Vaccines, Your Body, and Loving Your Neighbor with Dr. Rob Balza

What if the story of vaccines is really a story about protecting what we value most? We sit down with biomedical researcher Dr. Rob Balza to chart the arc from smallpox variolation to today’s mRNA platforms, then push past headlines to the data that actually changes lives. Along the way, we face the hard questions Christians are asking: how do we balance stewardship of our bodies with love for immunocompromised neighbors? What does “personal choice” mean when disease spreads before symptoms? And how do we weigh decades of clinical evidence against the pull of a compelling anecdote?

We break the science down clearly. Attenuated and “old school” vaccines trained the immune system with weakened pathogens; mRNA vaccines use a temporary set of instructions so your cells make a single target protein, prompting immunity without the virus itself. We unpack trial results showing early high efficacy against infection, strong and durable protection against severe disease, and shorter infectious periods that can reduce spread. We also talk openly about waning antibodies, evolving variants, and why expectations should adapt as the virus changes.

Trust is the other half of the story. We examine how mixed messaging about masks, politicized guidance, and recycled myths—like the debunked vaccine-autism claim—fractured public confidence. Then we turn to a sensitive ethical concern: fetal-derived cell lines used in research. Dr. Balza explains moral proximity, timing, and intent, clarifying that vaccines don’t contain fetal tissue and that long-established lines don’t require new abortions. Through a Lutheran lens of vocation and providence, we explore how God often works through ordinary callings—clinicians, scientists, and citizens—to safeguard the vulnerable.

Come for the history; stay for the clarity. You’ll leave with a grounded understanding of how vaccines work, how evidence should be weighed, and how faith can guide wise, neighbor-loving choices in a world where our decisions ripple outward. If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with someone who has questions, and leave a review to help others find the show.

Transcript

Grounding Human Worth And Ethics

SPEAKER_00 0:00

On today's episode.

SPEAKER_04 0:02

Humans of our inestimable value, right? So we're products of a divine intervention created. We're loved by God. We're made in God's image, and all this gives us like this intrinsic value. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to protect and care for our own lives, stewardship of our own body, but also we have a responsibility to our neighbor to protect and care for the most vulnerable comments. And that's what makes bioethics surrounding vaccines complex. You have the one question of like what's best to do for my body on a kind of a personal level, but you also have the question of what's best to do for my neighbor.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

Welcome to the Life Challenges Podcast from Christian Life Resources. Our world today presents people with complicated issues of life and death, marriage and family, health, and science. It can be a struggle to understand or deal with them. We're here to help by bringing good information and a fresh biblical perspective to these matters and more. Join us now for life challenges.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Hi, and welcome back. I'm Krista Potretz, and I'm here today with Pastors Bob Fleischmann and Jeff Samelson. And today we have a special guest with us, Dr. Rob Balza. And we are going to talk about the subject of vaccines today. Some of our maybe long-term listeners here will remember that you were one of our first guests on the podcast a few years back. It's great to have you back with us again here. He's gotten so much older and wiser now.

SPEAKER_04 1:38

Grayer maybe. I did hear that was the highest-rated podcast ever. Is that true, Krista?

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Or is that just a rumor? It's it's yeah, yes, it is. But uh we're we're glad to have you back here. And last time I'm I think we talked about a variety of uh different topics, but today we really wanted to focus on the vaccine topic. So can you just describe a little bit for our audience here your background, specifically like kind of in talking about vaccines and your interest in this topic?

What Vaccines Are And Early History

SPEAKER_04 2:10

Sure. So I'll start by saying that I did for a very short time work at a pharmaceutical company. However, I'm not employed at a pharmaceutical company, nor do I invest in pharmaceutical. I I believe I have no conflicts of interest with this uh with regard to vaccine development and things like that. So I'll also say, you know, I'm mentioning things I'm not. I'm also not a physician. If if I'm perceived as giving medical advice at any point today, uh, you know, consult with your physician and you know with regard to all medical decisions. But I I am a biomedical research scientist, you know, so I was trained at the Medical College of Wisconsin. My advanced degree is in biochemistry, but I do research with development and muscle and involves genetic studies and how proteins work, right? So I work right at the molecular mechanisms of how our DNA, our genetic material, produce this wonderful molecule called messenger RNA and how that's turned into proteins that do all the things that our cells do and make us who we are. And that's often, you know, the level at which diseases often it boils down to things happening at the molecular and cellular level. So the things I study are the foundation for lots of disease processes and immunologic processes that involve vaccines and things like that. For over 20 years now, I've been teaching nursing students, pre-med students, and things like that at the college and university level. And now I do a lot quite a bit of uh academic administration work.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Well, thank you um so much for explaining that. For our listeners, especially maybe those that don't have a medical or science background, how would you explain what vaccines are and how they they work?

Jenner, Smallpox, And Eradication

SPEAKER_04 3:48

Sure. So I'll do a little history lesson as well, kind of share, because I think if you think through kind of the history of vaccine development, it also kind of reveals how vaccines work on a practical level. But you know, vaccine technology isn't new, right? So most, if you look at history of science books, most it'll trace it back to the, you know, as early as the 15th century. Some people go all the way back to before Christ. There it gets a little sketchy in terms of what we know. But what's really clear is that in Europe in the 15th century, smallpox was a was a big deal. Back then, millions of people would die a year from smallpox. It had something like a 25% mortality rate. And interestingly, what was noticed over time is that you if you took a little bit of pox from someone, it manifests with blisters on the skin. And if you if you're not driving right now and you're listening to this podcast, you can search, you know, smallpox on your phone and you'll see pictures of people with, you know, these pox. And you can take a little bit of that, and say on a knife or something like that, and you can scrape that into your skin. And typically what happens then is you do get kind of this little minor infection where it's rather than like getting down to your lungs and make you completely sick, you'll get little blisters and things like that. But that's enough to generate what's called an immune response. This technique became known as variolation, taking a little bit of pox from someone else and scraping it on your skin. So you didn't get the full-blown disease, but you you triggered your immune response. So your body like started attacking that virus or bacteria and to protect you against it. And what they discovered is that that mortality rate from someone that had gone through that procedure dropped from 25% all the way down to 1%. And now it's of getting affected all went way down as well. And that technology, that's how it existed for something like 200 years, and it was passed down from word to mouth. There's lots of interesting stories about physicians traveling to foreign lands and seeing this practice and bringing it back and talking about in their community and doing experiments with it. But it really wasn't until the late 1700s there's a gentleman, uh, an English physician by the name of Edward Jenner who took that technology and really took a scientific approach to it and kind of formalized it. What he did is he he discovered there's a related virus that infects cows called cowpox, appropriately enough. And milkmaids will sometimes get these kind of a lesser infection in their hands, these pox. And what he found is if you did a varulation uh with a cowpox infection instead, it's it has less severe side effects, right? But it also protects against that related virus, the smallpox virus. That's that's where we get the name vaccine. Vaxa, it means cow, right? So and this is I consider this to be kind of the first real vaccination was then against smallpox. And I mentioned before, I mean, smallpox is killing millions of people per year. I mean, this is a big deal. This is the leading cause of death. The most historians will estimate something like 10% of people died from smallpox. How did um smallpox kill? What did what did it do? It's infectious, it gets down to your lungs, gets into your blood stream stream, spreads through your body, and just kind of overwhelms your body, you know, as many viruses do, right? Transmitted in ways similar to what we're all experienced with COVID and flu and things like that. Um you can think of it that way. And now it's this historical note, right? And that's the most interesting thing of all is like as of the 1980s, like smallpox has been eradicated from the world. And that shows you how powerful vaccination is. So in the 60s and 70s, the World Health Organization had worldwide vaccination efforts. Countries got together on an international way for vaccines across the world, and we eradicated this virus. Interestingly, it does still exist in some freezers in carefully guarded labs in two places, the United States and Russia. What could possibly go wrong with that? But what an amazing success story. And you think about like how many, you know, hundreds of millions of lives have been saved since that that virus has been eradicated due to vaccine. And then fast forward like another hundred years, you know, we're in the late 1800s, 1885. You know, probably you've heard of Louis Pasteur, not a physician. He's a guy like me, he's a scientist, but he developed vaccines, like, for example, for typhoid. You know, typhoid is not caused by a virus, it's caused by bacteria. But both viruses and bacteria are these tiny little things that what they have in common is they can, you know, they're much, much smaller than our cells, right? And they can multiply very quickly and spread through your body and make you very, very sick. So typhoid was caused by salmonilla bacteria, which you still hear about sometimes, uh salmon typhy. It's a water spread bacteria. So sanitation improvements and different things like that, just washing your hands has greatly reduced uh the spread of so-called typhoid fever. But it's been estimated that Louis Pasteur's vaccine for typhoids saved something like 50,000 lives per year since its discovery. And then in the 1900s, the name that pops up is Jonas Salk. There's the Salk Institute still developing vaccines and doing fundamental research here to this day. And what Jonas Salk contributed to vaccine development is he realized that rather than using a live virus like they were doing with varulation, Edward Jenner did with smallpox, you can use what's called an attenuated virus. And this is a really interesting thing. And I think a lot of people don't understand kind of how that works. But what he did for polio is he took the polio virus and he managed to grow it in culture, so in incubators, which is a creepy thing to grow up a pathogen in an incubator. And this is still being done all in the world. This is how we really understand how diseases work, right? So I've got a colleague, uh Jim Hinkle, shout out to Jim if he's listening. He grows chlamydia in peacher dishes the same way. So it infects human cells. He grows little glass or plastic peacher dishes filled with human cells, and he infects them with this chlamydia bacteria and watches the disease process and tries to find drugs to see how they work. This is what Jonas Sauk did with polio. He grew human cells in a dish, infected them with this virus. And then interestingly, this is the really innovative thing, is he over time changed the conditions in which those cells were growing. So typically you would grow human cells in a petri dish in an environment that is very similar to the human body, right? So 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 Celsius, and then all the right vitamins and nutrients that you would have in your bloodstream feeding your cells typically. But what you can do is you can change those conditions. So for example, one way you could do it is you could slowly, you know, lower the temperature which you're growing the cells. Go from 37 degrees C to 36 and then 35 and then to 34. And what's interesting is that virus will adapt over time to that environment. This is evolution, right? Evolution on a small scale. The genes change, mutate, so that the proteins are better suited for those cooler temperatures. And so if you do that long enough, the virus adapts and grows really well at say 30 degrees Celsius. And but then it doesn't survive well at body temperature. And so then you take that virus out of a 30 degree Celsius incubator and you inject it into a human, that virus doesn't do well. It starts, it kind of sputters a little bit and grows a little bit, enough to make some back, you know, some proteins and things, but you don't really get sick because it doesn't thrive at that temperature. And then your immune system can really kind of take over and attack it, produce these things called antibodies, which are these wonderful proteins that stick to the virus and keep it from infecting other cells and identify it so your immune cells can come gobble it up. But so that's what an attenuated virus is. It's a weakened virus that doesn't really make you sick, but it's similar enough where it triggers an immune response. So that gives you then lasting protection against the real thing. So then when you encounter polio, native polio in the in the wild, your immune system already kind of knows what it looks like. It's got you've got antibody circular in your body that protect you against polio. That's why you don't see too many people that are paralyzed with polio anymore. And back when Jonas Alk was working, right, in the 1950s, this is a something affected millions of people. Uh American presidents, I can't remember which one, you know, was paralyzed with polio very famously, right? FDR. Yeah, thank you. FDR. You can tell I'm not a historian. Trying to talk about history and I'm a biologist. So a little outside of my comfort zone, but again, estimated to save millions of lives, prevent tens of millions of cases of paralysis. Absolutely incredible. That's kind of a brief history of kind of how vaccines work, and you know, hopefully that gives you some idea of the biology and kind of the you know how we develop these over time.

Pasteur, Salk, And Attenuation

SPEAKER_03 12:14

Yeah, I just wanted to emphasize that the history there is important, and not just for understanding how vaccines came to be, but uh precisely because of the blessing that vaccination has been. So many Americans and people you know elsewhere in the world have no clue what it is that they've been protected from. You talk about smallpox, well, that's that's yeah, that was a problem at some point. Polio. I think I remember hearing about that. Oh yeah, it was in his American history class. There was something about FDR, yeah, yeah, yeah. I am old enough that I I know people who knew people who had suffered from polio infections and things like that. And things like you know, the measles and you know, German measles and uh rebella and you know, some of those things that we've we've been vaccinated against. People just don't realize how bad those things were. And you know, it's the purse of of being blessed in in a way. And so uh this little historical thing is a good reminder to us, like, oh, things haven't always been the way they are, and maybe they could go back to that if we aren't careful.

SPEAKER_04 13:20

It's interesting too because some of the skepticism and concern about vaccines, that's not new either, right? Um my wife has a grandmother, it's it's in her late 90s. She's very sharp and still tells wonderful stories, and recently told us a story about how one day at school, she was given by the school nurse a polio vaccine. And she got home and told her dad, and her dad was furious and thought this was some suspicious government conspiracy and tried to scrub it out of her arm with a bar of soap in the bathtub. And uh I thought, man, you know, some things never change, right? So we're still dealing with those kinds of conspiracy theories and things like that surrounding vaccines too.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Well, kind of in that regard, Rob. I think it was called the cutter, uh the cutter incident, where it was polio, but it wasn't attenuated fully, and it got out there. And uh the only reason I mention it is because sometimes the critics of a vaccine tend to pounce on where something goes wrong. And the attenuation uh is a pretty, pretty decent science. I mean, it's it's not like uh uh well we'll hopefully it worked this time, but it's not that precarious. But people do recall some of that stuff, or at least they'll recall it from a from a history book.

SPEAKER_04 14:35

Right. And and you're right, it's it's not perfect. And the success in aggregate is is overwhelming and awe-inspiring. It's I mean, these are some of the most successful biomedical inventions in all history, and then you think about the millions of lives that have been saved. But again, they're not perfect, right? So flu vaccine is a good example. Sometimes, even in a good year, it might reduce your odds of getting the flu by 50%. And someone goes to the trouble of getting their flu shot and they still get the flu. And it's like, well, what in the world did I do that for? Obviously, that was a waste of time, and that's the last time they ever get the flu vaccine. Some sometimes the vaccines don't work, sometimes there's a bad batch, sometimes it's you know, injected incorrectly, there's a lot that can go wrong. And sometimes you have a failure in the attenuation process, and someone can get sick, and that does happen. And it's funny how that's the stories that people tend to hear and latch on to more than hey, I never actually got the flu. Nobody talks tells that story, right? You have to look at it in a well-controlled scientific environment, right? So the way we test vaccines is using controls, using large numbers. Patients in clinical trials were very, very carefully statistically analyzing side effects, benefits, costs with some kind of control where they're not getting that new experimental vaccine to see what effect that has.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

I often wondered whenever I listen to people get engaged in the debate over uh just different kinds of vaccines. I I've wondered if all of us should be responsible enough to to cite statistical uh data. You know, like for example, with the cutter incident, which was an attenuation problem, if the real problem still was so statistically small that the benefit was far outweighed the risk. And of course when those things happen, the system tightens up. It's kind of like but never fails when you're doing a lot of flying that all of a sudden there's a there's a airplane disaster. And I always used to say, well, the best time to fly is like the the next day, because everyone's really paying attention now. And but but I people kind of lose sight of those statistics, they kind of dwell on um the exception to the rule, and uh it becomes and it's frustrating because I think it's very good and I I like the way you worded it, you know, is that it's an it's imperfect. We're imperfect people engaging in imperfect science. But statistically, like with polio is a is a great example, despite the cutter incident, it's phenomenal what what the polio vaccine's done.

SPEAKER_04 17:00

Your analogy to airfare, flying in a plane, is a really good one because when a plane crashes, it's front page headlines everywhere here. Everyone hears about it, and everyone's scared to fly. Like I fly all the time. I still I get a little nervous when I'm getting a plane. It just doesn't seem like this is a defying physics right now when you take off in a plane. But you know, statistically it's safer than driving a car. You know, something we do every single day, mile per mile. That's something I always have to think about is in and the statistical safety of something, you know, relative to the alternative.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

In the past few years, vaccines have been front page news. And we've kind of talked about that and stuff too, more than ever. What do you see as the biggest lessons learned from the COVID era vaccination efforts?

Risk, Statistics, And Public Perception

SPEAKER_04 17:44

Yeah, so we all we all live through that. Like, you know, measles, typhoid, polio, that's in the history books now, but even our kids remember the COVID pandemic. And vaccines played a very important role during that pandemic. And what's interesting is there's there's new technology that emerged post-COVID. So that was that marked the the emergence of what we we call messenger RNA, mRNA vaccines. And this is really interesting technology. So just to back up a little bit and go back to the basic biology. So we all have this genetic material, DNA, that we inherit from our parents. And that makes us who we are. So our kids have half of my DNA, you know, and then half of my wife's DNA, and somehow combines together, and they have this now unique genome that's made of this molecule called DNA. And that DNA is transcribed in this very similar molecule called messenger RNA, mRNA. And what mRNA does, we call it a messenger because the DNA is in this very protected nucleus inside of your cells that kind of keeps the DNA safe. And then the messenger RNA takes that genetic code and it leaves the nucleus to these little protein, they're called pore complexes, and they're very carefully gated. So these little doors that let the messenger RNA out. And then the messenger RNA like gives the instructions to make proteins, which is everything that we do, right? So like the ion channels that allow our neurons to communicate as we're thinking right now, right? The the proteins that are allowing muscles to contract, allow me to speak and drink my coffee, all that's powered by proteins. Proteins are what we do. And for viruses and bacteria too, right? They're making proteins that in that case make us sick. So what was discovered recently is rather than taking a live or attenuated virus, injecting that in hopefully a safer way to stimulate an immune response, what you can do is simply take that messenger code, that messenger RNA, and inject that into a human, and that tricks your body into making a little bit of viral protein or bacterial protein. And that will trigger an immune response. And it's much safer because you don't actually have the virus. In the case of COVID, you're not getting that COVID-19 virus into your body. You're simply getting the instruction to make one protein. Happens to be a protein on the surface of the virus that your immune system can see. It's called the spike protein. And so this is a much safer way, and it leads to much faster vaccine development, right? Because we can synthesize these messenger RNA in ways we can ramp it up. The limitation you remember about the vaccine relatively early after it was being produced, that was largely supply chain issues. That was, you know, like we couldn't find enough glass vials and syringes, couldn't figure out how to store it and keep it cold. You know, there's all kinds of these supply chain logistics that were being worked out. And thankfully the government did a pretty good job like helping support all those logistical things. Um, you might remember Project Warp Speed, right? A lot of that was like working out all the logistics of how to, you know, distribute this vaccine in an efficient way. And the other amazing thing about mRNA technology is you can adjust that messenger RNA to make proteins that more closely resemble that protein as the virus evolves over time, as it changes over time. And we're all aware that the original strain of COVID is very different than the strain that's circulating now. And we said all these different variants. Remember Delta and all these different variants that came through over time and Omicron. And you can adjust that messenger RNA very quickly to produce a protein that more closely resembles the proteins on the surface of it. So it's it's much more effective that way. And for viruses that change quickly, like flu, like COVID, right? You have to kind of adapt your vaccine very quickly, you know, as that virus evolves resistance to it. So it's looking more and more like COVID might be around forever. Just like influenza, right? Which is bad news.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

But well, and I remember too when the vaccine came out. So there were two I think companies that had like the mRNA vaccines, and then there was another company that I think had what would we call it, like the original. The old school, yeah, that had intenuated virus. Yeah. And there were some people that you know that felt more comfortable with that type of vaccine. You know, why is that? Can you kind of break down maybe what some people's worries about the mRNA vaccine were? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

COVID Lessons And mRNA Basics

SPEAKER_04 21:52

So Pfizer and Moderna were the two companies that produced the first clinically approved in America. Other countries had their own versions of this, but but the Pfizer. Moderna products were the first ones approved in the United States, and those were mRNA vaccines. And then Johnson Johnson produced kind of an old school, like attenuated vaccine. And when they did the clinical trials of that, and they they each did independently large clinical trials that involved tens of thousands of patients, where they would inject the mRNA vaccine or a placebo, and then just a saline solution that had no effect biologically. And then they would watch these people went out into the wild. Some of them got sick, some of them didn't. They very carefully tracked the percentage of people that then got sick with COVID and the ones that didn't. And if they got sick, how sick did they get? Were they hospitalized? Did they die? Those kinds of things. So early in those clinical trials, what we saw is that the messenger RNA vaccines were about 94 to 96% effective at eliminating infection. And those that did get infected, 5-6% that did get infected, the duration was shorter. They were producing more efficient antibodies. There's a particular type of antibody that's in our secretions, like in our nose. So the virus that you then do shed is less likely to infect other people. You're you're sick for less time, so you're less likely to infect other people. So it made it less likely that you were going to get sick and the severity of the illness went down, but it also made it less likely that you were going to get other people sick, which is a really important, I think, discovery. If we start talking about the ethics of vaccines, it's not just a personal decision. There's also public health implications. Like, how does it affect the people around you? But COVID-19, early in the pandemic in the United States, we saw a 0.67 case mortality rate. Like one in every 180 people or something like that would die of COVID-19. And we know that the older folks were much more likely to have severe cases, be hospitalized to die than the younger folks, it wasn't too bad. Very, very small mortality rate with kids. But the vaccine dropped the hospitalization rates dramatically. It dropped the amount of cardiovascular damage that resulted from people that recovered from COVID. There was about a 50, 60% decrease in mortality rate. Again, the duration of the infection was shortened, the severity of infection. So lots of good things. The Johnson Johnson vaccine was a little less effective, still quite effective for a vaccine of this nature. It was in the 70s or something, yes, maybe low 80s or high 70s, something like that. You know, so still very effective. But some people were more comfortable with that technology that'd been around a while. There were a lot of rumors circulating. I remember seeing memes on social media and stuff talking about how these messed RNA vaccines are going to reprogram your DNA and turn you into a zombie or robot or something like this, or the government's trying to control you with microchips. Being a college professor, you hear a lot of things from students, right? I think there's just that fear of something new. I think one of the most important things that I do in education is helping students understand how to weight the quality of evidence. So I spent a lot of time working with science students or pre-health students, you know, nursing students and things like that, and talking to them about, right, here's two different studies that came to two different conclusions. Which one's better? Like the number of patients involved, how well it was controlled, this type of statistics that were used. Like we spent a lot of time talking about all that stuff. But for the general public, it's even more basic than that. Like, how do you weight a clinical study that involves tens of thousands of patients against a meme you saw on Facebook? It turns out most of the public doesn't even know what to do with those two things, right? Or or even how to access the, you know, those clinical studies and start to get out of that data. So I think there's an important role for education here.

SPEAKER_03 25:24

And even when you get to statistics, I mean you you ask somebody, well, you know, we we've got this new thing, whether it's a vaccine or or whatever, and it's 98% effective. Should we go ahead with this? And they'll say, oh yeah, that sound sounds like really good odds. Let's do that. But if they happen to be among the 2%, or they have a loved one who's among the 2%, then like, no, no, this is awful. No, no, nobody should be doing this. This is dangerous. It's it's hard to overcome that kind of thing because again, the the 2%, you know, like the case you were talking about with air air travel and things like that, that's what gets the attention.

SPEAKER_04 25:56

And also the the other problem was it turns out, unfortunately, it's not like measles, it's not like polio. This COVID virus was evolving pretty quickly. It was changing pretty fast, which means that that immunity, that really profound immunity, I mean 95% is like about as good as we've ever seen a vaccine work, but it wasn't that durable. What happens is you take the vaccine, the the levels of antibodies and therefore production build up over the course of three, four weeks, and you have very robust protection, like that 95% protection was like, you know, four to 12 weeks after the vaccine. But then the antibody levels start to drop off, the virus is starting to change, and the proteins on the surface of the virus start to look a little different, and your antibodies don't stick as well. And so the good news is like the risk in terms of death and hospitalization was durable, but the protection against infection went down over time. Or six to twelve months later, maybe you were only at 15% less likely to get infected than someone that was unvaccinated.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

At the risk of poking the beer, you know, there's a lot of lot of talk today on mRNA, and the current administration has kind of pulled funding and so forth. What what is their logic without without us m making a statement? I well, first of all, just full disclosure, I've been a fan of mRNA research from the very beginning. In fact, I remember when I reported on it to the National Board, I had said that I'd always felt that it would it would hold the chances for a cure for the common cold. I just really like it, but I don't understand what what is the the blowback on it that we're getting now.

Efficacy, Transmission, And Trial Data

SPEAKER_04 27:30

Is it just anti-vax attitude or is there some science or I'm I'm gonna try really hard not to get drawn into politics, a because I'm not a political guy, like I don't consider myself Republican or Democrat, or you know, like uh but you know, clearly there's political influence on these things, you know, and that's where a lot of the funding for vaccine antibiotic research comes from. A lot of people trust places like Center for Disease Control, and these are federal agencies, right? And the recommendations that they make affect like how insurance provides vaccines to families, the recommendations that they make, and so and these these agencies are led by political appointees. And what's interesting is over the years, there's been some study, like I'll mention one in particular that I think has kind of influenced and changed the way we look at these things politically. There is a paper published in a pretty well-known scientific journal back in the late 90s. I think it was like 1998, 1999. And the author was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Wakefield, physician. Um, he's a lead author. It was published in this journal, Lancet. And um, basically, what he, the conclusion of this paper was that vaccines were linked to autism. We saw this increase of autism that rose alongside the increase, the spread of vaccination around the world. And again, one of the first things we teach students in science classes is to be very careful not to confuse correlation with causation, right? People buy more ice cream in the summer, you know, kind of like correlations and then trying to figure out some cause of link, like why do our taste buds change and then when it gets hot, or you know, like you make strange conclusions if you'd read too much into a correlation. But that's what this was. And it turns out this paper was retracted, like it wasn't well controlled. I I think there were like 12 authors, and everyone but Dr. Wakefield, who eventually lost his license, kind of said we made some mistakes here, and like just kind of disavowed that that paper over time. But that had a lasting effect on the public psyche. I mean, we've all met kids with autism, and it's true, like the diagnosis rate of autism is is going up, and there's all kinds of reasons for that we could talk about, but we don't fully understand still what causes autism. And so people are trying to find something to pin that to. And that that paper somehow really got out there in the media and it it kind of stuck, even though it was retracted. And now many, many, many very well-controlled studies have been done. It's showed absolutely no link. You do these placebo-controlled studies, taking vaccine or sometimes ingredients in vaccines like thimerosol, you know, from some of the, yeah, some of these things that were like preservatives, like added to the vaccine to help give them a longer shelf life, for again to fix those supply chain problems, were were kind of implicated in some of this too. And many cases those were removed. And again, they saw no difference in vaccine efficacy or safety, autism rates, things like this. And so all that's been debunked, but it still sticks. And and we I hear politicians kind of talking about that kind of stuff still. And so, and it's difficult for, you know, I think for someone that doesn't know who to trust, they s they see this public official talking about, hey, and we uh we're gonna slow down on the vaccines, you know, like you know uh these kinds of things.

Evolving Variants And Waning Immunity

SPEAKER_03 30:38

And it it kind of sticks with people. Uh, and that I mean you just connected two two thoughts there, you know, or previous topics of the the conversation is the COVID era stuff and the public trust of, you know, whether it's the CDC or what your doctors are telling you, or the American Medical Association Association or or whomever is that I mean it is a sad truth that the way the COVID, I'll just call it emergency was handled here in the United States, there was a lot that was done and said um that caused the general public to no longer trust the experts, whether it's people in government or people uh other other types of experts. And in some cases it was people lying just because it was easier to lie than to tell the truth. In some cases it's what you might be calling the the noble lie where they're thinking people can't really handle this, so we'll tell them something other than the truth. But that kind of stuff, it it just gets out there and then people don't, you know, they stop believing anything. And you know, now we're at a situation with where the leadership of the the CDC and the FDA and such is has changed. There's that much more reason people have to say, well, if that just changes according to the politics, I I don't I don't think I'll believe any about it, any of it from anybody. And you know, that makes your job as a scientist that much harder because you know you've got the data, you've got the facts, you've got the logic. Uh, but if people are saying, well, I I don't feel good about that, you know, that it you know, they just won't listen.

SPEAKER_04 32:02

A good example of that is the like the masks. Remember wearing face masks early in the pandemic. And like a surgical mask is is designed that's used in hospitals for good reason, right? I mean, there's this water-loving surface on the inside that absorbs the water droplets that are coming out of your mouth when you talk. And if physicians wear those when they're doing surgery, like droplets from the mouth that might cause an infection in their patient as they're operating on, right? Many of them get trapped. Again, masks aren't perfect, just like vaccines aren't perfect, but it it really helps provide good protection for patients. We know that there's been lots of studies done. You're less likely to have infection post-surgery if your surgeon was wearing a mask, right? And that's why that's best practice. And you wouldn't want your surgeon not to wear a mask when they do surgery on you. And we know COVID is spread through respiratory droplets. And so everyone, when this pandemic started, let's put some masks on and stay safe, right? Um and but early there was this massive supply shortage. So suddenly hospitals ran out of masks, nurses that are caring for COVID patients, they were having to reuse masks and think about how gross that is, right? Horrible things like that were happening. And, you know, well-intentioned tension government officials like tried to stop the rush on face masks by saying, We're not recommending masks at this time, thinking we need to save them for nurses and doctors, these frontline medical workers who don't have them or don't can't have access to them. So the public said, Oh, they're not recommending masks, they must not do any good. And then they change their mind once the mask supply came back up. And these this kind of mixed messages, I mean, we have to be very careful how we communicate that stuff, or you can lose public trust very quickly. And that's the kind of things that we saw happen during the pandemic that are just tragic in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Aaron Powell You know, Rob, during the um you had mentioned about correlation and causation. Correlation oftentimes spurs research. You know, when people see correlation, it spurs it. But it's kind of like having a half of a job done. I know that we got, because we have on the CLR website, we have a paper on there on mRNA, and then we have another paper on there on the physician statement on vaccines for CLR. And uh the people who have objected oftentimes came from a correlation perspective. And so uh and and the the so the problem that you always have is you're you find yourself in a predicament where you don't necessarily want to disagree, like you say, you know, the uh corollary rise in autism uh must be vaccines, because we we draw those correlations a lot uh in other areas, and people will automatically presume so we've seen it before. But it's always kind of like half doing the homework. It's like you turned in your homework half done. And so when people would write me and they were angry because I wouldn't accept a correlation as concluded research. And I I love correlations. I mean, I I I I'm always I'm I'm a problem solver, so I live by correlations, you know. But you don't die by correlations, you know.

Politics, Misinformation, And Trust

SPEAKER_04 35:01

You're absolutely right. Correlations, when we observe something like that, that's the reason why we set up a controlled scientific experiment to try to get at the cause of is there a causal link between these two? That's what a good scientific experiment is. And we study those kinds of correlations because like it's interesting no matter what happens. If there's not a link between a vaccine and autism, that's important information. And if there is a link between vaccine and autism, I always try to set up experiments that are win-win that way. No matter what happens, like it's interesting, valuable data. And I encourage my students to try to find experiments like that too. But starting with that correlation is really important. But yeah, you have to do a controlled experiment with a placebo group, large numbers, carefully documenting, doing statistical analysis to see if there's a meaningful statistical difference.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Yeah. Well, um, want to be able to talk some about the ethics um of vaccine, especially as it relates to Christians as well. How can Christians think faithfully about vaccines in light of loving our neighbor and caring for the vulnerable?

Autism Myths And Evidence Quality

SPEAKER_04 36:05

Yeah, great qu question. So from my perspective as a Christian, humans of our inestimable value, right? So we're products of divine intervention created, we're we're loved by God, we're made in God's image, and all this gives us like this intrinsic value. And so because of that, you know, we have a responsibility, you know, to protect and care for our own lives, like stewardship of our own body, but also we have a responsibility to our neighbor, right? Um, you know, to protect and care for the most vulnerable around us. And that's what makes bioethics surrounding vaccines complex, right? Because you have the one question of like, what's best to do for my body, right? On a kind of a personal level. But you also have the question of what's best to do for my neighbor. And I think one of the disheartening things that I saw during the pandemic is when students sometimes would ask me, or my friends, you know, because I know I'm a biomedical research scientist. So here's the closest we have to an expert. Let's let's ask him what he thinks. They were always asking it from a personal perspective. And I always try to redirect them to think more broadly about their community. So for example, I taught nursing students, and I'd have a nursing student that for whatever reason was just very cautious, kind of apprehensive. This mRNA technology is new. Like, how do we know we can trust it? You know, I've seen the studies, I know it looks safe, but what about long-term effects? You know, these kinds of concerns. I'd always just say, I mean, it's important to think about those things, right? And those are legitimate concerns. But it's also important to think about your patients, right? You're scheduled to do a rotation at Children's Hospital, Wisconsin next semester. Most of the kids that are there, a lot of them are have leukemia, which is impacting their immune system. And we know that this vaccine reduces the likelihood that you're going to make someone else sick. Not only you get sick, but the nasty thing about COVID is sometimes you can even have asymptomatic transmission. You know, especially in young people like students, they can get just a little bit sick and then spread that virus without realizing it. It would be much simpler if, you know, you had a runny nose, stayed home, it wouldn't spread. That wasn't the case with COVID, right? You were shedding infectious virus even before all the symptoms came on sometimes. So by taking that vaccine, you're not only making you safer, you're making your grandma safer. When you visit her, you're less likely to infect her. You're making those kids with leukemia at children's hospital safer. So there's a lot of things to kind of weigh and balance there and becomes really complex. Another factor I think, you know, I looked at back statistically, um, some of the groups that were more likely to not accept the vaccine during COVID were Protestants and Catholics. And I think a big part of that was work that was done on the research and development side with to develop the COVID vaccine and understand how it works. I mentioned before when I was talking about like Jonas Salk and how he was growing viruses in petri dishes with cells. Well, in some of the research and development of making vaccines, sometimes we use human cell lines. And some of those cell lines have interesting paths and sometimes bioethically complex paths. So for example, I think it was the Pfizer line. There's some research and development work using a cell line called HEC 293 cells. HEK293. And HEK stands for human embryonic kidney cells. And what most people, like my students, when they encounter these in a lab, it's funny because I'll get emails from a student that I taught 10 years ago, like, hey, Dr. Balza, I'm using these cells. I just looked them up. HECK 293, I didn't even think about what they were, just culturing them. I actually looked them up on Wikipedia or something, and they're they're human embryonic kidney cells. Can you tell me about the bioethical implications and things like this? And these cells are really interesting, they have a long past. Um they were they're about as old as I am, you know, developed in the in the mid-1970s in the Netherlands. And we don't really know like they came from human embryonic kidneys, but we don't know if that was that, you know, a miscarriage or was that an elective abortion or what happened, like that history. We don't know anything about that. So there's a possibility that there is an elective abortion. Some of these cells were biopsied, placed into culture, and propagated in labs, and then passed down over the years. And so some 50 for some 50 years, these cells have been propagated and we're using them to research things like vaccines and many other things, by the way. Um, just to be clear, the vast majority of the UMS pharmacopia is developed using cell lines that ultimately at some point in their past were developed from fetal cells. And so the question that a lot of people wrestle with is like some of my students would wrestle with, am I morally culpable if I'm working in a lab that uses these cells in abortion? Or thinking about it from a patient perspective, if I accept a vaccine that at some point in the development of the technology used to make that vaccine, they were tested on these human cell lines. Am I morally culpable in that abortion in some sense? And these are good questions to be thinking about and things that I wrestle with too. What I'll say to that though is I think you think about several things. Think about timing, proximity, knowledge, intent, way all these factors are going to be thinking about that. Here's an example. You can just kind of think through this complex problem. I think if you're pro-life, as I think we all are, i we would all agree that it would be immoral to be a surgeon performing elective abortions in a clinic. We'd also probably agree that if there was a a nurse there assisting that physician, handing her tools or something, right? That nurse is probably morally culpable in that abortion as well. But what about the janitor that takes out the trash from the abortion clinic? What about the secretary at the abortion clinic? What about the bus driver that brought the secretary to the abortion clinic that morning? Is that bus driver morally culpable in that abortion? What about the gas station attendant that pumped gas into the bus that took the secretary that scheduled the abortion, right? Like, so you can keep going back further and further and further. And if you think about it, like everything we do like touches sin in some way, right? You know, I heard somebody make the argument that, you know, you shouldn't buy a Volkswagen because they built machines for the Nazis back in World War II, right? Are you morally culpable for the Holocaust if you're driving a Volkswagen, right? Those kinds of arguments, like how far back do we take this, right? And if if so, like can we do anything? Can you buy any product that's that's not produced in some sort of simple way? And so it's really hard. And so weighing things like that against protecting your neighbor, protecting your mother, you might have a spouse that's that's dealing with cancer going through chemotherapy and you you know, or has lung disease already, and you know it's very susceptible to COVID. Um, these are complex moral decisions, right? And from a Christian perspective, obviously like following one's conscience on these matters is very, very important. But also to having clear understanding of like you hear people say things like, well, you're just injecting fetal tissue into your body when you accept this vaccine. That's just not true. You know, every time you know they develop a vaccine, they abort babies to that's also not true. In fact, you can make an argument these cell lines reduce the demand for fetal tissue because they're immortal, right? These hec 293 cells have been growing for 50 years and they can grow for 500 more years, we'll never run out of them. And therefore, in some ways, like the use of these cell lines reduces the need for experimental material derived from a abortion or something like that. So really complex issues. Uh and kind of sometimes the more you think about it, the more confusing it gets in some ways, but it's important to think through these things.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

Just one final question. If you could leave our listeners with one guiding principle for navigating vaccines wisely and faithfully, what would it be?

SPEAKER_04 43:45

Oh, great question. I'm a Lutheran, and so I'll say from a Lutheran perspective, Luther always talked about God providing for us through masks. The the gross not surgical masks. Not surgical masks, the the mask of God, Luther would often talk about, right? So So in other words, like God provides for our daily sustenance through butchers and bakers and farmers, and these are the masks through which He provides for us. Right. And so some people have told me like you know, for a Christian to accept a vaccine demonstrates a lack of trust in God's providence. And I would say if you think through that from a Lutheran perspective, that vaccine may be God's providence. It may be his way of protecting you, your loved ones, your community for something like this. So we're not just the product of God's providence, we're also the agents of God's providence. And I I teach my students that are going into medicine or science this too, right? God is gonna serve your community through you in these fields, much like the way you know God provides for a congregation through the pastor. Lutheran idea of vocation. And I think that's a c a concept that gets lost a lot in these in these discussions. So I guess I just leave my my my Christian and Lutheran friends that are wrestling with these topics with that idea, you know, to kind of think about too in the midst of all this.

SPEAKER_03 45:01

If I can just add on to that, the vocation of the average person is also that of a citizen. And as Christians, as Christian citizens, we have an obligation to love those around us and look out for what's best for them. And that's again the previous things. Whether or not we get vaccinated or have our kids vaccinated, that is something that affects other people as well.

Masks, Messaging, And Public Confidence

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Well, thank you very much for joining us. Um and we we really appreciate it. And for all of our listeners too, if you have any questions on this topic, you can reach us at lifechallenges.us. Thanks a lot, and we'll see you back next time.

SPEAKER_03 45:38

Thank you. Thank you for joining us for the Life Challenges Podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it, and sharing it with friends. We're here to help, so if you have questions on today's topic or other life issues, you can submit them as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes at lifechallenges.us, or email us at podcast at ChristianLiferesources.com. You can find past episodes and other valuable information at Lifechallenges.us, so please check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit ChristianLiferesources.com. May God give you wisdom, love, strength, and peace in Christ for every life challenge.