Vaccine Ordering
You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.
You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.
This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
Two COVID-19 vaccines have been approved in the United States (one from Moderna, the other from a joint venture between Pfizer and BioNTech). Each of these vaccines require 2 doses, taken 3-4 weeks apart.
Megan is reading an article on her phone to Cueball. A report from the CDC says that it's possible to get effective immunity against COVID-19 when mixing mRNA vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna, but that this practice should not be the norm. The report in question can be viewed here; it stresses that mixing the vaccines is acceptable only in exceptional circumstances, such as "when the first-dose vaccine product cannot be determined."
Cueball wonders whether the order in which you receive the vaccines matters. Megan then attempts to create mnemonic devices to help them remember which mix-and-match strategy is best for the mRNA vaccines (e.g., "Beer before wine and you'll feel fine; wine before beer and you'll feel queer"). She "concludes" that receiving the Pfizer vaccine after the Moderna one will be just as effective as having two doses of either, but that having the Moderna vaccine after Pfizer's will lead to the patient becoming the ruler of an ancient city. Megan might mean that the patient will be literally transported back in time, as she and Cueball (and Black Hat) were in 2321: Low-Background Metal. The apparent truthiness of these mnemonics might be attributed to the rhyme-as-reason effect, a cognitive bias that is often misleading - very much so in this case. Megan succeeds by rhyming "Pfizer" and "wiser," but struggles with finding a rhyme for "Moderna," settling for Smyrna, an ancient city located in what is now Izmir, Turkey. Two equally ridiculous rhymes could be “Pfizer before Moderna, you’ll have a broken xiphisterna (plural of xiphisterum, or the xiphoid, a small triangular extension of the sternum)” or “Pfizer before Moderna, you’ll be attacked by sharks of genus Sphyrna (a hammerhead shark)”.
A side effect of a drug is an effect incidental to the intended purpose of the drug. Side effects can be positive or negative, though in vaccine trials the greater concern is usually about negative side effects. Becoming ruler of an ancient city that is now only a historical ruin would certainly be an unexpected side effect.[citation needed]
The title text continues the theme of difficult rhymes, using the full names of both the Moderna vaccine drug (mRNA-1273, rhymed with banshee) and the Pfizer one (tozinameran, rhymed with catamaran).