About that vaccine video...

      A friend just sent me a video (which I will not share here) asking me for my synopsis of its content, and it occurs to me that many others may receive this video and be seeking answers to the same question, so I thought I'd do a post about it. The video is from someone examining the package of the new Astrazeneca vaccine, and calling our attention to certain words printed on the packaging they think we should be very alarmed about. 

     Now, the usual caveat should apply here: I AM NOT A TRAINED SCIENTIST. However, I've learned a lot of the very very basics from a lifetime of being a nerd very interested in science, and I have a strong background in general critical thinking and making sense of stuff, which I suspect is why I have friends who come to me to ask about this kind of thing. As well, my son us currently studying cell biology and it's been fascinating talking with him about how much more staggeringly complex and beautiful and interesting these things are than I ever imagined (and I've always imagined them to be pretty darned cool). What I'm offering here is not an expert explanation, because I'm not an expert. It is simply an educated lay-person's reading of the matter, intended as an alternative to the panicky less-educated lay-person's account given in the video. 

     I'm not sharing the video here for a couple of reasons, but mainly because I don't think it needs more bandwidth, and also because I suspect there are multiple similar videos and forwarded emails making the same claims. I will attempt to charitably present the concerns it raises, and then explain why they aren't nearly as problematic as it seems from the video.

     The first word the video attends to in the vaccine packaging is "ChAdOx1-S (recombinant)". The narrator seems to think "ChAdOx1-S" is just a meaningless serial number name of the vaccine itself, and focuses on the word "recombinant" as the frightening bit, which is in a way kind of amusing for reasons I'll get to in a moment. "Recombinant" means more or less what it sounds like: re-combining DNA from two or more different organisms. This is actually not a new process: it happens every time a baby is conceived or a flower is pollinated. Even asexually reproducing bacteria often absorb bits of genetic material from various sources, sometimes incorporating it into their own genome. And naturally-occuring retroviruses splice their own code into the genome of the cells they infect. 

     What is new is our ability to do this artificially in a test tube, which we've only been able to do for a few decades. And it's tremendously useful, first for research and later as we get better at it for practical and therapeutic applications. If you don't know exactly what a strip of DNA does, you can sometimes figure it out by snipping it out of a cell to see what happens when it's gone, and then splice it into a cell that normally doesn't have it to compare the results. And then when you understand things better, you can do stuff like take the gene that produces insulin and splice it into some E. coli to produce this important life-saving hormone in industrial quantities without having to harvest it from animals. 

     So the ChAdOx1-S (recombinant) vaccine is, presumably, a vaccine made by recombining a sample of genetic material from the pandemic virus with some other genetic material that made up the precursor to the ChAdOx1-S vaccine. In other words, the vaccine is the result of a recombinant process, not something that will cause a recombination in your own cells. But if you thought that it was the latter, then the original vaccine is even scarier, because it turns out that "ChAdOx1-S" actually refers to Chimpanzee Adenovirus Vector 1, evoking a terrifying Island of Dr. Moreau scenario. So I find it hilarious that the person in the video missed this detail. But of course, it's not actual chimpanzee DNA; it refers to an adenovirus that infects chimpanzees. And humans and chimps being very very similar, viruses that infect chimps can often infect humans and vice versa.

     A vaccine is often just a de-activated version of a virus, something that resembles the actual virus enough that the immune system learns to recognize it as something to be destroyed, but isn't actually itself infectious. Think of a wanted poster: it has an image of the face of the bad guy, so you know what he looks like, but the wanted poster can't rob your stagecoach. But a wanted poster is more than just a photo: it also contains information that alerts you to why you should beware of the guy in the picture, whom you should call if you see him, maybe a reward or other motivation for doing so, and so on. 

     So it's not enough to just present some molecule to the immune system. You have to present it in a way that the immune system will recognize it as a pathogen and start producing antibodies against it. It's like you have to include all the "WANTED" text from the poster, except that with molecules we don't know how to generate all the relevant text from scratch. So a recombinant vaccine is sort of like taking a successful wanted poster you already have for some other virus, and cutting and pasting a photo of the new virus into it.

     That's what I think they've done with ChAdOx1-S (recombinant). They've taken a vaccine that seems to work for the chimp adenovirus, and spliced in some part to make it work for the new pandemic virus.

     The next bit the video gets very alarmed about is something called "MRC-5", which turns out to be a human cell line derived from fetal lung tissue. It sounds like the person in the video is deeply disturbed that aborted human fetal tissue is an ingredient of the vaccine you'd be injected with. It's not. Human cell cultures are a kind of lab rat: they test the vaccine on those cultures, to see how it affects human cells. They do not use it as an ingredient in actually making the vaccine itself.

     Now, you might have moral reservations about using a product that was tested on aborted fetal cells, but there's an important detail I need to point out here. Nobody is getting pregnant to produce fetuses for the purpose of harvesting tissue. These are fetuses who were going to be aborted for other reasons, possibly even naturally as a miscarriage. Using fetal tissue for medical research is no different, morally, from using the tissues of an accident victim. You can regard the abortion itself as an appalling tragedy, and so it might well be, but so is the death of any other organ donor; that doesn't make deriving some good out of their tragic sacrifice inherently immoral, especially if we are appropriately respectful and appreciative.

     (Also, it's interesting to note that the particular fetus MRC-5 is descended from died in 1966. Fetal cells are particularly useful for culturing because they're so early in the development process, and have so much more growth ahead of them. It's usually easier to make them immortal than it is to do so with cells of a mature adult. That said, the first human cell line to be immortalized came from Henrietta Lacks, a cancer patient who died in 1951. Cancer's weird that way.)

     Finally, the video emphasizes a passage in some of the research documents about the vaccine calling for AI resources to go through the high volume of expected ADR ("Adverse Drug Reaction") reports and make sure every detail is recorded and analyzed. Yeah, at first glance, this sounds scary, like they expect the vaccine to be horribly dangerous and hurt a whole lot of people. But here I want to repeat a theme I brought up here: if they know the vaccine is going to have a lot of ADRs, and they still intend to go ahead with it, what are we missing? Either we should assume they're diabolically evil or stupid, or maybe, just maybe, having a lot of ADR reports isn't quite the terror it seems.

     We already know that developing a vaccine is going to take (has taken) a long time, and a very large part of that is safety testing. They know that there are always risks with developing any new therapy. And they know they're going to get a lot of reports of adverse reactions. A report of an adverse reaction, however, is just that: a report. Many, probably most, of those reports will turn out to be something else. Someone gets a shot, and happens to get totally unrelated food poisoning the next day. Someone else has a heart attack. Someone else doesn't realize yet she's pregnant and reports some of her symptoms as a potential adverse reaction. When you're testing a drug, you want all of this data, whether or not it's actually related to the drug, so you can look through it all for patterns to figure out what, if anything, really is due to the drug and what isn't. And finding those patterns is an absolutely monumental task, which is why an AI system would be so incredibly useful in sifting through all the data.

     I am not saying that there is nothing to be wary of with the Astrazeneca vaccine, or indeed any of the new vaccines they're bringing out. There's a lot of pressure to get these vaccines in use very quickly, and it's not unreasonable to fear that corners might have been cut, or there just hasn't been enough time for unknown side effects to become apparent. Of course there are risks; the real question is, as always, are the risks of not being vaccinated greater or less than the risks of being vaccinated?

     What I am saying is that many of the fears people have of this new vaccine are unfounded and based on an extremely incomplete (even more incomplete than mine) understanding of what these words mean. When terrified people urge you to "do your own research", understand that research involves more than just googling; you need to know how to interpret the words you're looking up, and how they are actually used by the experts doing the work. 

     A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when you think it's a lot.