some viruses, then like absolutely no risk associated with that. If we were to say like, this is basically gene therapy, but a vaccine, there is, there’ll be, it would take longer. Shall we say? so mRNA is actually like the really good way to kind of find the middle ground when it comes to vaccines, because it doesn’t last very long.

[00:24:07] Like, you know, your cell will make a few copies and then there are particular tags you can put on the beginning and the end of the mRNA that tells it like how many copies to make and when it should get digested.

Serena Chen

[00:24:16] So cool

Sophia Frentz

[00:24:17] It can’t really integrate into anything. like it won’t touch your DNA probably.

[00:24:23] And yeah, it gets your cells to make a bunch of the copies of the spike protein in the, COVID-19 case. The cells put those on the outside. your immune system goes, well, what the fuck are those? Kills those cells a few times. And then it’s like, cool. So those are bad. Those are evil. Got it.

[00:24:42] and then as soon as you get a COVID-19 infection. Like usually the infection will land a bit, right? Like this is how the flu vaccine works. The infection will land a bit, but it basically gets destroyed before you notice that you’ve had an infection.

Serena Chen

[00:24:56] Hmm. That is really cool. I also, so I read a really cool blog post, which you might be able to tell from like, Me linking everything back to, to computing analogies.

[00:25:10] And it’s this blog post that’s like, titled like reverse engineering, the mRNA vaccine where they look at the source code for the mRNA vaccine and break it down and kind of explain and, in comp sci terms, what each bit of the source code do.

[00:25:26] And one part that I found really, really interesting and really cool was that all of the, all of the Us, I think, cause its RNA were replaced by the symbol the psi symbol and they explained that it was because we were using a, a modified version of that base because they found out that by using this modified version, it gets through our, like our own body’s you know, firewall, antivirus the, the original, the original firewall

Sophia Frentz

[00:26:02] I mean, the fever’s, the original firewall, probably just the original antibiotics.

Serena Chen

[00:26:09] Yes, but it, it gets through that because our bodies just see it and they’re like, cool, whatever. Whereas, when our bodies see the usual, like U base then they’re like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, hang on. Hang on, hang on. This looks like foreign code and I’m not going to do any- I’m going to destroy it.

[00:26:28] which is literally how hacking works. Like it’s literally how, how we break into computers. We send them corrupted data basically, or like a, like a different version of the data that they’re not expecting. And so, if they’re not expecting to see it, it gets through the computer’s defences, and then it gets executed upon and it’s like, Holy shit.

[00:26:55] This is like exactly the same idea. Exactly the same. And we’re now using it to, to stop a pandemic.

[00:27:04] That’s, that’s pretty incredible.

Sophia Frentz

[00:27:08] Yeah, that was very cool.

[00:27:10] Oh, the things I did want to touch on is- I think a lot of people have, I mean, fair enough, given the information that a lot of people have around vaccines, expressed concern about how fast these were developed.

Serena Chen

[00:27:22] Oh yeah. Hmm.

Sophia Frentz

[00:27:23] There are a couple of elements to that. firstly, that like we’ve been working on various types of coronavirus vaccines for a while. So, since the SARS outbreak there’ve been like various attempts to develop a coronavirus vaccine. While this is a new type of coronavirus, there was some work that had gone into this already.

[00:27:38] the other element being like when it comes to mRNA vaccines, as I said, we’ve been working on that for like 30 years, just trying to get the technology good. But mostly it’s happened quickly because, all the bureaucracy has got out of the way. And when I say bureaucracy, I don’t mean safety testing.

[00:27:53] I mean bullshit like writing grants to be like, please let us make a vaccine that will save lives. And then, you know, policy makers are like, I dunno, do you really need to save lives though? Like, is it more important than like, this other research? I just, I dunno, we should decrease medical funding next year.

Serena Chen

[00:28:14] Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:28:15] so there was just like, basically there was money. There was like agreement that this was our priority. And there was an ability to like get people for trials quickly and easily. And that means instead of taking 10 years to develop a vaccine, it took, shit like a year, six, eight months.

[00:28:34] Yeah.

Serena Chen

[00:28:34] It’s incredible.

[00:28:35] It blows my mind how much, how much humanity is capable of if we just prioritized it.

Sophia Frentz

[00:28:44] It’s hard when you work in medical research a lot of the time, because like all of the work is valuable, right? Like, I mean, certainly I worked in paediatrics the time that I was in medical research. So, you can’t really turn around and be like, these children do not deserve to live or have quality of life, whereas these children do.

[00:29:04] And yet that’s what people who make decisions on grants decide every year. It’s really, it’s a question of funding, right? Like there needs to be more money in medical research. Because, if we don’t have that money in medical research, then people are going to suffer unnecessarily, die unnecessarily.

[00:29:19] And also like the economy will be bad, probably, I don’t know. it’s, it’s that like shitty, argument you have to make, when you’re like talking to policymakers and lawmakers where you’re like, you know, there’s harm, there’s suffering. This is really bad. Also, there’ll be a burden on the healthcare system and they won’t be able to contribute to the economy.

[00:29:38] So can you let me do the thing now?

Serena Chen

[00:29:43] It is, it is quite disappointing how, how often we have to frame all of these arguments in terms of this mythical worshiped economy. And what’s even more frustrating is that, the knowledge that we have more than enough money and resource to. Because the thing is like these grants for research, and funding for healthcare often come up against and compete with funding for like infrastructure and education and other things that like are really genuinely things that we all need.

[00:30:26]and the thing that’s disappointing is that these things never seem to -

[00:30:34] Sophia’s just linked me to, a Twitter account that’s like - Is this the has Jeff Bezos decided to end world hunger yet? And it’s just, no. Is that the account? Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:30:45] yeah, so, I mean, there’s like, there’s some good political commentary around like, you know, why we worshiped billionaires and why like, we seem to think that someone who earns like $400 million an hour, like actually earns that wage. But also like every day there’s a tweet that says Jeff Bezos has decided he will not end world hunger today.

Serena Chen

[00:31:06] Pretty much. And that’s what I was trying to get at before, which is just like all of these crucial things: medicine, healthcare, education, infrastructure, all of these are vying for the same small and ever decreasing pot of money. When we have this like huge pot of money, which is, in like the hands of 20 people. And we’re not vying for that pot at all. And it’s just baffling that we could-

Sophia Frentz

[00:31:35] I’m just sending Serena, like Twitter accounts that do a bunch of maths around billionaires, specifically Jeff Bezos.

Serena Chen

[00:31:42] it’s baffling. It’s baffling. Eat the rich, wheel out the guill, guillotines. I don’t care like

[00:31:48] I’m not saying we all have to kill billionaires. I’m just saying let’s take their money.

Sophia Frentz

[00:31:52] Yeah. We don’t even have to take all their money. There’s been like a bunch of people who’ve done the math around, like.

[00:31:58] If we took all of the billionaires down to $1 billion or like 1 billion and $1 or something like that, we’d still have enough money to like, just make the world an objectively better place, but money say like, what are we going to do?

Serena Chen

[00:32:11] So there’s, I mean, it’s easy to take then? Cause, damn

[00:32:14]at that point, I feel like if someone took the majority of your wealth, like if someone took you down, let’s say 10 billion, God, these are numbers that like, we can’t, even as human beings, we can’t even conceptualize.

Sophia Frentz

[00:32:30] Hmm.

Serena Chen

[00:32:31] And if someone took all that money away from him, he wouldn’t… (sighs)

Sophia Frentz

[00:32:34] So here’s some, here’s some fun numbers

[00:32:39] In 1980, 2.6 million people died of measles. In 1990 that had gone down to a fifth of the number, so it was 545,000 people had died. and by 2014, deaths from measles had gone down to 73,000 people.

[00:32:59] That’s such a decrease in pe- like, you know, vaccine preventable deaths.

[00:33:04] Despite these trends, rates of disease and deaths increase from 2017 to 2019 due to a decrease in vaccination. (long sigh)

[00:33:14] So I am going to spit a couple of hard truths about vaccinations and a little bit about the coronavirus vaccine as well.

[00:33:27] It doesn’t include a microchip. Have you seen how big microchips are? It’s definitely not there.

[00:33:33] Follow-up point. If you or anyone in your life is not convinced by the fact that microchips are surprisingly big for something that’s called a microchip.

[00:33:41]do you genuinely think that this government is organized enough to do a conspiracy like this? like really, at every level and no one’s leaked anything like, do you genuinely think every state employee is that competent? And it’s fine if you do, but that is such a tenuous thing to believe.

[00:34:02] This was the point where the very bad date I was on faltered slightly.

[00:34:06] Cause he was like, Oh yeah, the Australian government’s in on it. And I’m like, Scott Morrison? Scott Morrison is this together?

Serena Chen

[00:34:12] But also like just thinking about everyone in the chain who is paid what they’re paid to keep something like that a secret that’s just - I don’t believe it. People paid much more than government workers have leaked less incend- incendiary things all the time.

Sophia Frentz

[00:34:33] Oh, just like dipshits in Canberra have just fully left like documents about people on the seats of their cars that have then been broken into. Like, they’re not going to keep this quiet.

[00:34:46] If you’re worried about vaccines. And if you’re worried about any vaccine at all, like talk to your healthcare provider about it, talk to someone that you trust about it, because they will be able to say like, yes, I see why you’re worried, get it done at the hospital. Or, like I can be there when it gets done, if you want that.

[00:35:03] I think a lot of people are concerned because for a very long time, a lot of vaccines had egg as part of the binding agent. And so, people who hadn’t been like, diagnosed with an egg allergy did have quite serious reactions to vaccines and those are people kind of our age and a bit older.

[00:35:18]and I think that’s very fair to be afraid of. But if you talk to your doctor or, a nurse who’s involved in your treatment, or any member of your medical treating team like, they will be able to tell you like the risks associated with it.

[00:35:30] The other thing is that a lot of the anti-vaxxer scandal bullshit, includes stuff about how there’s formaldehyde and mercury in vaccines. There’s less formaldehyde and mercury in the vaccine than there is in your sushi. Like there’s more mercury in all salmon.

Serena Chen

[00:35:46] Food safety could be better.

Sophia Frentz

[00:35:47] Every vaccine you’ve ever had. Yeah. Well, I mean, we could have polluted the oceans less, like let’s be honest.

Serena Chen

[00:35:53] Yeah. So , what I worry about with the, we say to everyone, and this is what everyone hears, right is, at the end of the day, talk to your doctor, talk to the people that you trust talk to, talk to the nurse that you know, and the worry is with- specifically with the anti-vax crowd and with the like general conspiracy theory crowd, is that the people they trust are specifically not healthcare workers, they actively distrust doctors and the people that they do trust are deeply embedded in these conspiracy theories.

[00:36:31] And yeah, I’m, I’m just not sure how …

Sophia Frentz

[00:36:36] I think. I, I think in those situations you have to ask like, quite genuinely, like why someone is afraid, why they don’t trust the medical system. Because, I mean, I think with the coronavirus vaccine, we see a lot of distrust from communities that have been historically marginalized by the medical systems.

[00:36:56] And it’s like, that’s fair. Like it’s fair if you’re an indigenous Australian and you don’t trust this vaccine. That reflects your entire, like people’s history of engagement with Western medicine. It’s fair if you’re black in America and you don’t trust the coronavirus vaccine because the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, I think was trying to tell people that they were treating syphilis when they were actually giving it to them.

Serena Chen

[00:37:15] Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:37:16] Right. Like very legit. Do your best to find someone that you trust in those circumstances and in the instances that you’re afraid, like, and I mean, I think this is something to call out to, you know, medical professionals as much as anyone else like. People are afraid, right? Like that’s why they don’t trust it. And often they’re afraid for reasons that are legitimate given the information that they have.

[00:37:40] And I think we’d really need to be more sympathetic to that. I see far too many people who are just like overeducated, inner city, bullshit liberals who are so willing to go like, Oh, they’re not vaccinating their kids. They must be dumb.

Serena Chen

[00:37:52] Yeah, it’s, yeah

Sophia Frentz

[00:37:52] And it’s like, well, no. Like, I think a lot of the time when I have conversations with people who may not be totally trusting of vaccines, bad date notwithstanding, a big fear around the MMR vaccine is that there was a lot of advertisement around the idea that this vaccine causes autism. Now that study has been fully retracted by the guy who wrote it. Like he admitted that he fudged his numbers, but the other thing, and the really key thing to this is like, would you rather your child die than have autism?

[00:38:29] Like, really? And something I found like really compelling to talk about is like, I think people think of autism and they think of like the most severe worst-case scenarios, and those are, you know, still beautiful people who deserve our love and affection. But I think it’s something that as a parent, you want to alleviate your child of any suffering that you possibly can.

[00:38:51] And like, I completely - not being a parent, as much as I can - I completely understand that. But I think, you know, when I talk to someone and I say like, Hey, like I’m autistic and it’s chill. I have a good time. Mostly. there’s been a pandemic. It’s been pretty hard the last year, but you know, aside from that, having a great time.

[00:39:11] That’s a better conversation to have than to be like, Oh, you must be stupid. Oh haven’t, you read this or haven’t you considered those? It’d be like, well, look like your fear is someone like me. And I’m pretty rad. I got an award last year for being really good at being a gay like. 30 under 30 media luminary, Sophia Frentz.

[00:39:40] Yeah. like it’s, it’s about understanding fear and it’s about understanding that hesitation and not shutting down the conversation because like, you know, shit, I understand why people are emotional about any kind of medical treatment that goes on in their families. I understand why they want to protect their kids.

[00:39:57] but it’s about making sure that people are as well-informed as they can be to make the best decisions that they can. And the decisions that like, you know, protect their kids and protect their family. And sometimes it might mean, you know, “one of my kids had an allergic reaction to a vaccine. Can we delay treatment or can we have them done at the hospital?”

[00:40:15] And that might be the conversation they need to have, but if everyone who’s ever heard them say they want to delay the vaccination just kind of shuts that conversation down. That’s, that’s meaningless, right? Like it just, it stops everything. It’s counterproductive.

Serena Chen

[00:40:30] Yeah. I think this hearkens back to, conspiracy theories.

[00:40:36] Can’t remember if we talked about this in our conspiracy theories episode. To, to believe in a conspiracy theory is not. It’s not an, a marker of poor character or judgment, but it is a marker of your environment and your past experiences and a lot of like very reasonable reasons to distrust authority because like historically, authorities have not been so great at keeping their people safe, being truthful.

[00:41:18] Like there was a, there was a horrific vaccine scandal in Samoa, not long ago.

Sophia Frentz

[00:41:25] two babies died after being given a wrongly mixed vaccination.

Serena Chen

[00:41:30] Yeah. And that kind of stuff happens and like when, especially, you know, as you mentioned before, if you’re a community where your own people did not have a hand in developing these vaccines, do not have a hand in like, in the science behind these things. Or like whatever other conspiracy theory touches on. Like, like if

Sophia Frentz

[00:41:54] so like, if, if we’re talking about the Pacific islands, like this is a bone I continue to pick with a huge amount of medical researchers, often medical researchers and doctors that go over there to work and help and try and make the systems better don’t speak the native languages, and they don’t make an effort to learn really beyond like “Bula”, right?

[00:42:13] Like that’s not Samoan, you know what I mean. Like, and it’s just like, yeah, of course they don’t trust you. You don’t try and speak their language. you’re not making an effort to create the human connections that are necessary to like, create that trust and means that they’ll believe what you say.

Serena Chen

[00:42:28] Yeah. that’s a really good point actually. It was just, how, how powerful learning a native language is and how powerful that trust can be when, when you make that effort.

[00:42:40] there’s a, there’s a, there’s a passage in this short story by Ken Ngu, about an immigrant mother whose child is like, you know, would only speak English, hits me hard, makes me cry, but his mom in the story is like, when you say I love you, I feel it in here. And she points to her head. And then she says, when you say, wǒ ài nǐ, I feel it in here. And she points to her heart. And that’s the difference that speaking in someone’s mother tongue makes.

[00:43:15] Kill me Serena, why don’t you

[00:43:21] This story, I was just like in bed crying for half an hour, anywho’s what were you going to say?

Sophia Frentz

[00:43:29] I think it’s an, like it’s an element of cultural engagement as well, right? Like, I’m sure I’ve talked about this on the show before, but like it’s been re- it continues to be really jarring the difference between my experience in medical research in New Zealand and medical research, and subsequently work in Australia. Where New Zealand, like, of course you’d go to a hui, of course you’d like work to get the kaumātua, to like agree with you and understand what you were doing and make sure that they were okay with all of it, of course you’d have a Māori person on your ethics committee.

[00:44:00] Whereas here, like I talked to, we had a few labs, in my Institute that did a lot of work in the Pacific islands. And whenever they talked about their research, they didn’t mention any of that. And I think about like trips my dad did to Samoa when I was a kid, cause he’s a, he’s a town planner that focuses on environmental impact.

[00:44:16] And so he was, working with a few, chiefs. I don’t know the Samoan word for kaumātua, like in Samoa to like, talk about what their people needed, to sort of best protect their, their land and their homes and their livelihoods, and, you know, with upcoming sea level rise and storms and all of that.

[00:44:32] And it’s like, you do like the Samoan version of a hui, right? Like you do the things that the native people do because it’s their land. And they’re the people who eventually make the choice. And I think like, particularly like, and this is something I’ve really noticed with Australians is like, it’s a bit of a white saviour complex, a little bit.

[00:44:53] Where it’s like you come in from like extremely educated, well off Melbourne or Brisbane or Sydney to teach, like, and you know, you’re here to just help everyone. but you don’t meet them on their own land, really. Like you might travel to the land, but you’re not meeting them there. You’re still bringing like all your old thoughts and expectations and like viewpoints from where you’ve come from.

Serena Chen

[00:45:14] Yeah. So, there is like really something to be said about, like, yes, it is frustrating. As people who are privileged enough to have this education and to like, know how these things work, to know how science works. it can be frustrating from our viewpoint to, to see this huge rise in anti-vax

[00:45:34] and like there is, there is also something to be said about, Grifters, and people who know that they’re lying and are lying anyway. and that’s, that’s a different, different issue, but we, as people who are privileged enough to, to have this education and knowledge and trust in the system is also a huge privilege.

[00:45:57] We have, we have to do the work to, to first like acknowledge people and meet them where they are, about their fears that are completely reasonable, about the history that is disastrous and oftentimes cruel build that trust first, before we do any explanation or reassurance, and most importantly to be like really honest, about what we don’t know and honest about the potential for failure and honest about the kind of mental calculus that we’re all doing in our own heads around risk and reward. It’s work that we all got to do.

[00:46:47] Talk to your family, everyone.

Sophia Frentz

[00:46:50] I just, yeah, obviously I’m extremely angry about the MMR autism study and all of the impacts it has had, because like, there’s a lot of people out there who would rather their child die than turn out like me.

Serena Chen

[00:47:04] So much of that is like a misunderstanding of what autism is and the, like the like super problematic, media portrayal of autistic peoples.

Sophia Frentz

[00:47:17] I was thinking about this the other day that like a lot of labels just aren’t meaningful. So, you know, there used to be Asperger’s, which was a term used for like autism Lite

Serena Chen

[00:47:28] Oh, I didn’t know that.

Sophia Frentz

[00:47:29] and now like, yeah, pretty much. and now like high functioning and low functioning are kind of the terms used. but they also like fundamentally misunderstand that like, what autism is, is like, it’s a neurodivergence. Brain wired different.

[00:47:41] If you put me in a very stressful situation, I might become low functioning, right? Like, you know, quote unquote, low functioning. and so even like the labels that are used by, parts of society that might be more forward thinking and accepting of autism and neurodivergence, aren’t useful for explaining and communicating things, but, you know, language is limited and we do our best with it.

Serena Chen

[00:48:05] Yeah. We’re all trying our hardest. Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:48:11] if you’re worried about your family and the coronavirus vaccine, particularly if you’re worried, they might not get it. something you might be able to do is if you sit down with your family members and help them write a list of questions, for their doctor just sort of saying, like, what do you need to know to be comfortable with this?

Serena Chen

[00:48:28] That’s a good approach.

Sophia Frentz

[00:48:29] I think that would be really, really useful if your family members are at risk. In addition to like, you know, being old, as I presume a lot of people’s family members are

Serena Chen

[00:48:40] That’s just statistics, right.

Sophia Frentz

[00:48:42] There’s a lot of old people in the world, I guess you’re related to some of them.

Serena Chen

[00:48:45] Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

[00:48:46] and you know, if you can potentially like attending doctor’s appointments to kind of help, if you’re comfortable in that scenario. I certainly been in the situation before where like I’ve been in the room where a medical professional has been communicating to a relative of mine.

[00:49:00] And as soon as I’m like, oh no, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m a scientific doctor, but I am a doctor. My background is in medical research. They suddenly start explaining things properly. Which is- I understand why it happens. it’s just like, if you can have a short hand to say, I’ll understand the big words, you can go for gold, but it’s also a shorthand of saying, like, I’ll just be very comfortable to ask questions when I don’t understand things.

[00:49:24] Whereas I think for a lot of people who engage with medical professionals might not be willing to ask questions. and that’s just like, we all have our own relationships with the medical professionals in our lives. And unfortunately, there is like a lot of people who have the relationship where they’re afraid to ask questions of those people.

[00:49:43]and so sort of helping them facilitate that, particularly right now when like we rely on the medical professionals in our lives to live, facilitating that relationship is only a good thing.

Serena Chen

[00:49:55] I wonder if it’s, it’s a bit different outside of, The, the countries that, have things more under control right now.

[00:50:01] Cause I feel, I definitely feel the pressure to not go to the doctor unless it’s an emergency right now, to like basically not touch the medical system as much as I can right now, just because of, how strange it all is

Sophia Frentz

[00:50:17] Even when we first started lockdown 2.0 when we were sort of getting like 400 new cases a day in Melbourne, which is.

[00:50:25] It’s not happening anymore. So that’s good. like, the messaging even I was getting from my, my GP, cause I was just like, you know, a lot of my appointments are at the women’s hospital where everyone is immunosuppressed because they’re pregnant. Like I don’t want to give them all COVID.

[00:50:41] And her, her emphasis was like, you know, I don’t want you to be missing your regular appointments. Still make the appointments. You might have to wait a bit longer, but you need to be continuing with your medical regular health care. Cause like one of the big risks we’re going to see from COVID, and I think a lot of places are already seeing from COVID, is that people are delaying medical care until their conditions get worse.

[00:51:01] We’re going to see a long-term negative health effects from people like, not paying attention to medical issues now that they really needed to.

Serena Chen

[00:51:09] Caveat too that like, I don’t understand German. So, I may be missing out on like the majority of the public messaging here.

Sophia Frentz

[00:51:20] And look at least you’re not in Sweden.

Serena Chen

[00:51:21] Oh, goodness.

[00:51:23] I just can’t imagine. I just don’t know how they haven’t all been fired.

Sophia Frentz

[00:51:29] There was like a politician or someone recently who was like, why would we immunize disabled people, they’re just going to die.

[00:51:35] I was like, thanks.

Serena Chen

[00:51:36] Why go to the doctor at all? Why put a band-aid on a cut? Why, why do anything we’re all gonna die? I mean,

Sophia Frentz

[00:51:46] I love that for just like so long. New Zealand has compared itself to Scandinavian countries. And now we’re just quietly not doing that. It’s like we compare ourselves to ourselves

Serena Chen

[00:51:58] just like Sweden? I don’t know her

Sophia Frentz

[00:52:00] you know, who’s great? Norway.

Serena Chen

[00:52:02] Finland. They’re pretty cool. I think.

[00:52:06] So when I first, was reading up about the new mRNA vaccine, my first worry was if this thing that is engineered to like cloak itself past our body’s defences. so that our cells would, you know, make the spike protein, could it make like the wrong spike protein or make the bad thing?

[00:52:32] Like, could it hack our body in a bad way? And that was my first concern.

Sophia Frentz

[00:52:38] Okay. That’s a fair concern to have. The short answer is no,

Serena Chen

[00:52:42] I suspected

Sophia Frentz

[00:52:44] the long, the long answer is when you get the vaccine, there’ll be lots of copies of the mRNA in there. so even if there’s like a little mutation somewhere in it to make it like a slightly different spike protein, that’s kind of fine, there’s lots of good copies around, and this isn’t an infectious element, right. It’s just a bit that makes the protein. It’s not something that’s going to give you a disease.

[00:53:04] The other thing is RNA. RNA technically can alter DNA. This RNA probably won’t slash is really unlikely to, because the instances where RNA does alter DNA are very few and far between.

[00:53:20] So it just kind of like goes into the blood stream, goes into our cells’ goop, makes a protein, gets digested. Like that is a. Very fast process. It’s also, for something to be approved, it does have to go through all of the safety testing, right? Like this sort of like allowances around COVID approval, is that it’s been allowed to be approved while we’re still partway through phase three testing.

[00:53:47] So phase three testing, is like efficacy and particularly long-term efficacy, right? So, like these vaccines have been approved while we’re still in phase three trials. So, like, we’ve got a good idea of efficacy from like, when we first started phase three, we don’t have like an amazing idea of efficacy for 10 years because we didn’t have this vaccine 10 years ago.

[00:54:07] Right. So that’s the bit that’s been sped up slightly. It’s like, we know that it’s going to get you this far. We don’t know how much longer it’ll go. We’ll keep updating you, I guess. But if we can do enough to like, stop this being a pandemic, like that’s good.

[00:54:22] So, I don’t know if you remember when we were in like year seven or year eight there was a MENZB vaccine. So, meningitis B vaccine that came around a bunch of schools

Serena Chen

[00:54:30] Yeah, I do remember that.

Sophia Frentz

[00:54:31] Okay. So, what was happening there was that there was a sort of like little epidemic of meningitis B starting up, a lot around like 11, 12, 13-year-olds. There were all those posters that were like, don’t share spit, it’s gross, you’ll get meningitis. that vaccine, it doesn’t give you lifelong protection. It gives you like, sort of, a year ish of protection. but it was enough to stop that from becoming like a fully-fledged epidemic. If this vaccine does that, that’s probably all we need to get like healthcare back on track.

[00:54:58] If this vaccine gives you lifelong protection. That’s awesome too. Right? Like, you know, we’re sort of, we’re trying to fight this battle one step at a time. And so even if we get like a year protection out of a coronavirus vaccine, it could be an annual thing, like a flu shot. Like, and that’s fine.

Serena Chen

[00:55:14] That’s cool too.

[00:55:15] Thank you for, for doing all this.

Sophia Frentz

[00:55:18] I mean, it’s, it’s my pleasure. Like I love this stuff so much.

Serena Chen

[00:55:21] it is so cool.

Sophia Frentz

[00:55:22] if you’re interested generally in like hearing more about vaccines or medical history or science in general? my, my fave podcasts for this kind of stuff. Sawbones and Science Vs. those are probably my two go-tos.

[00:55:36] I also listen to No Such Thing as a Fish, which is not always science, but they do like fun facts and I love a fun fact

Serena Chen

[00:55:45] fun facts are fun

Sophia Frentz

[00:55:46] so I think like are probably like main points that we’ve hit from this episode are vaccines are groovy. If you have doubts, please talk to a medical professional in your life.

[00:55:57] There won’t be a microchip in any of the vaccines because microchips are big and vaccines are liquid. I don’t know how else to put that

Serena Chen

[00:56:03] microchips are really big. It’s like a different order of magnitude kind of thing, right? Like when we talk about tiny, tiny microchips fitting on to like the, you know, the, the nail of your pinkie finger or whatever, that’s like small in terms of microchips, but in terms of like, molecular machinery, that’s huge that’s massive, your body will shut that out. So fast

Sophia Frentz

[00:56:28] Think about a microchip like the size of a grain of rice and now imagine being injected, but with a grain of rice, an uncooked grain of rice. Now you’re getting it. No, thank you. obviously, vaccine rollouts are different in every country. but please like with the coronavirus, the COVID-19 vaccine, like check where you’re at and make sure that you get that in as timely a fashion as possible.

[00:56:50] Generally, yeah, love vaccines. Don’t love the Swedish government. I think that’s the summary of this episode.

Serena Chen

[00:57:00] That sounds perfect to me. Stay safe, wash your hands.

Sophia Frentz

[00:57:06] wear a mask.

Serena Chen

[00:57:07] Wear a mask.

Sophia Frentz

[00:57:08] Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. Give us some likes. Give us some stars. wherever you find us, we love your opinions and thoughts. if you would like share those opinions and thoughts with us, we’ve got an email it’s castinginterest@gmail.com.

[00:57:24] We’ve got a Twitter feed @CastingInterest, and we have a Facebook page, which is Things of Interest. The email is checked the most. So, do with that knowledge, what you will, I’ve been Sophia Frentz.

Serena Chen

[00:57:38] and I’m Serena Chen

[00:57:41] And as always stay interesting.