I hope I cheered my doctor up.
I had to go see my doctor for a problem not related to Covid-19. As it happened, my son had seen him earlier, whereupon my son reported that he was basically freaking out about the vaccine/mutation situation.
Apparently he was thinking it was never going to end, and was extremely stressed about the vaccine supply apparently because the State of New Jersey had a disconnect with the status of his vaccine supplies and the people who could get it and now he was forced to field a lot of calls from anxious and sometimes angry people. He was worried about the mutants.
So after the exam was done, I asked him, cheerfully, if he was having "fun" with Covid. He looked really frazzled and said, "No! No!"
Happily - unhappily because it was a disease - I am a veteran of the industrial scale up of HIV protease inhibitors, and was intimately aware of what people go through under such a circumstance, a circumstance wherein a logistical screw up, or perhaps, a regulatory or process screw up means, literally, that people will die. So you do everything you can to do everything right.
It's serious, a huge responsibility, but in those times, one in which pharmaceutical teams, I'm happy to say, rose to the occasion - you saw the best in people mostly, and very little of the worst. I was very, very, very proud of the opportunity to have been involved.
"Look," I told my doctor, "for about a year, I was dealing with people begging me for supplies and then, all of a sudden, the whole thing dried up, because so many players rushed in that eventually there was an over supply."
As for mutations, I said, I know, I know, I know, retroviruses suck because they mutate so rapidly. But I told him, and of course he knows this, that this is reason we now give HIV protease inhibitor cocktails, because any virus with a single nucleotide polymorphism, or even a polynucleotide polymorphism is going to be hit by one or the other.
We saw these SNP's and PNP's all the time, but lives are still, almost 30 years later, being saved with protease inhibitors.
I told him about the glycosylation patterns on the coronavirus, contrasting them with HIV, and letting him know that this was a different, easier, ball game and finally about how these nucleotide drugs are easy to re-engineer to a moving target.
"Look," I said, "it's going to be, at the worst case, ultimately, like when you ask me to get a flu shot every year. You're going to ask me did I get my annual Covid shot. The infrastructure will be there, and sales guys will be calling on you to tell you why their vaccine is better than the other guy's, begging you to use theirs."
Expecting a doctor to really know about the industrial operations of the pharmaceutical industry is rather like expecting your car mechanic to know about how an auto parts plant works. Your mechanic doesn't need to know about the metallurgy of a water pump to fix your car. He just needs to know if the part fits and if it works.
I felt my doctor felt better. I hope so. He's under a huge amount of strain, and I could see it.
I feel better because adults are in charge of the country again, which makes everything better automatically. It doesn't mean we're "there yet," but at least we know where we're going.
Life is interesting, and then you die.
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