{"id":2132,"date":"2020-11-25T17:44:15","date_gmt":"2020-11-26T00:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patandstacy.com\/blog\/?p=2132"},"modified":"2020-11-30T09:26:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T16:26:34","slug":"azd-1222-pandemic-pioneering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patandstacy.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/25\/azd-1222-pandemic-pioneering\/","title":{"rendered":"AZD-1222: Pandemic Pioneering"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"I
Behold, the evidence of injection. I don’t know if it was THE<\/strong> injection or an<\/em> injection, and won’t for another two years, but I have my suspicions…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My head hurts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it allergies? Is it stress from the white-knuckle madness of Los Angeles traffic? Is it the two glasses of red wine I drank last night? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it a cellular response to a self-inflicted invader? The harbinger of Immunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I won’t know for certain for two years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, I enrolled in the AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine Phase III Clinical Trials (AZD-1222),<\/a> volunteering my blood and guts to fight the greatest threat to humanity since the Cold War: SARS-CoV-2, which has infected 60 million people worldwide since December 2019, killing 1.4 million of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As opposed to the sexier mRNA-based vaccines developed by Pfizer \/ BioNTech and Moderna<\/a>, the AstraZeneca vaccine is vector-based: It uses a common cold-type virus as a Trojan horse to introduce an altered gene for the coronavirus protein into my cells in hopes of training my immune system to recognize and destroy COVID-19. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a double-blind trial, so I will not know if I got THE<\/strong> shot or merely a<\/em> shot for two years. Until then, I will wallow in hypochondria – or at least for the next 48 hours. The clinical trial nurses advised me to watch out for certain side effects during the first two days:<\/p>\n\n\n\n