The Super Episode

your brain probably moves pretty fast too. From School of Humans and iHeartRadio, I'm Sean Revive and this is Long Shot. Let's get this party started two ninety three million years ago. That's when Joel Wertheim, an associate professor of Medicine at UC San Diego, estimates coronavirus has first appeared. Our estimates put the incestor of all coronaviruses at hundreds of millions of years old, which actually would line up with the

split between bats and birds or their divergence. Now, as much as I'd like to think, in all of that noise and all of that uncertainty, we managed to hit the nail on the head going back hundreds of millions of years and identifying the split between bats and birds. I just think that that's a lucky happenstance, and nobody knows how old they are. Okay, so he's not really sure about that number, but it's probably safe to say

that coronavirus has first appeared millions of years ago. But the practice of innoculation, the prevention of disease through contraction of that disease, doesn't start with coronaviruses. It starts with smallpox. Yep. Smallpox one of the deadliest diseases in human history, killer of hundreds of millions of people. Smallpox probably predates written history, but some Egyptian mummies were found with signs of smallpox.

There are written descriptions of smallpox from seventh century India, so we know it goes back many hundreds of years at least. But what about smallpox inoculation. There's a legend about smallpox inoculators living unmountain in China about the millennium ago. The son of a local governor got very sick from smallpox, which by len had to plague the China for at least a thousand the years. The governor offered the piles of gold to anyone who could help. He's his son.

Real documentation of inoculation comes about five hundred years later in a fifteen forty nine medical text by a Ming dynasty physician. Things start getting less hazy in the sixteen hundreds. In sixteen eighty, in an ooculator named fushang Lin is chosen by an emperor in China to protect his children. Lo the Conci emperor, survived the smallpox, he did not

escape it to trauma. Every time there was an outbreak of small pox, he was haunted both by his fallest death and by the isolation, and so when he grew into an adult, the county emperor searched far and wide for the umpire's best inoculators. Thirty five years later, in seventeen fifteen, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, a talented British poet and young aristocrat, gets smallpox, which is probably the single

deadliest disease in England at the time. Her symptoms are horrible, a wicked fever, a rapid pulse, trouble breathing due to the swelling of her nose and throat, liquid filled pustules that eventually cover her entire body and face. Lady Mary survives the pox, but her face is scarred for life. The next year, she moves from London to Constantinople with her ambassador husband. There she hears the Turkish have a

way of protecting against pox. What they do is purposefully inject a patient with a little smallpox matter, and that gives the patient lifelong protection from full blown smallpox. Two years later, in seventeen eighteen, Mary has her five year old son inoculated. He may be the first english person ever to be inoculated. And when she returns to London, she has her daughter inoculated by a surgeon named Charles Maitland. He'd go on to perform an innoculation experiment on prisoners

in seventeen twenty two. Here's historian Arthur Boylson. So six of them, all of them quite young, late teens, early twenties, and they were all inoculated with a big public spectacle. They had all been sentenced to hang from various crimes. And the King agreed that he would allow Maitland to inoculate some prisoners. And at one point somebody complained to the King and said, even that's a fairly nasty thing. To do. McKey said, well, it's better than they preferred

it to hang. Regardless of the ethics of this experiment, all six prisoners live and are pardoned. Meanwhile, around this time, an enslaved African brings anoculation to the United States. His name is One Samous and he's owned by a Puritan minister in Boston named Cotton Mather. And One Samous changes

the course of inoculation history in the US. When Mather asks One Samius if he's ever had smallpox, on Samius replies both yes and no. He shows Mather a scar and says it's from an operation where he got a small mountain of smallpox in order to protect him from

the disease. Years later, when a smallpox outbreak comes to Boston, Mather becomes the strongest voice in favor of anoculation, and by the time of the American Revolution, General George Washington makes an oculation standard practice for soldiers, so he inoculates the entire continent alarmy over a period of weeks. Within the army, it prevented smallpox, and thereafter inoculation became part of the enrollment ritual for new soldiers. They were given

a shirt and gun shoes and inoculated. It's the reason the United States exists. A few decades after Lady Mary in the UK and once Amiss in the US, a family by the name of Sutton starts at innoculation business in rural England, traveling around and inoculating entire towns. They're the first inoculation entrepreneurs. It was explosive. There were villages all over the country that adopted the Suttonian system. They hire a preacher to speak of God's support for the practice.

This is the way for our escape. Reason directs us to it. Experience proves the utility and safety. This sickness, as caused by innoculation, is not unto death. The Sutton's helped make anoculation to mainstream practice, and by the time their work is finished, a new type of smallpox prevention is discovered by Edward Jenner. The legend goes that he meets a milkmaid with perfect skin and she tells him about being exposed to cow pox, which gives her protection

from smallpox. We all know and believe that beautiful story of the milk Maide and how she was gorgeous, but it's not true. It's made up. Even if the story isn't true, Jenner does pretty much invent vaccination with his use of cowpox to fight smallpox. In seventeen ninety six, Dinner makes history by testing his vaccine on his Gardner's son,

eight year old James Phipps, and the boy lives. In the eighteen eighties, Louis Pasteur creates vaccines for anthrax and then rabies, using the practice of attenuation, weakening the virus before injecting it into the body. In nineteen eighteen, the Spanish flu arrives and sort of takes over the entire world for a couple of years, killing somewhere around fifty million people. The next year, Maurice Hilleman is born. Well, I'm Marie's Haliman. I had a long career in science,

about sixty years. Hilleman is the goat of vaccine invention. He helps develop most of the vaccines that we get today, measles, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Beninjacoccus, hib streptococcus, chicken pox. That's all him. He also accidentally helps discover ad no viruses while culturing the cells of a dead man's trachea. And

I said, well, I'd like to have his trachia. So I went over to the morgue and waited for him to carve out the trachea, wrapped it up newspaper and brown back the lab, cut dope and start chopping on tissue. Some days, you know, everything just goes right. Ad No viruses are used today as a delivery system for some of the COVID vaccines, like Astra's ENCAS and Johnson and Johnson's. Hillman even creates a vaccine from his own daughter's cells in nineteen sixty three. The name of the vaccine is

the Journal and Strain. It's on all of the boxes and package inserts that come out. I have had the pleasure throughout my life of also being called Miss Mumps, and usually by pediatricians. And while Maurice Hillman is doing his thing, some other cool things are happening with vaccines. By the nineteen forties, we've got new vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. In nineteen fifty five, Jonah Saut comes out with his vaccine for polio. There's also some not so

cool stuff happening when the polio vaccine comes out. One of the company's mass producing it cut her laboratory messes up and creates tens of thousands of doses containing live poliovirus. Fifty one people are paralyzed and five die after getting the vaccine meant to prevent polio. And in nineteen sixty six, a vaccine trial for respiratories and scial virus and DC goes bad. Eighteen babies, mostly from poor black families, end

up in the hospital and two of them die. RSV can be deadly in children, and there is still no FDA proof vaccine today. We'll get back to RSP in a sec In nineteen eighty, smallpox returns to the news when the World Health Assembly officially declares the virus eradicated. Yes, after thousands of years, vaccines have ridded the world of one of humanity's greatest killers. But HIV and AIDS appear

around that time. They spread throughout the eighties, at first primarily in gay men, but also in intravenous drug users and later in countries in Africa. Virologist named Eddie Holmes goes to Edinburgh, Scotland to study HIV spread in the early nineties. What we were trying to do was trying to work out how the virus was spreading through that population, how it diffused, and how it got into city, and

how it spreading. In the nineties, a team at the US National Institutes of Health creates a vaccine called rhoda Shield to fight a deadly childhood disease called rhodavirus. Rhoda Shield gets the nod from the CDC, but within months some cases of a rare intestinal disorder pop up and the CDC withdraws its recommendation. But all throughout the eighties and nineties, another team of researchers is working on a

rival vaccine for rhodavirus called Rhodotech. That one gets low from the FDA and CDC in two thousand and six, but not before the biggest clinical trial in the history of medicine eleven countries and nearly seventy thousand infants. Here's Paul Offitt, one of the developers of Rhodotech, and it ended in so called Phase three trial, a prospect the placebo control, the eleven country four year, three hundred and fifty million dollars trial to prove that the vaccine worked.

The size of that enormous trial leads to the similarly giant trials we have in twenty twenty for the COVID vaccines. Johnson and Johnson, Astra, Zeneca, Fizer, Maderna, and others around the world are all amongst the largest clinical trials ever. In two thousand and two, we get an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome the first stars. More than eight thousand people in twenty nine countries get it, but by two thousand and four it mostly dies out thanks to

people like Maurice Hilleman. We've got tons of vaccines at this point. But in two thousand and six, a new discovery leads to all sorts of advances in medicine, including the way we make vaccines. That year, Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese researcher, discovers a way to reprogram mature mouse cells into immature cells. They can then be turned to whatever type of cells he wants. Here's Derek Rossi who's in

the audience when Yamanaka announces his discovery. So what he demonstrated was that he could take any cell type, any differentiated cell which would normally we had thought been sort of fixed in its identity, but he discovered a way by introducing four genes to turn back the developmental time on what was differentiated cell type and reverted back to an embryonic stem cell like state. Derek is at Harvard in two thousand and seven and he wants to build

upon Yamanaka's work changing mature cells to immature cells. Yamanaka is inserting strands of DNA into cells in order to change them, but this is dangerous for humans. It could give you cancer. So Derek decides to use mRNA instead, which is kind of like skipping a step in the way that life is made. I call it the trifect of life. DNA makes mRNA, protein makes life. Postdoctor Othello. In my lab, doctor Luigi Warren had the idea, very simple idea, just saying, hey, you know, we need to

make these transcription factors. Let's just skip the whole DNA part. Let's just use m rna. That turns out to be a genius move, but he runs into another problem When he puts RNA into cells, the cells think they're being attacked by a virus, which caused the cell to respond by saying, looks like a virus is coming in. Let's

shut down the protein production. And it really looks like a virus is coming in, so let's kill ourselves, you know, an altruistic suicide and cell death, which is a good thing for the cell to do, you know, rather than let it be hijacked by a virus and have it make hundreds of thousands of viral particles. He finds a workaround from a couple of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers are Catlin Corrico and Drew Weissman, and they figured about a cloaking method for tricking cells into not thinking they're being invaded. Derek integrates it into his own work and lo and behold, now we can change human cells without killing them or causing cancerous mutations. That was the sort of technological breakthrough that led to the development of modified mRNA. We called it in the lab mod RNA.

He takes this work down the street to Bob Langer, a serial entrepreneur based at MT, and they start a company that they eventually name Maderna. By the way, just as a a fun fact, you know, Maderna. It comes from the term that we used in the lab describing the technology. We called it mad RNA. So mod RNA if you put any in there, you get Maderna. That's where the name came from. At its formation, Maderna has exactly zero full time employees and no products. They won't

have one for ten more years. In two thousand and eight, structural biologist Jason McClellan takes a job at the NIH where he meets Barney Graham. Graham wants to create a vaccine for RSV, which is that virus I mentioned earlier that can kill infants. The RSV vaccine that failed back in the sixties was made by weakening a strain of the virus by passing it through animal tissue or human cells. That's how Maurice Hilleman made a lot of his vaccines.

But Jason and doctor Graham have a new method in mind. They want to mess with the F protein of RSV. That's the one the virus uses to infect human cells. Before the F protein attaches itself to a human cell, it is in its prefusion state. If you think of your immune system as a security guard, you want to train your immune system to recognize the form that might infect you, like the dangerous form, and that's the prefusion form. If you train it to recognize the postfusion form, the

prefusion form can still sneak by you. Barney, Graham, and Jason want to figure out how to keep the F protein in this state, and in twenty thirteen they do. They figure out a way to sort of staypule the protein so it stays in that form. And when Barney immunized mice and compared postfusion versus prefusion, the mice receiving the prefusion form of the F protein elicited neutralizing antibodies about ten times higher than those that received the postfusion.

This is the first time that structural biology, looking super closely at the structure of a virus helps discover a new way to stop it. But now they want to see what other viruses they can work on using this prefusion protein state. This is right around the time that Middle East Respiratory Syndrome is first reported in Saudi Arabia. MERS is a really bad coronavirus. Thirty five percent of

people infected with it we're dying. It's a real lethal virus, and we thought that this would be a good target to try to take everything we had just learned about RSP and apply it to not just MERS, but coronaviruses in general, because we knew the Stars coronavirus had emerged in China in two thousand and two and it caused an epidemic. It turns out that MERS has a protein

that works kind of like the rsv F protein. It's called the spike protein, and when the merge virus attacks human cells, the spike injects itself into them in order to spread throughout the body. But it's not easy to staple the spike protein. It takes tons of trial and error. Here's Nanchan Wang Jason's post doc to explain how hard it is to figure this out. We got to try again and again most of the time. It's got to feel. Yeah, it's not so too easy actually to find their mutation

that to stabilize as product, it's pretty italented. By twenty seventeen, they figure out how to staple the spike protein in place and use that to teach the immune system to fight off a MERGS infection, but they don't have any people to test it on. Turns out MERS doesn't spread very easily and the outbreak is mostly over by then. No outbreak means no human trials, no human trials, means they can't be sure that stabilizing the spike protein really

works as a vaccine candidate. Then in December twenty nineteen, a new coronavirus appears. Here's Derek Rossing. You could see that. You know, it was really snowballing. I mean it had everything that a good pathogen would want. It was a respiratory. When it was first being reported, the fatality rates and the illness rates were very very high. We didn't, you know, it was a new virus. We didn't know how to respond to it. So the fatality rate was around two percent.

That's pretty darn serious. In mid December twenty nineteen, a worker at the Huanan seafood wholesale market gets sick with theemmonia like symptoms. He's admitted to Central Hospital of Wuha and he's one of the first novel coronavirus patients in the world. Central hospital happens to be where British phiologist Eddie Holmes and it's Chinese colleague Jan Jang Jang are

studying patients with acute respiratory symptoms around that time. But what that meant was we were kind of like on site, almost looking at the same Z syndrome in the right tissue samples with the right technology, and so we happen to be in the wrong place the wrong time. I feel like when it all kind of started, and that's gave us an open door to really to try and look at some of the early first cases to see

what was going on. Late at night and January fifth, twenty twenty, Jang finishes sequencing the virus, but Chinese authorities are trying to keep anything related to the virus from being made public. The Ministry of Health were controlling everything, and they wanted They wanted to control the message, they wanted to damp down on rumors, they wanted to be in control of the situation. On January eleventh, Jang gets on a plane in Shanghai and is about to take

off when his phone buzzes. It's Eddie. I cooled jan very early, and I said we need to release he stay tonight. Jang agrees, has a post duct send the sequence to Eddie. Eddie tweets out a link. That moment kicks off development for the COVID nineteen vaccines, and that's exactly what Jason McClellan starts working on the reports were coming out of these pneumonia clusters in Wuhan. We could just see it following along on science Twitter and on

the news. And then it was early in January when it was learned that, in fact, it is a coronavirus beta coronavirus that's similar to the first stars Kobe from two thousand and two. Jason's at the University of Texas. Now, I was a snowboarding with my family in Park City, Utah, and Barney Graham called me. He said he was in contact with the US CDC Chinese CDC and they were going to try and work quickly work with Maderna try

and create a vaccine. Maderna is still considered an upstart company at best, and it's never brought a vaccine to market. Anyone to know if if we were interested in continuing our collaboration to determine the structure of the stars cope to spike protein and use that information to create the vaccine antigens, Jason texts has graduate student Daniel Rep. We were sort of ready to go, that's Daniel, because we've been studying these spike proteins for such a long time.

We knew how to effectively stabilize spike in the prefusion confirmation and that acts as a really good vaccine candidate. Within a few weeks, they figure out how to stabilize the spike protein of the novel coronavirus. But to make a vaccine work, they need to make sure the mRNA gets where it needs to go to instruct the body to make stabilize spike proteins. What MADERNA does is encapsulate the mRNA in a lipid nanoparticle shell to protect the

mRNA on its way to doing its things. Here's biochemist Thomas Madden of Acuteous Therapeutics in Vancouver to remind us what an l enp is and does. If you wanted to order a really fragile glass ornament online and you wanted it delivered to your to your home, if you used the equivalent of our delivery technology, then the ornament would be would be wrapped and packaged to protect it and noboutter how rough the journey was to your to

your house. The package would would find your house, it would open the front deck door by itself and let itself in, and then it would unwrap itself. So the ornament is waiting for you to come along and pick up in your hallway, so the lipidano particle delivers the vaccine, kind of like how FedEx delivers a package. Around the same time that the Phase one trials from Aderna begin,

the US starts shutting down. Rush to the grocery store like every single other person, and you know, the meat sections were empty, and that just kind of that was a little eerie to see. This is Nicola Pescarilli, and all of a sudden, I just felt like everything was closed off, and I didn't like that feeling. And so it's like, what can I do to get everything to return back to normal as soon as possible? What can I do? What can I do to make things better?

Because I felt just so hopeless. Tom Hanks has COVID, the NBA has shut down, entire cities and countries around the world shut down, and Nicola volunteers for the Phase one trial at the Hope Clinic in Atlanta. I'm in Phase one, like, I am one of fifteen people getting the highest dosage that no one else in this country, in this world has ever gotten. And I think for a moment, I thought, oh God, it might crazy, Like could I die? And then I was like, no, it's fine.

Modern medicine is great, and it is great. The phase one trial is a success. It was a very small process, and I remember afterwards they wanted me to stay to observe me for a while after the vaccine, and it was still just like getting used to the whole new change in the world. Meanwhile, more than a hundred other vaccines are in the works around the world, all sorts of them spot Nick in Russia, Sino farm and Sino vac in China, Astra Zenica in the UK, Covaccine in India,

Soberana two in Cuba. They are mr Anda vaccines, had no virus, vaccines, in activated vaccines. There are even vaccines grown and tobacco like plants. But in the meantime, before the vaccines are actually rolled out, lots of people are getting sick and lots of people are dying, and nearly everyone else is stuck at home, stuck caring for people, confused about what to do and how to live. So happy Halloween to me. Turns out I did have COVID. A lot of us are really lonely, unable to see

friends or family, no office to go to. Some people get COVID pets. Like Marina in Sweden, I was having a really hard time sticking to any sort of schedule because the days were all the same and there was nothing to do. And then when COVID came around and I had been working from home for nine or ten months, I was just at my wits end, like so sick of just being by myself. So I decided, like, now is the time I'll get a dog. I can be

at home and train the dog. It seemed like a good idea, but during COVID everything is more complicated and plans just continuously get fucked up for everyone all the time. In a slightly different world, I would have gone all those things I wanted, but in a COVID world, I didn't get any of them. Some people get sick and stay sick, like Dave Hockaday in Oxford. It's just getting

worse each day. And then of course the fatigue was building, that was getting worse, and there was just generally feeling starting to feel really unwealth inflamed hot, was getting chills at night times and night sweats, insomnia, dreadful nightmares. My god, the nightmares were horrific. People like Dave have long COVID and even today it's unclear what exactly is causing it. Just seeing the numbers like them, an average number of symptoms that long COVID patients had. That's Athena Akramy, a

neuroscientist at University College London. She got COVID in March twenty twenty and seventeen months later she's still sick. She now spends a lot of her time studying long COVID. The average number of symptoms is more than fifty. Just like seeing that number that like one person I can't experience fifty different symptoms was kind of, I don't know, shocking, and it seems like long COVID it will be a

huge problem for years to come. We are just like accumulating so many long covides down like in a year, probably each country will have millions of people, most of them again previously young and faith that now they are just like really struggling to go back to semi normal life. That I really don't know what we'll how. It's a crisis,

it's a health crisis. But on a positive note. By early twenty twenty one, three vaccines have gotten emergency authorization in the US and they start making their way to healthcare workers and the elderly. There are major hiccups at first. I mean, it's damn near impossible for some people to get appointments because there's no central system to do that. It's a goddamn free for all instead of an orderly line. At first, I was not successful at finding a vaccine.

That's Stanley Plutkin, one of the world's top experts on vaccines. Even the guy who literally wrote the book on vaccines, has trouble getting an appointment at first. He's eighty eight years old and really vulnerable if he gets COVID. What do you mean you weren't successful, even like you were, You couldn't get an appointment at first? Yes, well, yeah,

I think initially of finding it was not easy. Initially there was a lot of uncertainty about where vaccines were available, how much was available, etc. That's how chaotic it is in the beginning of twenty twenty one, and so it became a You still have to navigate systems that are largely fragmented and by the way, all online in order

to secure an appointment. And guess what, the very populations that were favored is early beneficiaries of New York States vaccine program are precisely the populations who can't be on the internet all day or are not on the internet, so the elderly, restaurant workers, grocery store workers, taxi drivers. That's s Metro Khalita, whose organization Epicenter NYC helps get people vaccine appointments in Jackson Heights, Queens back when it's super hard to do it if you aren't really Internet savvy.

But eventually there's so much vaccine out there in the US that anyone who wants a shot can get one. Of course, not everyone does. One way to get vaccines made and distributed faster for the next pandemic is to use human challenge trials. That's where people get a disease on purpose so that doctors and scientists can study it. The first human challenge trial for COVID begins in the UK in March twenty twenty one, and Jacob Hopkins is

one of the participants. Speaks of getting and COVID is the most surreal thing in the world, Like it's intimidating. This is him describing how they infect him during the trial. It's like Jesus Christ, like this is like intense, and they get this huge p pair. It's like almost like a turkey basis, Like it's a massive pair they have.

They pick it up, they start counting down, So they count down from twenty, which is adds to the suspense really, and then they kind of like drop up in each nostrils, so they kind of drop it around the outside of the one nostril and then did the other and then their way and they count not from twenty again and

then they repeat. You're kind of just sit like you're kind of just laying there in silence, like just thinking, oh my god, I've just been infected with coronavirus, and like it kind of obviously kind of hits in at that point. And while the UK and US and other wealthy nations are overloaded with vaccines, poorer countries can't get

enough to vaccinate even small portions of their people. Even with donations trickling in from miserly nations like the US, low incombinations are still only two percent vaccinated on average, And so a bunch of researchers get together and create a new vaccine that can be produced cheaply and easily. Here's Bruce Innis from the organization PATH. We're extremely interested in ensuring that countries where health budgets are not strong have access to world class vaccines that are life saving.

On the proposition that everyone deserves to have access to life saving vaccines. PATH has helped coordinate the development of this new vaccine, which is called ndv HXPS. It uses a new stabilized spike protein called hexapro developed by Jason McClellan and his colleagues at UT and then also starting to make a second generation spike protein that was even more stable than the two protein form. The engineered protein is carried into the body by Newcastle disease by, which

is an avian virus. Here's Peter Palaze, a microbiologist at Mount Sinai who helped develop the vaccine, and so we said, okay, right, don't we put the sous coronavirus spike protein into Newcastle disease bows and thens what we did, so we have a vector ven vaccine. The big difference between this vaccine and the ones we've gotten in the US is that it's cheaper to make because it's grown in chicken eggs just like most flu shots, and it's being piloted in Vietnam, Brazil,

and Thailand. Already here's Bruce again. They've made multiple lots of vaccine, initially at pilot scale, which might involve a few thousand eggs, and we're getting typically about seven to eight finished vaccine doses per inoculated egg. You can think of the egg as a mini bioreactor, each one self contained bioreactor. And now they're in the process of manufacturing

the investigational vaccine at full commercial scale. Some phase one clinical trials have already finished and the results are promising, but the new vaccine still needs to go through the big phase three trials. If they go well, ndv HXBS may end up being, at least for some countries, the future of coronavirus vaccines. That brings us to the end of this podcast. We started millions of years ago and

finished still in a pandemic with no clear end. Variants are here, people are still getting sick and dying, and life is still weird and annoying even if you're healthy. I'm personally super impressed with all the incredible researchers and volunteers and historians we heard from and about. I mean, how the hell the first human being figured out that giving someone a little bit of a disease to protect from a lot of it hundreds, if not thousands of years go, is just mind blowing to me. But just

a reminder. This is not the entire story. It's just what I've been able to cover in this relatively short ten parts series. There are a ton of people who have made important contributions to so many vaccines, lots of names that have gone unsaid by me and by others, lots of people whose work has helped save hundreds of millions of lives, and also hundreds of millions of lives

that have been lost along the way. As of today, four point seven seven million people have died of COVID, and they include, just to name a few, Darlene Ray, Rose, Marie Fazzio, Ron Kieran, Adel Cercelli, Kenny Cassina, Doctor Ferkin, Ali Sadiki, Patricia Francis Prescott, Mark Dvorschak, and my aunt Rifka. A COVID vaccine could have saved almost all of those four point seven seven million people, just like a smallpox vaccine has saved who the hell knows how many people.

My hope is that when the next pandemic. Hits will be able to create a vaccine even faster and get it to more people faster, but that'll depend on more research, more domestic and international cooperation, and more agreement in the world in general. There's just no way to protect the world unless the whole world is protected. Now, let's end this thing with another dip into the recent past. March twenty seven, twenty one, the first Boutanese person is about

to get her first shot of a COVID vaccine. Her name is Ninda, which roughly translates to the Sun and the Moon. She's thirty years old and was born in the Year of the Monkey. The nurse who will administer her shot is also thirty years old and also born in the Year of the Monkey. After being picked to be the first person in her country to be vaccinated, Ninda says, let the small step of mind today help

us all prevail through this illness. She sits with her back to her room full of massed healthcare workers and monks, and they pray together until she gets her shot. Long Shot is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode was produced, written and narrated by me Sean Ravie. A Co producer is Gabby Watts. Special thanks to Noel Brown and iHeartRadio. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr. Fact Checking for this episode is by

Adam Shadow. Long Shot was scored by Jason Shannon. The score was mixed by Vick Stafford. Sound design and audio mixed was by Harber Harris with Tune Welders School of Humans