Vaccine: The Human Story -Part 1...Series Review and Q+A With Annie Kelly
Spoiler: This is not a Covid story
This past summer when I shared my plans for Bingeworthy with an old friend, she was keen, and right away asked: Had I heard about the podcast Vaccine: The Human Story?
I must have looked at her blankly…as in, did I really need to spend my time listening to a story of vaccines? I’d only recently weaned myself off the daily doomscrolling for daily Covid case counts, R(t) rates, and double-vaccination threshold rates…did I really need to step back into this world?
“Don’t worry, it’s not like that,” she said reassuringly. “It’s not even about Covid!”
But still, I wondered, what did I have to learn from a vaccine story about smallpox? Sure, I know smallpox has shaped much of the balance of power in our world for centuries…but what was the burning need to spend time with this story? Time is not infinite; I need reasons to commit to a binge-listen.
And then, this past summer, that footnote of vaccination history once again became a current day situation. This time it was monkeypox, a difficult but not deadly virus with a clear connection to smallpox.
Once again, public health agencies around the world were literally dusting off their old vaccine stock for smallpox...these viruses are similar enough that it’s the same vaccine for both. But finding supply took time; routine vaccination for smallpox began to slow down in the early 1970s.
People 50-years-old and younger have no immunity to smallpox, nor to monkeypox…which is still a lot of people, even with the targeted immunization campaign.
After spending the last two years obsessively reading Covid news, I felt like I should make time for a different virus, especially one that has managed to wield power over most of the planet, for centuries.
So, sure, I would take the time to listen to Vaccine: The Human Story, for three reasons.
To reflect on how it was that the world finally combatted the very deadly virus of smallpox
Because it seems that even though smallpox was officially over on paper, it found its way back into our lives again, this time a little bit differently.
This podcast binge-listen would go into the category of History Lesson, for science, culture, and immunology (new topic trend).
Episode 1
The series opens with a perfect execution of a BBC-Styled listening hook, and a well-executed Inciting Incident: The day in 1980 that the World Health Assembly gathered to declare the end of a war. Smallpox had been officially eradicated, eliminated, from all corners of the world, after centuries of effort.
For a podcast about a virus that was released in the middle of a pandemic, it was crucial to make the connection to smallpox to remember that it is thought to have been a virus of major concern for over 3,000 years.
First lesson learned: Suck it up.
For the last two-and-a-half years, we’ve been forced to do a quick study on how to live with a (potentially deadly) virus. At first, we had no idea how to manage it, so we locked ourselves at home, practiced social distancing, and dealt with the horror of a medical system on the edge of collapse, while our schools and shops and gyms and airports closed.
But perhaps we could all slow life down a bit and consider how far we’ve come in just under two years. It took two centuries before smallpox was under control…and then a third century to stamp it out. Do we post/ modern humans have the patience for this?
Some production notes
I should state my bias here…my narrative podcast listening tends to lean towards the journalism sphere. This means that I generally listen to stories that have been produced using the rulebook of journalism: original source audio and historical clips, voiced by the subject, or about the subject. This is what I’ve come to expect, and what I tend to gravitate towards.
However, sometimes I forget that there are other ways to make a podcast. Part of why I wanted to listen to this podcast is to remind myself that there are other formats and styles that work to tell a story.
Vaccine: The Human Story follows the style of an educational series, and it uses a historical framework to tell the story.
My bias towards journalism will explain why I was concerned when I realized that this series used historical re-enactments, voice actors, using a docudrama style, to narrate different chapters in the story.
First I asked myself why this production choice would have been made? If you’re telling a story of history that’s too old for source audio, your choices are:
The host/narrator can read the text
You hire an actor to read the text in character
I’ve seen this done with the host/narrator many times, and while the voice remains consistent, it can start to sound very dry, very quickly. If the entire story is history-driven, you run the risk of it sounding flat and monotonous.
However, using voice actors to read historical text is a dicey move. First, you have to find the right voice actor that fits with your story in the time period, second, you have to make that fit within the structure of the whole piece and fit with the narrator’s voice, and third, it has to fit the overall theme and style of the show.
You can’t just toss an actor into the middle of an episode to bridge a gap—the entire show must make sense from a bigger perspective. Plus, amateur voice acting can be spotted a few kilometers out, and it can compromise a story that’s otherwise very good.
I found the first couple of reenactments felt awkward to listen to. It took some time to amp down to the speed of this piece of history, which circled back a few thousand years at a time. But once I settled into it, and I let my snobbish audio-journalist layer subside, I realized that this style actually worked.
In the end, for these episodes, I realized that the voice actors allowed a texture and flow to this story that I think could have been quite dull without it.
Q + A with Annie Kelly, Producer and Host
Samantha: Tell me about the decision to use historical re-enactments…how did you weigh this decision, or maybe, what was the thought process, pro/con, that led to including them?
Annie Kelly: When I decided I wanted to tell this story, I knew I wanted to make it feel as real as possible to our audience as they listened. There can be a tendency when you’re looking at the past, where, because you know how the story ends, it loses its drama and feels like a foregone conclusion.
I wanted, as much as possible, to try to undermine that feeling. One thing I admired about the Fall of Civilizations podcast, who produced this show, was how adept it is at making the narrative feel as if it’s happening while you listen to it, and voice-acting seemed to be a key tool in how they achieved that.
SH: What was the audition process for the actors, and how did that tie into your production…whose task was it?
AK: My producer, Paul Cooper, had experience recruiting voice actors, so he took the lead on that. Some of them had worked for him before, others we sought out through the website Fiverr which allows you to recruit freelancers.
The actors usually have a sample of their work, and so we’d listen to it together and see if we thought it had the right sound. It can be difficult as most voice actors advertise for voiceover work, which has a different “sound”, like you’re listening to an advertisement. So it could take some hunting to find someone with the right dramatic quality.
Episode 2
How bad was smallpox?
Fully one-third of the people who contracted smallpox died. Of the ones who survived, most were scarred and maimed. It’s estimated that 300-500 million people died in the 20th century alone. But likely the greatest impact of this virus was felt much earlier, before good record-keeping was available, by the Indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia.
It’s recorded that the early Spanish explorers brought the virus with them to Mexico around 1520. Starting with the Aztecs and the Incas, the Europeans watched it virtually eliminate indigenous populations, which made their colonial goals much easier as a result, and thus changed the course of history.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the disease was unknowingly inflicted on populations, and then as time moved on, there is evidence that smallpox was used as a bioweapon of war.
Comparing this to our modern-day pandemic, on a grand scale, Covid has been devastating and difficult, and every death is tragic…but viewed from a historical perspective, things have been much, much worse.
If the story of the smallpox story was defeated, including how a tool used by forest firefighters speaks to you, hang on and listen to episodes 5 and 6 which go into detail about the fascinating ways this difficult feat was accomplished…stay tuned for next week’s newsletter!
After listening to this series, I reflected on the difficult balance it takes to report science with the proper weight of history, while still working to engage the audience.
Q + A with Annie Kelly, Producer and Host
SH: How did the producers and the academics work together? Who was in charge of what, and who had final say? Writing science journalism is incredibly precise, and scientists don’t always trust the way “stories” need to be told to reach an audience. How did you deal with this tension?
AK: I was aware that History of Medicine was an entire academic field that I had very little background in, and I know from my own research specialism in online extremism that it can be very frustrating when an interloper pops in and decides they’re going to popularise your field without really engaging with it!
So I was really keen to have the help of experts in the field to guide me, as well as offering paid work to early career researchers, as so much of that time in your life can involve working for free. I was keen to strike a balance, to not create a podcast that would have experts ripping out their hair listening to it, but equally to still have an accessible, humanistic feel that anyone could relate to. It was certainly difficult at times, because the history of medicine is a very complicated one.
On the one hand, it’s a story of miraculous progress that means we now enjoy so much less suffering and death than humans in the past, but it also involves a very violent history of colonialism, oppression, and racism – and that relates to contemporary vaccine-scepticism too, so it wouldn’t have been ethical or desirable to just ignore that.
SH: With the rise of monkeypox, roughly a year after you released this story, did you feel the urge to go back and update the story? Or put a post-script on the ending? The vaccine is the same, and a new (targeted) vaccine campaign was pushed into action. Do you see any patterns repeating?
AK: A few people have asked me about that with monkeypox, and I considered it – it’s certainly a striking example of how the story of the first vaccine remains relevant to us today. But it equally felt like a story that’s still unfolding, and I wanted to be cautious in case something new develops, or is uncovered.
I suppose if there’s one thing that this research has taught me, it’s that public health measures frequently have unintended or unforeseen consequences, and so I wanted to wait to see what those were before jumping in to add a new episode.
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Next week on Bingeworthy
We will dig back into Vaccine: The Human Story and cover Episodes 3-6.
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Series Details:
Vaccine: The Human Story
Independently produced by Annie Kelly and Paul Cooper and supported a Patreon community. Further Production support and funding by the podcast Fall of Civilizations.
6 Episodes
First published: Episode 1: May 28, 2021
Release structure: semi-monthly from June 2021 - Nov 2021
Final episode, Ep 6 published April 8, 2022
Total Listening time: 4 hours, 11 minutes
To listen to Vaccine: The Human Story
Find it Here on Apple
And Here on Spotify