 Hi, everyone, and welcome to a real conversation between two native English speakers. I'm Liz Wade, and this is Adam Navas. Hi, Adam. Hello, Liz. Hello, everyone. Yes, and so today we are going to discuss our program called Sending COVID-19 Vaccines Around the World. But before we get into that, if you have not listened to that program or watched it on YouTube yet, take a moment to listen to that and to go through it so that you know what we're talking about in this conversation. You can find it on our website where you can listen and read along, and that's at spotlightenglish.com or, of course, on YouTube at youtube.com slash spotlightenglish1. And then, yeah, you can listen to that program in a classic version, in a no music version, and also in an advanced version. So that's a lot of versions for you to choose from. And, yeah, you can also listen to the program as a podcast anywhere you can get your podcasts. 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And if you're not subscribed, please don't miss out on anything from spotlightenglish. Click that subscribe button and the little bell to never miss a video. And I think that has gotten all of the business out of the way, as they say, right Adam? Well said, I think you covered everything. Yeah, exactly. You might notice that today I have a little bit of a suntan, a little bit of a burn on my forehead. I wasn't quite as careful as I should have been on our holiday trip yesterday. So you spent some time outside. Yes. And that makes a lot of sense because the weather is getting cooler. And sometimes you forget that the sun can still give you a sunburn. Well, and it was just, it was gorgeous yesterday. The sun was shining, there were beautiful clouds and it was cooler weather so you could walk around. It was really great. It was a holiday yesterday for us, of course. So we were both off work on a much needed little vacation. Though I will say, as someone with no hair, I'm always aware of the sun. That's not something I forget about. Do you sunscreen the top of your head or do you wear a hat? Certainly, both. But if I'm not going to wear a hat, I'll definitely wear sunscreen. Front to back. See, I didn't even, I wore my hair down, so I didn't even put sunscreen on my neck. I just used my hair as my sunscreen. But I do have, I made, okay. So my family does a little tradition every year on Labor Day, which is the day we celebrated yesterday. Okay. Which is the first Monday in every September. And we always walk to a lighthouse in Luddington. And usually we go up, but you'll have to see what happens. I am going to make a video about that tradition and I will share it on our YouTube channel. Oh, nice. And we have a program about lighthouses, don't we? We do have a program about lighthouses. I actually, my only experience with lighthouses is walking up to the lighthouse, like on this tradition. But I learned a lot from that program, actually. You see, there's so many programs we could just do a conversation about. We should talk about those programs. Well, the sunscreen is one good thing that we do to protect ourselves. And this program is about another thing people can do to protect themselves. See, we're getting back to the program. Okay. So I was going to say for this program, I like to kind of give a little reminder of what the program has been about. So it starts with how really the first vaccine started to get spread around the world. And the story of some boys that brought that vaccine to Central America. And then the program doesn't talk about this, but they actually went many places in the world. And then it goes on to say, it goes on to the problem of how we're going to transport the COVID-19 vaccines all around the world. But these are also problems that like, for example, UNICEF and other vaccine organizations have been trying to bring vaccines to the places that they are needed over many years. Before UNCOVID-19 was in everybody's mind and bodies in the world. Yeah. So what did you think of that story, Adam, at the beginning? Well, the story at the beginning really made me think because so much of life I take for granted like cellular, mobile phones, smartphones. They have only been around for a short time. The internet in human history has still relatively, I think it's 25 or 30 years old. But even widely adopted things like YouTube, which you might be watching this video on. I think it was 2006 or something, YouTube. Right. So to think about, well, of course they had cold storage ways of keeping this vaccine at very cold temperatures. Oh, and then you realize, oh, maybe they didn't. Well, how would they do that? And of course, they had to get creative. And in this particular story, some of the ethics, meaning whether it was right or wrong the way they did this. And I don't, should we just, I don't want to spoil the, if for anyone who hasn't listened to this, but should we just talk about how they. Yeah, I think so. Okay. Well, I think it begins even with, we have a program about how the very first vaccine was invented. And that even is a crazy story about how it was for smallpox. And this Edward Jenner was just a country doctor. And he saw that if the people, the women who were milking the cows, if they got cowpox, that they wouldn't get smallpox. So he basically started experimenting on the people around him, giving them cowpox and then purposefully trying to infect them with smallpox. And he found that then they would not get smallpox. Yeah. So, so that was a way that they were spreading that vaccine around England. And actually, the Chinese had been doing that for a while as well, like there are, there are accounts of Chinese people. I think it's inhaling dried particles of smallpox so that they take very small bits of smallpox into their system where it trains their immune system. So we do have a program about that, but that is the vaccine that these boys were hired to bring across. Yeah, they were boys who were orphans, which means their parents had either died or they had no, they had no parents. Right. So in order to keep the, they actually wanted to keep the virus alive. So they had to systematically get one boy sick, and then the next boy sick, and then the next boy sick, and then the next boy six all across a boat that all across the ocean, right? Weeks long journey, because they didn't have any way to keep it cold or to, you know, keep it between a slide so that they could transfer it or, or whatever. They had to keep that particular, yeah. Yeah. So the heart wrenching part is these boys didn't have a lot of choice to do this. Yeah. And they went from one country and supposedly, as far as we know, once they got to this new country, they were adopted by families and given resources, but still. Some of them were as young as like three or four years old. Yeah. Like right, I mean, now we would never, like scientific, you would hope, scientific experiments would never be done on children like that. Like they would never be put in that position. But it does raise, and this is a interesting question. I want to hear what you have to say. And if you're listening to this and you have something to add, put it in the comments what you think. Yeah. So vaccines are a different kind of medicine than like a surgery or you have a headache and you take some medicine, right? That helps you as an individual. A vaccine may help you as an individual, but what it really does is help public health. Right, yeah. So making choices for public health versus individual health because some people may have a vaccine and they may get sick for a couple of days or they may not feel good or they may have an adverse, which means bad reaction. But overall, it helps people. So I think was it was it okay that these few boys helped a big group of people even though they had some negative consequences themselves? Well, and even just to make that question, like deeper, like it's not that they just helped one village in Central America, right? So once that once that vaccine had crossed the ocean, it could go from Central America to North America. Anywhere there's human to human transmission. Right, exactly. So it could be it could be spread all through the Americas just by these like eight, what was it eight or 10 boys who crossed this ocean and a very small amount. Yeah. And then like I said, in the beginning of this program, this voyage actually included more stops along the way. So they went, I think they went to Spain next and then maybe like around the Mediterranean. Oh, I'm not exactly sure I should have I should have double checked. I did read about it, but yeah, I don't know how I feel about that because I, I mean, I think that's a very brave thing they did. Yeah. But I mean, these are still people. But the same thing is true today. Right. Some people who are getting the COVID-19 vaccine have negative effects from it. Yeah, that is true. And but far fewer than are having trouble from from COVID itself. I agree. I agree with you. I'm more saying the logical point. I think it's very difficult to take a step towards something as a group, as a country will say that we know is good for the country, but will have negative effects on some people, even though we don't know who those people are. Everything we do, Adam has some risk attached to it. I mean, even sitting in your house doing nothing has some risk attached to it. Right. Yes. Like being in a car or on a motorbike or, you know, all of those things have some risk. Right. But I think if you are accepting the risk of a vaccine, you're also accepting that you're doing your part as a community. Yeah. Oh, I think that's part of the community. I think that's true. And I think in the United States, we have a very, a much stronger sense of the rights of the individual. Yes. One person is more important than the rights of the group. We have talked about that a lot, like in our live shows about, you know, masks and COVID and everything like that. And I think I've been really studying some other, not deeply studying, but reading some materials and some books about other cultures where they would say the group is much more important than the individual. Right. And it's even hard to get my brain around to understand how I wouldn't do something that's best for me or the people in my family. It has to do with, you know, the larger family or the tribe that I'm a part of. And I think that has varied. That's not just sometimes we talk about culture and we think, oh, you like this kind of food. I like that kind of food. Right. It's just a difference. But when it comes to maybe getting like vaccines, it might be easier in cultures that have a more public sense of the public good. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, I think that's true. We need to move to another country. Even here where in the US it's very easy to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Many people are still not vaccinated. Right. Even though health authorities have been suggesting that they get vaccinated. And, you know, people here are saying I'm not going to get that vaccine where people in some other countries who don't have access to the vaccine are, you know, practically begging to get it. Yeah. And I think that also is a really difficult question about or even just in general about this program sending vaccines, any vaccine around the world. Right. It talks about like West and Central Africa where there's not enough refrigeration to keep vaccines cold, even just normal vaccines, not just the COVID-19 vaccine. And so, you know, UNICEF is working to like build refrigeration in a in a line basically to make sure that the vaccines, any vaccines can reach people there. Yeah, because assumably, unfortunately, I should say, this is probably not the last time we're going to have to be prepared to handle a pandemic situation. Right. And so if you can build out that infrastructure now for hopefully it's it's 50 years or 100 years from now. But hopefully we can we can better be better equipped to have vaccine. What do they call vaccine justice vaccine equality. Yeah, equity equity. Maybe that's the word I'm looking for. One thing that I did find really interesting about this program is thinking about places that have not had COVID cases yet. Like, there are some like far away island countries that are pretty isolated that have had no known cases of COVID yet. And, you know, that we still have to get the vaccine there safely somehow without also bringing COVID. But because not not they might have enough like medical, you know, not knowledge, but like equipment, they might have the equipment to keep people safe. But it spreads so quickly that they actually could run out of room the same way that, you know, many places are running out of room. And so it's still really important to get the vaccines there. And how do you do that? How do you get it to every place in remote villages? Right. Because once one person brings it in, that's how viruses spread right to people to four people to eight people, etc. In the comments on some of these programs already, like we have had people saying that, you know, they have been able to get the vaccine or they they say their government is doing a lot to help them get the vaccine. And I would love to hear what people think, like, is is it easy to get a vaccine where you are? Like, yeah, how do you feel about that vaccine? Is it is it easy to get all vaccines where you live? Because, of course, that, you know, we just talked about how sometimes that is not easy. Yeah, and there are a number that, you know, we talk a lot about the COVID-19 vaccine. But of course, vaccines have been around for a number of diseases. And so many, like when I brought my young children, they just gave them the childhood vaccine. You know, I don't even remember. Measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, RSV, all that stuff. Do you know what? Okay. And here's how I'm going to wrap it up, Adam. I'm going to wrap it up with some hope. Do you know what vaccine they didn't have to give your kids? Oh, yes, I do. Smallpox. They did not have to give your kids the smallpox vaccine. And that is because in the 1970s, the whole world, and I'm going to get so worked up about this because this is my favorite story and it gives me so much hope. And you should all check out the smallpox program that we have made because it is one of my absolute favorites. In the 70s, as a world, we decided that we were going to get rid of smallpox. Seriously, I'm getting so worked up about this. I love it. In a good way. We decided we were all going to work together and get rid of it for good. And we did. Like health organizations around the world, they lined up kids. They lined up adults. Everyone got vaccinated for this virus. It's a virus. Same COVID-19 is also a virus. We sent health organizations to remote villages to every place on earth because we knew it was a very important thing to do. And I think it was in 1978, I want to say. It was completely eradicated. And there have been no known cases of smallpox in the world since that point. Because everybody got vaccinated. And that was it. And that was done. And they're trying to do that with things like polio, which is still something that we're fighting with. But that people do get vaccinated against. And we can get rid of things. That is the hope here. We can get rid of it just like we got rid of smallpox. And yeah, everyone should check out that program. And when you can do your part. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. All right. So that was my little bit of hope. My little bit of like, yes, moment. And I hope you have checked out all of those programs, the smallpox program, the vaccine programs, if you want to learn more about the history of vaccines or how vaccines work. And of course, I also have made up a COVID playlist. So if you want to hear about masks during COVID time or Captain Tom says thank you during COVID time or the life and loneliness, people's experiences during COVID. And of course, this program sending COVID vaccines around the world. You can check that out in the COVID playlist and also in our vaccine playlist. Learn more about those health words there. Check out the join button below to become a member of the Spotlight English Channel. And yeah, like I said before, hit that like button and subscribe. And yeah, until next time, listen, watch, practice, learn, spotlight out.