This week we tackle virus and vaccine myths. Do 5G towers cause COVID19 disease (no). Are we being injected with nanoparticles that are tracking us with the COVID19 vaccines (no)
Listen in to hear the other myths we discuss focusing on the science, data, and facts
Our weekly question and answer session with Fred Goldstein, Dr. Luis Saldana, and Nick van Terheyden, MD on our COVID Insights to Action Discussion webinar that takes place live every Wednesday at 4pm ET You can register here
You can also find our training modules and services available to help businesses, education facilities, and employers get their employees, staff, customers, and students back to work and school safely in the context of COVID19
Raw Transcript
Fred Goldstein
Hello, everyone, we’ll be beginning at the top of the hour. Hello, everyone and welcome to this week’s COVID insights to action. I’m Fred Goldstein with veilig health and accountable health. And I’m here joined today by our two physicians. This week we’ll be discussing vaccinations, facts and myths. It’s an interesting topic. Obviously, there’s been a lot out there. And we’ll dive into it with our physicians, as we go through this today. If you have any questions, as pointed out in the in the chat box, please feel free to put those either in the chat box or the q&a. We’ll be monitoring those if you’d like to get involved and actually come on screen. You’re welcome to do that as well just ask us and feel free to ask questions however you’d like. So why don’t we start the today’s session with you, Dr. Nick, tell us a little bit about some of these more out there types of myths that we’ve seen or heard over the past coming months regarding the vaccines, as
Nick van Terheyden
well. So we were talking about this before we started and I was trying to think about the myths that bothered me the most. And the one that really struck me was the 5g myth, it was related not so much to vaccines, but to COVID-19 in general, and the 5g towers were causing COVID-19 disease. And I think it bothered me the most because it was actually associated with damage. People were going and burning these towers, these are cell phone towers. And that was a major reaction. So first off, when I talk about myths, I always ask the question of people, what information would change your mind about this particular opinion? Unfortunately, a lot of the time I receive an answer is nothing, I’ve confirmed my view. So it can be a little bit challenging. But let’s break that one down a little bit. 5g is just another part of the spectrum. We have no instance of radiation that’s coming from these towers causing any viral disease, we know that there’s an association and we can see the link between the virus and the disease, we can demonstrate that somebody that has it has the virus, who never comes in contact with 5g because they’re nowhere near any of these towers would actually get the disease. So if it was related to the towers, we would see these clusters of people. So there’s a number of scientific facts that would essentially dissipate that, but that didn’t stop it from being permeated and promoted out on the internet. But, you know, let’s just knock that one off to one side and say, there is just no evidence to support that at all.
Fred Goldstein
Right? It makes a lot of sense. Particularly Do you think about just 5g out there in general, there are many parts of my community man right now that don’t have any 5g towers, and no service here in the United States, let alone around the world. And you begin to say, well, then how did the virus get there?
Nick van Terheyden
I think Coronavirus no 5g that already sort of defeats that one right?
Fred Goldstein
Yeah, slightly. So getting to the vaccines now. Obviously, great news. They’re out. We’re getting them distributed. It looks like We’re getting even more purchased now that they’re gonna be here in the summer, and so much more concerted effort to get people vaccinated. Luis, what are you hearing? Or what are some of the things that people need to consider? Or some of the concerns they’re expressing that may in fact not be true?
Luis Saldana
Yeah, I think, you know, I think right now, we’re kind of at a interesting time in the vaccination process, or the, you know, vaccinating the whole us kind of process, in that we hear, you know, about vaccine hesitancy, some people have concerns of gaming, yet, if you look at their huge lines, or stories about people that probably need to get it, they can’t get it. So we’re right now in this kind of point, that it that it’s kind of very, very challenging to, to really start pushing people to say, We want everybody or need everybody to get vaccinated, to really have the maximum input of immunization, which just looking at me as a, as a public health kind of intervention, which which it is, is, you know, we go way back in history and time to see how immunization is a public health intervention. But, you know, as, so this is going to be a dialogue that will be going on to really talk through these myths, every various ones that might be reasons for vaccine hesitancy and start to paint a picture of why you want to get it, why you you want to get the vaccine. And so that’s why I think we did we did this, we thought it was a good opportunity to kind of surface some of those reasons why people may be hesitant to get the vaccine.
Fred Goldstein
So let me bring up one for you, Luis, that we discussed beforehand, this idea that there, there are all these deaths after the vaccine, and people are dying from getting the vaccine, what are we what are we seeing from the vaccine in terms of deaths?
Luis Saldana
Yeah, I’m gonna relate this to kind of the, this goes back to deaths about from COVID are related back to that, and how we can look at kind of baseline of, of events, I think one way to look at it is, so one way we know how many people have died of COVID is this excess deaths, looking at these year over year trends was statistically we can kind of really very accurately predict how many people are going to die, die of certain things even and such. And that’s this excess and deaths kind of really connected us to saying, you know, these people died as a result of COVID in this in this system, but, but to put that into context with the vaccine and events is a certain number of events are going to happen. Regardless, every single day, somebody will get hit by a car, somebody will will get diagnosed with cancer, somebody will, you know, and 95 year old will will will pass away. And so I think we have to look at when an event happens. And just because the vaccine was proximate isn’t a cause and effect type of thing that we have to look at. That’s why it’s important to look at populations and look at data set big data sets to really draw conclusions about these things. And really, based on those conclusions, we I mean, we had a lot from the bait up to the base three studies and things like that, I there’s really no reason to be concerned about, you know, these adverse outcomes are this lead to, you know, to some severe adverse outcome as resolved as a result of the vaccination.
Fred Goldstein
Right. And as you mentioned, those that phase three trials were like 30,000 people or 40,000. So if you’re running that over a number of months, you’re going to naturally see some deaths occur in that population from various clinical conditions, or elderly or whatever. And so, but they are not necessarily related to the vaccine itself. So a really important point. What about Nick, this issue of these mRNA? vaccines use nanotechnology, and they’re going to attract me or something? What are they doing with the nanotechnology in the vaccine versus what you would consider a tracking bot or something like that?
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah. So I, I have to I always try and think where these ideas come from. So you know, the Association of nano nano technology, you know, obviously, if others are like me, they watch television, we’ve seen some fantastic concepts in various science fiction series with nanobots. And, you know, I think we’re gonna see nanobots in my lifetime, that will be used for delivery mechanisms. But right now, we don’t have anything that is injectable that could survive that process. We do use nano. What does nano mean? Smaller It’s, you know, small technology for the construction. And in this case, it’s the construction of the vaccine that is created from a genome sequencing, but then bundled up into a molecule that is a carrier specifically to allow it to be injected into the body. In fact, RNA vaccines have been around for a while, but they’ve been, I don’t want to say useless, but they were ineffective, because when you put them into the body, the body says, Oh, this is some materials that I can use and process and consume, and they get consumed into nothing. So we have to put it in this very clever lipid molecule that allowed it to be protected. And that’s part of the reason for the cold storage. So I think there’s a little bit of confusion around this term nano that says, gosh, we’re injecting a chip. And then, you know, later on, there are some hackers out there bio hackers who have injected chips into their body a bit like we inject chips into our cats and dogs for tracking, they’ve done the same thing. So that is possible. There’s some you know, it tends to be at the edge. But in terms of what’s going on in this vaccine, yes, we use nanotechnology to create it. But there is no chip, or robots or anything that gets injected in it’s part of the construct of this particular virus. vaccine. I’m sorry.
Fred Goldstein
And I think on a related topic in that area, there’s also this thing that says, Well, I’m getting this mRNA vaccine, and it’s gonna change my DNA. But do you want to address that one, Luis, and where it really goes and how it works?
Luis Saldana
Yeah, I mean, you got to remember that a virus in and of itself is essentially a genetic is an injection of genetic material. So So really, the messenger RNA piece, as Nick kind of described this has been out there for a while, is just one segment of that genetic code, or genetic makeup of a virus. And we’re taking one little piece or snippet of that, and using that as a delivery system and a way to kind of trick or the body or trick the immune system into saying there’s, there’s a threat here, that’s what we’re trying to, that’s the goal of this is we’re trying to let the body use, we’re trying to trick the body to using its immune system for that. So but in terms of our body, our own DNA does not change as the result of stealing genetic material come in. And, again, we see we get that all the time. And there isn’t a change to that. Now. I mean, you talk about epigenetics and environment does alter, you know, things and and, you know, even in looking at these viruses, you’ve talked about mutations and mutations happen and things like that, but they’re not as a result of our, of our risk of exposure to genetic materials, such as the mRNA thing. So really, there’s, there’s absolutely no reason for, for concern there. We’ve been doing, you know, mixing the messenger RNA technology’s been there for a long time, we use other genetic material, really the you were using the Add no bars to deliver the Jeff Johnson and Johnson system. So there’s different kind of delivery mechanisms to do this, and none of those impact our genome.
Fred Goldstein
anything you’d like to add to that? Nikkor?
Nick van Terheyden
No, I think that’s exactly right. It’s it’s, you know, building, I always like to use my Lego analogy, because I think people can associate with this. And you know, sorry, I picked Star Wars again, and the Death Star, I don’t know that that’s the right thing. But, you know, the, the virus molecule is the Death Star. I think that’s a good visual, quite frankly, it feels that way. So 2020, what we’re doing with these vaccines is taking pieces of it. And saying here, this is a piece of the virus to our bodies. And you can identify this part of the desktop, when it shows up as a complete Death Star, and then you’re equipped, you’re ready to recognize it and shoot it down. That’s essentially the basis of this technology. But it’s not changing anything inside, it’s essentially creating this reactionary force that can prevent infection that’s caused by the SARS covi. To virus,
Fred Goldstein
right, and in the case of the mRNA vaccines, it’s getting it to recognize portions of the spike, and in the other vaccines understand it that will be made from an attenuated virus or something they’ll use. They’ll make it out of that, like the older vaccines were done. Is that correct?
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah. So each of the vaccine platforms comes with a different set of strategies as to how it looks and you know, you look for the various elements that are in there. We’re essentially trying to create an immune response as a result of that. The four pieces that I’m aware of the protein spike, the protein membrane, the protein envelope, and the nucleocapsid. Protein are all targets, that you can use different vaccine strategies. And as you rightly pointed out, we have this virus like particles, we’ve got messenger RNA that codes for that. We have inactivated viruses, we have got live attenuated. They’re all sort of various strategies. I forget what the total number was that I saw. But, you know, the messenger RNA is just this wonderful platform that is much more agile in terms of creating new vaccines quickly, which is good news. And as of today, there are 11 vaccines that have been approved in at least one country. Wow.
Fred Goldstein
And so what’s the what’s the issue now, or belief of those who have already been infected? And then getting the vaccine? Where are we with that?
Luis Saldana
Yeah, well, I’ll guess I’ll jump in first on this. Well, certainly we know that folks that have had have had an infection have not now we know have good immunity to to, to to COVID. So reinfection is very, very, very low, very low rate of reinfection. So really, those people I’ve already had that native immunity from having the disease, you know, and, and as such, have protection, now, the vaccine is going to give a more predictable rate, the idea is giving a more predictable response of the of the immune response to it, and may is going to be more studied and measured in kind of that under the lab circumstances. So you can say how, how long it’s going to last and things like that. But honestly, there was a, I think, an opinion in the Washington Post, I guess, Dr. makary, I think but he posted, as he thought that people would have, have had an infection, we should have should have probably been, you know, asked to kind of go to towards the back of the, towards the back of the line as far as the line. But But just because they have if our goal is to reduce new and severe infection, the way to do that is doing the most vulnerable. And, and and there. You know, the argument, I think, would be that that group is probably not the most vulnerable as far as that goes. But I think universally, it’s felt that they should have the vaccine, you know, for to ensure that they have that more predictable immune response and protection.
Fred Goldstein
So it’s something that at this point, I guess, we’re still vaccinating those individuals and saying, get it. Because the science shows this, we just don’t know whether they’ve achieved a high enough level of immunity response from their infection. But at some point, it may be looked at differently. But for now, this is sort of how they’re going. Interesting. And what about the the issue of, and I’m a little worried about this one. Once I’ve had the vaccine, I can go back to 100%. Normal. Where are we with that?
Nick van Terheyden
Um, well, to be clear, at some point, we’re going to go back to something, I don’t know that we necessarily are going to define it as normal, because it will be the new normal, there’s gonna be a difference to our world. Again, I like to use analogies and I happen to travel to Japan, shortly before this pandemic outbreak. And one of the things that was notable to me that stood out as a Westerner, in that society was traveling around in Tokyo and seeing people wearing masks, not everybody, but some. And I think what we’re going to see is more instances of that in our society, because they’ve been exposed to a series of infections, you know, and they’ve been sensitized to this. And mostly, in those instances, the masks are worn by people that think they might have in this case, it could have been just simple colds, flu and so forth. And they don’t want to spread it. So they actually try and protect others, we wear masks for a different reason to be clear. But the point I want to get to is for us to return to whatever this new normal is where you know, life is back to something approaching social interactions that we’ve had before and dinner out and so forth, requires the virus to essentially no longer it’s it can be a no damage, as I like to call it, it will probably be still around, but it can’t be constantly replicating and expanding. And until we reach that point, we’re not going to be able to change or reduce the majors so we must enact all of that even whilst We’re vaccinating the whole population. And by the way, this is not just the United States or the United Kingdom or any other country, this is the world because of international travel. So this permeates throughout. So we can’t just say, Well, we’ve got the whole of the US vaccinated, right, you know, all bets are off, because that’s not true for the rest of the world. So we have to get to this level of herd immunity, we’re not quite sure where that is. And once we’ve done that, we then have to apply appropriate measures to say, how are we going to protect ourselves because guess what there’s going to be other versions of viruses that will impact us, we’ve seen a whole series because we got SARS, COVID one MERS and, you know, others, we have to be better prepared. And hopefully as a result of SARS Coby to the world in general, not just the Middle East, and and the Far East that I think we’re better prepared, because they’d had previous experiences are all going to say, we’re going to take this seriously, and will be much better in the way that we respond so that we don’t end up with a worldwide pandemic.
Luis Saldana
Yeah, I’ll kind of add into what Nick said a couple things. One in the initial, the initial studies of the vaccines, the existing vaccines, they didn’t, especially I’ll just say the Pfizer vaccine, they didn’t test whether you could pass on the disease, if you got if you got the vaccine, that is, if you were exposed, did you still be a vector for, for passing on. So he didn’t have that they have a pretty good idea. And Mulder, and I did do some some, you know, did do some sampling and things like that. So I think there’s a pretty high confidence of that. But we also do know that they call, we hear about 95% efficacy, but there still were cases in the trials of people getting COVID. So so it again, it’s not predictable. So we’re at a point in the in the pandemic of Nixon, where we still have very high numbers, we all need to be wearing masks to period, it’s part of that Swiss cheese approach, we need to be taking every single precaution that that that we have, I think I saw somebody get criticized when they tell when a doctor or actually I think an infectious disease doctor said, You know, I missed that time when, you know, now my nurses vaccinated and vaccinated where maybe we can some point have a hug or something, you know, that type of thing and stuff. And, and and she kind of got got kind of crucified for that, because she was saying that they were both vaccinated. But I you know, I think the the idea is, though, there’s going to be time for that our scientists will communicate to a CDC, I think, you know, will communicate to us, when we can start kind of loosing these up as numbers go down. We have good data from Israel, that we’ve seen that as larger numbers get back from a we are seeing the curve go down. And so I think those types of things are promising on that. But for now, we have to say that we all need to continue what even once you’re fully vaccinated, you need to continue to take the same precautions for all of us.
Fred Goldstein
Yeah, I think that’s really a great point. You know, because you’ll have situations now where one person in the house is vaccinated, potentially and one person is not. And whether you’re the vaccinated or the non vaccinated person, you need to continue where the mask, wash the hands keep the distance. And until we get to that point, like you said, where the science demonstrates that we’re comfortable doing something that may be different than that. Or there,
Nick van Terheyden
I want to hit off one other myth that I think is important for people to understand that I’ve seen trending a little bit is you can buy in to getting early access to the vaccine, there is a bunch of people that are trying to sell access to the vaccine, and I would caution people a you have no idea what you’re getting be. It’s completely inappropriate. And see, this is almost certainly a scam of some description. And please don’t get sucked in. There are, you know, open honest processes, there’s certainly been some mistakes and, you know, instances we can point to and say, gosh, that wasn’t quite right. But I think everywhere is good intention, you will get access. You are not paying for this and there is no early access. I think it’s important for everybody to understand we will get to it, you will be gotten to but you’re not gonna have to pay for early access or even access at all.
Fred Goldstein
What about the issue of that I’ve heard come up a couple times about hey, I may be allergic so I’m just not going to do it.
Nick van Terheyden
If you don’t mind, I’m going to pick off this because this actually came from a family member, my brother’s a physician. And he’s volunteered back, he went through the 21 training courses that he was required to go through, including sensitivity training, fire training, and so forth. It’s required in the United Kingdom for a GP of 30 years to be able to give vaccines. But he was also offered access. And he tells me a story, I hadn’t realized this, he has a severe allergy to waltz that came from an experience in the Amazon. So he actually elected to wait for the AstraZeneca vaccine rather than going with the RNA vaccines that were available. And I think people have to make their own selection based on why not the individual, but they should, in counsel with their clinician, make the appropriate selection. And there are certainly going to be people that maybe are ineligible to have a vaccination, which is why it’s the duty is on all of us that are able to take vaccines need to have them. It was kind of a learning experience to discover that he was so allergic to wasps, especially when he visited me, and I didn’t know that I have a big wasp nest that I have to deal with on a regular basis.
Fred Goldstein
Those are some tough allergies. Yeah,
Luis Saldana
I’ll just I’ll just add to that. Because Nick kind of mentioned it, there may be some people that can’t get it because they have had an allergic reaction to a vaccine in the past. And I think now that the current one there was some question is there, they’re not they’re not right now recommend that don’t get it now, if that’s the case, but there’s a lot more people that that’s a very, very, very small number of people that have had those kind of reactions. There’s a lot like Nick’s brother, peanuts, other allergies and things and museum, most of those people may have made them carry epi pens and things like that, to be prepared with and and that’s why people have reaction history of an allergy to something if you have a history of allergy going to watch it for 30 minutes. Whereas if you have no no allergies, if you have no history of allergies are going to watch you for 15 minutes. And then they all have the reactions, which the number has been extraordinarily low, have allergic reactions to to both the Pfizer and the maternal vaccine. But they do happen within that period of time. And those can be easily in most cases can be easily managed, I’ll say every time. But most cases, if they’re they’re caught early and treated early and and under medical medical observation can be treated rapidly, much like we that’s why people carry it. And then they can they can treat those responses those responses properly as well.
Fred Goldstein
Great. We had a good question come into once you get the vaccine, how long before it works to protect you? What are we seeing in that sort of data?
Luis Saldana
Well, start on that. So based on and some of the A, I think most of the data, I think that I’ve seen the good data on this. I think it applies to both the Pfizer and the majorna. But I came from the materna. Study. And if you go and look for their their, you know, the data that they submitted to the FDA, you see this graph that shows kind of protection, and you start seeing even after the first dose. After two weeks after the first dose, you start seeing it more after about 30 days after the first dose, which is about time. The second dose. big reason for that is that first two weeks, I’m thinking make it draw any conclusions you could have been, you could have been exposed before that. So it’s hard to you know, draw any conclusions. But they talk about 80% possibly protection, even after the after, after a full two weeks with the materna. But, you know, then you get to the hard numbers after this after the second dose. When two weeks of after the second dose. I think that’s kind of when everybody would feel after two weeks after the second dose that you have the maximum protection. And that’s what I would recommend to people that if you’re thinking about that, that’s the time to think that you probably have the maximum protection based on what we’ve seen. And I don’t
Nick van Terheyden
know, I would just say that’s, that’s exactly what I would have said the only addition I got to that is even when you’ve got maximum protection, keep wearing your masks.
Fred Goldstein
Right, right. So if individuals have you know, additional questions, obviously we’d be happy to answer those you can submit them to us. Next week we’ll be doing another session. But also I think it’s important if you for people who have questions really look to the communicate a the communication sources that are valid look to the CDC, FDA, talk to your physician and get the answer that’s right for you. You in terms of this, but I really appreciate you guys going through all the data and and discussing the various myths and other a bunch more out there we can get to. So thanks a lot again this week for joining us, Louise and Nick. It’s as always, it’s a pleasure.
Thank you.
Fred Goldstein
And with that, we’ll end this session. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll have the list for the topic for next week up probably tomorrow. And we thank you for joining us. And please feel free to as we said, submit any questions you’d like or you could ask us things later. Thank you.
