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U.S. approves world's first vaccine for honeybees to stave off deadly 'foulbrood' disease

The way the bees receive the vaccine is fascinating.

Photo by Meggyn Pomerleau on Unsplash

Honeybees are getting their first vaccine.

Without bees, the human race would be screwed. We rely on those little buggers to pollinate most of the crops that feed most of the world—they're a critical link in the food chain that sustains human existence.

But scientists have been worried about bee populations in recent years, as colony collapse disorder, habitat loss and various bee diseases have threatened the planet's primary pollinators. There's good news for our fuzzy, buzzy friends, however. The world's first honeybee vaccine has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help stave off American foulbrood, a deadly disease that's spread through bacterial spores and can take down entire colonies.

So how does a bee colony get vaccinated? Are we talking 50,000 teeny-tiny syringes or what?

The process is actually quite ingenious. According to a press release from Dalan Animal Health, the vaccine, which contains dead Paenibacillus larvae bacteria, gets mixed into the queen bee's feed, which is then consumed by worker bees. Those worker bees incorporate the vaccine into the royal jelly they feed to the queen. After she eats it, the vaccine gets deposited into her ovaries, which provides immunity to the larvae she produces. Thus, all her little baby bees are born already vaccinated for American foulbrood.

Pretty nifty, eh?

The vaccine was developed by the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in collaboration with biotech company Dalan Animal Health, and researchers are hopeful this breakthrough will lead to similar vaccines.

“They are taking a stab at this one because it’s such a historically important bee disease,” Keith Delaplane, CAES Department of Entomology professor and director of the UGA Bee Program, told Georgia Public Radio. “With the good results, which we anticipate based on lab work, we can expand the product line to other diseases.”

There is currently no cure for American foulbrood and, despite its name, it has become a global issue. According to Delaplane, beekeepers have been using antibiotics to fight off the disease, but the USDA is trying to cut down antibiotic use in all food-producing animals. This vaccine helps eliminate the need for them in the honeybee population.

The Guardian reports that the vaccine will first be made available to commercial beekeepers. American foulbrood has been found in up to a quarter of hives in some U.S. regions, forcing beekeepers to burn infected colonies and use antibiotics to limit the spread.

Annette Kleiser, CEO of Dalan Animal Health, pointed out that population growth and climate change make honeybee pollination all the more important to protect. “Our vaccine is a breakthrough in protecting honeybees,” she said. "We are ready to change how we care for insects, impacting food production on a global scale.”

The development and approval of this vaccine is also a good reminder that vaccine technology is always evolving and it's not just humans that benefit.

Of course, good news for honeybees is good news for humans. According to the FDA, honeybees specifically pollinate a third of the food Americans consume. We need them more than they need us, but helping them thrive is a win-win for us both.

Yay, science.

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Education & Information

Why the pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is actually a good thing

Steven Cornfield on Unsplash

Americans woke up this morning to the news that the FDA and the CDC have recommended a pause on the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine out of "an abundance of caution" while they review 6 incidences of rare blood clotting issues out of the 6.8 million J & J vaccines administered in the U.S.

Let's be super clear about the numbers here. Six out of 6.8 million. That means, of the people who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine since its February 27th emergency use authorization, 0.000088% of recipients have reported encountering this rare blood clotting issue. Literally less than one in a million.

On the flip side, some people are trying to compare these rare clots with the increased risk of blood clots in pregnancy and for those taking birth control pills, but this particular combination of clots and low platelets can't be treated the way clots normally are treated, which the CDC and FDA say is part of the reason for the pause—to alert doctors to treat any of these rare issues properly.

Getting technical:

"In these cases, a type of blood clot called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) was seen in combination with low levels of blood platelets (thrombocytopenia)," said a statement from Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, and Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. "All six cases occurred among women between the ages of 18 and 48, and symptoms occurred 6 to 13 days after vaccination."

"Right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare," the statement added.

The problem, of course, with this responsible pause for review is that people who were already unsure about the vaccines may become even more hesitant. "See? We were right to wait! The vaccine isn't safe!" However, there are two big reasons why that's the wrong reaction.

1. Even assuming these clotting issues are truly caused by the vaccine and are wrapped into the numbers, the vaccine is still a far, far safer bet than taking your chances with COVID.

The math bears this out clearly. More Americans have received a COVID vaccine shot than have been diagnosed with COVID, with no pattern of deaths following vaccinations that would indicate a safety issue. Meanwhile, we have 562,000+ deaths from COVID. Even if you believe the COVID mortality numbers to be overcounted in some way (despite experts believing the count is likely an undercount), you would have to have practically zero COVID deaths to make the vaccines riskier.

But risk isn't just about death, right? What about side effects and long-term health effects of both? According to the WHO, approximately 10-15% of people who get COVID will develop severe illness, and about 5% will become critically ill. No one knows the long-term impact of COVID infection yet, but a WHO survey found that even among people ages 18 to 34 years in good health, 20% (1 in 5) of reported "prolonged symptoms." People with mild illness have reported months-long health issues, and we don't know yet if, when, or how people will recover fully. Meanwhile, immune system responses to the COVID vaccines can make people feel ill for a short time, and a very small number of people have experienced allergic reactions to the mRNA shots, but researchers have identified no patterns of long-term health issues with the vaccines at this point, which leads us to the second point.

2. This pause means that safety monitoring is working exactly like it's supposed to.

The FDA and CDC had to weigh the risk that pausing the J & J vaccine may cause vaccine hesitancy, but went with the pause recommendation anyway. Some people have expressed frustration with this choice, as the miniscule risk of blood clotting issue does not mathematically outweigh the risk of people not getting vaccinated, but ultimately people need to be confident that the process is thorough and transparent.

This is exactly what the safety monitoring of the vaccine rollouts is supposed to do—identify any potential risks and review them as they come up. These blood clot issues are so rare that there was no way for them to have shown up in the clinical trials, as that would have required a sample size of millions of people.

Messaging here is vital, of course. People need to know that the issues FDA and CDC are reviewing are extremely rare, that a pause is not a permanent halt, and that the reason they are pausing is because of the 6.8 million doses administered so far, these 6 very specific, very rare blood clot incidences are the only potential red flags they've seen.

That is impressive. And as far as hesitancy about vaccines goes, people also need to know that the J & J vaccine is a different kind of vaccine than the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. The J & J pause has zero bearing on the other two.

In addition, a pause on the J & J vaccine is not going to have a humongous impact on our country's vaccination numbers, since it only makes up about 5% of our total vaccine shot numbers. More than 100 million doses of Modern and Pfizer have been administered, with only a minuscule number of severe allergy reactions.

Statistically, the vaccines—even the J & J, despite the pause for review—are on very solid safety ground. The problem is how humans process and calculate statistical risk. (Basically, we're really bad at it.)

For some people, the idea of putting something into our bodies on purpose (a vaccine) feels riskier than taking a chance with getting the virus and the chance of having problems with it. But that's risk assessment based on feeling, not fact. People make most of their decisions based on emotion over reason, even if they think they don't.

So even though the J & J pause is actually a good thing, as it shows that the people in charge are monitoring things closely and taking any potential risks seriously no matter how small, there's a good chance that this news will lower people's confidence in the vaccines.

The key thing to remember is that nothing is 100% safe. But there is zero doubt that, overall, the vaccines are a far safer bet than COVID.

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Well Being

Hundreds of doctors have asked the FDA not to rush—or politicize—a coronavirus vaccine

Photo by CDC on Unsplash, Andy Slavitt/Twitter

"There's only one thing more dangerous than a bad virus, and that's a bad vaccine," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's health emergencies programme, said in March. "We have to be very, very, very careful in developing any product that we're going to inject into potentially most of the world population."

Since the beginning of the pandemic, experts have said that developing a vaccine and getting it through the necessary safety and efficacy protocols would take, at minimum, 12 to 18 months. Yet here we are, 7 months in, and Vladimir Putin has just announced that Russia has already approved a vaccine for the coronavirus.

According to the BBC, there are more than 100 vaccines in various stages of development and testing. Six of those have reached phase 3 trials, involving more widespread testing in humans. Russia's vaccine is not among those six.

Meanwhile, hundreds of U.S. doctors have signed a letter urging the FDA not to rush or politicize vaccine trials.

"We are experts in virology, epidemiology, vaccinology, infectious disease, clinical care and public health," the letter opens, before declaring the "urgent" need for a COVID-19 vaccine. "We are committed to promoting the broad uptake of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. The need is urgent but all vaccines must be rigorously studied to determine whether their benefits exceed their risks."

The letter expresses concern that public confidence in a vaccine will be greatly undermined by rushing the process, and that thorough safety trials must be followed through in order for doctors themselves to confidently recommend and administer one.

For those reasons, the doctors urged transparency in the process of trialing and documenting any potential vaccines:

"The foundation of public confidence in vaccine safety has long been, and must remain, the well-established and trusted FDA approval procedures. The public is typically and rightly able to comment on vaccine approval. It is important that investigators share Phase 3 trial design details. For example, Data Safety Monitoring Boards apply predetermined 'stopping rules' to decide whether a study should be terminated early based on the detection of early benefits, the likelihood of no benefit, or the emergence of serious safety problems. These stopping rules should be publicly available. There must also be continuous monitoring for unexpected severe side effects that might only become apparent after large numbers of people are vaccinated."

Finally, they drove home the point that doctors can only recommend a vaccine if they believe it is safe, and that evaluating safety can only be done with a transparent process unmarred by politics.

"We can only perform as advocates if we ourselves are persuaded that the vaccine(s) truly is safe and effective. We must be able to explain to the public what we know and what we don't know about these vaccines. For that to happen, we must be able to witness a transparent and rigorous FDA approval process that is devoid of political considerations."

Russia's announcement could very well push vaccine makers and the government to rush the development and trialing process, which would be a mistake. Vaccine development usually takes years, not months, and skipping safety steps in the name of competition or expediency could make public health problems worse, not better.

As always, government needs to listen to the health experts on this front. We need a vaccine as soon as possible, but we also need to make sure we utilize the knowledge and processes that will ensure any vaccine will be safe to administer, no matter which company or country gets there first.

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Mother uses side-by-side photos to show the miraculous connection between vaccinations and breast milk

via Jody Danielle Fisher / Facebook

Breast milk is an incredibly magical food. The wonderful thing is that it's produced by a collaboration between mother and baby.

British mother Jody Danielle Fisher shared the miracle of this collaboration on Facebook recently after having her 13-month-old child vaccinated.

In the post, she compared the color of her breast milk before and after the vaccination, to show how a baby's reaction to the vaccine has a direct effect on her mother's milk production.

"The 'normal' colour milk is from the day before she had them, the 'blue' colour milk is from today - 2 days after she had them. It's blue from all the antibodies my body is producing as it thinks she's sick with what she was vaccinated against!" she wrote.

"When she feeds her saliva sends signals to my body to produce more milk with illness specific antibodies!" she added.

According to researchers, Fisher's hypothesis is correct. A mother's body can detect if a child is sick through breastfeeding and then pass on antibodies that will help immunize the child through her breast milk.

In 2015, Katie Hinde, PhD, a biologist and associate professor at the Center for Evolution and Medicine at the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University, explained the phenomenon to journalist Leslie Goldma of Mom.me.

"There, it is believed that mammary gland receptors interpret the 'baby spit backwash' for bacteria and viruses and, if they detect something amiss (i.e. the baby is sick or fighting off an infection), her body will actually change the milk's immunological composition," Hinde said.

"Putting this all together, some scientists hypothesize that this could be one of the ways babies let mums 'know' about their condition and mums respond with infection-fighting antibodies," she continued.

via Flickr

Fisher's post shows the amazing power of mothers, babies, vaccinations, and breast milk and how they all come together to create healthy children.

However, the post received a backlash from anti-vaxxers who have a hard time grasping the overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are safe. In fact, a 2019 study of over 650,00 children concluded that the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism.

via Facebook


via Facebook


via Facebook

Fisher had some strong words for the anti-vaxxers who claimed she was harming her child. She says the "whole point of vaccinations" is to cause your body to "make antibodies and 'heal' itself."

"Don't come on my post preaching about not having vaccinations and them been poisonous," she wrote. "I hope your child(ren) never becomes ill with anything serious or doesn't pass it on to a poor baby waiting to have their immunisations because you don't believe in vaccinations!"

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