Hello everybody. I'm here from my office
temporarily for two reasons. First, to
let you know that this is your last
chance to support Sihow during our
yearly postcard fundraiser, and I want
you to understand something about that.
Second, I want to tell you about the
illness that I have right now, why I
have it, and why you maybe never will,
because that's a science story, and it's
fascinating. So, to the first part, I
need you to know that in order to fund
size, we need people to give us money,
but we do not need our conversion rate
to be particularly high. We are
dedicated to making highquality reality
based trustworthy science content at
Sihow, which is more expensive than the
average YouTube video, but we're also
focused on doing that efficiently, which
means that only a select group of you
actually need to support us financially.
This is the way we want it. We don't
want to make everybody pay. We want it
to be free for everyone. But this select
group does pay so that everyone else can
have it. And on the order of the whole
channel, it's something like one in
every 3,000 people who watch Sidihow
gives us money. So, I want to be honest
with you. This lets a lot of you off the
hook. You don't all have to give us
money, but there are some of you for
whom $60 isn't that much money. $5 a
month. 5 time 12 is 60. And so, we have
a $60 postcard that you can buy and that
we will send to you. And there are also,
and this is more rare, but it's real.
There are some of you for whom $500
isn't that much money. And so, we have
this $500 spinner, which has etched on
it the most important photograph in the
history of science that you could buy.
If you think this value is worth it,
hundreds of videos per year, not just
for you, but for everyone in the world,
combined with the efforts of our team to
get that content in front of people, to
get them to click on it, to enrich their
lives, to help them understand their
world, to push back against content made
by people who one might say have less
allegiance to the truth. Now is your
time. If you don't do it now, you won't
do it. So do it now. And now the second
part of the video. I have shingles. This
is a very weird disease. It's very
unpleasant. I'm in pain. The goal for
this video previously was that I was
going to do some kind of stunt. I cannot
do a stunt right now. I am moving the
maximum amount I can currently move. And
this is this is weird. I'm 45 years old,
but I first got the virus that is
causing my shingles when I was around
eight when I got chickenpox. And when I
was a kid, everybody got chickenpox.
Like literally 99% of kids got
chickenpox. And on the whole, chickenpox
isn't that big of a deal. With millions
of cases in the US every year, only a
very small percentage of those kids were
hospitalized. Around 10,000, and only
dozens of them died from the disease.
Now, that's dozens of kids who died.
They didn't get to grow up and become 45
year olds with shingles. But compared
with a lot of infectious diseases like
measles, for example, this was a much
less dangerous disease. While immunity
from chickenpox after the first
infection, is usually lifelong, the
virus that causes chickenpox never
leaves your body. It hides in your
nerves and later, given the right
circumstances, can reemerge, infecting a
branch of your nerves and then erupting
out of the skin. Do you want to see what
it looks like? Too bad. This later
infection is more dangerous and more
painful. If it happens on the face,
which luckily did not happen to me, it
can threaten your vision. It's also
extremely painful, and it can sometimes
lead to lifelong nerve pain, though
that's unlikely in cases like mine as I
am fairly young. Fingers crossed. But
the thing is, if you were born in the
late '9s or later, you probably will not
have to deal with this because you were
probably vaccinated against chickenpox.
One of the solices I have been taking
from my very painful ordeal is that
humans looked at this and said, "This
does not have to be normal." They did
something about it, and now, as a
middle-aged man, I'm kind of a relic.
I'm getting a disease that my child will
almost certainly not get. But how come
it showed up in time for him, but not
for me? There's reasons and I want to
tell you about them. In the 1970s, a
scientist named Mitiyaki Takahashi
isolated the virus from a child and then
did what vaccine scientists often do
with viruses like this. He weakened it
by growing it over and over again under
lab conditions in weird circumstances
until it became much less dangerous.
That weakened version, which is called
the Okcha strain, could still teach the
immune system what the Vericella virus
looked like, but it was much less likely
to cause the full-blown disease. And
this is the core trick of what we call a
live attenuated virus. You are showing
the immune system the enemy, but a
version that cannot do nearly as much
harm, but it is still alive. Doing this
with the chickenpox virus is a different
challenge than with most viruses,
though, because everyone knows that
vericella doesn't just infect and leave.
It stays forever. And a live attenuated
virus would also stay forever. And we
didn't know what that was going to mean
for the long-term epidemiology of the
infection. Would the attenuated virus
reemerge as shingles? Would it change
the course of the infection in some
other way that we don't understand?
Well, it's one thing to make a live
attenuated virus vaccine against a virus
that infects you, replicates, and
leaves. It's another thing to make one
against a virus that can disappear into
the nervous system for life. Could the
weakened virus also go latent? Could it
reactivate? Would immunity last? Would
it be safer than the natural infection
in the long run? Those are the kinds of
questions you want scientists to be
asking and they were the questions that
were being asked as I was being born. So
once the vaccine existed, it still took
time to understand what the full course
of the vaccine's impacts would be. But
given enough follow-up time, scientists
found that the live attenuated vicella
vaccine did not just prevent a lot of
chickenpox, it also left kids with a
much lower risk of shingles later on.
The disease got better at basically
every point we care about. fewer
infections, milder illness, and less
reactivation down the road. There was no
way to get that information except for
watching a vaccinated group and an
unvaccinated group grow up together. But
that wasn't the end of the story. By
1988, when I got chickenpox, we probably
knew enough that we should have started
giving kids this vaccine, but we did not
do it until like 10 years later. And the
reason is that we had a new question,
which is that should we be vaccinating
against chickenpox at all? Because for a
long time the answer from society was
like I don't know probably not.
Chickenpox was very normal. Almost
everyone got it. Most people were fine.
Yes, millions of cases a year in the US
meant tens of thousands of
hospitalizations and around a hundred
deaths before the vaccine. But because
each individual case was nearly always
resolved without complications, it was
treated as like just a routine little
misery like getting the pukes or
scraping your knee or lice. And that
meant that the vaccine didn't have like
the same kind of urgency that the
measles vaccine had had. Measles was
terrifying in a way chickenpox never
could imagine being. Measles is much
more severe, much more likely to
hospitalize, more likely to kill, more
likely to have serious complications. So
one reason it took so long is that
scientists had to solve a hard problem.
But another reason is that once they
solved it, society had to decide whether
the problem was worth solving. And this
is a weird thing about vaccines and
other public health interventions. They
don't just prevent suffering. They
change what kinds of suffering we
consider acceptable. They take a thing
that generations of people shrugged at
and say, "Uh, actually, no. Children
don't need to go through this and
45year-old sideshow hosts don't need to
have this happening on their back." And
that's what happened with chickenpox. We
had the science and then we had the
caution and all the science that came
along with the caution. And then
eventually we had the social realization
that just because a misery is common
doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything
about it. And this might also explain
something else which is why people are
often more afraid of the measles vaccine
than the chickenpox vaccine. Even though
measles is by far the more dangerous
disease. Now part of this is historical
bad luck and misinformation. The measles
vaccine got caught up in one of the most
damaging pieces of medical fraud in
modern history. And the effects of that
lie are very much still with us. But
there's also like a human thing here.
People are not great at risk assessment.
And measles is just much more forgotten
than chickenpox is. And look, I don't
have good data to back this up. So this
is not something that we would say in a
typical sideshow video, but this is not
a typical sizehow video. But I think
people remember chickenpox and I think
they don't remember measles. Even though
chickenpox is a much less dangerous
disease, chickenpox feels like more
immediate and real. While measles feels
almost old timey, parents born before
the mid '9s almost certainly remember
the unpleasantness of chickenpox. And
they might also have recently
experienced the pain of shingles. My
wife got shingles while she was
pregnant, but they almost certainly do
not remember what it was like to get
measles. And this is one of the great
tragedies of successful public health.
When you do your job well enough, the
intervention becomes much more visible
than the disaster it prevents. And this
is one reason why good information is
extremely valuable. We are bad at risk
assessment, but science is good at risk
assessment. And this is why science and
common sense often do not align. And
that misalignment can be exploited
either by huers or by true believers who
imagine themselves to be heroes. But
there are ways to get common sense and
science to align more tightly. And we do
that with good information explained
well. And that's what we do here at
Sihow. And we're going to keep doing it
with your help. Even as I wse through a
virus that has been waiting in my nerves
since the Reagan administration, a virus
I could have avoided, but science took
its time to make sure the vaccine worked
well and was safe. And now I know my son
will probably never have to deal with
this pain. So help us out. This video
will be deleted 24 hours after upload.
If you don't buy a postcard now or get a
spinner now, you will not get one.