"Small steps of hope" (with Derek Lowe)
Topics Discussed
Atlanta Spa Shootings
Derek Lowe & the Covid-19 Vaccine
Outside of Politics: Daylight Saving Time
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Episode Resources
Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021 (Director of National Intelligence)
ATLANTA SHOOTINGS
Atlanta Shootings Live Updates: Suspect Had Visited Targeted Spas Before, Police Say (The New York Times)
A trip to the spa that ended in death. These are some of the victims of the Atlanta-area shootings (CNN)
These are the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings (New York Magazine)
Man charged with killing 8 people at Georgia massage parlors (Associated Press)
Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different (The Atlantic)
Transcript
Sarah: This is Sarah
Beth: And Beth,
Sarah: You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.
Beth: The home of grace-filled political conversations.
Sarah: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are so happy to be here with you today, as we always are. It has been a tough week in the news with the violence in Georgia and we're going to talk about that in the first section of the show. And then in the main segment, we're going to share a conversation with Derek Lowe.
Y'all you're going to love him so I just, I cannot wait for you to love him as much as we loved him at the end of this conversation. And then last as always, we'll talk about what's on our mind outside politics. But before we get started, we did want to remind you that on Thursday, March 25th, we are going to be having a happy hour on Instagram live, sponsored by Caliper.
It will be at 5:00 PM Eastern standard time. We're going to use some of the leftover, ask us anything questions that we didn't, weren't able to get to in the fall. And we're going to answer more questions that maybe pop up, live on the air. I love ask us anything. I'm so excited.
So we hope you can join us [00:01:00] next Thursday, March 25th on Instagram live at 5:00 PM eastern standard time. Also, we wanted to share that we are accepting submissions for a Pantsuit Politics fan art contest. We are so excited. We're partnering with T public for the opportunity to design new Pantsuit Politics merchandise.
Some of the submissions already in are amazing. The submissions are due by Friday, April 1st, and the winning design will be chosen via voting in April, and then we'll be putting it on our T public site for everyone to purchase so that's going to be really fun.
Beth: [00:01:34] My favorite thing about this is that the winning artists will earn a commission from all of the shirts sold so it's a really fun way to support people who do amazing graphic design work and are also part of the Pantsuit Politics community.
Sarah: [00:01:47] Last, but certainly not least, we are gearing up for the second quarter in our extra credit book club. We have a, a central question we're all answering with our book selections for this quarters box, which I'm really excited about.
This is the [00:02:00] first time we're trying out this new approach and the question is what book changed your understanding of power? So I can't wait to get into those conversations. And if you have not subscribed, you can subscribe through Wild Geese Bookshops, and we'll put the link in the show notes.
We are still learning more about the mass murder in Georgia on Tuesday. As we record on Thursday, Robert Allen long has been charged with eight counts of murder. The police say he went on a rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent. He had purchased the gun just a couple of hours before the shooting at a suburban Atlanta gun store.
His parents recognized him on the surveillance image and called the police. And they gave the investigators his cell phone information, which allowed law enforcement to track him down and arrest him.
Beth: [00:02:58] We only [00:03:00] know the identities of some of the victims. There are victims from Gold Spa and Aroma Therapy spa in Northeast Atlanta, whose names have not been released as we are recording. Officials say they're waiting on that until they've been able to notify all family members. We do know about some of the victims from Acworth, uh, Delaina Ashley Yuan Gonzalez was 33 years old. She and her husband were both in the spa or a couples massage. Her husband was not harmed, report say he was locked in the nearby room and that he is really, really struggling through this, which goes without saying, but I can imagine just how difficult combining his grief and that survivor's guilt must be.
They have two children. She has a 14 year old son and an eight month old daughter. Uh, she had worked as a restaurant server. There's a 54 year old man from Atlanta, Paul Andre Michels, who owned an electric company. He's an army veteran. He had been married for more than 20 years. His brother has been quoted in a number of pieces about the murders and, uh, is extremely distraught. They were [00:04:00] apparently very close.
A 49 year old woman, Xiaojie Tan of Kennesaw. She owned Young's Asian Massage and at least one other spot in Atlanta according to reports.
Daoyou Feng who's 44 years old. I haven't been able to find additional biographical information.
I think it's important to say the names of these victims to think about them as full and complete human beings, to learn as much as we can learn about them and also to recognize that we have a victim who did not die, Alex Hernandez-Ortiz, who is in intensive care right now. He is a mechanic who immigrated to the United States from Guatemala. His daughter's 10th birthday is coming up and his, his wife says she's been reminding him of that upcoming birthday to try to motivate him to say strong as he is recovering from surgery and just really critical wounds.
Sarah: [00:04:54] So there has been a lot of reporting on the shooter's [00:05:00] self-proclaimed motivations. There's also been a lot of reporting on the way law enforcement handled that information. The shooter claimed that he was driven by a sex addiction. The Cherokee County sheriff was in a press conference and he used the phrase he was having a bad day, which was rightly criticized as reductive and insensitive.
And we're going to talk about more of that in a minute, but you know, whatever the self-professed motivation and I have to wonder if people who commit these heinous hate crimes have caught on to the fact that if you profess that are a hate crime, the charges are harsher and so is the punishment.
So I I'm a little skeptical of that um, but whatever his self-professed motivation, the ongoing conversation about violence towards Asian Americans and Pacific [00:06:00] Islanders across the country has been growing and growing and growing. Even before this heartbreaking act, the stop AAIP hate groups, which was founded I think `pretty recently, has been leading an effort to collect the reports of hate incidences targeting members of this community.
I listened to an interview with one of the co-founders and he was talking about like part of it is we just wanted to give people a platform. We wanted to give people a place to share their trauma and share what has happened to them. From March 19th, 2020 to February 28th of this year, they have collected 3,795 reports of hate incidences targeting Asian-Americans.
Anti-Asian hate crime is increased 149%. And this is probably just a fraction of the actual number again, because they're [00:07:00] depending on people to report it themselves. As reflected in the heartbreaking events in Atlanta this week, women reported attacks more than twice the rate of men and Chinese Americans numbered over 42% of the victims.
Beth: [00:07:15] 68% of these reports involved verbal harassment, 11% involved physical assault. 20% of the reports involved shunning, which is defined as the deliberate avoidance of Asian Americans. Civil rights violations, such as discrimination in the workplace, or being refused service at a business, made up 8.5% of reports with another 6.8% being for online harassment.
And I have to say, I read a piece this morning about the trauma that these murders exacerbates for Asian-Americans, and it began with an anecdote about being refused service at a restaurant. That paragraph made me [00:08:00] instantly aware of how disconnected I am from this life experience. I can not imagine being refused service at a restaurant. It is so difficult for me to even picture what that could be like and for that to be on the less aggressive end of what's being reported to this group, it was a real wake up call to me.
Sarah: [00:08:21] As I read about all of this harassment and particularly the violence, you know, on the West coast recently, there have been videos of several acts of violence that just, they are horrific. They will take your breath away. You know, in January there was an 80, 84 year old Thai immigrant who died from a brain hemorrhage after a random attacker slammed him to the ground.
19 year old, Anton Watson was later arrested for this crime. 19 year old Jose Gomez, stabbed three people in a Midland, Texas Sam's [00:09:00] club before a store employee saved this Asian American family's life. In San Francisco, in San Francisco there were again acts particularly against elderly members of the Asian-American community, including one who was 91 years old.
I watched a video of three teenagers, one of which kicked this Asian-American woman in the face. Like it just, it is heartbreaking, especially in, particularly right now in the middle of a global pandemic when everyone is already, you know, so scared and at their wit's end to watch people be physically attacked.
But like you said, not just that, just the shunning and particular, the, the reports of shunning or people coughing and spitting on members of the Asian American community, our fellow citizens like it just, it is so horrific and it has clearly [00:10:00] been going on for so long, without a doubt, as a result of the racist language of our former president surrounding the Coronavirus.
And I think it also speaks so much to, you know, the fear of reporting, the fear of speaking out, all wrapped up in this sort of model minority myth that our culture places on Asian-Americans, which is such a burden and increases the hesitancy to report. It's all of this, you know, that is like you said so far removed from many of our life experiences and in so many ways, and also is incredibly relevant to all of us.
These are our fellow citizens. What happens to them, happens to us. And so that's what I think, you know, makes talking about it so important, makes shining light on not just [00:11:00] these heinous acts of mass violence, like we saw in Atlanta this week, but all the way down to those small acts of shunning that are so hurtful and so traumatic and so stressful for the fellow members of our community.
Beth: [00:11:17] We were talking this morning about the particular aspects of the reporting on this story that have been striking to us and how those probably connect to just how we view the world. And I think it's helpful to kind of pull all that apart because part of what is so challenging and talking about this story is that it combines so many different issues of race and class and assumptions about sex work and assumptions about the people who investigate these crimes and the perpetrators with whom they identify versus the perpetrators with whom they do not identify there's a lot going on here.
And so focusing in, I think [00:12:00] on what caused us to react, I hope will provide good conversation starters for our listeners as they think about what they're reacting to and why.
Sarah: [00:12:08] Yeah, I was so struck by a quote from Bee Nguyen, who is the first Vietnamese American to serve in the Georgia state house and she said the shooting appears to be at the intersection of gender based violence, misogyny, and xenophobia.
And I just thought. I just finished The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor and she talks about like, we all live at intersections of our own identity. Every one of us has an intersection of our race and our class and our gender and it is hard to talk about those things. And it is hard to piece apart because in so many ways we can't. We can't pull the pieces of ourself apart as a puzzle.
An Asian American woman can't piece apart, well, this is what I'm reacting to. This is what breaks my heart as a woman and this is what breaks [00:13:00] my heart as an Asian-American and I would not want her to do that. That's not what's called for in this moment. Right. And I think what you see in particular with the stories of harassment that were unfolding on the West coast, was that they were at really difficult intersections of race, right.
That several of the teenage boys, and I'm going to use that phrase purposely and I'll explain in a minute that were arrested, were of color. And I think that's why there was this really difficult hesitation to talk about this in a helpful way that moves the conversation forward. One of the big intersections of my own identity is that I'm a mother of three boys.
And what I see is the thread that connects a lot of the particular acts of violence [00:14:00] towards the Asian community are young men. And, you know, I'm always thinking historically, and I try to think about things historically, and I was thinking about how easy it is to look back at American history including, you know, some horrible racism towards the Asian-American community and say, well, it's just ignorance. Right?
And it's just, it's like easy to look back and think like they just didn't know. And what we're seeing, I think right now is it's not just ignorance. The people who are shunning Asian Americans, men, and women, who are spitting on their fellow citizens, coughing on their fellow citizens, they're not missing information, right?
They're not missing some really important context about how viruses spread or that viruses don't care about the color of your skin. This is about [00:15:00] hate. This is about hate and I think particularly, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about how hate motivates young men and how anger motivates young men because I'm raising them and it reminds me that intellectualizing this only gets us so far and that there is essential political leadership here, but that there is also essential moral leadership here and cultural leadership here, and a role for all of us to play in standing up and protecting our fellow citizens and seeing that we are all connected.
And not only that, we are all connected to those being victimized, [00:16:00] but that we are also connected to those doing the victimization and that's really hard to say. It's really hard to say. It's scary to say, because it's so easy to other and to say, you know, that's about criminals and that's about perpetuaters of violence and we will lock them up and throw away the key and that will solve it.
And I just think that what is going on here is so much deeper than that and that that mindset has not protected communities of color. That mindset that people who commit crimes are other and people who commit violent acts, especially refusing to see that it is young men who commit violent acts primarily and asking ourselves why and asking ourselves [00:17:00] what we can do is not protecting anybody.
And it's moments like this, where the heartbreak is so deep, it sits at these places of such deep intersection that make it both seemingly impossible to talk about, and also absolutely essential to deal with. And I am so grateful for the members of the Asian American community who have been relentlessly leading this conversation and courageously stepping out and saying something is going on here. We belong here, here we are members of this community and something is broken and we are the victims of that.And I hope that we can all [00:18:00] continue to follow their lead.
Beth: [00:18:03] So when I read this story as a white lady, raising two white girls, I try to think, okay, as a white person, what are my responsibilities here? And what am I supposed to be learning from this? And how can I do my part to create better than this?
Because I begin with the certainty, that whether this suspect is able to know it or not, race was absolutely a part of what happened here. I don't, I don't trust any human being, including myself to be able to completely understand and articulate our motivations for what we do, especially not for something as complex as the decision to take other people's lives.
Whatever he says, you know, race is a part of what happened here. And race is a part of what's happening in our country and I try to think through like, what do we even mean when we say Asian American? Because we're talking [00:19:00] about such a diverse part of the world. I was reading an interview with Cathy Park Hong, who is a poet, an essayist, and the daughter of Korean immigrants.
It appeared in the Atlantic and sh she was talking with the interviewer about how the term Asian American was coined in 1968 by student organizers in response to a racist world that had put many of their family members in internment camps and, and they were Filipino and Chinese and Japanese. And, you know, we have Pakistani and Bangladeshi and Indian and Cambodian and Vietnamese. We just have so many people under this umbrella of Asian and American.
And that term kind of has to exist to help white people understand that we're grouping people together like that, erasure of the diversity of the term is part of the problem here. Okay. And it's also just necessary to create a [00:20:00] community of people to talk about these issues and, and raise awareness. So trying to understand that better is I think part of my work to do.
You know, Sarah is you were talking about the age of the perpetrator sticking out to you, part of what has really been knawing at me about this story is the use of the term "massage parlor" and sort of the assumptions behind that term and how I don't understand this immediate connection that the police have made between entering a place called an aroma therapy spa, and going to Florida to shoot people related to the porn industry that they reported after they apprehended the suspect.
I just think it is so demeaning to the women involved here to make those assumptions. I also think it's demeaning to characterize a story this way as though that somehow changes what it means to be a human life. I've been [00:21:00] really bothered by all of the reporting around Sarah Everhard in the UK, that she did everything right.
I've heard that phrase in like every news story that I've read or listened to about Sarah Everhard and I get what they're trying to say. I get that the intent behind that phrase is to say, women have been told that they are not safe. Women have experienced that they are not safe. And women have been told, here are your responsibilities to keep yourself safe.
And I think the intent is to say, like, even when we check all those boxes, we are still not safe so maybe stop telling us what our responsibilities are and look at the responsibility of the men who kidnap attack, rape and kill us. And I think that's right, but the contrast between a story about a woman's murder and how she did everything right with eight people were killed in massage parlors is really upsetting to me.
And I'm trying to [00:22:00] think about why and what that says about race and gender and social class and economic status and how we value human life. But I just keep coming back to like eight people are dead and this is an incredible tragedy and it is an incredible tragedy unfolding in a way and at a time that realizes the concerns that our fellow citizens are living with every single day, because people are spitting on them, avoiding them, using terrible racist names in a country that used nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has had to justify that to itself.
In a country that interned people in the course of world war II, in a country where we've had all kinds of ways of attributing moral values around communism. And I mean, we just, it is a thorny history that has created the, the moment that we're [00:23:00] living in and so what are we to learn from that? I don't know, but I think it's a long list of things that I'm working hard on in myself and then the other piece of this that I can't stop thinking about, and I know that the motivation of the killer as he States, it is just not relevant for a lot of purposes.
As a white mom, when I hear someone who knew him well, describing him as a person who took the lives of women in some part because he had learned to hate sexual sin, to such a degree that he believed killing other women versus working on his understanding of those issues within himself was a good plan, that speaks to me as a woman who takes her children to a Christian Church and what we are instilling in each other about [00:24:00] sex and about faith and about hating the sin.
Because what I see here is if the reporting so far gives us any accurate picture of what was going on with this man, his faith community somehow taught him to hate what he perceived as sin more than loving other people, or more than being able to see all other people as full and complete other people and I can understand where that came from enough to know that it is a reality in a community that I'm part of and that it's my responsibility to keep working on that.
Sarah: [00:24:39] Well, and it feels like there are threads here, right? When you mentioned Sarah Everhard and I thought the connection between asking victims to be responsible for their safety connects to me, to this narrative around the model minority and the idea that you are responsible for bearing or [00:25:00] ignoring or not reporting discrimination as if any discrimination is somehow your responsibility as an Asian-American.
And I thought, you know, well, if we're talking about also the responsibility and pressure and what's going on with young men and toxic masculinity, and I think maybe why that there's such defensiveness and there's this sense that like any discussion of the perpetrator, particularly when it comes to hate crimes, is an excuse for the perpetrator.
You know, you know, I reject that and I reject that because a 14 year old who committed by what's affected my life forever. So like, I just think maybe what's missing is leadership from men. Leadership from men saying, because I think that's the most powerful type of advocacy and activism, and I'm not talking about men's rights activists, right?
I'm talking about, you know, the work that Clint harp is doing on his podcast. This idea that like it's [00:26:00] time for men to say, we see that the perpetrators of violence are men, and we need to talk about that and we need to figure out what's going on in our own community, because we are hurting other people. We are killing other people.
And I think maybe that, and I don't, and that's not to imply that there aren't men doing that. I know that there are what's so hard is like, I feel like as a woman, even as the mother of sons, if I say a word about it, it's read as like me excusing it, when of course that's not what I'm doing, but I care.
I want to feel safe. I don't want to have to worry about violence from men. I want all my female friends and relatives to feel safe and not to be constantly consumed by true crime, because they're constantly practicing their own responses because they feel unsafe all the time. I want that for my friends of color, that they're not consumed by the threat of white supremacy at all times, or the, the psychological harassment, the [00:27:00] shunning, which isn't just limited to men.
I, you know, I just, but it's also again, because there's so much intersection, it's so hard and it's so heartbreaking and it's so hard. I mean, we didn't even get to like the age-ism issues and the, so much of the heinousness of those videos from earlier this year. I mean, just the vulnerability of these elderly people and the way they're just completely attacked and caught off guard and then even to lose their lives, like it's just,
Beth: [00:27:33] and if you are LGBTQ, I mean, they're just, they're so many.
Sarah: [00:27:37] So many compounding and it feels like we have to pick, or we have to rank, or we have to prioritize and I just reject that. I reject that because to me, what matters is not sorting us into groups and ranking based on priority, but to understanding that we all belong to some group and we all belong to each other.
[00:28:00] And I'm not saying that that's like this some kumbaya, Woohoo moment if we just all hold hands and feel our connection, this will solve it. But I think continuing to try to do us and them, as we have for years is not getting us there either.
Beth: [00:28:22] Yes, it's incredibly complex, but at its root, it's like really simple. Other human beings deserve to live as much as you do. Other human beings deserve to be treated with as much kindness and dignity and respect as you do. And that's a lot, it's a lot, we all deserve a lot of kindness and dignity and respect and gentleness. We all deserve right now to look at each other and say, what a tragedy all of humanity has been through.
Let's recognize that tragedy and honestly treat each other as we would, the people who are standing by a casket when we are at a funeral home. Like that's all of us right now in some [00:29:00] way to varying degrees but as you said, we don't need to rank that. Like, okay, so how can we go through the world with a little bit more kindness for each other, no matter what the conditions are.
And if someone is telling me, you know, my place of origin or my family history or my skin color or my gender identity or my sexual orientation is making me a target to people and people who look like you are being less kind and respectful to people who look like me, then my job is to listen to that and do better. And that's it, right? Like we can make it pretty simple at the end of the day.
Sarah: [00:29:43] I think it's also that at this particular moment in human history, we are being asked to see our connection to other human beings at a depth we've [00:30:00] never been asked before. Right. In that we're really trying on this experiment of multicultural democracy. Right. And it's, I think for so long, we said we are connected to one another and the strength of that connection is based on how, uh, like we are and that's what we evolved to do.
And what we are being asked to do right now is to say the strength of that connection is built on how diverse we are and how beautiful and unique we are from one another and to hold the paradox of that, we are all connected because we are all human and that also the strength that connection can be built on how diverse we are and how all these intersection of these different identities that we each hold that makes us who we are that makes us Sarah and not just human being.
And that it's a lot in it's particularly a lot in the middle of a global pandemic when we are all scared for our lives. I mean, that's [00:31:00] just, that is a big, heavy lift and some emotional and psychological and spiritual evolution that we are absolutely going to need each other for.
Beth: [00:31:14] And I think many of us have experienced not being scared for our own lives, but scared for someone else's life and that takes on its own layers of grief and our fear being converted into things that are not particularly constructive. Like there we're just going through a lot.
And so, you know, to have a mass murder in the midst of all of this targeting some very vulnerable people in American society is I'm just thinking of everyone who experiences this on an even deeper and more identity-based level than I do and I am really, really heartbroken about this.
Sarah: [00:31:58] Well, here's my moment of [00:32:00] hope as we move out of this conversation, which is. President Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will meet in Atlanta on Friday with community leaders and state lawmakers. And we will have, in the vice president, the first member of an Asian-American and Pacific Islander community to hold that office.
So I think to have someone in leadership at this very difficult moment who understands deeply, those intersections is incredibly hopeful. And also as we grieve the lives of all eight of our fellow citizens, but as we think about the women whose lives were lost in this shooting, the house of representatives just voted to reauthorize the violence against women act. And so that's a step and an important step, and I'm glad it happened. And I'm clinging to even small steps of hope right [00:33:00] now.
Beth: [00:33:01] We're going to transition now to, uh, an area of enormous hope for both of us and, uh, uh, development for humankind that has resulted from our diversity and the strength of our diversity, which is the, the making and manufacturing and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines.
And we're going to talk about that with Derek Lowe, who describes himself as Arkansan by birth, who got his BA from Hendrix college and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke. I know many of you know, who Derek Lowe is. He writes for Science Mag. He has worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia and Alzheimer's diabetes, osteoporosis, and other diseases. And as Sarah said, he was a delight to talk with about the making and distribution of the COVID vaccines.
[00:34:00] We're so excited to be joined by Derek Lowe. Derek, I wanted to ask if you would start with just a brief review and I know it's not a question well suited to a brief review of how the MRN vaccines were not, as you say, in your writing invented from scratch.
Derek Lowe: [00:34:34] Yeah, that's a, it's a good question because these things have been coming on for many years now. The whole idea of using MRN as a vaccine platform has been around for oh 20 years, more than 20 years, but it's proven difficult to actually get it to work. And frankly, we're really fortunate that the [00:35:00] technology had gotten to the point that it is by the time we got hit with this pandemic. If this had happened five years ago, we would not have seen it come on this quickly, but there are a lot of things that had to be, you know, had to have troubleshooting done to them. Getting it so that the MRI actually survives when it's injected so it gets into the cell, so it actually sets off the protein production you need for the antigen vaccination effect. All of those things didn't work well at first. Yeah.
Sarah: [00:35:31] I have a real sliding door moment where I think, boy, I wonder how much longer it would have taken to get the MRI and a vaccine technology working without the pandemic without that real global coordination to patch these holes in the technology that existed for a while. There'd been a major breakthrough with Ebola, right? Isn't that what had just happened right before the pandemic.
Derek Lowe: [00:35:54] Exactly. And there are several MRN vaccines in development because [00:36:00] over the last few years, some of these things had been worked out pretty well, but none of them were quite ready to start going into humans, but this accelerated everything.
Sarah: [00:36:10] Tell me if this metaphor works. I saw this metaphor in a conversation on Facebook and I thought it was really good. The woman said, okay, so previous vaccines, just imagine a bike. We're trying to get your, your body to recognize the bike. So they would have given like a piece of a pedal of the bike, or they would have given an old bike that didn't go anywhere anymore, or she's like, but the MRN is basically like giving the instructions on how to build the bike to your body so it's not giving you a piece of the bike. It's giving you actual instructions for how to build the bike.
Derek Lowe: [00:36:44] Up to a point but you got to remember the MRN a that's going in is just giving the instructions to only build the spike protein.
Sarah: [00:36:52] Yeah, sh I'm sorry. I messed up her metaphor. You're right. She said, it's only the instructions for the pedal, not the whole bike.
Derek Lowe: [00:36:59] And [00:37:00] instead of injecting that protein and having your body react to it, which is how the Novavax vaccine candidate works, instead of doing that, you are recruiting your body's own cells to make that protein. Now the Adeno virus vaccines, like the J and J one and the Oxford AstraZeneca one also do that, but just through a different route.
Beth: [00:37:21] So can you talk with us about how the vaccine actually gets made? You know, we've had a lot of conversation about how and why does it work? What is the process to actually create these messages that enable us to make the protein?
Derek Lowe: [00:37:38] Yeah, it's a multi-step thing because in order to make something like this first, well, you have to make your MRNA and that is to be honest, probably the easiest part of the process. Once you figured out exactly what MRNA you're going to make, because one of the legs up we had on this [00:38:00] pandemic, was the 2003 SARS epidemic that didn't take off globally but everyone was worried about that.
A lot of vaccine efforts were tried on that and we found that for that class of Corona virus, the spike protein looked like a really good candidate for a vaccine. So when this one came around, it was so close to the 2003 SARS that everyone immediately jumped on the spike protein, and we didn't even bother messing with the others.
Interesting. So once you've got that figured out, the next thing that people did, and the RNA vaccines do this as does the J and J, they didn't make exactly the natural spike protein. There are a couple of mutations they put in to hold it in the right shape because the spike changes shape when it actually starts infecting one of your cells.
It binds to a protein on the cell surface called ACE two. When it does that, the spike kind of shifts [00:39:00] around. And the idea was that you want to stabilize the spike in the shape it has before it infects you and that's the shape it's going to have while it's circulating round in your bloodstream, looking for sales to attach to and that's when you want your immune system to recognize it. So they actually put in a couple of mutated amino acids to make sure it stays in that shape and it doesn't switch and forward to the other one.
Sarah: [00:39:27] So when we talk about the raw ingredients, the RNA, the lipid, I think there's a few like nanoparticles and when we start manufacturing that, those actual pieces, what does that look like? Where are the difficulties?
Derek Lowe: [00:39:43] Well making the once you've got the sequence, as I say that making the MRNA is not too bad, because there are a lot of enzymes that we've kind of co-opted over the years in molecular biology to crank out RNA and DNA.
And that process works pretty well. They're [00:40:00] making kilos of MRNA, which for a molecule or like that, it's just an unimaginably huge amount, but you can do that. Now, one bottleneck is you've got to make sure that that MRNAs is extremely clean. One of the things you can get in there are some RNA molecules for two strands of RNA loop around each other, like the DNA, double helix.
RNA in the body doesn't usually do that and it turns out if you have double stranded RNA as a little trace contaminant, it sets off an inappropriate immune response. It can actually damp down the vaccine efficacy. So you got to get this stuff really cleaned up. That was one of the things they found over the last few years, but making that is actually not the hard part.
The lipids, you mentioned, those are the hard part because the lipids it's a mixture of three or four, and some of them are pretty [00:41:00] easy, like cholesterol, which is easy to get. And there's another one called, um, DPFC and that one's also a catalog item. You know, people know how to make that, but there are one or two in there that are very unusual, proprietary, and have to be made from scratch.
And making those from scratch is apparently um a pain in the butt technically speaking. It takes about 10 steps and several months under normal conditions to make a big batch of that who
Beth: [00:41:28] is making big batches of that stuff? Like when I hear you say enzymes, I think we're just one procure enzymes? Is that what's the size of that business globally?
Derek Lowe: [00:41:38] It's messy because there are a lot of supplier. And when you look close, when you start buying enzymes and antibodies and things, sometimes you find out that the stuff you're buying from different suppliers actually is from the same batch that somebody else made entirely. And they sold it on to some other people who are now selling it to you under different [00:42:00] catalog items.
That's always fun. You can make some of these things yourself, but in many cases you want to go to a trusted supplier that you know is going to give you the right stuff in the right specifications. Now, this is where it gets tricky because companies do not like to talk about exactly who their trusted suppliers are.
In the case of some of these lipids, we know that for example, the Pfizer Biointech MRMA vaccine, the lipids come from a company in Vancouver called Acuitus. Acuitus in turn sources that to another company in England that has a facility in Alabaster, Alabama. So that's where the lipid is coming from is from a factory in Alabaster, Alabama that is making them. However they have to order raw materials, because that tends to have synthesis uses all sorts of different reagents and starting materials. [00:43:00] They're sourcing that from somewhere else and that's where the trail goes cold for me. I do not know where they're getting that.
Beth: [00:43:06] It makes me nervous to hear you say that the trail goes cold for you. Should I feel nervous about that?
Derek Lowe: [00:43:12] Oh no. That's standard. People don't want to talk about their suppliers because they'll have a special deal set up where it's like, okay, you're sending us this stuff and you're only going to deal with us, right. And it all comes in under the specification or, or, you know, we reject it and here's the price we negotiated that we're not going to talk about. I mean, to go back to the food metaphors, it's like, you don't know where all the products that are branded in trader Joe's come from either.
Sarah: [00:43:40] more, especially the ingredients in the products. And this is what I've learned. Like truthfully, I did not pursue a scientific path. I didn't take many scientific classes during my education, but that part of the functioning of the human body and the sort of, you know, hobby virology, we've all [00:44:00] adopted during the P like that part, I can wrap my brain about.
What I have understood is that I really don't understand manufacturing and that is like an entire universe of just our global economy that I really don't understand. And that there's way more going on there than I understood.
Derek Lowe: [00:44:17] The supply chain stuff, the logistics is a different world. It's not one that I've had to worry about too much because my career has been spent way back early in the very early stages of drug discovery and I have certainly made a lot of weird compounds and chemicals over the last 30 years, but I've made them on a very small scale. I've never had to worry about what if I had to make enough of this for a hundred million people. How would I do that? That's a different thing.
Beth: [00:44:46] I read one of your blog posts about this sense that once Pfizer and Maderna had the technology, lots of other companies should have been able to just jump in and help them [00:45:00] the way that we see Merck now partnering with Johnson and Johnson, and you were saying, hi, this, this does not reflect any kind of real understanding of how vaccines are manufactured. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Derek Lowe: [00:45:12] Yeah, because that gets to the other key step in the MRNA stuff, making those lipid nanoparticles, making the MRNA, not too bad. Making the lipids, uh, significantly worse, but it's a chemical synthesis problem so you can hammer on it until you find a good route and if you can find the supplies. Getting the lipid nanoparticles made, though, that is a tricky one, because these things are very small, you know, this, the nano and they have to be in just the right ratio of how much lipid and how much MRNA is in each one.
They're just sort of like a little ball or like a very tiny peanut cluster looking thing of MRNa with lipid wrapped around it, like the chocolate in a, [00:46:00] in a candy cluster. And they have to be all the right size and all have similar amounts of the two ingredients. So the manufacturing process is, um, Not well-documented. I'm sure the FDA knows more about it than we do, but as far as we can tell, it involves a custom made piece of machinery that has a lot of low mixing chambers, probably all running in parallel, a whole bunch of these things. The mixing chambers are going to be small and a very specific shape, and they have inlets coming in one with the lipids in some kind of solution and one with the MRNA in another solution.
The flow rate of those two and the temperature and the ratios have to be very precisely controlled so that they hit and mix in the right way to form a stream of the right size nano-particles coming out the other end. If you get it wrong, you could end up [00:47:00] with something that looks like clam chowder.
Beth: [00:47:02] Should we understand the supply of vaccines right now as being a manufacturing miracle that we're getting as much as we are, or that we are behind the need and, and more could be coming or something in between?
Derek Lowe: [00:47:17] Yeah. I honestly think that we've got as much of these things as we could possibly hope to have by this point to a good approximation, because these companies have been worrying about this for months and trying to line up suppliers and capacity and equipment for months now. So they've been presumably doing just about everything they can think of to keep the supply going.
At the same time, there are constraints on the mixing equipment I was talking about is a true bottleneck, a physical bottleneck, because everything has to go through those tiny chambers. The supply of the lipids could be a bottleneck too, because of the difficulty in synthesizing them and [00:48:00] working that up on scale.
The Johnson and Johnson one, the bottleneck there is that they, and the other adeno virus people have a human cell culture step that's absolutely inescapable, crucial and human cell culture on scale is another black art, which can occasionally just decide to stop working for reasons that are very hard to figure out.
Sarah: [00:48:22] Well, you know, we read a book for our book club a while back about water, follow me here. I promise it's related. And it was about how they manufacture microchips and just when you're talking about, you know, nano teeny tiny, I don't even know the specific, like they were talking about how they use pure water to extract everything, make sure it's pure.
Cause if you know, water will suck up impurities and so they have to get this very special water to clean it up before they even make anything and I thought that was another moment I was like, I don't really understand what, how manufacturing works, but I mean, I think that we have this vision of, well, Amazon can get anything to anyone in the country, but [00:49:00] yeah, Amazon shipping you a spatula, like it's not manufacturing at the nano level and so to do that at this scale and distributed this widely, it's just a whole other universe.
Derek Lowe: [00:49:11] It is. And of course Amazon is not really making specialists. They are contracting with people who know how to make specialists and, and taking delivery from them. Really actually making the spatulas yeah, that's a different thing.
And uh, the nano spatulas are, are very different on top of that. No, this is really the cutting edge of manufacturing, being able just to make these things reproducibly. That's the real killer with a lot of chemical processes and a lot of biotech manufacturing. Can you do it is one question, but can you do it over and over and not have to throw away every third or fourth batch?
Beth: [00:49:51] Are you able to help us think about the distribution side once these vaccines are manufactured? We know that our listeners have a real [00:50:00] sense of frustration about the unevenness of the rollout state by state and I'm wondering from your perspective, is that all policy or is any of it science and supply chain?
Derek Lowe: [00:50:13] I wish I knew. I think it's more policy to be honest because the stuff is, there are only a few places that these vaccines are even being physically manufactured. You can count them on your fingers because there are only a few places in the world that actually had the facilities to do that and to package them in sterile vials.
All the companies that can do large scale, fill and finish, as they say, where you fill up the vials and get the labels on them and get them into boxes. All the companies that can do that on scale were tied up months ago, you know, for all the vaccine manufacturing, people were signing deals frantically with companies in the us and Europe, Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, [00:51:00] and they've all been signed up for deals and they've all been bulking up their manufacturing capacity.
So the only a few places they physically come from. Once they leave so then yeah, you're into distribution. Where do those trucks go? Who gets it? How much does it go there? And at that point, I'm kind of as baffled as you are. It's really strange because you saw the other day that Alaska just announced that they're going to make it available to everyone over 16.
Now that's partly because Alaska just doesn't have that many people and they're widely, you know, scattered apart in many places so they really need to do something like that. Whereas I live in Massachusetts and my wife and I were both in our late fifties and we're waiting and waiting to see when we'll finally move from group 2A into 2A part two or whatever.
And then I see people from other parts of the country on Twitter and they're practically [00:52:00] acting like, Oh, damn, the vaccine truck just came down the street for the third time that music is driving me crazy.
Sarah: [00:52:08] But you know, the other big news was not just Alaska, but that Italy stopped a shipment to Australia. Like I think the international long-term distribution is something to consider like.How long do you think it might be before everyone in the world who wants a vaccine can get that on that Alaska plan where if you're over 16, you can get it? Why should Americans care about that?
Derek Lowe: [00:52:32] Oh yeah. We should care both on just simple humanitarian grounds and also because we don't want this virus out there for any longer than it has to be, because the longer it runs around in the human population, the longer we're giving it a chance to throw off some nasty mutation that might escape the effects of the vaccine entirely. I don't think that's likely, but it's not impossible.
And one of the virologists that I read, [00:53:00] Andrew Rasmuson, she had a good phrase for it. She said, if you don't want the Corona virus to hit the Powerball, stop selling it so many damn tickets. So the faster we can get this thing out of the human population, the better off we're going to be. The distribution worldwide has some trickiness to, because as you know, that they MRNA vaccines have to be shipped very cold and kept cold.
Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca are a little bit more like refrigerator temperature. Novavax might even be room temperature. I'm still waiting to see what the specs on that are. So that's one thing. If you're distributing the vaccine to suburban Massachusetts, and they can come knock on my door anytime, but what if you're distributing the vaccine to islands in Indonesia, or if you're taking it to South Sudan, or if you're going up into the mountains of Bolivia. These storage requirements really make it tricky.
Beth: [00:53:58] I want to ask you [00:54:00] where things are headed from here, because I read about this technology and get really excited, especially when I read articles like this may have application to diseases like MS. I listened to a question and answer session that you did on YouTube back in 2015. And the first question that you were asked was what skillsets should students who are thinking about careers in science have, and you answered that your main skill set needs to be the ability to rapidly acquire a new skill set.
Derek Lowe: [00:54:31] Yes. Yeah.
Beth: [00:54:34] That aged well. I was just thinking about that in light of, you know, the enthusiasm that I feel as a person who barely understands what we're talking about when I hear people saying this technology could just exponentially grow into new areas. With your perspective on what it takes to actually make that happen, what kind of expectations do you think the [00:55:00] general public should have about where the science will take us from here?
Derek Lowe: [00:55:03] Yeah, that's a good question. I'm excited myself although I do understand a lot of the difficulties and the potential ways that things could go off the rails, but this has been really something to see getting these platforms like MRNA and adeno virus out to humans as quickly as we have. The effect of the pandemic on vaccines has been. I like to say this has been a little bit like the effect of world war II on airplane design. You started out with biplanes still in service and you ended up with, with, you know, jet engines. So that area is never going to be the same.
And the applications of RNA are going to be jump-started. Now we already had a couple of RNA therapeutics. The tricky part is, is that the vaccine has an advantage because you're just injecting it into the muscle and it's actually your muscle cells up in your deltoid muscle in the arm that are making the spike protein for [00:56:00] you and down into the lymph nodes under your armpit on that side.
That's where the vaccine is going and that's where the production is. It, it goes on for about the first three or four days after you get the shot, but what if you want to get an MRI and a, that goes, say to, Oh, I don't know the spleen, or if you want it to go to the stomach lining or to your lungs, that is much harder because if you inject RNA directly into the bloodstream, even formulated as nanoparticles, it gets chewed up fairly quickly and it especially gets chewed up in the liver.
They only MRNA therapies as opposed to vaccines out there. The only MRNAs therapies that are out there are for liver disease because the developers realized that they were probably not going to be able to get it to go anywhere else before it got chewed up. So that's going to be tricky. But at the same time, we have a lot of people [00:57:00] trying to get around that problem with new delivery technologies.
And if we can get some of this stuff to work, even with the limitations we have now, there is a lot to be done with MRNAs therapies. It's not the only weird thing going on, frankly, I've been in the business for 30 years now and we have more new modes of treatment going into the clinic and in development now at the same time than has ever been the case. It's, it's really something to see.
I think we really are seeing the end of the pandemic insight. The end is insight. We're going to vaccinate our way out of this and I hope we're more ready next time, because I don't want to be a wet blanket, but there is going to be a next time eventually, you know, not next, not next winter, maybe, but not even another five years from now, but over the next 20, 30 years. Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me a bit and I hope we're a little bit more prepared.
[00:58:00] Beth: [00:58:46] I'm barely functional this week because of the daylight savings time switch and that's really all I can say about it. I am just barely operating as a human being because of this one hour time change. And I'm both embarrassed about it and relieved to see that I am not alone in [00:59:00] this, in this incapacity.
Sarah: [00:59:02] Well, let me just like, let me just give you like a little cataloging of what that looks like in my life this week to make you feel better. Um, I got. Not one, not two but three reports from adults about my kindergartener, not being his best self on Monday. So that really started us out strong. Okay. Uh, he has also been very much struggling in the face of daylight savings time.
Um, I will respect his privacy and not share more beyond that. Also on Wednesday, I showed up to pick up for church small group like we do a little carpool, just an hour early, was texting my friend that I'm here in your driveway and then realized that I was not supposed to be there until an hour later.
I had a doctor's appointment for one of my children I showed up 30 minutes late to, I mean, it was in my calendar correctly just for the record. I just showed up a half an hour late and was like, Oh, I thought it was now. I just decided in my head it was half an [01:00:00] hour later. I've gotten the day wrong. I'm not really sure what time it is. I'm having to be woken up by an alarm, which I don't do super well with because usually I wake up on my own. I'm just Im, on the struggle bus in so many ways.
Beth: [01:00:16] And I love daylight savings time. I am not complaining about having the sun for a longer amount of time every day. It's just, it's another example to me, of how my coping skills are all at operating at a complete deficit.
You know, usually the time change does not affect me this much. Now I do find that everything is affecting me more every year of my life. I don't know if it's because as you get older, you get like more settled into your routines and just, this is what I do and I have more control over it and so when something, I am not in control of disrupts it, I do not like it, but that has been part of my experience. But I just feel this year, like my Jenga tower is just barely stacked up. And every piece that moves puts me in [01:01:00] a more precarious situation.
Sarah: [01:01:02] Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I'm just tired. I'm cranky. I mean, it's not like every day was horrendous. I had some nice moments overall. I'm just, it just felt like every step I took was through mud and literally in some parts because it also rained all week here so, Oh, just get out of here this week. We're done with you,
Beth: [01:01:28] The rain is for sure part of it. I'm just, I think it's valuable to talk about this, even though I recognize like what a fortunate life I have that an hour time change is my biggest problem this week, but I see so many people who are like, God, I don't feel like myself. I don't feel good in my body. I, my sleep is all jacked up. Like it's just this time change is not working. I fully supported it.
Sarah: [01:01:50] We are moon people. Maybe there was something is there some sort of planet or a moon thing going on in this? I don't know. I'm grasping here. Cause it, I agree. [01:02:00] It felt like more, it hit me harder than most time changes hit me.
That is for sure. Well, we hope that daylight savings time was not as hard on you as it was on us and if it was hard on you, solidarity, we're here with you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics, we will be back in your ears on Tuesday with a new episode and until then keep a nuanced, y'all.
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