A cold beer won’t save your life
But your favorite brewery may keep you breathing for years to come
Homer Simpson often proclaims alcohol is the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems. He may be right but I doubt he has any idea how monumental the problem it solves could be.
The last time I left my apartment was roughly four weeks ago. I was in line outside a local grocery store and the man in front of me—whose unexpected neighborliness in a city where practically no one knows his or her neighbor—told me a coronavirus vaccine was forthcoming from Germany.
A jolly and eerily optimistic New Yorker, he shared three too many details with me about the sci-fi novel he’d just published, and then he went inside the store, deserting me as I realized I’d wait another fifteen minutes for the next group of ten impatient shoppers—which I was now at the head of—to be admitted into the building, the home of one of the largest and oldest active food co-operatives in the United States, and a place with one of the best revolving beer selections in this part of Brooklyn.
Like your favorite brew, vaccines take time to ferment. While Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, reminds us that a COVID-19 vaccine will take a minimum of a year to 18 months to develop, the hard truth is the fastest vaccine to be produced took four years.¹
The mumps vaccine was first licensed in 1948, three years after the war culminated. Many people—including countless doubters of the severity of the mumps—perished as epidemiologists and other health experts conducted the necessary clinical trials to validate the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.
While many still resist the importance of vaccinated their children, most of us understand that mumps aren’t as harmless as the word looks and sounds.
As complex and slow as testing a vaccine is, health experts tell us—and history shows us—that generating hundreds of millions of doses is even more challenging. Most American vaccine plants produce 5 million to 10 million doses annually, primarily for the 4 million babies born and 4 million people who reach age 65 annually, said Dr. R. Gordon Douglas Jr., a former president of Merck’s vaccine division.²
While contemporary techniques using RNA or DNA can accelerate the production line, clinical trials take time, in part since there’s no way to speed up the production of antibodies in our bodies—no magic hangover cure like the one lurking behind so many Americans’ bathroom mirrors.
Last summer my wife and I visited the Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, ME, a beautiful facility just steps away from several up-and-coming micro-breweries that dream of becoming the next Allagash, which is the largest brewer in Maine and one of the companies responsible for bringing hazy, Beglian style wietbier to the masses in the US. The tour guide gave each of us a pair of bulky headphones, the likes of which I’d only seen before when I gazed out the window from the seat of an airplane as it revved its engines.
What struck me most about Allagash’s facility was its gargantuan chrome vats and its sterility. Unclean brewing systems produce bad beer that can boil over into a public health issue of its own.
Allagash’s brewing facility was a lab fit for so much more than the fermentation of starch sugars in the wort.
Established in April 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) is an agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with six semi-autonomous regional offices and 150 field offices worldwide, the WHO conducts collaborative research and makes recommendations to its 194 member nation states, has no legal authority of its own, and relies on two primary sources of revenue:
- assessed contributions: set amounts expected to be paid by member-state governments, scaled by income and population
- voluntary contributions: other funds provided by member states, plus contributions from private organizations and individuals³
In turn, the WHO advises its member states who make their own decisions whether to implement the WHO’s evidence-based guidance, which derives from field research by preeminent health experts on the ground, and in the lab.
One of the WHO’s many programs is its Initiative for Vaccine Research (IVR), which facilitates vaccine research and development against pathogens with significant disease and economic burden, with a particular focus on low and middle income countries. The IVR’s activities span the following areas:
- facilitation of early stage R&D in disease areas with no available vaccines or sub-optimal vaccines
- research to optimize public health impact where existing vaccines are underutilized
- research to aid introduction decision-making and post-licensure assessments of risk/benefit research to improve monitoring and evaluation of vaccines in use in immunization programs⁴
The US government is a primary partner of the WHO, providing the largest amount of funding of any member state. President Trump recently said the US contributes “between $400 million and $500 million per year.” Meanwhile, Trump approved a defense bill in late December 2019 that authorizes $738 billion in spending for fiscal year 2020.⁵ The US government also delivers substantial technical support to the WHO, and is an instrumental participant in the organization’s governance structure.
The WHO currently faces challenges, namely limited funding and bureaucratic red tape. Despite the major role the organization played in responding to a number of recent outbreaks, the White House just announced it will suspend funding to the WHO until a review of the organization’s COVID-19 activities are reviewed.
Accountability is critical and so is speed to resolution. How quickly will the Trump administration organize and complete its review of the WHO’s COVID-19 efforts? A primary factor is motive.
Countless studies over decades show vaccines are incredibly safe, despite claims to the contrary in many anti-vaccine publications. Most adverse effects of vaccines are minor, short-lived, and controlled by over-the-counter medicine. Roughly one per thousands to one per millions of vaccine doses result in more serious complications, and so few deaths are attributed to vaccines because the volume is so small and the statistical significance of any correlational study is too low to report.⁶
Vaccine plants, like Allagash’s beer-making facility, are large, but unlike the nearly 7,000 breweries actively operating in the United States today—prior to the implementation of critical measures to begin flattening the curve, that is—there are a limited number of vaccine plants in the US.
China is home to the biggest vaccine industry, and India, Brazil, and several European countries have many plants of their own. While these nations may be equipped to make vaccines for the United States, they’ll likely prioritize their resources for their own citizens first, just as the US federal government and many states would, if we had the means. The price for vaccine imports will be large, and Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, defunding of the World Health Organization, and his inability to cooperate with leaders of other nation states, won’t afford the US many discounts.
Arthur M. Silverstein, a retired medical historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, suggests another avenue, and this is where Homer Simpson’s declaration comes into play.
The US federal and state governments could work with breweries and distilleries to convert beer and liquor plants into vaccine production facilities, and tap into those big, shiny vats to ferment a brew that saves lives.
Vaccine production is complicated and many of the biggest beer companies in the country operate facilities in other countries, but Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, and Pabst Brewing Company—and many of the larger micro-breweries in the US—should be prepared to step up, or Trump should invoke the Defense Production Act to force the effort—like he has hundreds of thousands of times to ensure the procurement of military and defense equipment.
Let’s hope Trump moves faster than he did when he had the opportunity to invoke the Act swiftly in February in order to mandate the private sector to manufacture more ventilators, a decision he made only after weeks of rising pressure from governors and health experts was too great to ignore.
If a safe and validated vaccine is created, the United States may need over 300 million doses to feed the population, and that’s assuming only one shot is needed per person. As of mid-April 2020, there are over 330 million people in the US, and I suspect many of them will resist and refuse the vaccine, in turn increasing the risk of further contamination of the national and global population, including the epidemiologists, doctors, nurses, and other essential workers who are risking their lives every single day for the lives of us all.
Sources:
[1] The New York Times, April 18, 2020
[2] The New York Times, April 18, 2020
[3] Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF.org)
[4] World Health Organization (who.int)
[5] CNBC.com
[6] CDC and InfoMed Online
[7] Worldometer (worldometers.info)
Thanks for reading…
