Best vaccine explainers

December 18, 2020 2:12 PM

I am a nurse in a program that educates patients about their health and care. The vaccine will be available to me and my coworkers within a month. And presumably to our patients soon after. There are many concerns among my coworkers about vaccine safety that we need to address quickly. What are the best, factual, non-shaming articles or websites to share with my coworkers?

We are an interdisciplinary and multi racial group of various specialties and unlicensed health workers. Folks have reasonable concerns and are open to reading to get information. Some shared today they're already seeing conspiracy minded videos etc that worsen non-fact- based fears.

An example of a site I consider helpful, accessible, and accurate, without discounting people's understandable concerns, is COVIDtracking.com.

What else can you recommend, specifically about the vaccines?

posted by latkes to Human Relations (10 answers total)

I assume a book is too long? If not, On Immunity by Eula Biss is smart, generous, sensitive and correct. It has a running metaphor of our public health being a garden that we tend together.

If a book is too long, this New Yorker review gets to the point.
posted by caek at 3:24 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

I thought this piece in today’s Atlantic was very good, regarding the vaccine’s side effects & why they happen (because the vaccine is working! & so is your immune system!). it’s not shaming or condescending at all.
posted by changeling at 3:29 PM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

I expect this question is about covidi vaccines in particular, not vaccines in general, right?
posted by NotLost at 3:34 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Dr. Campbell has ~daily 30 minute Covid videos that have made me a bunch smarter. Discussion on vaccines are interspersed throughout.
posted by tinker at 3:40 PM on December 18, 2020

At risk of outing myself, let's say I definitely have not been involved in this particular link but this might be a good start. I didn't work for any of the companies involved in vaccine development, but I've been involved in the sample collection and data analysis. Relative to other drugs that people willingly take voluntarily without so much as glancing at the federally-mamdated product insert that comes with every FDA-regulated drug, the three leading vaccines in the COVID-19 vaccine race (there are many, many, many more coming down the pipeline) are what we tend to call unicorns. They are the elusive examples of how modern safety and efficacy testing paradigms have finally overtaken the old-school (read: iffy) approaches to drug development and approval, yielding a rapid response therapeutic that will forever change (for the better) how medicines are developed and clear the many, many hurdles that stand between the lab and being injected into our bodies. Happy to elaborate more via memail if you have questions, I just gotta stay on this side of NDAs and all that in a public forum.

Purely anecdotally, these are some of the safest drugs ever developed. Folks in the medical field(s) have a tremendous amount of transparent data analysis available to them in an unprecedented fashion. This pandemic has seismically shifted the drugmaker-regulator dynamic for the better.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:42 PM on December 18, 2020 [9 favorites]

I found this video, presented as part of a lecture series on covid19 presented by MIT to be quite enlightening. It's midlevel technical for the first part, but the last 15 minutes convinced me of the efficacy and safety of the Moderna (and hence the Pfizer) approach
posted by OHenryPacey at 3:50 PM on December 18, 2020

If they are getting a mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) maybe a CDC fact sheet?

I would remind them that this isn't a brew that's been whipped up in mere months. mRNA technology has been researched and developed for more than a decade. It was primed and ready for this virus and one of the factors is was available in "warp speed".
posted by loveandhappiness at 4:16 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Healthcare Triage did a piece on this today.
posted by Poldo at 7:40 PM on December 18, 2020

A biology professor/dean friend just posted this link.
posted by mareli at 6:33 AM on December 19, 2020

among those at This Week in Virology mareli posted, two good episodes, recent and on topic, may be episode 687 "peter hotez sticks to the vax" and episode 693 "vax to the future" though their discussions are typically technical and wide-ranging. also useful may be the clinical updates with dr. daniel griffin, recently packaged separately from the longer panel-discussion episodes. the panel discusses, to some degree, latest vaccine developments and research each episode.
posted by 20 year lurk at 9:17 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]