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In this issue on #SOHM, we are celebrating the lives of two entertainment industry professionals who have passed away in the last year #MarionRamsey and #BillBa...rtlett. Here at Shine On Hollywood, we like to honor people who dedicate their lives and careers to giving back to the community and helping others. One of the most apropos times to do so is after such a person has died. This isn’t just a way of remembering and saying farewell. It is also an important part of celebrating life. Click the link to learn more. https://shineonhollywoodmagazine.com/.../html5/index.html... Respect, Shine On Hollywood See more

Happy birthday!

#SOHM #ENDUREStudios #jaydenton #shineonhollywood COMING UP TOMORROW SATURDAY @ 2PM, PST... JAY DENTON INSPIRED US IN 2020 WITH HIS POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY ABOUT R...EFUGEE MUSICIANS IN BEIRUT, ENDURE: LEBANON. Now, the founder of ENDURE Studios continues to promote music as a universal language with a live-streamed concert on February 13. At 2 PM PST, this virtual concert will bring acoustic performances live from Jay’s studio in Los Angeles, where he will be joined by Aaron Kellim and Faith Richards. If these names sound familiar, it’s because these LA-based musicians were both featured in Endure: Lebanon and on the corresponding album, For Home. During this hour-long program, Jay plans to feature more music from his guest artists than himself. That’s not surprising from this humble musician/producer, who is more interested in giving a platform to others’ voices than promoting his own. Approximately a quarter of the time will be dedicated to discussion and information. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H7qBFAr4Og&feature=emb_logo Available on Amazon Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Endure-Lebanon-Jay-Dent//B08DRYL8SG This concert’s host is Jeffrey Vaughan, the music curator and executive content creator of KRXM Radio, an iHeart Media agency. The event is being sponsored by Shine On Hollywood Magazine, which proudly featured Jay as the cover feature of its 2020 Holiday Issue because of his passion to connect people through music. Tiffany Brannan, SOHM’s senior writer, will be discussing the magazine’s mission and vision live at the concert. https://shineonhollywoodmagazine.com//web/html5/index.html To watch this concert live, visit KRXM Radio’s Instagram account. Please log in at 2pm on Saturday and look for the poster and click on it in ordinary to view. https://www.instagram.com/krxmradio/ Mr. Denton hopes to also stream the concert live on Facebook, but the surest way of accessing the event is on the IG live stream. The show will be available in archives afterward. SOHM applauds Jay Denton and ENDURE Studios for their passionate promotion of positivity and global friendship through the power of music. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear and see musicians making live music together! Cheers from Shine On Hollywood

Hey! I've been getting a bunch of questions about the vaccines, and also overhearing a lot of questions from other healthcare workers in the ICUs where I work. ...I'm going to try to do a reasonably comprehensive FAQ. Obviously this won't cover everything; if there's anything else you need to know, post it in the comments and I'll try to get to it. I will supply evidence as I'm able to. Please also feel free to share if you think it will help others. Pretty much anything that I post publicly is intended for dissemination. **How does the vaccine work? I don’t get this one quite as much as the others, but understanding this will help answer a lot of the other questions. This is the longest answer, I promise! Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines are mRNA vaccines, which is a novel mechanism for vaccination. As some background, viruses at a basic level have two parts - genetic material, and a protein envelope, which serves as a delivery mechanism for that material. While all cellular organisms use DNA as their genetic material, viruses can use DNA or RNA because they're so incredibly simple. The genetic material (which I will refer to as "viral RNA" because SARS-CoV-2 and all coronaviruses are RNA viruses) of the virus "codes" for the proteins that make up the coat, which is to say that when a host's cellular machinery reads the viral RNA, it creates the virus's protein coat. You can think of this like a letter in an envelope from snail mail chain letters - you open the letter, it has instructions inside that say "copy this letter a bunch of times, make a bunch of envelopes, put the letters in the envelopes, and send them to other people/cells". Our body doesn't fight letters/viral RNA, because that looks almost exactly like our own RNA. Our body is on the lookout for envelopes. Up until now, most vaccines have been either inactivated viruses or live attenuated viruses. An inactivated virus is just the envelope without a letter inside. Your immune system recognizes the envelope as foreign and develops antibodies to it (or T-cell immunity, which is less-well understood), but since there are no letters inside, there's nothing that says "make more of these and spread them", so it doesn't go anywhere. Almost all currently available vaccines are of this type. A live attenuated vaccine is an envelope plus a letter, but it's been altered in some way to make it way less infectious (in our metaphor... the writing is really smudgy or something, I dunno). You can accomplish this by "passaging" the virus in various ways - copying it in different cell lines so it gets less good at infecting humans. Historically, this is what we've done because it's a lot less technologically demanding than creating an inactivated vaccine. These can still theoretically make you sick, although it's incredibly rare. Sometimes a weak virus can still replicate. This method is very rarely used (although there are some flu vaccines that use it for people with healthy immune systems - I believe the nasal flu vaccine uses this mechanism). The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna do not use either of these methods. They work by containing mRNA (messenger RNA) that codes for a particular protein (the spike protein) that the virus uses to attach to our cells. The rest of the vaccine is basically just things to help that mRNA get into our cells - mostly a lipid coating (lipids/fats make up our cell membranes) and then a few other things that are needed to keep that mixture stable. Once mRNA is absorbed into our cells, they use it to make whatever proteins the mRNA codes for. Remember, we can’t tell the difference between outside mRNA and our own mRNA. Our own mRNA comes from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. That’s a one-way street - DNA is used to make RNA, but RNA isn’t used to make DNA. It’s relatively rare for anything to be allowed into a cell’s nucleus (although some DNA viruses manage to get in and change things). So the mRNA vaccine gives our cells instructions on how to make envelope proteins from the virus - not the whole virus, and not even the whole envelope. Once those proteins are released from the cell into the bloodstream, our immune system recognizes them as foreign, and develops immunity against them. In the letter/envelope analogy, the mRNA is like a short piece of the virus’s letter/genetic code, and it only has the instruction make postage stamps. Our body then recognizes the brand of stamp the virus uses, and is ready to fight anything that uses the viral postage stamp. Here's a good article that talks a little about this: https://nymag.com//2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design **Was the vaccine rushed? The very short answer is that the vaccine was developed quickly. This is different from it being rushed. The amazing thing about mRNA vaccines is that mRNA is (relative to proteins) really easy to make. The SARS-CoV-2 virus pretty much uses a single protein (the spike protein) to gain entry to cells. This means that we have a good single target. The vaccine that I got in my arm on 12/17/20 was basically developed and in its final form by around February of 2020, because researchers had been working on this method of making vaccines for the past few years. Vaccine trials (and all drug trials) are done in humans in three steps - Phase I is for initial safety data, Phase II is for dosing and efficacy (roughly), and Phase III is for efficacy in larger populations. All of these phases happen _after_ animal safety studies. So we had the actual vaccine for the mRNA study back in February, and the last ten months have been spent going through those phases. One of the big issues in vaccine trials specifically is getting enough people to volunteer, and then waiting for enough infections to happen - in order to show that the vaccine actually prevents the disease, you need to see more infections in the control group than the vaccine group, and you need to accrue a certain number of infections. There was no shortage of volunteers here, and unfortunately no shortage of infections, which meant we could go through these phases pretty quickly. There are some things we didn’t do with these trials that we normally do, mostly things that take time. We didn’t wait to see how long immunity lasts, and we didn’t wait to see if there were any side effects after a few months out (more on those below). **What about side effects? There will be side effects. We haven’t seen any bad ones in the trials, although the vaccine has a good chance of making you feel like crap for a bit (I had some fatigue in the 2-3 days after my vaccine, which has since resolved). Here’s the article on the Pfizer trial in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577 Figure 2 covers adverse events - the most common ones were pain at injection site, fatigue, headache, and chills, all of which were more common in people under age 55. During the trial two vaccine recipients died, and four placebo recipients died, all from cardiovascular or unknown causes (unknowns were in the placebo group). **I heard that [someone passed out/had a seizure/got Bell’s Palsy/allergic reaction/whatever] - should I be worried? There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens to humans every day just because we’re alive. Someone in the Moderna vaccine group got struck by lightning: https://metro.co.uk//covid-vaccine-volunteer-struck-by-li/ It’s a silly story, but I think it’s instructive - there’s no causal link between the vaccine and the lightning strike, but investigators still had to report it. My guess is that we’re going to see at least a few people die in the 24 hours after receiving one of these vaccines, just because we’re vaccinating millions of people, and everybody dies at some point. Same thing with seizures. Unless we see a whole bunch of these events in a weird pattern, I’m not worried. Additionally, the Pfizer vaccine had >20,000 people vaccinated, and didn’t show up anything scary. (I’m focusing on the Pfizer vaccine because the trial results are published; Moderna’s aren’t yet). **What about longer-term effects? Good question! We don’t know, because we haven’t studied more than 2-5 months out (depending on when people got the vaccine and in which phase). It’s incredibly rare for vaccines to have adverse effects more than a week or so out from injection. This is a novel mechanism for a vaccine, so we don’t know for sure. My smart immunologist friends don’t think there’s much of a risk, but again, no studies. Since the mechanism of action is very similar to other vaccines (instead of injecting viral proteins, we inject instructions to make viral proteins), I expect that long-term negative side effects aren’t likely. Personally, I would still take this vaccine even if it had about a 1/5000 chance of killing me, because I think that’s a preferable situation to not being vaccinated. At the risk of getting sidetracked, there’s a human cognitive bias to be more afraid of bad results from deciding TO DO something as opposed to deciding AGAINST doing something. I would offer that deciding against getting this vaccine is actually an active decision that you will almost certainly get Covid at some point in your life. Not the main argument I’d like to make, but something to consider. **What if it alters our DNA? It won’t! This is an mRNA vaccine, which is a molecule that lasts inside your cells for about 10 hours. More of a Snap and less of a written letter. There is no mechanism in our cells to turn RNA into DNA. The few viruses that can do this (most notably HIV) have to code for a specific enzyme, reverse transcriptase, that allows them to turn RNA into DNA and integrate into the host genome. The vaccine doesn’t contain that enzyme or instructions for how to make it, because why would it? Additionally, the reverse transcriptase for HIV is specific to its own genome, so even if you have HIV, it still won’t put the mRNA from the vaccine into your DNA. And if it did, it wouldn’t really do anything anyways. **How does the vaccine take to work? Figure 3 in this paper https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577 shows that the number of infections drops substantially about 12 days after the first dose, and then to almost nothing a week after the second dose (which is given three weeks after the first dose). Infection is defined as symptoms plus a lab test, so they didn’t look for asymptomatic infections. Protection isn’t complete, but it’s about 95% effective at preventing symptomatic infection. **Will the vaccine stop me from spreading the disease? Also a good question! We don’t know, because asymptomatic infection and spread weren’t endpoints in the trial (i.e. they didn’t look for that). There’s a theoretical risk that getting the vaccine makes you more likely to get an asymptomatic infection and spread it to people around you. This seems unlikely to me - most vaccines we have prevent secondary transmission, and the most likely mechanism for stopping symptomatic infection is to stop infection period. But again, we don’t have data yet to prove this. We’re continuing to watch for it. **What if I already had Covid? Current recommendations are to wait three months after your last positive Covid test, and then get vaccinated. I can’t tell you the science behind this, as I mentioned elsewhere in this FAQ, immunity after an infection lasts at least eight months, and potentially much longer. **How long will the vaccine last? What if the virus evolves? Another good question that we don’t know the answer to. For Covid infections specifically, we have data that immunity after infections lasts at least eight months, and probably longer: https://www.medrxiv.org/conte/10.1101/2020.11.17.20233544v1 (pre-print article, so be aware this hasn’t been peer-reviewed, but it hasn’t been torn to shreds and taken down, either). The hope is that the vaccine provides comparable immunity, although it’s possible that it doesn’t. There is currently talk of a SARS-CoV-2 variant in the UK that seems to be able to spread slightly faster than prior variants: https://www.sciencemag.org//mutant-coronavirus-united-king Viruses mutate all the time - small mutations are how we track where the virus has been and how we can tell which cluster a case originates from. The question is whether the virus is capable of something called antigenic escape, in which the mutation makes it no longer susceptible to antibodies agains the spike protein. This gets really esoteric really quickly, but the short answer is that this is theoretically possible, but we haven’t seen it yet. There is no evidence that the UK strain (or any other mutation) is capable of re-infecting people with Covid at higher rates than people are already re-infected which is not zero, but very low. As a side note, influenza is hella capable of this kind of mutation. This is mostly because flu viruses, unlike basically any other virus, have eight strands of RNA which are capable of assorting at random and causing mutations as a MUCH faster rate than other viruses. SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t shown anything like this capacity. **Is it safe if I'm pregnant? The vaccines have not been tested in pregnant women. The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine has a statement on this here: https://s3.amazonaws.com//SMFM_Vaccine_Statement_12-1-20_( Summary - we don’t know for sure, but theoretically it’s very low risk. I know many pregnant healthcare workers who have opted for the vaccine (mostly because getting Covid while you’re pregnant is particularly bad), and we’ll have a lot of data in the next few months about how that turns out. **Why should I be a guinea pig/why should I use an untested vaccine? What if I don’t get it and just let everyone else get it and then I’ll be safe? You won’t be a guinea pig - the people who volunteered for the trials did that already. These are some of the largest vaccine trials in history. Additionally, by the time this vaccine is available to people who aren’t frontline healthcare workers or vulnerable populations, we’ll have millions of additional data points. This will be one of the closest-watched vaccine rollouts in history. As for why you shouldn’t just skip it and rely on others - in addition to this being a dick move, there are plenty of people who can’t get the vaccine, either because of immunosuppression or lack of access to healthcare. Your vaccination is necessary for keeping them safe. **We don’t know what’s in the vaccine! Yes we do! Check out the second image on this post: https://www.facebook.com/zephulos/posts/10114349387514213 This vaccine actually contains fewer difficult-to-pronounce ingredients than most (not that those are bad for you). The long chemical names are the lipids that are needed to help the mRNA enter our cells (see the first question). If your issue is that you don’t trust Pfizer or Moderna to accurately publish the list of ingredients and they’re secretly trying to poison you/whatever, that’s a different question, and the burden of proof is on you for that extraordinary claim. **I heard there’s a microchip in it/something about 5G/Bill Gates/whatever First off, you already have a microchip, you just paid a few hundred (or thousand) dollars for it and it’s in your phone. If you’re worried about government surveillance, start there. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has done a lot of really good work on privacy and safety: https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy Also, any microchip that could fit through a 28 gauge needle could also be delivered in ANY NUMBER of other ways, like in your drinking water. On a more serious note, anti-vax and anti-science propaganda is a super serious threat to public health, and a lot of these conspiracy theories come from that side of the world. I fully expect that every single story of someone passing out or dying within a week of getting vaccinated will be overly amplified with no regard for truth or plausibility (we’ve already seen a bunch of these). Also, if you want a real conspiracy story, a whole lot of anti-vax debate is being driven by Russian bots on both sides: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/ This isn’t to say anyone who disagrees with me is a bot - I know many people in my circles, specifically acrobatics and wellness, who have fallen hard into the anti-science side of things, specifically recently. It’s a serious threat to our public health and something I will continue to advocate for. Thanks for reading this far! If you have questions that weren’t answered above, feel free to post in the comments below. I’m working a LOT this week, but will try to answer as I’m able. As a ground rule, a question is in the form of words with a question mark at the end of it (implied or otherwise). If your question is this video says you’re full of shit or what do you think about this video and then you link to something on YouTube, I will delete your comment and, depending on the tone, I may block you. Please please please stay safe. We do not have room for you in the hospitals right now. Emergency room lines are long and we’re already putting multiple people in rooms that are barely designed to handle that. We’re running low on equipment and everybody is working extra shifts, and are rapidly moving towards the point where we may not be able to deliver the level of care we want to to everybody who comes in. Do your Christmas in the summer, do it over video chat or the phone, do not assume that people are safe just because you like them or are related to them. The current surge has already wiped out ICU capacity in California, and additional cases from the solstice-adjacent holidays will probably put us well into New York City April peak conditions.

John Lennon, So this is Christmas