Fr. Thomas Soroka: Welcome to Ancient Faith Today. This is Fr. Tom Soroka, and I’m so glad that you’re with us this evening. We’ll be taking your calls in a bit, at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Trudi will be answering your calls tonight, so please make sure to turn the show volume off before you come on air. We don’t have the chat room up yet, but we do encourage you to go either to the AFR Facebook site at facebook.com/ancientfaithradio, place a question in the thread for tonight’s show—actually, it’s already been heated up there—and where it is already being live simulcast. Or you can go to facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday, and place your question there in the thread for tonight’s show. You can even send us an email at aft@ancientfaith.com. So let’s get started.

Well, the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly caused a major upheaval to our lives, from the way that we shop to the way that we meet. Even going on almost one year now, everyone is feeling the stress of this ongoing global health crisis. Now, the good news is, history tells us that pandemics end, one way or another. Relatively modern medical technology has certainly helped us weather this. Some people who would have otherwise died did not because of medical technology. We do know that in general medical technology and medical progress has lengthened our lives as modern human beings. As Orthodox Christians, we don’t oppose medicine. We see the wonders of such progress as a sign of the higher faculties of man, even the image of God, which allows us to think higher thoughts, to create, to inform, and even to build.

But we also acknowledge that we do not live for medicine; we live for Christ. Christ is our Savior, not medicine. However, we have always acknowledged that the medicine of the day, of that generation, whether it be whatever medicine the Evangelist Luke imparted to his patients, to the great unmercenary physicians, Panteleimon and Hermolaos, to more modern physicians, like St. Luke of Simferopol. Medicine can be helpful to heal physical ailments, but in all of this we always remember that Christ is the Great Physician.

So tonight, as we turn the page on a new year, we hopefully also turn a page in the age of COVID. Will vaccines help us get beyond the problems that the COVID pandemic is causing and get back to a normal life? That’s what we want to discuss tonight with our guest, Dr. Cassandra Oehler. Dr. Oehler is a medical doctor, an infectious disease specialist, in the Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh. I’m so happy that she’s joining us tonight. However, I want to set up what this show is about, because there [have] been some questions. Number one, does this show have an agenda to push vaccines? The answer is no. Does Ancient Faith Radio have an agenda to push vaccines? Dear friends, that’s absurd! It’s a radio station; it doesn’t have an agenda for anything except glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ and building up the Orthodox faith. So let’s all take a breath, let’s be rational, let’s be calm, and let’s discuss this like Orthodox Christian adults.

Dr. Cassandra Oehler is also an Orthodox Christian, but she comes here as a servant of the Church and a servant of medicine. She’s going to give her medical opinion as an Orthodox Christian. She’s not giving us the only opinion, she’s not telling us what we have to do: she’s giving us her informed perspective. So I hope that all of our listeners will give her our undivided attention and the respect that she deserves. With that, Dr. Oehler, welcome to Ancient Faith Today.

Dr. Cassandra Oehler, MD: Hi! Thanks for having me.

Fr. Tom: I’m very, very glad that you’re here, and I want you to take a big breath also, because I know this is a difficult question here that we’re going to talk about tonight, and that is this vaccine. Of course, we’ve heard on the news sort of a kind of rejoicing about the vaccine—and yet, there are other people that feel very skeptical. Here on this show, we try to respect everyone’s understanding. We always sort of try to take the middle path; that is the royal way as Orthodox Christians.

So before all of that, Dr. Oehler, I want to learn more about you. I will confess to everyone here: Dr. Cassandra is, I am very proud to say, my parishioner. However, because of COVID, because of her and her husband’s incredibly stressful schedule as medical practitioners, I have not had the opportunity to get to know her as much as I’ve wanted to. So, Dr. Oehler, tell us a little bit about yourself, about your medical background, if you don’t mind. But also, I know you have a story about your journey to Orthodoxy; we’d love to hear that also.

Dr. Oehler: Sure. Yeah, I can start with my medical background. I guess… I’m not sure exactly how specific to be. I completed my residency in internal medicine, and then a fellowship in infectious diseases. I completed a second fellowship specifically in HIV medicine, which is probably my biggest area of interest, although I’m also a general infectious diseases practitioner, and I think it’s hard… It’s hard for any infectious diseases practitioner not to have a great deal of contact with COVID, and so that’s been a lot of what I’ve been dealing with in the last year, unfortunately.

In terms of my personal journey and my journey to Orthodoxy, I was raised in an enthusiastically Lutheran family. I was catechized in the Lutheran Church, and then at some point in my early adulthood, I spent some time searching for a church that I thought would answer some questions that I had in my faith better than what I knew of Lutheranism. So I spent some time in various other churches. Mostly I was sort of drawn to high Anglican Church. Then a friend sort of made an off-hand recommendation that I read The Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware). [Laughter] I wasn’t acquainted with Orthodoxy really at all at that point.

Fr. Tom: Sure. That’s our fault! [Laughter]

Dr. Oehler: I read that. I read that, and then I loved it. Then as a way to kind of connect with something I knew, my father gave me a book that was something that I still have a hard time believing it exists, but it was a Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue, I think from the ‘80s that was edited by [Fr.] John Meyendorff.

Fr. Tom: Absolutely, yep.

Dr. Oehler: It was just such a… I still sort of can’t believe there was such a side-by-side comparison available that way, but I benefitted from that, and then I benefitted from the endless patience and wisdom of a few priests whom God put in my path.

Fr. Tom: That’s wonderful.

Dr. Oehler: Then a few years later, my husband and I joined the Church. Specifically, we joined at St. Makarios Orthodox Mission in Chicago.

Fr. Tom: Wonderful. That’s tremendous. Thank you for sharing that. I know I kind of put you on the spot there, but I really appreciate you being open to discussing that. I think it’s really important for our listeners, and it helps me, too. Thank you for joining us tonight.

Dr. Oehler: Sure, of course.

Fr. Tom: Dr. Oehler, what I want to do is sort of look at the 50,000-foot view here. We did do several shows on COVID and what it is and so forth, but what I would like to ask you, as an infectious disease specialist, give me the layperson’s terms, the layperson’s explanation on: What is COVID? And what is the latest research showing that you might be aware of? What should we know? Literally, within the last few days, we’ve been hearing about this variant of COVID, that it’s now reaching our shores. So just tell us: What is COVID? What does it do to people? Why is it so dangerous? And what’s happening now?

Dr. Oehler: Sure. Obviously, that’s a wide-open question, so I don’t want to take it in a direction that you’re not hoping for, so I will start talking, and I can talk and talk, and if you can redirect me as you see fit…

Fr. Tom: Yes, we only have an hour, and we have phone calls, and we want to get to the whole vaccine issue, but I think we want to sort of paint a picture to make sure people understand what we’re talking about, so just the short, the skinny on what COVID is.

Dr. Oehler: So COVID-19 is the name of the illness caused by Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that we’ve been aware of for a while, and cause sort of variants of the common cold. They really, more generally, they cause a spectrum of respiratory illness and disease, but in general we think of them as common cold type viruses. The SARS virus and the MERS virus of the last 20 years or so are also members of the coronavirus family, so obviously there’s a spectrum of what these viruses can cause. For COVID specifically, or SARS-CoV-2, it enters the mouth and nose cavity and colonizes kind of the back of the nasopharynx and can cause an infection, an upper respiratory infection, and then it can also descend and cause viral pneumonia. And then with that it can also cause other systemic diseases.

Just like the other coronaviruses, within SARS-CoV-2 itself, it can cause a whole spectrum of illness, and I think people are pretty much aware of this by now. Some people get infected with the virus and don’t get sick at all. How many people that is has really varied widely over the last year in terms of the best estimates we have. Some of the more recent estimates that I have read put that number of people who have an asymptomatic infection somewhere between 15 and 20%, probably, but most people who get the virus do get sick from it. People who get the virus and are asymptomatic can still spread it to others, so it’s a problem even if you don’t have symptoms. Of the people who have symptoms, most people will have a mild illness from it, and I think that’s also something that people have a lot of experience: knowing people who have had COVID and who recovered. But about 10-15% of people who get a SARS-CoV-2 infection, or COVID, get seriously ill.

Getting seriously ill with COVID, I think it’s important to say that it’s more than just a respiratory disease or a pneumonia. There are a lot of other systemic complications that can result from it, from the inflammation that people’s bodies generate in the second week of illness and beyond, in terms of clotting disorders that people can develop; it can lead to stroke or a clot that goes to your lungs or even a coronary event. So it’s more than just kind of a pneumonia. It really causes a whole battery of other problems, depending on how sick people get. Those effects can last a long time. There can be complications down the road, again, that are not the virus itself, but we see people, about 10% of people get another infection, like a bacterial infection, or sometimes a fungal or mold infection, down the road; those can be devastating and also fatal. So it’s really a big spectrum of the way that it affects people.

Fr. Tom: And we are hearing about long-term effects also. Obviously, we don’t know that yet, right? But it seems like there may be some long-term effects for some people. Is that the case?

Dr. Oehler: Absolutely. I’m glad you bring that up. I think that’s something that is not something that we think or talk about enough. That’s sort of the idea of so-called “long COVID.” I think the numbers that I’ve heard… I’ve heard as high as 20, but the most recent that I’ve heard is about 13% of people. That’s like one out of eight people who have a COVID-19 infection will go on to feel chronically severely fatigued, sometimes in pain, have kind of like a brain fog. This often comes with depression, and this can last… I mean, we only know as much as we know over the last year, but this can last months and months. These are people who are really suffering, and I think that kind of suffering, from a chronic, poorly understood disease, is especially hard during a time when we’re all torn from our daily routines, our social supports. It’s just a lot of suffering that happens from COVID, even if people are discharged from the hospital, and even if they don’t have a stroke or one of these other awful medical complications.

Fr. Tom: Right. May I ask you one more question, though, in that same vein, and that is: You had mentioned that there are some people who don’t get it for whatever reason. For instance—and I’m just throwing this out there—I have asthma, and I have pretty chronic asthma. I have an IGG, immunity deficiency, and so forth. But, as you know and as everybody knows, I have a parish, I’m around a lot of people, I’m not wearing a mask during the services, because I’m not supposed to and so forth, and I have not gotten sick. Now, I have tried to be careful, and I use various prophylactic things like gargling, and I clean my nasal cavity and so forth. But there is this very odd thing where it says, “People with asthma may actually not be affected by COVID.” Have you heard anything like that?

Dr. Oehler: You know, I haven’t. I definitely know early on in the pandemic when we were seeing a lot of people, we were concerned… Two.. or three of the big conditions that came up that people were concerned would predispose people to worse COVID actually were obesity and high blood pressure and asthma. I’ve definitely seen a lot of patients who have COVID with asthma; I couldn’t tell you that it was a disproportionate number, relative to all the COVID patients that I’ve seen, but I haven’t heard that people with asthma or with… yeah, I haven’t heard that people are protected from infection.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, and I’m not… I want to be very clear to everyone, I’m not saying that that’s true. I’m saying that I received an article, and it documented this and so forth. So, please, everyone, understand: I’m not giving the medical advice here. Dr. Oehler is the doctor, and unfortunately she just gave me three strikes, because she said obesity, asthma, and high blood pressure, so I have to be very, very careful on that front. All right. I appreciate it very, very much.

Okay, so we went through and were sort of talking about these particular issues with the COVID-19 problems and what it is and so forth. Tell us about what you’ve personally experienced. Have you been treating any COVID patients? What have you seen? What’s going on? It must be very difficult for you.

Dr. Oehler: [Sigh] Oh, yes. It’s hard… I think in terms of whether or not… I think it would be hard for an infectious diseases doctor to have avoided this. I will say I think credit should be given where it’s due. I think the lion’s share of the suffering of medical personnel doesn’t fall on infectious diseases doctors; it falls on nurses and respiratory therapists and people in the ICU. But I have treated hundreds of people with COVID. Yeah.

In my experience, and I was reflecting on this last week a lot, because of the particularly troubling experience that I had. It’s been really saddening. The hospital is such a sad place to be right now, and it’s not because—well, it’s not only because it’s very full of very sick people, but I think, and I think people will probably see a parallel in their own lives outside the hospital. I think the COVID pandemic has kind of laid bare our priorities in terms of what is essential and what is not, and that’s kind of been an ugly thing to see, I think. That’s true inside the hospital as well as out. In terms of inside the hospital, as with so much of medicine, for a whole bunch of reasons, prevention has been really underutilized. I think we know what prevents this disease fairly well, and we as a society have really failed to act on that knowledge. I think I don’t exempt medical professionals when I speak about failure.

Patients are benefitting a lot from all of the intensive resources that have gone into understanding how best to manage COVID once it happens, but these patients are… They’re going into hospitals without the benefit of any family support. Their families can’t visit them. They’re being cared for by nurses who are being asked to do so much with so little. They are isolated in their rooms. They receive mechanical and pharmaceutical support, and they are stripped of social support and spiritual support and often dignity, and it is… It’s not the medicine that I think anybody signed up to practice, and it is really sad to see it this way. I don’t say this because I have a solution for this or to impugn anyone who has contributed to us ending up this way. I can see why it’s necessary, but it is really… It’s painful to witness it, particularly in its extreme forms. It’s something that I reflect on a lot when I see patients who are isolated and suffering. It’s a stigmatizing disease.

Fr. Tom: I appreciate… Yes, yes. I remember when one of our first parishioners at the church, at our parish, had gotten COVID. And of course, that person was not in the church at the time, they weren’t standing there; it was just kind of an isolated circumstance somewhere they had traveled. And that person felt somewhat stigmatized, because after… They really had to struggle to get better, and everybody… They felt like everybody was looking at them, like they were some kind of pariah and something. So I can understand that, and I appreciate your honesty and your sensitivity to that issue.

1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Now, if you’ve had the vaccine, could you call us? We’d love to hear from you. If you are absolutely against the vaccine, fine—give us a call. We’re not going to argue about it or whatever. We’re here to talk about the facts that we know as it is. But if you have a point of view and you’d like to call in, give us a call at 1-855-AF-RADIO.

Dr. Oehler, let’s now turn our attention to the vaccine. Can we again: 50,000-foot explanation for laypeople. What is a vaccine? How do they work? And why is the vaccine the big answer that’s coming out right now for COVID?

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, so the goal of any vaccine is to expose the body to a weakened version or a portion of any infective agent, whatever it’s trying to target, and to attract immune cells to that weakened part, so that they can produce antibodies that are specific to that infection. Your body generates antibodies to insults or pathogens that it encounters all the time. This is just kind of a way of directing your immune system with intention. Then the idea is that when the person is exposed to the real deal, the actual infection, their bodies are primed to attack that pathogen, and they’re able to defend against it without getting sick.

In some cases, obviously if you haven’t been vaccinated for a disease, your body can still fight it off; it just hasn’t been kind of prepared in the same way. The weakened version or portion of a pathogen that has to be present in a vaccine has to be strong enough that your body can mount a sufficient response that’s protective against the actual disease.

Many vaccines—and I think any parent who has a child working through the pediatric vaccination schedule will know this—many vaccines have boosters, and the purpose behind that is that the second dose provides an even stronger and more specific burst of antibody production to protect against that disease. And that’s true for most… Well, it’s true for the two COVID vaccines that are approved and the one that is likely to be soon approved; it’s not true for all of the ones that are in development, but that there is a booster that needs to happen.

The need for… I bring up the need for the vaccine to be strong enough to give protective immunity because that means that when people are vaccinated—and I talk about this with patients all the time—sometimes they’ll experience what we call reactogenicity, so it has the symptoms that are kind of related to the immune system revving up and creating an inflammatory response. That’s why some people feel crummy after getting the flu vaccine or a tetanus vaccine, because you’re experiencing the sort of vaccine-drive inflammation that is happening intentionally as a result of that vaccine.

Do you want me to talk more? I can go on and on about this.

Fr. Tom: No, I would say… The vaccines, for whatever reason, there’s a small portion of the population that is very leery of vaccines. Can you help us understand what would our world be like now without vaccines? Now, I’m not talking about COVID. Are there other major illnesses that vaccines have actually helped eliminate, or at least subdue?

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, I think a good one to think about now is probably polio, and I’m saying that as someone who is too young have experienced much polio. But that’s sort of my point, that that’s something, that’s a disease that a vaccine was developed for, and it has almost eradcated it from the face of the earth, to the point where I think if you asked a lot of clinicians what to do about polio, they would scramble for a textbook, because the vaccine was so very effective. It may be analogous also because that vaccine came out and people lined up. There wasn’t 20 years of safety data behind it when people were being vaccinated, but here we are and a lot of people barely know what polio is.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. Very interesting. And, you know, by the way, Pittsburgh can claim a major portion in that research because a lot of that was developed at D.T. Watson in Sewickley, and in Edgeworth, and that was a very, very big deal when that happened back in the day. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346.

Dr. Oehler, there is an issue with a couple of the vaccines in terms of Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, that are very concerned about the use of aborted fetal tissue. Obviously, as Orthodox Christians, we are absolutely, unequivocally, pro-life. For us, this is a black-and-white issue, and we simply do not promote abortion in any way. On the other hand, there’s another vaccine here—I think it’s a Moderna vaccine—that is using a kind of manipulated genetic code, and I don’t know all the technicalities of that. So let’s turn our attention, if you don’t mind, to the vaccine that was developed using aborted fetal tissue.

You know, there’s some really informative articles out there, because I think some of this information—and I’m speaking as an Orthodox priest here; I’m speaking as a pro-life advocate; I’m speaking as one who has stood in front of abortion clinics and prayed for the children in there and the women in there—I want to make that extremely clear—but my understanding is that the fetal tissue that is used or that was used in the research was, like, from 50 years ago, and it was actually… That tissue is probably no longer available; it’s been grown over the years out of that tissue. Can you talk a little bit about what the issues are as far as an Orthodox Christian would be concerned with the fetal tissue, and what your read is on that?

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, I can… if I can speak personally, I also consider myself to be very pro-life, just so people know where I’m coming from on this.

Fr. Tom: Thank you for saying that.

Dr. Oehler: I think it’s important… I guess I should also say before I say anything else, I am not a vaccinologist, so this is not my main area. I can certainly speak to this the way that I and my colleagues speak about it, but there may even be somebody listening who has more expertise than I. I think that there are a lot of things in medicine that have really dark and sad histories. There are a lot of things that we know of and probably things that we don’t know of, and discoveries in medicine that we sort of take for granted even in our practice that are based on kind of a history of heartbreakingly unethical practices. Usually those practices are… the brunt is borne by the powerless in our society.

People will probably be familiar with the Tuskegee experiments; that’s something that always comes to mind. That’s when effective treatment for syphillis was withheld from black men in order to observe the progression of the disease in them. I mean, it’s horrifyingly unethical, and something that informs what we know about syphillis now. And there are lots of others. You could dig up, without digging too hard, examples of Nazi medicine. All this is to say that there’s a lot of this that is embedded in medicine, and a lot of things that we know we know for bad reasons. It is true that cell lines that are used broadly in medical research… I can think of one other very prominent example of… There’s the so-called HeLa cells, taken from a woman named Henriette Lacks’s cervical cancer that are used to do all kinds of medical research. I should say, taken without her consent.

So that is certainly an evil, and I would say it is an evil that aborted fetal tissue was used this way, but you are correct in saying that these cells, the cells that were taken from these aborted fetuses, have been modified and sort of immortalized and replicated on and on, so it’s not true that any vaccine that is being studied is “benefitting,” so to speak—I’m using air quotes, but you can’t see—from ongoing abortion practices or ongoing cruelty.

Fr. Tom: Abortion, right.

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, that’s not the case.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, so here’s my layperson’s understanding of it, and I want to thank… There is Dn. James. I appreciate your comment on a thread earlier this evening, and I want to read… He is a lab scientist who worked on part of the clinical trials. So I want to read maybe what he said here, and I hope… Well, it’s out there in public, so I can read it. It basically says:

Moderna’s and Pfizer’s do not require the use of fetal lines in their production. Those that do utilize fetal cell lines are a completely different bioethics issue which I do not personally believe are quite so black-and-white as some would have us wish. Digging deep into the specific cell lines, including what they actually are, cells are kidney cells taken from an embryo in 1973 and widely used for many modern medical products, especially as cell therapy is showing a great deal of promise for a variety of cancers. The fact that use of these cells in no way drives the abortion industry, that is, banning the use of these cells would reduce the number of abortions by zero, because the use of these cells [does] not require ongoing abortions, scientists just grow more of them.

In other words, the technology that came from it, from what you clearly said was a terrible situation, but you have this reality of this aborted fetus, and they’re using kidney cells from it back in 1973, not to actually produce the [vaccine], but it was used to test the [vaccine].

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, I think… yes. I don’t know… Yes.

Fr. Tom: Vaccine, I meant.

Dr. Oehler: Yes, that’s basically true, yes. Yes, to test the vaccine. I think it is true… I don’t know. I think it’s a little bit, not naive, but I think we have to be honest with ourselves about where… how we have gotten where we have come in medicine. It’s true that the AstraZeneca… So I don’t know; I should frame this first and say that the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines, both of which are approved in the US, operate by a similar mechanism. And then the next one that is likely to be approved is the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, which operates by a different method, which is I think what a commenter was talking about. I think that, from my reading about this, all of these vaccines in some way have benefitted, however indirectly, from these cell lines. mRNA vaccine technology has benefitted from this. This becomes more and more indirect, and as you said these cells become more and more indirect as they are multiplied in a laboratory, and don’t have anything to do with abortion practices now. But, yeah… Does that make sense? It’s a complicated issue.

Fr. Tom: So, to be clear, babies are not being aborted in some laboratory to produce this vaccine. Is that correct?

Dr. Oehler: Absolutely correct, 100% correct. I don’t think you would find people who would dispute that anywhere, really.

Fr. Tom: Right. And so I think that’s very important for people to understand. In other words, Orthodox Christians that may have heard this or they’ve heard that, can they feel like… One can question the ethics of using that fetal cell line. That is a given. But they exist, it has existed since 1973, the scientists grow cells from it, and what you’re saying is that it’s so far from the original source that at this point it’s kind of one of these things that it has produced and saved millions of lives, even if the fetus was given up in a terribly selfish and unChristian and abhorrent way, the reality of that cell line is with us, and it has done good, ultimately.

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, no, I would agree with that, and I would extend that. I said that I am pro-life, and by that I mean that I’m anti-abortion, but I also mean that I’m pro-life in other ways, too, and I think there is something very pro-life about the goals of this vaccine and the goals of protecting people, because it is, again, the less power and the more vulnerable people who are at highest risk for bad disease. So I think there is something pro-life about this vaccine and about what this is trying to accomplish as well, and I think that’s important to remember.

Fr. Tom: Thank you very, very much. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. We do have a caller on the line. Trudi, I’m sorry I can’t see who it is, but we’re going to welcome the caller onto Ancient Faith Today. Caller, you are on with Dr. Cassandra Oehler. Welcome to Ancient Faith Today.

Kurt: Is that me?

Fr. Tom: Yes, go ahead, caller. I’m sorry. What is your name?

Kurt: My name’s Kurt.

Fr. Tom: Kurt, thank you for calling in. What is your question or comment?

Kurt: I guess just a comment. I just wanted to bring up a couple of points. I’m a former molecular biologist and virologist, and I’m an Orthodox Christian. I’m not going to lie. My heart’s kind of beating really fast right now, and it’s somewhat angry. I think as Orthodox we’re not materialists, so in terms of these cell lines, and she’s right. So for all of molecular biology, pretty much every type of experiment or procedure or anything, they used materials from those aborted cell lines. And if you believe in life starting at conception, those cell lines are being kept alive artificially, unnaturally, in an inhumane sort of ghastly way. I think it’s a little ridiculous to say that anything we’ve done in this material plane has altered or changed the suffering of humans. Like, we’re here to care for each other, and we don’t know that wiping out these viruses or these diseases, or messing with nature this way at the molecular level, is actually causing any good to our health or otherwise, because everything has side effects. We just don’t know that, and we have to look at it non-materialistically, like that’s this person’s body. It’s not even dead. And we treat with saints’ relics with greater respect, than to do these ghastly experiments with it.

And then, just one final thing with all of these vaccines. You’re training your immune system in a way that has nothing to do with how God designed the world. So the immune response to a vaccine, it’s kind of like training for a fight. And if you train yourself wrong or an inappropriate way—so, like, normally you’d get infected through your nose or through your respiratory tract, and it has a progression of infection, and your body responds to that and learns that way. When you train your immune system to respond to an injection in the arm, or if you actually inject foreign RNA in yourself and let random cells start expressing proteins, it’s like giving your body a DVD on kung fu and then telling it to go get into a fight. It’s probably going to make things even worse.

And, yeah, I guess my only comment is I wish people would stop looking at this stuff so materialistically. I think scientific materialism is a heresy, and I think, yeah. Those are my thoughts. I’m willing to talk, but I’ve kind of said my piece. I’m a little bit too upset to dialogue.

Fr. Tom: I appreciate your comments. I have thoughts about it from a spiritual point of view, and as I gave, Kurt, examples from the beginning of the show, where we have great saints that were also physicians, great saints that were also scientists, and we said we don’t put our trust in medicine. But the one place where I would push back is I would say, well, I’m not a Christian Scientist. I don’t say—and by Christian Scientist, I mean the heresy of Christian Science—I don’t say that illnesses don’t exist, that if I have a virus it’s just a kind of a spiritual issue. It is a real issue, and it’s an acknowledgment—

Kurt: But we don’t even know… I’m sorry, but, like, we don’t… The current viral paradigm is incomplete. It was made by people who were really infatuated with reductionism, so it’s extremely likely that the way that people are conceptualizing what is happening right now is somewhat fragmented and incomplete, like our bodies—

Fr. Tom: So you’re saying that diseases are not real. Not that we don’t know enough about it, you’re just saying that diseases aren’t real?

Kurt: That’s not what I’m saying at all.

Fr. Tom: Okay, but—

Kurt: I’m just saying that…

Fr. Tom: But you stopped me mid-sentence—

Kurt: I apologize.

Fr. Tom: —to let me finish my point, and that is that you said that scientific materialism is a heresy. And there’s no proof of that whatsoever. There’s nothing…

Kurt: Okay, well, we disagree.

Fr. Tom: I can show you encyclical after encyclical of the bishops. I can show you the lives of the saints that were scientists and so forth, that say that, yes, there is good in science. We don’t p—

Kurt: There’s a difference between science and scientific—

Fr. Tom: We don’t put our trust in science; we put our trust in God, but—

Kurt: Then you wouldn’t be doing that with these people’s bodies from these cell lineages. You would be aghast. Those people are still alive in these cell lines. They’re still living.

Fr. Tom: That, and as I acknowledged, the ethics of that is certainly gray, but it’s a reality that we have.

Kurt: Yeah, we don’t have to dabble in that issue.

Fr. Tom: Dr. Cassie, any comments on that?

Kurt: Because we’re not afraid of death. We don’t have to—

Fr. Tom: I understand. Let’s go ahead and let Dr. Oehler respond.

Dr. Oehler: I think—oh, sorry, Kurt. I think, obviously, Kurt, you and I don’t agree on everything or maybe even most things. I think I do agree with a couple of things that you said. I think it’s true that every medical intervention will have side effects, often unintended or unanticipated side effects, and I think it’s important to be honest about that, as we’re doing these kinds of things. You’re obviously a lot closer in terms of your background in molecular biology to understanding what it’s like to work with cell lines like this, and as I acknowledged, that’s not my background, so I can’t necessarily speak to that.

But I think I agree with you that humility in science is really important. Science is not everything. It’s not salvation. It doesn’t… It’s not… It should not relieve my… Or I guess it shouldn’t form my thoughts about death primarily, and I think it’s important to be humble whenever we’re making scientific recommendations or whenever we’re advising people to get a vaccine, that there’s… Science is always changing. I think that’s been especially apparent over the last year, if you look at the CDC recommendations and kind of how they have changed over the course of the last year. It’s enough to enrage some people that they have changed so much, but that’s because science is this iterative, dynamic process, where we learn more as we go, and often we learn that we were wrong before. I know that can be damaging, and I agree with that. Hopefully it is not mostly damaging, and this stuff is done in good faith and with the hope of enriching human flourishing, and I believe that, really. But, as I say, I know you and I won’t agree on a lot of things.

Fr. Tom: All right. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346.

Dr. Oehler, there was another comment on the Facebook page, and it says:

There are many who are not against all vaccines, but are concerned that vaccines are overused. Trying to protect us from sicknesses that we would, on the whole, do better to endure. Some vaccines seem to be used not to avoid dangerous diseases, but to avoid missing a couple of weeks’ work. So when we are trying to get any particular vaccine, we weigh the risk of getting the disease with the risk of the vaccine. For example, we have decided that polio is a vaccine worth getting, but we don’t get the flu vaccine each year. In this case, the risks of the vaccine are still so unknown since its trials have just begun. It’s hard for us to feel comfortable getting this vaccine for us or for our children.

Thoughts or comments about that, Dr. Oehler?

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a reasonable perspective in some ways. I think with COVID it’s tough. It’s tough to kind of weigh the risks of getting the disease and speak about it in terms of a few weeks of missed work. It’s tough for me, I should say, because of the sort of the scope of suffering that I’ve witnessed at work, in people who are not as healthy as I am or not as young as I am, or those kinds of things. I think that the people who bear the—I’m just guessing, based on the fact that the commenter spoke about vaccinating children, that the people who are most seriously affected by this are not people our age; they are people who are older or who are dealing with multiple illnesses, who are more vulnerable.

I have been vaccinated, just for full disclosure. And when I got vaccinated, it really wasn’t primarily because of fear for my own health. It is true that I have seen people in their 30s die of COVID, but that’s not mostly what I’ve seen. Mostly I’ve seen people my parents’ age die of COVID, and I think when you’re sort of weighing the risks and benefits and the idea of “Well, is it a few weeks of missed work or is it this vaccine?” I think you have to remember that a lot of what we’re doing here is for the common good, and I think there is something very Christian about that, about considering the weak and the vulnerable when we make decisions like this, and that’s what I am thinking about.

Fr. Tom: I could not agree more that we have great saints who were physicians and scientists and so forth, and, again, I don’t know how many times I should say it, but we don’t put our salvation in medicine or in vaccines, but that is not to deny that there can be a benefit. Now, as you said, I think this comment is reasonable. I think this comment is like: “Hey, you know, maybe the vaccine is too much. Maybe it is using a fire hydrant to get a drink of water. It’s overkill and it’s an overreaction.” That is, I think, a legitimate concern that somebody can express. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346.

Dr. Oehler, there’s also a concern about—and I think it’s very prickly—the development of the Moderna vaccine. That vaccine is something very new. My understanding—and again, from kind of a layperson’s understanding—is that it contains manipulated genetic instructions surrounded by a lipid particle. And so, is that safe? And what is that? I mean, I’m not even sure. It sounds almost like science fiction.

Dr. Oehler: I should say both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine work this way, so both of the approved vaccines in the US have this mechanism. I want people to be clear about that. You’re not avoiding one with the Pfizer and sort of taking it with the Moderna. They are very similar this way. They are both mRNA technology, or messenger RNA technology. It’s sort of the middle phase of translation between the paths to genetic material, DNA and proteins. The vaccine contains that messenger RNA, which is a kind of RNA that codes a specific part of the virus, the receptor-binding domain in the spike protein. It is coated by the lipid nanoparticle. The lipid nanoparticle is like a coat that allows the little strip of messenger RNA to be uptaken by a cell, sort of into the lobby area of the cell, the cytoplasm, which is not the kind of inner sanctum, the nucleus, where your own personal DNA is stored, but kind of the outer room. That mRNA is then processed and translated into a protein. The messenger RNA itself degrades naturally, so one nice thing about these vaccines is they have a really predictable half-life within the cell.

I’m not sure if you’re mostly asking about the nanoparticle which is what people have been asking a lot of questions about lately, or the messenger RNA.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, I’m kind of asking about both, or I’m not sure what I’m asking. But here again, sort of translated by a layperson. When I start hearing things like, “Yes, this genetic code was manipulated by computer, and we’re going to upload it to your bloodstream, and it’s surrounded by a lipid particle, and it’s going to reprogram this virus and your response to it,” that sounds really scary and dangerous and, I don’t know. It really sounds like science fiction, and it sounds like something that is just very wrong. But I don’t know enough about science to know.

Dr. Oehler: Sure. I think that whenever one starts framing… I’m uncomfortable with this in all domains of medicine. Whenever you start framing the human body in terms of its being a machine, there’s something really limiting about that analogy. One of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry, talks about this in an essay, that the human body is really only like a machine in some very limited ways, and I think it’s important not to think about it as a computer being reprogrammed or something. This is kind of an intermediate piece of genetic-type material that your body uses to make a protein that it can make an immune response to. That genetic code does not become part of your genetic code. It doesn’t enter the nucleus of your cell. It degrades on its own, and you are left with a protein, and your body synthesizes proteins all the time, and it reacts to proteins to create an immune response, and that immune response, which is the end goal of any vaccine, comes about from these proteins. So I think it’s a mistake to think about—not a mistake, but I think I, too, am uncomfortable with the thought that my computer is being reprogrammed, but I think it’s a mistake to think about it that way.

Fr. Tom: Right. So I liked what you said, though. You said it’s a kind of protein.

Dr. Oehler: It creates a kind, yes, the messenger RNA is translated into a kind of protein by the ribosome of your cell.

Fr. Tom: Has this technology been used before?

Dr. Oehler: This technology has been studied before, has been studied for at least a decade, ten or twelve years. It’s been studied for some years. There have been messenger RNA vaccines that have been attempted. There are some attractive things about messenger RNA vaccine technology. It can be upscaled pretty well, because it doesn’t rely on cell culture. I know they have attempted a vaccine for a different kind of virus: CMv or cytomegalovirus, as well as some other vaccines using messenger RNA technology. COVID has kind of “benefitted”—and again I’m putting this in air quotes—from the fact of there being so very much of it that it has been easy to study this way.

We’ve been able to put together an extremely large-scale trial in a very short amount of time, with the sort of threat or promise, depending on how you look at it, of many people in that trial being exposed to the virus in question, so having many event rates in that trial to reach a conclusion. I think other messenger RNA vaccines have been attempted and not “succeeded,” but nothing so far as I know in at least the recent history of medicine has had the kind of money and mental power focused at it the way that COVID has, so I think that that is a reason for the success of this vaccine.

Fr. Tom: Good point.

Dr. Oehler: It’s not that messenger RNA vaccine technology has been failing us for ten years and suddenly we let one squeak through. This circumstance is different.

Fr. Tom: Right, and you put that so clearly. Let me kind of spit it out as a layperson. There is this messenger RNA that is wrapped in a lipid cell or whatever, and it’s put into your blood, and it eventually just degrades. It doesn’t change anything genetically about you.

Dr. Oehler: That’s correct, yes. It degrades inside your cells. Yeah, it’s uptaken by cells, translated, and degrades. That’s correct.

The lipid nanoparticle has gotten some attention recently with people with concerns about allergies and anaphylaxis, so that’s something that has people have kind of… I’ve actually heard at least as much concern about that in the last two weeks as I have about the mRNA technology from my patients and from laypeople.

Fr. Tom: Interesting.

Dr. Oehler: Is that something that you have heard about also, or…?

Fr. Tom: No. You know, the only thing, again—and again, I’m just nobody—but I read this with great fascination about asthmatics not being responsive to COVID, but I will send that on to you, and you can make your own decisions!

I have one last question for you, Dr. Oehler, and that is—and I think this is the one that’s on everybody’s mind, and that is: Is the vaccine safe for the long-term? Obviously, this was… These vaccines have been created, as you said, in record time, mostly because there has been such a focus on them, so the time issue may be somehow compressed because of the brain trust that’s been put into that, kind of like—maybe a terrible example, but it’s kind of like in World War II when they developed the bomb and so forth. It was just so many people that were doing that.

Dr. Oehler: [Laughter] That is not a neutral example.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, no, but, so… Do we know about the long-term effects, and is that really something that people should worry about? I think it’s something I worry about.

Dr. Oehler: Yeah, so I think that’s a very reasonable question. The Pfizer vaccine data that’s been published follows patients for about three and a half months—at most, I should say, for about three and a half months after their vaccine. That’s not very long. That safety data, I will say, is really, really, like miraculously good, because it’s like… It has seemed to be very safe, but it only goes three and a half months. And it’s not really possible, for obvious reasons, in the middle of a fast-moving pandemic like this, to collect longer safety data before we act.

I think a really important thing to know is that I think, in terms of knowing the long-term safety data for this vaccine, we, both as physicians and as citizens, people, have a lot of control about what we will know and what we don’t know. There are major Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, and another system, sponsored by the CDC and FDA, to try to understand how people do with this vaccine in the long term. Those things are completely voluntary and self-reported. People are encouraged to report anything that they think might conceivably be related to their vaccine, but that stuff will be forthcoming over time, based on… from people who do get the vaccine. And that’s something we will all benefit from, whether people choose to get the vaccine now or they choose to get it down the road.

Fr. Tom: Right. So, you know, let’s kind of put a bow on this whole thing. And, again, I want everybody to understand: I don’t have an agenda here. I am not a doctor. I know I have health issues. I know that I have had parishioners that got very sick from COVID. I am not a COVID denier. I don’t believe it’s [not] a pandemic. But I do… I am concerned about some of the political ramifications that have been going on—absolutely, no doubt about it—but I think this, from a medical standpoint, this is very real.

So what I would like you to do, Dr. Oehler, is, from your heart, as an Orthodox Christian… You already said that you got the vaccine, right?

Dr. Oehler: Yes.

Fr. Tom: And are there any of the vaccines that you feel like: Yeah, I would steer clear of that? Is there anything on the horizon that you feel like is really causing a kind of a knot in your stomach, like this is really not the right way to go?

Dr. Oehler: No, I mean, there are a lot of vaccines in development, and I have to be frank about my familiarity with ones that are in much earlier stages of development. In terms of the three kind of leading vaccines—the two that are approved and the one that is likely to be approved in the next month or two—I don’t have major misgivings. I think that the commenter who brought up the possibility of the vaccine being worse than the disease, that’s a real thing to think about, and the fact that we don’t have long long-term safety data, that’s a real risk we’re taking. But I guess I see the risk that we’re taking now—not even a risk: I see the thing that we’re living now, and I don’t think that is something that I am willing to… a world that I want to continue in. So I think I am willing to take what I see to be a small risk that these vaccines have.

There’s not a vaccine that I can point to and say, “Yeah, I would steer clear of that one,” but the truth is there are likely to be other vaccines. I mean, this is something that would probably bear repeating in the future, because I only have clinical familiarity with the ones that are in later stages of development.

Fr. Tom: Very good. Dr. Cassandra Oehler, thank you so much for your even-keeled, your very calm, informed opinion. I really, really appreciated it. —not opinion, but facts, I should say, and your viewpoints, and everything that you presented tonight was really very, very helpful. And as I said to you, as I said to the listeners, my only agenda here is not to push a vaccine—people have to make their own decisions about that—but rather to inform. And I think you did that extremely eloquently and in a very sophisticated way tonight. You told us the facts about the vaccine, you told us about your own experience with treating COVID-19 patients, and I think it was really just a wonderful tribute to all of the work that you are doing, that doctors are doing, scientists are doing, to really try and minimize the effect that COVID has had on our world. And I want you to know how much I and we appreciate you very, very much. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Dr. Oehler: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Fr. Tom: Thank you. Thank you.

Before I share a few final thoughts, I do want to offer my sincere thanks again to Dr. Cassandra Oehler for joining us tonight; for Trudi, engineering the program; for everybody listening in, those who called in, and for those who were putting in comments in the comment-box. I want you to know, again, that I know that the opinions on the vaccine, as well as everything COVID-related, is so… It has divided people so much. I agree there is never going to be one way to see all of this. There is never going to be one answer. People are going to have to make their own decisions about what they want to do. If you have been with someone that has lost a loved one to COVID, if you have been with someone that has had COVID, you find out very quickly that this is very real. Does it mean that everybody should be treated the same way? Of course not. But we have a pandemic that we have to move out of, that we have to move forward, whether it is by allowing it to run its course, which apparently in the United States is happening, and it’s taking a great toll on our country, or we use medicine to try to lessen the effect of it—whatever the answer is, what we need to do is to pray to the Lord Jesus Christ to help us and guide us, to pray to the Unmercenary saints, to pray to the Evangelist Luke, to pray to St. Luke of Simferopol, to pray to all of these physicians who can help us weather the storm of COVID-19.

And that’s our show for tonight. Remember to like us on Facebook at facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday, share out our program after that’s posted, give us your feedback, and contact us with any ideas or topics that you might want to hear about. Join us next Tuesday evening for another edition of Ancient Faith Today. Good night, everybody!