We took a break for the weekly Weather Report yesterday, so this is a lurch back to part three on the subject of Medical Adventures. We have tried to frame some of the disparate events as a spectrum of medical process involving all sorts of people, from the White House in two Administrations, Dr. Fauci and a host of be-lettered public health organization.

So here we go. The Case- let’s call it “TC” for reasons of brevity- came out of left field. We are tempted to call it “Patient Zero” (PZ) since it was for one of us. The identified patient was a male Boomer born in the early 1950s. As such, we suspect he was exposed to some of the social excesses of the 1960s. We are not asserting that exposure contributed to the consequences this far down the road. And please recall the assorted triumphs of that age. We could make a reference to the Lunar landings that begin in 1969, but for purposes of this more limited analysis, we will stick to things related to medicine.

We talked about the Wuhan Lab in chapter two of the saga last Wednesday. From that we could discuss something about the context of vaccine development the way we understood it. One of the classics in research, development and mass inoculation was the landmark vaccine against the scourge of polio. That was an invidious disease with awful consequences on young and growing citizens. The discussion of the triumph over it came with development of effective mass vaccination strategies which were painstaking and slow.

In the case of polio, Edward Jenner in the UK created the first successful smallpox vaccine in 1796, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that vaccine treatments began to effectively eradicate the disease, mostly in the First World.

Compare that extended process to the dramatic speed of the development of the Covid vaccines. They were developed not in centuries but in months. We do not assert malfeasance on the part of anyone. There are a lot of moving parts in the process. We did note that the definition of what these ‘vaccines’ was used to promote acceptance. In the finest traditions of modern medical science, they simply changed the definition of the word.

Miriam-Webster is a company known for producing reference books and dictionaries. It has, according to some, become the source of online misinformation about vaccines.

We are skeptical about anyone or any organization that claim to have certainty about when to attach “mis” to the simpler word “information.” Misinformation used to have other terms associated, like “Lies.” We note that the word “Vaccine” used to be defined as a substance that provides ‘immunity’ to a specific disease. Now, Merriam-Webster states it builds “immune response,” and addresses the new technology of mRNA vaccines in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have no qualms with updated medical terminology, but the mRNA process is something new that Dr. Jenner would not recognize.
The first mRNA flu vaccine was tested in mice in the 1990s. it was not until 2013 that the first vaccines were tested in humans for rabies. That was only ten years ago, and the robust research normally required for illnesses like polio were not done to the same effect, even though the vulnerable human population was much larger.

The early years of mRNA research were marked by optimism for the effectiveness of the technology. Some difficult technical challenges were noted. The biggest challenge of these was that mRNA would be taken up by the body and quickly degraded before it could “deliver” its message—the RNA transcript—and be read into proteins in the cells.

The solution to this problem came from advances in nanotechnology: the development of fatty droplets (lipid nanoparticles) that wrapped the mRNA like a bubble, which allowed entry into the cells. Once inside the cell, the mRNA message could be translated into proteins, like the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, and the immune system would then be primed to recognize the foreign protein.

As a matter beyond our expertise, please don’t consider us part of the “denier” category, also known as ‘anti-vaxxers.’ But several of us actually had the Moderna vaccine administered in response to announcement that airline travel might require proof of vaccination. They went and got it because there was an important meeting on the West Coast.

There wasn’t any notification associated with the shots at that point. They were billed simply as ‘vaccines,’ though there was an opinion on the street that the changes to incorporate mRNA technology in whatever the shots were, they were going to have unexpected outcomes due to the hasty nature of their development and deployment to more than seven million people.
The non-misinformation from Merriam-Webster, according to USA TODAY, was to be scientifically accurate about how vaccines work, not to question their effectiveness. We don’t question that ‘effectiveness’ either. They just may have been effective at something unexpected.

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