Lab 004: Protect Ya Neck

I remember in the seventh grade one of my friends, her older sister, was sneaking zema's. She had them under the bed. Do you know what zemas are? They were like yes, right and Berth Yes, It's like a prelude to smear advice.

It was smear knov Ice before smear knop Ice. Zima was blazing the trail.

Something I did without my parents' permission. I got a tattoo. Same right before going to college. I got a tattoo. And I still don't think my mom knows. She's about to know, she's about to know. I didn't know about it. Mister Shoda, Yes she did.

Everybody getting in trouble. If I'm getting in trouble, you getting in trouble to you.

And it was before my time. I'm t T and I'm Zachiah And from Spotify Studios. This is Dope Labs. Welcome to the Lab. This episode, we're talking about vaccines. So tt what did vaccines have to do with all the sneaky stuff we did as teenagers.

Well, we started talking about it after hearing about this teenager from Ohio named Ethan Lindenberger. He snuck out of his house but not for the reasons that we were talking about, Right, he snuck out of his house to get a vaccination, Like, snuck out the house and got a golf drup living life on the wild side, man.

But why did he have to sneak out to get vaccinated?

So Ethan's mom is a part of this growing community that is against vaccinations. So they don't really want to vaccinate their children because they feel like it has some adverse effects. And Ethan says that his mama basically was at Facebook University getting all this information.

And so he's been testifying in the Senate hearing to kind of give kids the right to get vaccinated if they want to, because he was only able to do it because he was eighteen. Right, that's when I got my tattooed. But I was still living at home and terrified. I don't know how you got away with that, Chile. The other thing to remember is that this, even though we heard about it because of Ethan, that story really helps us kind of capture where we are today. This isn't just happening in Ohio.

So there are some reasons why people don't want to get vaccinated, right.

Yeah, and some of them are good reasons, well, what I would consider a good reason, Like there are medical reasons you're allergic to something that's in the vaccine, so like if you're allergic to eggs, eggs, right, religious reasons, And then there are some people who it's like a philosophical reason, like I'm not sure about it. I don't think the government should tell me what I should do with my child.

I kind of understand a little bit why people are like, oh, I'm not too sure about vaccines because people don't really trust the medical community and because of I mean, it's history, but they're absolute trust in people who are not even medicine adjacent, like people who who don't even have a lick of a degree in any type of biological science is a mind boggling to me.

Like Jenny McCarthy has been one of the most outspoken celebrities against vaccines, but Cindy Crawford, Jim Carrey, Charlie Sheen, and Alicia Silverstone with Tiger Blood Tiger Blood Yes, and Alicia Silverstone from Clueless, they've all expressed concernment it comes to vaccine safety. Why are you going to Jenny McCarthy for your medical advice? I mean it's just like going to Dry Rule for political advice. You remember that Dave Chappelle's skit. Yes, it's like, no one wants to hear

But other than that, no, thank you exactly unless you count down the ball drop on Ryan Seacrest New Year's Rock and Eve.

I don't want to hear from you. Keep it. But you know what's happening now. People are getting sick.

And the year two thousand, measles was pretty much eliminated.

Right, it was eradicated. The CDC declared it eradicated, right.

And now there have been already over two hundred and fifty confirmed cases of measles in twenty nine.

Yeah, did you see the boy in Oregon who had tetanus and was in the hospital all those weeks? Listen.

I don't even really know what tetanus is, because that's something that I felt like only the Pilgrim's.

Got, well, every pilgrim had tetanus. Listen, it's the Oregon trail out here Okay, you have got to check your neighbor. I feel like we're going back in time. I don't want this life.

I don't want to be walking outside and feeling like, oh, there's a chance I may catch some medieval disease.

Well you better keep your eyes open because the black flague might be next. So let's get into the recitation. What do we know? Zakia? Just to get everybody on the same page, this episode is not about whether or not vaccines work.

Right.

We know that they work right when they're introduced to a population. The instance of those cases, right, the number of cases for the disease that you're vaccinating against, it drops, and it drops dramatically. We also know that they've been around for a while, right, Yeah, we were talking about measles, and the measles vaccine has been around since nineteen sixty three,

I feel like there was an uptick in people saying that their vaccine hesitant or anti vaxxers in recent years, and so I'm wondering if scientists have been seeing that.

Uptick and what do they attribute to that uptick. Is it just memes on the internet or are there is there a greater force at play here? Yeah, And I'm kind of just interested in the basics, like what is a virus?

Like, what is a vaccine? How does a vaccine work? So let's get into the dissection.

Buckle in, here we go. Today's guest is doctor Rupolli LeMay.

I am an assistant scientist here at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I also serve as the Associate director for Behavioral Research for the Institute for Vaccine Safety.

So one of the things that's really cool about Rupauli is that she used to be in marketing.

So she knows about a good message.

So I've come at public health in a very different way. And what we're trying to do is think about how do we use persuasion techniques to get parents to accept vaccines for their children.

Rupolli is a woman after our own hearts. She understands that the science it's only as good as the medium that you're using to communicate it, right, Right, nobody wants to read paragraphs on paragraphs of the dry eyes commercial basis exactly. Nobody wants that you.

Know, there's verses, right, So first things first, before we get into vaccines and how they work, let's start with the basics.

What is a virus? I like to think of viruses as like little peanut eminem's right, love peanut M and M. Well you want well, love peanut eminems and not viruses. So you have the hard shell, right, that's like your protein coat that has different particles and different types of proteins on the outside, and then inside the peanut is some type of nucleic acid. So it could be DNA or RNA depending on the virus. So that's the anatomy. That's the basic anatomy of a virus.

Okay, peanut eminem i got it, But what do they do it?

Really lives to reproduce, is what it's. It's really the best way to explain it.

And it's spread by a number of ways.

Right, you can cough on someone, You can have droplets in the air from sneezing, really any contact, mostly with bodily fluids.

Remember that woman that was on the train with us coughing and not covering her mouth.

Yes, she was a projectile.

Pushing those organisms all over the train, and I was like, we have to change cars. Zakia literally leaned over to me and said, she has protests, we have to change cars. If she wasn't going to cover her mouth, she at least needed to put on like a nextcare mask. Yes, okay, but once you get a virus, how do those things harlem shake through your whole entire body.

So usually what happens is that a virus will enter your body, it has to find a hostyle to infect. Once it gets into that host cell, it replicates, and then once it replicates, it leaves that host cell through the membrane and goes to infect other host cells.

I think viruses are like you know in the cartoons where it's like two kids and a coat. They ring there like when there's the little rascals when they stack them cells on top, stack themselves on top of each other and ring the doorbell. That's how a virus enters your cells.

Right, Hello, I'm here to sell you encyclopedias. Then they get inside like psych I'm here to infect and.

Then they just hijack all the machinery and make tons of more virus that then goes on to do the same thing at each other hostess dipset and go to the next cell.

So it just continues to spread rapidly through your body.

So what really happens If you think about each cell as like a house in a neighborhood. You go from one person ringing the doorbell, right, one of those disguises is to like trigger treat. It's like everybody at every door pushing to get into all those host sales. Right, it's mayhem, it's madness.

After these cells are infected with these viruses, these kids that are just running up on all of us, what happens. What are the symptoms that start to occur. Let's take measles for example.

In terms of symptoms, it's sort of the run of the melt, like it's a fever. It's a cough, it's a runny nose, it could be a sore throat. Your child could get conjunctivitis. So if you're a parent and you're experiencing these symptoms with your child, you might just say, oh, my kid has the flu or you know, some sort of other viral infection. It wouldn't necessarily think it was measles.

Yeah, and this can get really serious and in some cases it can lead to death. That's a lot of backterier. Can I just use a bunch of pirel?

Uh?

Okay?

So?

Oh no, no, I know I said something wrong. You know, uh, that's not quite right. There's a big difference between viruses and bacteria, one being that there's no cure for a virus.

So, you know, from like a parental perspective, people will say, oh, you know, maybe your doctor'll say we'll give a viral infection, and they'll say, well, can I get antibiotics? It's not really going to do anything for it.

Oh so pirel is not gonna it's not gonna do that, not gonna. So, because viruses don't have a cure, it's all about.

Prevention, and a lot of that has to do with being able to defend against them when they present to our bodies or when we encounter them.

Vaccinations can't cure them, but they can stop them from spreading, and that's why vaccinations are so important within viruses.

So let's have doctor LeMay help us break down vaccines. What are they and how do they work.

The most I think common way that people are familiar with is that you take the virus, you weaken it, you then inject it into someone's body through a vaccine. So then your immune system, your B cell sort of response, remembers it. So in the future, if you get infected by that virus, you're able to fight against it.

B cells these are white blood cells that help your body with building immunity.

So when we think about immunity, they are kind of two different ways. You split it up. There's innate immunity that you're born with, and then there's adaptive immunity, which is where B sales play a role. And adaptive immunity is like see something, say something. So I saw something that's out of place and is strange. I remember it and the next time I see it, I know to get rid of it. And so your b are part of that system.

So when the vaccine, the weak and form of the virus is injected into you. It's just so that your body recognizes it when the real deal shows up.

But because it's a weakened virus, your body is able to fight it. So as a result, when you actually perhaps encounter that virus, you will be able to fight it and not deal with really the more negative and dire consequences of viruses.

Your body is creating a most wanted list so that as soon as it sees this person is showing up at your door, it's like, I know exactly who you are, and I'm not answering it.

If a virus enters your body that you're vaccinated against, your immune system has already seen this before, so the sort of flag goes up. The army kind of gets into place of your immune system, if you will, and they know how to fight it.

So what vaccines are sounding like is like a dating app essentially, It's like vaccine tender. You see something coming up, that virus got a gold to swipe left right, a political swipe left, struggle mals swipe left.

That's right. So now we know how vaccines work on a cellular level, But how do they work in the broad population.

Here at Dope Blasts, we try not to throw around a lot of scientific words, but there are two words you really need to know for this episode, herd immunity.

So I think the easiest way to think about herd immunity is thinking about it like a protective net if enough people. Let's say you have ten people in a herd, and let's say that all of them are vaccinated, So if measles comes along and wants to infect someone, it will just die out because there's no one for it to infect. And we know for it to live, it has to be able to replicate. It literally exists to replicate.

And that protective armor is so much more important when the virus is contagious. So there are levels to how contagious a virus is. So, for example, measles is really highly contagious, and what we mean by that is we use a number called the reproductive number, and that tells you how many more people can be infected by one case of measles. So let's just say you have twenty people over at a dinner party.

I don't know if I would have twenty people, but that's fine, Okay, I don't know twenty people.

I just know you, your husband, and your sisters and your parents, and that's it. That's not even twenty and Daisy my dog. So if you had twenty people over for a dinner party and one person showed up and had measles and no one in the room was vaccinated, twelve to eighteen people would get measles. Oh my god. So that's how many cases can you get from one

That's why measles is such a challenge for us, because we have to really have high rates of adherence to the vaccine, and if you don't, it ends up spreading very very very rapidly, and that just happens to do with how they transmit.

So even if you don't think you need a vaccine, part of her immunity is that it's not just about.

You, right, what about older people? What about babies they can't get vaccinated? Yet not being a self self centered it's.

About protecting the people that you love, and we're doing this strategy it's called cocooning where we're asking, for example, if you're about to have a baby that you as the mother, as well as everyone that you found yourself with, your spouse, your mother in law, your parents, et cetera, should all get the flu vaccine because that baby can't

That's exactly what Gabrielle Union did right when Kavea James Union Wade aka Shady baby he was born, and Oprah wanted to do an interview. Gabrielle said that everyone on the production team had to be vaccinated before they stepped foot into her house. She was Cocoon and the shady baby, and that's exactly what her community is is providing indirect protection for a baby. Kvea. We love you, Kavia, we love you. Yes, we're big fans.

Okay, we're gonna take a break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about the good and bad feelings that are associated with vaccination.

The good, the bad, and the ugly. I always love saying that I don't like Clint Eastwood no more, though we don't like a lot of people anymore. Stay tuned, all right, So we're back and we're ready to talk about vaccine hesitancy. What's up with that?

Vaccine hesitancy is anyone that thinks about delaying of vaccine, trying to think about an alternative schedule, or really having major concerns that would make them think about perhaps not getting a vaccine that's recommended.

So, in terms of how people feel about vaccinations, it's kind of a spectrum, right, We're on one end. You have people who are saying yeah, that's totally fine, I'm going to take my kid to go get vaccinated as soon as the doctor tells me.

Mostly about a third of the population is usually kind of like, yeah, I'm going to get vaccines. I'm going to do what my doctor says.

Right on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are completely against it and they say no, I will not vaccinate my child no matter what. Yes, And that's about two percent, and they're commonly called anti vaxxers or anti vaccination.

Then you have another probably fifty percent of the population that is sort of ambivalent, if you will, so just needs to be nudged in the right direction.

And then there's a huge chunk leftover who might just be vaccine hesitant. So what are the reasons that people tend to be vaccine hesitant? What leads them to this hesitancy. So there's usually three reasons people tend to be vaccine hesitant. One has to do with this unfortunate misconception related to adverse events related to vaccines. So that's what's really driving hesitancy,

And then the third sort of reason that people are hesitant is having to do with ingredients. Like people will say, oh, there's formal to hide in a vaccine, And the way that we have tried to address this is, you know, my response to them is, you know what, there's more formal to hide in a pair that's in a vaccine.

I've never felt more betrayed by a fruit like Rick Ross's shout out to de Paars shut out to pairs.

But we do hear that concern from parents. They're sort of like, why would I inject a virus inside of me? What we're trying to get parents to understand is that it's better for your body to be exposed to it so that you're ready to prepare it. I kind of think about it like a car seat for a baby. You hope that you're not in a car accident ever, but it's nice that it's there, so if a car accident does happen. Your child is protected.

Okay, so let's go back to the first reason that Rupauli mentioned, the one about misconceptions around vaccine safety. Unfortunately, there's been at least one well known instance where a doctor published research around vaccines that was later proven to be complete trash in that it was completely false.

The biggest one in sort of the elephant in the room, right, is sort of the nineteen ninety eight study that was published that made this unfounded and incorrect link between the MMR vaccine, which is measles moms and rubella and autism. Right, that paper was protracted, he lost his medical license.

Not only was the science not sound in that study, but he also had other financial competing financial interests because he was trying to make his own measles vaccine.

Unfortunately, the misconceptions that that article started we're still struggling with now.

So information is a really important part of staying healthy. Remember the more you know. Yes, right, it's true though, and part of why we're experiencing a rise in viruses that were once squashed is because there's a lot of conflicting information being shared out there and it's not always backed up by actual fact, Right, and when you have a large platform, the information you share has such a

But the damage was done right, And she's just one of them. And I think that if you have someone like that that has a platform, that has a large platform and is spouting misinformation, yeah, it's really hard for us to correct that, Like who am I or some other kind of academic person to come on and say, guess what? It doesn't cause about who do you think people are gonna believe?

Jo Rule is not all knowing, and neither is your favorite celeb on Instagram.

What's really interesting is that information is just like virus. Right, So when that virus shows up, or the information shows up at your front door, and it's wearing that disguise and it's not actually fact, it's just non fact being said by somebody famous or somebody that you really like or somebody that you really admire. You let that information into your house and you just let it replicate and then you spread it. And so that false information just spreads just like a virus does.

So we have to figure out and we have to think about how misinformation is spreading and proliferating so rapidly, because if not, this misinformation is already starting to outnumber correct, scientific evidence based information.

If you come across a meme that you aren't sure is scientifically correct, please tag dope Blast podcasts in it.

We'll do the work for you. We'll do the leg work because we're all friends here. We don't want you to let those incorrect memes and a trench coat into your home.

The other thing I think that really plays into this is how many parents do you know go on social media and say, Hey, I had a great vaccine experience. Most parents aren't going to say that, So most of the parents that are being vocal are ones that will say, oh, I had a terrible vaccine experience. I think it led my baby to.

X, Y and Z.

Negative views on vaccines are just like Yelp reviews. You don't leave a Yelp review unless you got something to complain about. So what we need is more people saying positive things.

Like I got a flu vaccine and I didn't get the flu this season.

And neither did my grandmama, right or my baby cousin exactly.

Everybody's healthy.

And the thing I think that blows my mind the most is when I look at social media and I think about why are messages so incredibly effective. It's because they're really focusing on emotional you know, emotions of the parent, fear based appeals to the parent they're looking at. They're using stories or music, anecdotal stories, which I think are just much better for parents to understand.

Basically, doctor LeMay is saying we need more memes that spread the truth, because really, all it takes is one meme with Will Smith in the background looking serious in a total neck and y'all will believe anything. People are out here making memes and they don't care about the facts. They show a Lamborghini icon of somebody in a business suit and a needle and say like, big Pharma is making vaccines to make two trillion dollars off of your babies. That are no, it's just crazy.

You're just doing Google and researches and then putting all those things together in a PowerPoint Yeah, and a fool of nobody.

Bruh.

Vaccines honestly only account for two percent of the profit that Big Farmer make.

I think the number one drug you know, one is for a rectile dysfunction, sort of most prescribed and also most profitable, but there's also one for toe fungus. And I'm blinking on what the prescription is in terms of money making drugs, if you will. Right, So, vaccines, in the grand scheme of things, do not Pharmaceutical companies do not make money off of them.

A lot of y'all got toe fungused, that's what I'm learning, or a few of y'all are spending a lot of money on the prescription.

Unfortunately, because of the political climate, our nation has become just extremely divisive, especially in political opinions, and so what we are finding and you hear about this a lot, you sort of think, oh, I am really worldly and I traveled the world and I have all these friends, but you really mostly live in a bubble.

So even though we're super connected and we have all these platforms that are that allows us to talk to people all over, we're choosing to talk to people that have the same ideas as us. And that's part of the problem, right, because we're talking to people that believe the things already is like preaching to the choir over and over and over again.

But unfortunately, what that does is that tends to not allow ideas to kind of spread and bridge across networks. So as a result, if let's say, an influential person in your network says, hey, you know what, I'm anti vaccine.

Right, It's just like that emotional mind thing we're talking about in the last episode. Yes, you will search for the facts that support the beliefs and the views that you have. So this reminds me of Jess Hilarious when she was going through something she posted, you know, her apology. She was just misunderstood in everything that she retweeted was people that agreed with her perspective exactly. But I could look at her comments and see that a ton of

They should talk to someone that they trust. Unfortunately, that tends the best person that you trust may not be the person that's most knowledgeable, right, And I understand that there's been this decrease in trust with your healthcare provider and that is unfortunate. But thinking about perhaps who has the expertise to talk about this, but also who has your best interest heart?

So what do we take away from this?

So one thing that we want to point out is that we are talking about the US when throughout this whole episode, there are developing countries where vaccines are not readily available. And I think, just for me, I know how viruses work, but to think about how contagious measles is, and to think about those countries where vaccines are not as readily available and there's not a lot of great infrastructure, so people are, you know, in constant contact with each other.

And I think it's so easy for us to take this for granted, you know. And I think some of this taking it for granted goes back to what you said about the Yelp review. I never had measles, so I don't really care about a measles vaccine so much. I'm not talking about it because also the people around me haven't had measles because they were vaccinated. But this could be a very real reality if we don't keep our herd immunity levels or having ninety five percent of

So, like even there was a cyclone that hit Beta, Mozambique, and now people are trying to support the relief effort, and one of the main things that people are talking about is medication because there's a lot of water. Everything is underwater, and so that's one of the things that folks are trying to do to support the people there. Same thing with Nebraska, right And in Nebraska, you know.

Something that we've gone back and forth about is whether to say, you know, what our position is. But I think the only responsible thing is to say, like, the facts line up. The facts line up for me, and that is that it's important to get vaccinated.

Global citizenship is something that's really important and we should all keep that in mind when we are making these decisions.

We're not telling you what to do. We're saying what we do.

And I'm getting vaccinated because I am a citizen of this world.

Thanks for hanging out with us in the lab today. Don't forget to check out our website for a cheat sheet. On today's episode, we're gonna include a lot of good info and some pretty charts and graphs for you too.

Also, we want to hear from you, and now we have a phone number so you can call and leave us a message. For our next episode, we're going to be taking a trip into the magical mythical kingdom of Wakanda. Are you excited about the new Avengers movie and the Black Panther sequel? Do you know what vibranium is made of? Our number is two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.

That's two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight. Find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Last Podcast t T is on Twitter at dr Underscore t SHO and you can find Zakiya at z said so. And if you do love the show, don't forget to follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Special thanks to today's guest doctor, Polly LeMay. You can learn more about her work in the show notes on Dope lasspodcast dot com.

Our producer is Jenny Rattletmask mixing and sound design by HANNS.

Brown. Original theme music by tak Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura. Additional music by Elijah Alex Harvey.

Dope Laps is brought to you by three M and is a production of Spotify Studios and Mega Ohm Media Group, and it's executive produced by us T. T. Shidia and Zakiyah Wattley. I had a friend who treated heel. He was a virologist. We were getting ready to go out to eat and he said, did you get the flu vaccine yet? And I said no. He said, oh, well then we can't go to dinner. I was like what, And he walked with me to write aid to get