Covid Vaccine Update 12/16 LIVE

Okay guys. ZDoggMD, Dr. Z, Zubin Damania, whatever you wanna call me. We’re live. It’s December 16th. It’s about 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time. And I wanna talk about these new coronavirus vaccines, in some depth, a little more discussion because so many people are confused and worried, and anxious, and happy, and every emotion you can imagine, because these things have come out and people are thinking well, is this the end of the pandemic? I’m scared to get it, it’s too new. I’m worried about long-term consequences. And so I am streaming to Facebook, YouTube, and Locals.com right now, to talk to you guys about all of these things at once. And so leave your comments. Everybody’s here, let’s get going. So here here’s the deal so far. I wanna address, first of all, the big elephant in the room, which is people are losing their minds, including a lot of healthcare professionals and particularly nurses about this new mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna saying, you know what, now they’re telling us as frontline healthcare professionals, we’re in tier one, we should get vaccinated because we’re at high risk taking care of people. And if we get sick, there’s less staffing.

The hospitals are full. The ICU’s are overwhelmed. We need to do something about this, et cetera, but I don’t wanna be a guinea pig for something that has been developed in “record time.” And we don’t know the safety, we’re worried about reports that come out about Bell’s palsy. We’re worried about anaphylactic allergic reactions. How should I think about this? And so I wanna talk to you guys again, not just as a physician, but as someone who is going to get this vaccine, like I am 100% getting this vaccine. The only reason I haven’t gotten it right now is that it’s not available for me, right? So there are people ahead of me in the line, but the minute I can, I’m gonna live stream me getting it. And I wanna explain why I came to that decision because I didn’t come to it lightly. You guys remember in the early days of this pandemic, I was talking with Dr. Paul Offit, who’s been on the show several times now about how can it be possible that we compress vaccine development, which the fastest vaccine ever previously developed was four to five years for mumps. And this was back in the 60s or 50s. And that was the fastest we’ve ever done it. Typically it’s a decade, trials, billions of dollars.

And you know, even just looking at HPV vaccine, which was one of the newer vaccines, it’s a different model of a vaccine. It’s a purified protein derivative than our current mRNA vaccines we’re talking about, but we’re talking a decade and a billion dollars and tens of thousands people studied. So how is it that we were able to compress this because Paul, and I were both skeptical in the beginning that it was gonna work and yet it did. And I’ll tell you why I’m comfortable with that, and then you can make an educated decision. And you should understand this, nobody is mandating this vaccine, right? And if they are, I think that’s a mistake. So we’re not saying right now at this early stage, you have to take this, right? This is a voluntary decision.

And what I think is gonna happen is enough people are gonna want this thing that’s it’s gonna be impossible to get, it’s more a scarcity issue. So there’s actually for people who are like, well, he just wants, he’s shilling this vaccine, he’s paid by Big Pharma. No, no. And honestly, if anything, if I’m acting in self-interest, I’d be like, you don’t wanna get this, it’s garbage, more for me and the people I care about ’cause there’s not enough yet, right? It’s got challenges in scaling up the logistics of delivering this vaccine to the amount of Americans that are gonna want it. So this is why I’m comfortable with this. As Paul and I discussed on the show, the reason vaccine development takes a very long time is you have to go from basic science principles, which are difficult enough that you have to prove, okay, this is a new vaccine platform. Is this gonna work? Does it make sense, biologically? How does it work? What are the potential pitfalls, et cetera. With the messenger RNA stuff, which we’ve done videos on, this has been actually looked at over like a couple decades, right? So they’ve been working on messenger RNA as a delivery vehicle for a long time. It’s just, they’ve never reached the vaccine development and approval stage.

Now the COVID pandemic catalyzed that stage to the point where all the work these people have been doing for a long time can suddenly bear fruit in a way that’s accelerated, but not, this term “rushed” is not accurate. Rushed means you’re cutting corners that affect the outcome, the safety and efficacy of the outcome. So what was done here? Normally in vaccine development, you have phase one, which is these like, you know, early stuff where you’re like, okay, does this thing generate an immune response? What’s the dosing? And phase two is a scaled up version where you’re looking for immunogenicity. Does the vaccine create an immune response? And again, at what dose does it do that? And are you seeing major safety problems, right? And you’ve already done animal studies and all of this. And then phase three is the business end of the trial. That’s the part that actually gives you the meaningful data that you’re gonna make decisions on. Tens of thousands of people prospective, in other words, looking forward, going, starting at point zero and saying, okay, we’re gonna recruit a bunch of people to this trial. We’re gonna randomize them.

So I’m not making decisions on who goes where, it’s random into two groups, get the vaccine or get a real placebo. And in this case, it’s a saline injection. It does not contain another vaccine. It’s a true placebo. So anyone who says these aren’t placebo-controlled trials is not telling you the truth. So in that phase three trial, you’re randomized, you’re blinding both the participant in the trial so they don’t know what they got, whether they got placebo or not, and the investigators in the trial. So they don’t know which group got what, because if they’re not blinded, you introduce bias. And when you look at things like, you know, people are buzzing about ivermectin and they’re buzzing about this and that, the trials there, you have to be very careful to look well, okay, does it have this bias removed, right? So that’s what a phase three vaccine trial would do. And all the other steps are really designed to make sure that the pharmaceutical company that’s doing that phase three trial is comfortable with the dose and with the fact that it’s gonna work and with the fact that there’s a chance people are gonna use it, and it’s gonna be approved because there is tremendous financial risk to undertake this process, billions of dollars, decades because of the slow nature of the approvals. The fact you’ve got to do all the basic science and do those early trials, and then get enough participants for the randomized controlled trial and hope you have enough disease out in the community that you’re gonna show a benefit. And a lot needs to happen to make the phase three trial work.

Well, guess what, we were able to make that happen. In this year of the pandemic, building on the decade plus of work on the mRNA technology. And then the government said, okay, listen, we’re gonna take the risk away for these companies. So all that financial risk that they were worried about, the government said, listen, we’re gonna buy a bunch of doses, whether it works or not. And we’re going to basically allow you to jump right into that phase three trial where you go, okay, does this thing work, right? Go ahead and do that trial in a way that’s not gonna destroy you financially because we’re telling you if it doesn’t work, we’ll still pay you money, right? That took the risk away. Then actually recruiting people for the trial was a piece of cake because it’s a COVID vaccine trial during a pandemic. Next, the amount of disease out in the community is all over, it’s all over the place. So you’re gonna have enough disease to actually show statistically significant outcomes for prevention, in other words, it’s not so rare that you need a million participants to detect a case, right?

So, you know, the 40,000 odd in each of these trials, that’s like, yeah, that’s pretty good. You’re gonna find and you’re gonna see evidence of outcomes here based on that, because all these things aligned. So the government actually did the right thing with operation warp speed. You have enough spread in the community. You have the risk taken away from the pharmaceutical companies to do this. And Moderna partnered with NIH. Pfizer did it themselves, but still got guarantees of purchases for so many doses, right? So it takes a lot of the risk away. And then what happened? The scientific community did something remarkable. They did what they’re supposed to do and science, the living crap out of this thing.

From the day when we had the genetic code in January, from the Chinese scientists to a functional, effective vaccine less than a year. And people say that’s rushed. No, the business end of the trial was done absolutely superbly from all the data that we can see so far. And as Paul said on the show, most of the serious, rare adverse events happen within the six, even six weeks of the injections. And now we’re out, you know, two months. And so we have pretty good data now. So this idea that it’s all rushed. No, no, no, no, no, they just took all the unnecessary stuff and said, don’t do that. Just do the business end of it, do it correctly, and we’ll make it so that you don’t go out of business taking that risk.

And it worked. So now you have a vaccine that, both the vaccines are like 94-95% effective, meaning it’s gonna stop that percentage of cases. I mean, the measles vaccine is like 97-98% effective, and you nearly eradicated measles with it. Nearly, and I say nearly because anti-vaxxers, right? So that being said you now have this amazing accomplishment. Now here’s the question. Is it safe? Is that enough? I think it’s pretty effective, not only effective across age groups. So older patients have a pretty good efficacy. Younger patients, now we haven’t studied it under, you know, 12 or whatever it is, I believe it is 12. So it depends on the trial you’re talking about and which vaccine you’re talking about, but we have studied it in older people, and we have studied across racial groups and ethnicities, and across countries. That’s huge, right? This isn’t your typical white person, male trial that we used to do, and then go, let’s apply it to a 62-year-old Hispanic lady, that doesn’t work. This does. This is science done pretty damn good you guys. And I’m saying this as someone who was a very skeptical that they were gonna be able to pull this off.

One of my skepticism pieces was the worry that FDA was gonna become politicized and truly rush it, meaning before the phase three results came out and Paul was worried about this as well, releasing an emergency use authorization from FDA and saying, you know what, it’s good enough go, and we’ll finish the study later because it’s a pandemic. Okay, you do that, and it’s game over for trust and for the science of it. So they did the right thing, they waited, right? And of course that happened after the election. So people say, oh, they, you know, they were trying to screw President Trump or whatever. None of that matters, the bottom line is they did it. They didn’t rush an EUA. They waited for the phase three results. Now this is the question.

Could it be that in this phase three trial, we haven’t seen a safety signal yet that will be seen when millions of people get vaccinated? And the answer is, sure, absolutely that’s possible. Let’s look at a couple of the safety signals we have seen and talk about them. Okay, the first is you guys have heard a lot about this, the severe allergic reactions that were occurring in some participants that are now being immunized out in the world. Let’s talk about this. So it’s, and how much of those reactions are related directly to the vaccine? How much are related to something else? We don’t fully know yet, but we can say, sure, it’s totally possible that people can have up to severe anaphylactic reactions to vaccine components. It happens with other vaccines, right? It’s not common, but if you immunize 300 million people, it’s they’re gonna be a lot of people who have that reaction. So the question is, does this have to do with the safety of the vaccine in itself? Is there something else going on? And the answer is probably not.

It’s probable that some people just mount this overwhelming immune response to a lot of things, and that’s why they talk about people with severe food allergies, with severe medication allergies, being more cautious with the vaccine. But the recommendation is still, you can get it unless you’re allergic to a specific component in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine in which case you shouldn’t get it ’cause you’re gonna have an allergic reaction. But if you’re just at high risk for allergies, the idea is get the vaccine, but stay in a clinical location for at least 30 minutes or whatever they’re recommending so that you can be monitored because anaphylactic allergic reactions can be treated. Right? So that’s one piece that people should understand that doesn’t prevent you from getting vaccinated. It doesn’t speak to the overall safety of the vaccine. It’s just a function of this happens. It’s like understanding risk in general. If you wear a seatbelt, there’s a small chance that the seatbelt will kill you in an accident, right?

But there’s a much bigger chance that the seatbelt is actually gonna save your life or at least not harm you. So that’s one piece. Now the second piece is you’ve heard probably this one safety signal that they’re seeing in the trials is Bell’s palsy. So what is Bell’s palsy? Let’s talk about that for a second. And I’m just looking at the comments here to see them continuing to stream, perfect. Is Locals working? It is, I see you guys on Locals.com. This is my new favorite platform because it isn’t the wide open internet, people want to be there. It’s not a bottomless well of addiction like Facebook and YouTube. God, I’m starting to think I should just cancel both of those, but then I wouldn’t be able to reach people until other things grow up. So Bell’s palsy. Bell’s palsy is a facial nerve… Inflammation or damage that usually reverses itself, it takes some time. And what it is, is, you know, the facial nerve controls these muscles in the face. So it manifests, it shows up as a droop or an inability to move half your face. And that can look like a droop. It can look like just, you know, half your face is smiling. So it can be, you know, visually very uncomfortable for people. You can have tear problems, eye problems, some people have to even, you know, artificial tears and those kinds of things. It just depends on the severity of it. And we saw four cases in the Pfizer trial, in the vaccination arm.

Now these are tens of thousands of people, all right? So four cases in the vaccination arm, none in the placebo arm. In the Moderna trial, again, tens of thousands of people, three cases in the vaccination arm, one in the placebo group. Now here’s how we can think about this. Could it be that the immune response, ’cause remember some of the causes of Bell’s palsy can be viral infections, and it’s felt that there’s either a direct viral effect or it’s an immune effect from responding to the virus that can cause this facial nerve effect. Could it be that the vaccine is triggering such an aggressive, generalized, innate immune response that it is doing something that’s triggering Bell’s palsy? Sure, that’s possible. It’s totally possible. If that’s the case, there’s gonna be a background of people that get that and already two have recovered. It takes time to recover from Bell’s palsy and often you will recover. So it may not be the worst possible thing that can happen, but it’s not pleasant, right? But here’s the other proposal. It turns out Bell’s palsy occurs in a certain percentage of people anyways. So in a trial of tens of thousands of people, you would expect a certain background rate of Bell’s palsy anyways. And so far, these numbers are within the spectrum of that background rate as far as we can tell, right? Now, could it be when you immunize a million people you’ll see more in the vaccination group than you would in the community?

Well, then that’s gonna be important to know. And as Paul said, “You never breathe a sigh of relief “with vaccines until the first 3 million doses have gone “into people’s arms.” And he’s quoting the guy who like pretty much made most of the vaccines back in the day. And that’s true because you just can’t know for sure, right? And there’s uncertainty in it. And there’s always risk in anything we do, right? It’s just, how do we weigh it? So the Bell’s palsy thing, isn’t a massive signal yet, but look how science works. It’s publicly reported. The data is looked at and it’s now all eyes are on new vaccinations to go, hey, are they experiencing this? Is this something? So we’re gonna know the answer to this. It’s not like brushed under the rug or they’re hiding it, or any of this other nonsense conspiracy stuff, right? So science f’ing works. That’s how it works. Business end, phase three trial, look for data, follow up, be vigilant, all of that happening. And that’s why I’m comfortable so far going, yeah, hit me up.

Now, the other thing is people say, well, people are talking about these terrible side effects of the vaccine, right? Well, first of all, again, like Paul said, “The immune system needs a better PR agent.” These aren’t side effects. These are effects of the immune system revving up, which is adjuvant effect that allows you to and that’s probably why these vaccines are so effective because when you get a fever, weakness, headache, muscle aches, arm pain, that is a sign that your immune system is revving up because those are the same immune effects that happen when you get infected with a real virus, that’s your immune system going “time to fight.” And when it gets jazzed up like that, let’s think about this metaphysically for a second, and philosophically of what a vaccine is doing. A vaccine is giving your body, your immune system a heads up, hey partner, let me show you something that you are gonna see in the future if you’re not careful in the real world. So let’s pretend, let’s do a little drill here. Let’s pretend that I’m invading you. And here’s the tip of my spear that’s invading.

You’re gonna recognize that tip, the spike protein, and you’re gonna start firing it up. And that’s what the immune system does. It goes, okay, we’re on it. You know, DEFCON one, fire up immune system, start making the antibodies that are gonna bind to that and neutralize it, the neutralizing antibodies, but then make the memory cells B and T cells that in the future, then sit there like sentries, when the virus actually comes, and remember, this virus has a slightly longer incubation time than, you know, say flu, which can hit you in like 18 hours. This thing is a mean time of five, six days, you got plenty of time to spin up an immune response. Yet another reason why this vaccine is probably so effective. So the fever in particular is a positive. In fact, Paul, advocates that you don’t treat it if you get the vaccine and you’re just laid out with, you know, fever to 102 and muscle aches, and feeling crappy. Take that as awesome. DEFCON one is working.

Immune system is fired up, it’s gonna remember. If you treat the fever, you actually lessen the immune response in Paul’s research. And I’m gonna do a special show on that in particular, why fever is actually our friend, all right? So that’s another thing. So these things are not side effects. They’re effects that come with the vaccine. And Moderna seems to have a little more aggressive effects than the Pfizer in the data that we’re seeing, although it may be not an apples to apples thing, but when FDA meets on Thursday to talk about it, the committee meets, it’ll be interesting to hear what they have to say about about it. So all of this is to say now the other question about this, what about pregnant women? What about lactating mothers? Well, Moderna has done some of those toxicity studies and they haven’t found any toxicity, but in general, those decisions are to be made between the mother, the doctor, and saying, okay, what are the risks and benefits?

Well, we don’t really know because it hasn’t been studied aggressively in pregnant women. So you have to make educated decisions, but we do know that getting COVID in pregnancy is a very bad thing. So you have to make those decisions. Now, the other people will say, well, why should I line up to get this you know, “rushed” vaccine, COVID itself is not a very serious disease. So the chances of me dying are very low. A lot of cases are asymptomatic. Why should I bother? Well, this is the thing, it’s all risk-benefit. So are you willing to roll the dice that you’re not one of those people that ends up hospitalized, that ends up with a longer term, “long COVID” syndrome that we presume is auto-immune from other components in the virus, right? Are you willing to make that choice? And then the second thing is, are you willing to potentially put others at risk by getting infected? Now it’s important to make the distinction. These vaccines have been studied mostly to look at symptomatic disease. In other words, they’re 95% or 94% effective at preventing disease, meaning symptoms. How good are they at people who are carrying it without symptoms?

And it turns out theres signal in the trials that are saying it’s actually pretty good, especially Moderna’s may stop asymptomatic infection as well to a degree. And that means the end of the pandemic, because you’re no longer, if you’re vaccinated, you’re not gonna silently spread the thing. You’re not gonna get an asymptomatic infection. That’s huge. That is absolutely huge. And we have to remember that again, there’s two shots. So here’s another thing that comes up. Well, what about the two shots? Like, can I just get one? Well, there’s some evidence from the trials that one shot has some effect, for sure. But does it have as good of an effect as two? The answer is no. There’s a reason they chose to do two because it has the most immunogenicity, meaning it creates the strongest immune response. So if I’m making the decision, I’m gonna go get both. You know, three weeks apart for Pfizer’s, 28 days apart for Moderna’s, which means a logistics challenge. But you know what? The entire pandemic has been a logistics challenge. Have you tried homeschooling your child with Zoom? That’s a logistics challenge. We can do it. This is not again, that’s not rocket science.

This we’re good at. So that I’m not worried about. So now people will say, well, but then I don’t wanna put this thing in my body, it’s a toxin. It’s new, it’s rushed. Pharma is funding it. Let’s use an old drug like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or something like that, Dexamethazone and I’ll just take my risk with that. Okay, well, you’ve made that decision, the decision makes no sense at all. It just, the only way you eliminate a virus anywhere, the only time we’ve ever done it is with vaccines. The vaccine has been studied in tens of thousands of people now in a randomized control trial, across race, gender, age, ethnicity. Those drugs that you’re pointing at have been studied in much smaller trials, often not randomized. And when they are randomized, like hydroxychloroquine, you don’t see any effect. So and they have side effects potentially, right? Just like anything, just like anything, just like the vaccine could. Why that decision doesn’t compute to me.

But if that’s the decision you wanna make, listen again, nobody’s mandating the vaccine. And if you don’t get it, it means there are more doses for people who are making the decision to get it. But the last thing I wanna say is this, vaccination is one of the few things we do that not just, we don’t just do it for us, although it has a huge benefit for us. We do it for our family. Okay, that’s fine, we do a lot of things for our family. We do it for our community. There’s some things we do that have benefit for our community. We do it for our country. It’s a smaller list of things that we do that benefit our country. And we do it for the world. It is the perfect merging of autonomy. And you make the decision to do it. It’s not mandated and communion, which is again, love and connection to everybody else. And that’s another reason that as soon as it’s available for me, I’ll be getting this vaccine. I won’t be huffing ivermectin. I’m not gonna be snorting hydroxychloroquine. I’m gonna be getting the vaccine. So that’s what I wanted to say in this live show. Garren Matthew, “Talk about autoreactive antibodies, “persistent immunogen expression, “toxic effects of non-native nucleotides.” Sure, none of those have been shown to be the case with this vaccine. So we’re not seeing auto antibodies to mRNA. We’re not seeing auto-immunity. In fact, you wanna talk about auto-immunity.

It turns out people who are infected with wild-type COVID, the actual virus, and are these long hauler patients, there’s some evidence that they’re generating a slew of auto antibodies, because that virus is more than just the spike protein that the vaccine is coding for in a very specific way. It’s a billion, not a billion I’m exaggerating. It’s a bunch of different proteins and it has its own RNA. Think about this, by the way, you wanna hear something just disgusting and gross. Where’s this virus coming from, right? It first of all, it came from a damn bat, somewhere in China. And then it jumped to God knows what. And then it’s replicating in all kinds of disgusting humans everywhere. And then it’s ending up in you. So it’s coming from snot. It’s coming out of some people’s butts, this fecal-oral stuff, it’s on surfaces. This viral particle has been through a lot. And then it’s getting into your body and you have no minimal innate defenses without a vaccine.

I mean, some people have some innate T cell immunity. Some people have seen enough other coronaviruses, I think that they have some immunity, right? But the vaccine actually gives you a chance to quickly spin up an army and be like, you’re not replicating that shit in me. So think about that, right? People have a very advanced morality around sanctity versus degradation about injecting toxins and this and that. But think about what a virus does and how absolutely disgusting it is. Let’s read some more crazy Facebook comments. By the way, in general, I have to say this. I wanna rant for one second. I find the comments on Facebook and YouTube from non-supporters, in other words, the wide open internet, there are some smart ones, and then the rest are a cavalcade of lunatic, conspiracy people, troll-y ten-year-olds and just people who have never been taught how to think critically. So they’re sharing anecdotes as fact. They’re making tons of logical fallacies.

And look, we don’t teach critical thinking. I make mistakes all the time. I was never taught it, I had to learn it the hard way, but the comment section is, can be so demoralizing for someone like me who’s trying to communicate science that I’ve almost just stopped looking, honestly, which is sad because that’s where we have conversations. So now I save those conversations for my paid supporter groups. Why, because I’m trying to make money? A little bit, not really. It’s because it’s so awesome. We’re rational. When we disagree, we have civil conversation. We respect the goodness in each of us trying to be good. And we all have similar goals. That’s the promise of the internet. That’s why you should try us out on the supporter tribes on Facebook, YouTube, or Locals.com if you wanna be off the Zuckerberg, Googleplex grid and stop playing the social dilemma games. I highly recommend it by the way. Who knows, that thing may be garbage too eventually, but we gotta try, we gotta try something.

Let’s read some comments here on Locals. “I love it when Dr. Z, brings it home like that, “it’s about community,” Lisa Catherine. Honestly, I get more philosophical the older I get. It’s one of those things. Let’s read another one from locals. “One healthcare worker in Juneau, Alaska had “an anaphylactic reaction, “very rare, I’m assuming,” J The Fit on Locals. So yes, I heard about this on Locals actually. I haven’t confirmed it. But yeah, and that can happen. Now remember, that’s why you wanna be pretty vigilant. The nice thing is a lot of the people getting this vaccine right now are in fact in healthcare settings. So we’ll be able to hash out a lot of stuff with our frontline healthcare workers first, not as Guinea pigs, but in terms of like anaphylaxis while you’re right in the best place you can be if you’re gonna have an anaphylactic reaction. So we wanna maintain that vigilance. Let me see on YouTube some comments. Here you go, classic YouTube. Evy Cortland, “How many lies can you say “in the same breath?” So this is what we deal with.

Like, it’s this kind of like BS, non discourse that how are we even, but she’s here, right? So by the fact that she’s here leaving a comment, YouTube’s effed up algorithm will juice this video, and more people will see it because of Evy’s ding-dong comment. That’s how broken social media is that you have to rely on trolls to get your video seen by actual people who are gonna learn from it. Like we’re in a broken world you guys like, that’s why we gotta celebrate when things work. Like this vaccine process, holy crap. And I did not expect it. I really didn’t. I was one of the biggest skeptics, go back and watch my early videos. I was like, don’t wait for this vaccine. Facebook. Let’s read one more comment. “Any evidence on people contracting COVID twice. “Oregon said they have dozens of cases “with people getting COVID two “or more times,” Jamie Sweeney. All right, this is a good one to end on. Look, if you could get COVID all the time, keep getting reinfected all the time, what’s the point? You’re not gonna be able to, the vaccine is not gonna work ’cause immunity doesn’t exist. You’re never gonna develop herd immunity because people just keep getting reinfected. So that would be a catastrophe, right? And there are agents like this, you know, the bacteria that causes strep throat, things like that, you can’t make a vaccine because there’s no lasting immunity. But in this case, it turns out the consensus so far, and I was talking to Paul Offit about this is that, like any virus, sure, when it comes back, what’s happening? You’re reinfected immediately. So the virus comes, it has a slow incubation time, it starts replicating.

By replicating it shows itself to the immune system. If you’ve been exposed before, and this is why they think the vaccine might actually be more effective than getting infected in the wild by the virus because you get the adjuvant effect… So, okay, actually, this is worth going into. Let me formulate how to say this. Okay. You’re infected with COVID in the wild. You mount an immune response, you survive it. You come away. You have memory B and T cells that can spin up an immune response the next time you’re infected. If COVID’s incubation period was very short. In other words, the minute you see the COVID virus, it’s replicating super fast, like flu and very quickly, you’re sick, right? Or RSV. It’s much harder for your immune system memory to spin up fast enough to keep you from at least not having symptoms. You know, you’re gonna feel ill and then you may get better faster because you have a headstart, but you’re still gonna feel sick, right? With COVID we’re somewhere in between five days median in incubation time. That’s enough time for immune system to spin up, but not perfectly. So you may get infected again. You may have some symptoms. You may be contagious. This is why people say, well, you may still need to be careful with distancing and hand washing and that sort of thing for awhile, until we really develop enough herd immunity, that it’s less of an issue. So that may still happen. But the second infection typically is gonna be much milder and less severe. Now there were a couple, I think, one exception where the second infection was more severe, but that again, in a population of how many millions have been infected to have a couple of cases like that, that’s not that discouraging. And that could just be a mutation. It could be, not a mutation in the virus, a mutatation in a human that changes their immune response.

Something happened they never had a proper immune response to the first virus. They just cleared it otherwise. So there’s lots of things that could have happened there, right? Now, how can the vaccine be more effective at creating immunity than getting infected naturally? ‘Cause you’ll hear the anti-vaxxer say, well, I went to a measles party or whatever, I went to a chicken pox party, ’cause I want natural infection. Why would a vaccine be better? Well, remember when I was talking about fevers, muscle aches, all the stuff that you had with the vaccine. It turns out the actual virus can generate an immune response that knocks out interferon, particularly in men who are more affected by this. I was talking to Paul about this on the show, Paul Offit, and interferon is part of the immune system that can help fight viruses. So by attacking it, by knocking it out of commission, the wild virus actually gets an advantage. And so you get less aggressive of an immune response and an adjuvant immune response. And so your memory response may be less aggressive too. With the vaccine it’s tailored, just here’s the spike protein, the one antibody you really need to make to knock that virus out.

Forget about all the other antibodies that may actually cause trouble, right? Just that antibody. And there’s an adjuvant effect where the immune system is fired up and you’re getting these muscle aches and fatigue, and interferon so that the memory of that may actually be better and stronger. Now we don’t know for sure, right? We have to look at the data ultimately, and that may take a little bit more time to see is it more effective than the wild-type infection? So that’s a great question. That’s an example when Facebook hits you with something really good, and that’s the hope of social media.

All right, guys, I, again, this is the last pitch to become a supporter because it keeps us independent. If people are like, oh, you’re sold out to Big Pharma, where’s my Pharma money? Please Pharma, I wouldn’t take your money now because I’m in your pocket. You guys. Like we have enough supporters that I can pay my team and do my show and never, ever worry about being in anybody’s pocket. Like that’s magic. And we have a group, a great discussion, a great tribe, wonderful people. It feels like family when I talk to them in my live shows to them. So do me a favor. Share this video. Become a supporter if you want, if you don’t, share this video. Anti-vaxxers, please leave your ding-dong comments. Leave as many as you want, share it everywhere. Be nasty in the comments. Hit the dislike button on YouTube, it just juices the algorithm. Some more people who are gonna need to see this video will see it. I love you. And we are out. Peace.