Virus explainer goes viral as Saskatoon doctor answers COVID-19 vaccine questions
On Twitter thread, Dr. Madhav Sarda avoids jargon, aims for understanding and fun
Dr. Madhav Sarda, a child psychiatrist at the University of Saskatchewan, has gotten used to friends and family asking him about the science behind COVID-19.
Days after the first COVID-19 vaccines were administered in Canada, he decided to write a Twitter thread about how mRNA vaccines — like those developed by Pfizer and Moderna — work.
"I was just sitting there, and I had a patient who was running late, so I started to put together a thread to explain how this kind of thing goes," he said. "I really expected a handful of people to read it, and maybe it would be helpful to them, so I tried to put it in basic terms — a really broad overview. Then it just exploded."
Sarda's educational thread went viral, with over 100,000 retweets and 275,000 likes.
The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) are kind of brilliant at a science level. I’ve had a few people in my real non-Twitter life ask me to explain how it works so I’m going to try my best here in this thread while I’m waiting for a patient to show.
—@WheatNOil"People are looking for information about how the vaccine works," he said. "My [explanation] took it down to a more basic, broad overview. And I threw in a few swears and things like that that caught people's attention.
"Maybe it's a bit of a cathartic experience, given all we've gone through with the virus and this pandemic. I think just being able to call it something bad resonated with people."
In his thread, he described how the vaccine allows cells to replicate the "asshole protein" that allows COVID to get into cells, helping the body build up an immune response.
So you destroy the asshole protein (which in and of itself can’t infect you, it’s just a protein, not the virus).<br><br>Now here’s the important part. Your memory cells ‘remember’ the asshole protein. They remember exactly how to destroy it.
—@WheatNOil"These mRNA vaccines, they don't have any virus in them," Sarda said. "They don't have any live or weakened virus in them. They're actually just the instructions to make a protein that the virus has in it, and all you're doing is giving your immune system some target practice so it can safely destroy that protein if you come in contact with it later."
And while Sarda is not an immunologist, he believes his background as a child psychiatrist has been helping him communicate with people outside the medical field throughout the pandemic.
"My whole job is to explain things to five-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 17-year-olds, parents, caregivers and family," he said. "I'm always having to adapt how I explain what's going on — including pretty complex things — to different people at different ages and in different walks of life."
And as more Canadians get in line for their COVID-19 shots, Sarda says this kind of clear, memorable messaging from the medical community will be critical in the months ahead.
"It's important to slow down, pull back and say okay, do people know the basics of what you're trying to explain?" he said. "If not, you might need to go back to the basics. And, second, make sure people understand, conceptually, what's happening.
"It doesn't matter if they know the right words or the right jargon — do they understand the concept? And the third thing, I think, is to make it fun."