The lost Lyme vaccine

Summary

Unexplainable — "The Lost Lyme Vaccine"

Podcast: Unexplainable
Host: Vox, featuring Meredith Hodinot
Date: June 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the story of the now-lost Lyme disease vaccine, focusing on one small-town physician’s central role in its rise and fall. Through the experiences of Dr. Vijay Secand, a family doctor in Lyme, Connecticut, the episode examines the hope, science, setbacks, and controversy surrounding Lymerix—the first and only Lyme vaccine ever brought to market in the United States. It’s a scientific and personal tale about community, uncertainty, and the difficult terrain between public health, trust, and scientific communication.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Vijay Secand and the Lyme Disease Epicenter

• Meredith Hodinot opens with a personal anecdote about the community bonds at her aunt’s family medical practice, segueing into Dr. Secand’s own community role ([01:11]).
• Dr. Secand recalls moving to Old Lyme, Connecticut—the site where Lyme disease was first identified in the US ([02:41]).
• Quote:
  "Old Lyme is the place where I started my practice of medicine. It's also the place where Lyme disease was first discovered in this country, and it's consumed much of my life." — Vijay Secand ([02:41])
• Rapid increase in Lyme awareness during the 1980s led to anxiety and frequent questions from patients ([04:13]).

2. The Elusive Nature of Lyme

• Lyme disease is tricky to diagnose, presenting with a range of symptoms—from a characteristic ‘bullseye’ rash to flu-like symptoms and even neurological effects ([05:52]).
• Quote:
  "Lyme disease is a chameleon, a shape shifter that's always changing." — Meredith Hodinot ([05:52])

3. The Vaccine Opportunity

• Dr. Secand is approached by SmithKline Beecham to help run a phase three clinical trial for a Lyme disease vaccine ([07:29]).
• The vaccine is unusual: it works not by killing the bacteria in the human body, but by priming the blood so that when a tick feeds, the antibodies in the blood kill the bacteria in the tick before infection occurs ([09:11]).
• Quote:
  "It's almost as if we're vaccinating ticks." — Meredith Hodinot ([09:40])

4. Testing in the Heart of Lyme Country

• Dr. Secand recruits an overwhelming number of trial participants—over 1,200 in a matter of weeks ([10:19]).
• The clinical trial becomes a community affair including neighbors, the local bakery lady, even Secand's own family ([11:35]).
• Memorable Moment:
  Dr. Secand’s son eventually married another participant from the vaccine study, underscoring the deep interweaving between the study and the local community ([12:11]).
• The trial was double-blind and tightly monitored, including innovative biopsy work on rashes thanks to resources from the drug company ([14:16]).

5. Results and Approval

• The New England Journal of Medicine publishes the results: 66 cases of Lyme in the placebo group, 16 in the vaccinated—a prevention rate of about 80% ([18:10]).
• Quote:
  "We knew it was safe, we knew it was effective, we knew it worked." — Vijay Secand ([34:24])
• The FDA approves the vaccine (Lymerix) in 1998 after an advisory meeting airing concerns over theoretical autoimmune side effects ([19:30]; [20:11]).

6. Anxiety, Controversy & Public Perception

• In the late 1990s, public skepticism about vaccines is rising, fueled by now-debunked autism conspiracy theories and other vaccine scares ([24:12]).
• Concern grows over whether the Lyme vaccine could trigger autoimmunity and arthritis, despite data showing no increased risk ([25:16]).
• Notable Quote:
  "So we had a perfect storm back then. Wait a minute. How do you guys know this vaccine's safe? Look at that MMR." — Vijay Secand ([24:55])
• Lawsuits alleging harm from the vaccine—and negative, sensational media coverage—undermine trust ([28:40]).

7. The Vaccine’s Downfall

• Despite further reviews upholding the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, public confidence collapses and sales plummet ([29:54]; [30:17]).
• Dr. Secand learns the vaccine has been pulled from the market immediately after giving a presentation to physicians about its benefits ([32:12]).
• Memorable Story:
  Secand racing across a river on a ferry (with help from a patient working as a ferry operator) to give what ends up being one of the last talks he'd ever give on the Lyme vaccine ([30:17–32:12]).

8. Personal and Scientific Loss

• For Dr. Secand, the withdrawal is both a personal and communal loss:
  "I'd given up my private practice. I really had devoted many years of my life to not only doing the study, but doing it well. ... No, it was your life." ([32:54])
• The episode reflects on what was lost: progress on Lyme, momentum for future vaccines, and trust in science ([33:37], [34:32]).
• Quote:
  "We lost a very valuable tool that came into existence because of incredibly complicated and careful science ... And we knew it was safe, we knew it was effective, we knew it worked. And yet this had happened." — Vijay Secand ([33:37]–[34:24])

9. The Shadow of Lymerix & Hopes for the Future

• The Lymerix story is seen as a pivotal moment in the history of vaccine skepticism and loss of public trust—a “cautionary tale of science communication gone wrong” ([35:24]).
• New vaccine candidates are in development from Pfizer and Valneva, potentially opening a new chapter for fighting Lyme—though the shadow of the past still hangs over these efforts ([36:07]).
• "Even years later, I can say, even way after the studies ended, I will meet people on the street who will say, wow, those were the days we remember. They call it the Lyme study." — Vijay Secand ([35:51])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Lyme disease is a chameleon, a shape shifter that's always changing." — Meredith Hodinot ([05:52])
• "It's almost as if we're vaccinating ticks." — Meredith Hodinot ([09:40])
• "So we had a perfect storm back then. Wait a minute. How do you guys know this vaccine's safe? Look at that MMR." — Vijay Secand ([24:55])
• "We lost a very valuable tool that came into existence because of incredibly complicated and careful science ... And we knew it was safe, we knew it was effective, we knew it worked. And yet this had happened." — Vijay Secand ([33:37]–[34:24])
• "Even years later, I can say ... I will meet people on the street who will say, wow, those were the days ... They call it the Lyme study." — Vijay Secand ([35:51])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:41] — Dr. Secand introduces Old Lyme as the birthplace of Lyme disease
• [05:52] — Describing Lyme’s elusive, shape-shifting nature
• [07:29] — First call about the vaccine trial
• [09:40] — Unique mechanism of the vaccine (“vaccinating the tick”)
• [10:19] — Massive community response to trial recruitment
• [14:16] — Rash evaluation and research breakthroughs
• [18:10] — Key study results; 80% prevention rate
• [19:30] — Presenting the results to the FDA
• [24:12] — On the rise of vaccine hesitancy and public distrust in the late ’90s
• [28:40] — Lawsuits and intensifying controversy
• [32:12] — The moment Dr. Secand learns about the vaccine being pulled
• [33:37] — Reflection: what the medical community lost
• [36:07] — New vaccine efforts and living in the shadow of Lymerix

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Closing Reflection

Through the eyes of Dr. Secand, "The Lost Lyme Vaccine" vividly explores what it feels like to be on the front lines of a scientific and community drama: the promise and hope of an effective vaccine, the pain of its loss amidst controversy, and the enduring legacy it leaves for science and public trust. The episode is both a cautionary tale and a glimmer of hope as science attempts to learn from its past missteps while new Lyme vaccines are once again on the horizon.

Transcript

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[Meredith Hodinot]

When I was learning how to make radio, I had a day job in the file room at my aunt's family medicine practice just outside of San Francisco. They were old school and didn't really do computers, so there was just a pile of paper taller than I was, of faxes, doctor's notes, checkups, prescriptions, just everything. And as I filed that mountain of paper, I saw the community that they had built at that doctor's office. The generations of families visit after visit, living their lives, trusting their health and their loved ones with my aunt's care. So it resonates with me when Vijay Secand describes his work as a family physician.

[Vijay Secand]

I take care of newborns to 90

and I say stop at 90 because

if you're 90, you don't need me.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Vijay has been a family doctor in a little town in Connecticut and ever since he first drove up there with his wife in the 1980s and we

[Vijay Secand]

fell in love with the place.

It was a small, charming town where you have a couple of very nice inns on Main street and just, you know, it's a lovely spot right there on the Connecticut shoreline at the bottom

of the Connecticut River.

[Meredith Hodinot]

But this town was special, the center of a newly uncovered disease that Vijay had only really read about in textbooks.

[Vijay Secand]

Old Lyme is the place where I started my practice of medicine. It's also the place where Lyme disease was first discovered in this country,

and it's consumed much of my life.

[Meredith Hodinot]

The story of Lyme disease is long and Winding. It's an old disease that's spread across much of the northern hemisphere. But in 1976, a Yale professor, Dr. Alan Steere, was the first to pin it down to ticks in Lyme, Connecticut and give it its name. Over the last 50 years, Lyme disease has impacted millions of lives and has become one of the fastest growing insect spread diseases in the United States. But this isn't that story. This is Vijay's story of how a disease and the search for answers can become a career, a community, a life. I'm Meredith Hodinot and this is unexplainable. So when did Lyme disease tip from like something that was kind of theoretical to becoming a part of your everyday life and your practice as a doctor?

[Vijay Secand]

Very quickly, in the mid-1980s when the media reports started to come out, there's quite a lot of anxiety. So I started to get phone calls in my office almost every day. I almost to spend an hour before going home at the end of the day returning phone calls from parents who asked me what to do about their kids tick bites. And so all of a sudden we had a snowballing of interest, anxiety, stress, need for understanding diagnosis and treatment.

[Meredith Hodinot]

How did it feel for you to be a family practice doctor, like you said, treating everybody from the infant to the grandma in the household and also be at this, like, epicenter of Lyme disease in this country?

[Vijay Secand]

It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun because how often do you get to be a doctor and treat stuff that not only seems this new, but to be right in the middle of it? I mean, it's the kind of thing where if you made a phone call to a customer service agent, they asked you what your address was and you said, lyme, Connecticut. They said, oh, where the disease is. Right. It was a kind of. So, you know, as a doctor, it was kind of neat to have something that you can uniquely diagnose and be positioned to diagnose it as well as to cure it.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Yeah, yeah. I feel like it would be a lot less fun if you couldn't cure it.

[Vijay Secand]

Right. And there are those cases. One could write a chapter or two

in a book about that.

[Meredith Hodinot]

As Vijay saw more and more patients come into his office with Lyme disease, he realized it wasn't always easy to recognize. That's because Lyme disease is a chameleon, a shape shifter that's always changing. Lyme disease is caused by a corkscrew shaped bacteria that lives in ticks, bellies. If an infected tick bites you, the the bacteria gets in your skin and starts to spread in a rash, sometimes in this iconic bullseye shape. At this point, Vijay says it's often easy to knock out with simple antibiotics. But if it gets past the skin, untreated, the Lyme disease bacteria can get into the bloodstream and spread to your heart, your joints, your nervous system. Vijay treated patients that had half their face paralyzed, patients who passed out because their hearts were beating too slowly. The longer a patient had Lyme disease, the harder it was to recognize. Lyme disease could look like arthritis. It could look like a summer flu, it could look like meningitis, it could be completely asymptomatic and look like nothing at all. And Vijay was on the front lines treating his patients, his friends, his neighbors. He contributed to dozens of academic papers in his spare time, and he was also moonlighting at the local ER until one day he got a call.

[Vijay Secand]

I was making rounds in the hospital, and the nurse on the floor came up to me and said, hey, doc, there's a guy on the phone. He says he's from a drug company. He says he wants to talk to you. I said, drug company? Why is he calling me at the hospital? I'm making rounds. And she says, I don't know. He says, can you talk to him? So I said, okay. I went over to the nurse's station and I picked up the phone, and there was a gentleman there on the phone. His name was David Krause. He introduced himself and said, you know, we've developed a vaccine for Lyme disease

that's now ready for phase three, which is the actual late stage testing to see if it works.

It had only been through the early phases where you just check to see

that it's actually sort of safe to give to animals. Then you see if it's safe to give to people.

And then is it maybe safe in a small number of people? But you don't check to see if it actually works until you, you know,

all of those ducks are in order.

So, anyway, so Dr. Kraus said, would you be interested in working with us on this vaccine now that we've reached this stage? And I said, wow, that's fascinating, of course, and I signed on.

[Meredith Hodinot]

The drug company was Smith, Klein Beauchamp, a huge international pharmaceutical company. And this vaccine was kind of unusual. The thing about Lyme disease is that it takes about a day, maybe two days after the tick bite for the bacteria to travel from the tick into your skin. And in that time, there's a window after the Bite, but before the transfer.

[Vijay Secand]

So the vaccine does not work on the bacteria in you. What it does is the tick sucks up your blood, which has the antibodies in it, kills the bacteria before they could come and infect you.

[Meredith Hodinot]

So it kills it in the tick itself.

[Vijay Secand]

Yes. So here we have the vaccine, which is very unusual because it kills the bacteria that cause Lyme disease in the tick before those bacteria can infect you.

[Meredith Hodinot]

It's almost as if we're vaccinating ticks.

[Vijay Secand]

Exactly.

[Meredith Hodinot]

The previous drug trials were promising, but now it was time to test this vaccine in the real world. There were going to be dozens of test sites across the country with thousands of patients. And where better to test a new Lyme vaccine than in Lyme, Connecticut? So Vijay signed up to run a test site as an independent contractor for the drug company. That meant he'd be recruiting participants, enrolling them in the study, and watching over them carefully for the next 20 months.

[Vijay Secand]

Now, as soon as I started the process of recruiting patients, I couldn't handle the number that started coming in.

[Meredith Hodinot]

No way.

[Vijay Secand]

It was mind boggling. I put a little ad in the newspaper and the phone started ringing off the wall. I had to get more phone lines. I had to hire a person just to answer it. Within a couple of weeks, I cut my work at the hospital in half. We ended up recruiting 1,200 adults, well, age 15 and over, and had to shut it down because I couldn't handle anymore. I had ended up asking a colleague if he would rent space to me because I needed more space just to see all these patients. I lured a couple of nurses from the hospital and ended up having a large staff to take care of 1,200 people. So within about six weeks of that phone call from SmithKline Beauchamp, I was deeply involved in this study. So we took the baton and we ran with it. My wife volunteered. Ethically, I'm not the one who did

her consent or gave her the shots.

And in the pediatric study which followed,

both of my kids received the vaccine.

And I didn't know, and they didn't

know whether they were getting vaccine or placebo.

Oh, I had neighbors. I had all mannered with people. I had people, you know, the lady who ran the donut shop across the road and she would, of course, bring donuts. Every time I have to mention this. Years later, my son came, came home and told me he's getting married. And the woman he was marrying was one of those kids from the vaccine

study from 15 years earlier.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Wow.

[Vijay Secand]

It's a small world. And it's fun and it connects you to people.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Do you feel like it changed your perspective on the community?

[Vijay Secand]

Yes, in a way it did, because I was pleasantly surprised to see that so many people would turn out to stick their arms out and have a needle stuck in them. So we gave half the patients a

placebo, and we gave half the patients the actual Lyme disease vaccine.

And I didn't know what they were

getting vaccine or placebo.

It's what we call a double blind study.

It's the gold standard for studies.

And then we followed these individuals for a couple of years through tick seasons. We checked them closely to see if

they got symptoms of Lyme disease.

We checked them in the most intense detail. We drew blood beginning of the season, end of the season. And anytime you had an illness that might or might not have been Lyme disease during those two years, we, we

drew your blood again.

I had a photographer helping me with

photographing the skin rashes. Patients came down with, et cetera.

So we had the guy across the road, also next to the bakery, who had a photoshop and the Photoshop guy. Every time I had a patient with a skin rash, he would go out of his way to get the film, develop it overnight, provide a high quality picture for me to then fedex to the manufacturer. And so we had the FedEx guy, we had the photo guy, we had the bakery lady bringing the donuts. It gave me a sense not only of being a physician in the community, but being a part of it in a unique way.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Beyond the vaccine, the drug company funding fueled Vijay's drive to pin down this shape shifting disease. Take for example, the first symptom of Lyme disease, the rash.

[Vijay Secand]

Everybody talks about the bullseye. But if you have 12 different ways

this rash might look.

Wait a minute. It's not so easy to diagnose. Sometimes the Lyme rash can appear in ways that we never imagined. So we had dozens of different rashes. Anytime a patient in our study had a rash, they'd immediately say, you got to see me, doc.

I've got a rash.

And because we had the resources of the large pharmaceutical company, we biopsied those rashes. Now, nobody in his right mind, or even if they had a million dollars, would be able to have their patient in their private practice office have their skin lesion biopsied and sent to a lab. But we had, we had to prove if it was really Lyme disease or not. So we did a little biopsy from the edge of all of those skin rashes to see if they could find

the Lyme disease bacteria in it, you

would be amazed at half the time there were rashes that I had no idea whether they were Lyme disease or not. That turned out to be Lyme disease, which, if we hadn't had the study, we would never have known. We would never have known.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Vijay was managing one of the biggest test sites for this phase three vaccine trial.

[Vijay Secand]

As a matter of fact, it got so busy, I had to stop my private practice completely.

[Meredith Hodinot]

He stopped moonlighting at the er, he stopped working extra jobs in local clinics. The study was his life and he was the face of this study for his community. Was there ever, ever for you, even the smallest moment of doubt?

[Vijay Secand]

I love that question because it being a double blind study, I had no idea whether patients were receiving vaccine or placebo.

And as you can imagine, during the

course of those few years where we were blinded, I had patients out of

1,200 coming down with all kinds of things, whether it's heart attacks, strokes, things that people have in the normal course of their lives when you're adults. And I always wondered, gosh, I hope,

I hope the vaccine's not causing it.

But fortunately, we had what's called a

data safety monitoring board, independent board, which was not blinded.

So they were able to look at all these things that were happening that

were sort of worrying me and other investigators and know whether there was a signal or not that the vaccine was involved.

So fortunately, this data safety monitoring board never called and said, hey, stop the study. Which I wondered, gosh, I hope I'm not doing this.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Vijay had to sit with these open questions. Did the vaccine actually work? Was it safe? Were there side effects? Vijay monitored his patients for nearly two years, but then the study was out of his hands.

[Vijay Secand]

As you can imagine, the very vast amount of data that were accumulated from

all the sites around the country had

to be collated, analyzed, sliced and diced by statisticians run by data safety review boards, where they're looking at adverse effects that patients had reported throughout the study to see whether they may or may not have been related to the vaccine. But patients actually became impatient in a way, no pun intended, because they wanted to know, hey. And of course, patients, we didn't unblind the study until after it was over. So patients were wondering, did I get the real thing or not? And then, of course, it was a game. There were people who say, I know

I got the real thing because I

felt, mmm after my arm really ached or I had this achiness the next day, or I Had this little temperature. So I think I got the real thing. But it'd be amazing how often they were wrong.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Finally, after months of needles and months of waiting, the people of lyme got their answer. The study results were published in the New England journal of Medicine in July 1998. 66 people in the placebo group got lyme disease that year, compared to 16 cases in the fully vaccinated group.

[Vijay Secand]

So prevented roughly 80% of cases of lyme disease that would have occurred in people who were vaccinated compared to people who weren't.

[Meredith Hodinot]

With over 10,000 patients, this wasn't the biggest of studies, but it was a perfectly respectable phase three trial showing that there were no major side effects. Over the 20 months that the patients were monitored, most symptoms from the vaccine, as reported by the study, were a sore arm, A little fever, nothing. A few days, and some ibuprofen didn't resolve.

[Vijay Secand]

I was thrilled. I was thrilled.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Vijay was a lead author on the paper with scientists from some of the biggest research universities in the country. He contributed to textbooks and helped educate doctors around the world about lyme disease. And with the study over, Vijay took on a new advocacy.

[Vijay Secand]

Being the physician on the ground there in lyme, Connecticut. My job was to tell these folks from the FDA who, why we even

needed a vaccine for lyme disease.

[Meredith Hodinot]

In 1998, VJ and other sponsor representatives for the drug company went to a holiday inn in bethesda, maryland, to present the vaccine study to an FDA advisory committee. This meeting lasted all day. Going into the weeds of the study design, the efficacy results, the safety data. Vijay shared what he had learned about the many faces of lyme disease, how it could look like so many different things.

[Vijay Secand]

It's often difficult to diagnose, it may

be difficult to treat, it can have adverse consequences which may be serious and

untreatable or become chronic.

And now we have a vaccine that

is safe and effective in preventing it. What can we do except for give this to the American people?

[Meredith Hodinot]

Then the coordinating investigator of the vaccine study, Dr. Alan Steere, shared some new findings of his own. Dr. Stier was a big deal. He's the one that first discovered that lyme disease came from ticks decades before, and he'd been studying lyme on his own. Apart from the vaccine trial, he was particularly focused on how lyme disease impacted tick, the immune system. He noticed some cases where people with lyme disease developed arthritis that was resistant to treatment with antibiotics, and he thought the immune system might be involved. It was pretty rare. We're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of people with Lyme disease. And Dr. Steere wanted the FDA panel to know because he thought an even smaller subset of these rare patients was with vulnerable immune systems might react differently to the vaccine, even though the study showed that for thousands of patients, the vaccinated groups and placebo groups didn't have any significant difference in arthritis side effects. So what did this mean for the vaccine and autoimmune arthritis? The FDA panel wanted more clarity and asked for additional testing on long term safety, but ultimately they concluded the vaccine was safe and effective. Later that year, the vaccine, branded with the name Lymerix, was approved by the fda. But the questions from the advisory panel meeting haunted the vaccine.

[Vijay Secand]

There were some dark clouds on the horizon.

There were unanswered questions.

[Meredith Hodinot]

That's after the break.

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[Meredith Hodinot]

There were two things that changed the course of vaccine medicine in the late 90s. First, a British medical journal published a small, now very soundly debunked study connecting the MMR vaccine to childhood autism.

[Vijay Secand]

So here this researcher had his license stripped from him.

At the end of the day, he had the black eye. The journal had the black eye.

But the damage was done.

[Meredith Hodinot]

And then just A few months later, another childhood vaccine, this one against rotavirus, was taken off the market because it had a rare but dangerous side effect. And so the public perception of bad vaccines took off.

[Vijay Secand]

So we had a perfect storm back then. Wait a minute. How do you guys know this vaccine's safe? Look at that mmr. We read about it in the paper.

[Meredith Hodinot]

This was the beginning of the modern anti vax movement and the newly approved Lyme disease vaccine. Lyme limericks was one of their first targets.

[Vijay Secand]

One of the things that people were

worried about with the Lyme disease vaccine was whether it might cause an unusual form of arthritis related to autoimmunity.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Scientists were still digging into how the immune system was connected to chronic Lyme symptoms like arthritis. And so the FDA and the drug company wanted to keep close tabs on a vaccine that used the immune system to fight Lyme disease.

[Vijay Secand]

After approval, one and a half million

people received the Lyme vaccine over the following three years. Two or three years.

What happens afterwards? The manufacturer actually collected a large amount of data on the people who received

the vaccine after it was approved.

[Meredith Hodinot]

This is called a post marketing surveillance study, and it's common for new drugs. Basically, it's a trial period to make sure there aren't any side effects that are so rare. The other smaller phases of the trial miss them. Another retrospective study showed that of the nearly 1.5 million people who had the vaccine, a few hundred people reported any joint or muscle pain and 59 developed arthritis. A similar number of people would have developed arthritis in a group of one and a half million people who hadn't had the vaccine. But in the wake of all the other vaccine skepticism unfolding at the time, it was a good story.

[Vijay Secand]

A day didn't go by where I didn't get contact from one of the national or international media asking to talk about that vaccine that we heard might be causing arthritis or other autoimmune problems.

[Meredith Hodinot]

How did all this media attention, what did it mean for your patients? Were they starting to get worried?

[Vijay Secand]

That's a good question, because these patients

covered the whole spectrum.

We had patients who said, hey, I was in the study.

I came down with multiple sclerosis. Doc, my neurologist diagnosed, do you think

it's connected in any way to the vaccine?

Because I read that there were maybe problems.

I mean, you get stuff and you wonder, is it connected beyond the study?

[Meredith Hodinot]

Some patients were worried, confused. Maybe they had unexplained symptoms they didn't understand or a healthcare system that they didn't trust. And then some Doctors were confused, too. They were getting mixed messages from the government. The CDC recommended that only people at high risk for getting Lyme disease should even consider getting the vaccine. Vaccine Lyme disease was dismissed as a yuppie problem, a frivolous concern, and the vaccine, which could cost hundreds of dollars, was a luxury. Everybody else was doing just fine, wearing long socks, doing tick checks, and taking antibiotics if they caught it. And then the lawsuit started. It all happened so fast. Within months of limericks going on the market, a law firm in Philadelphia sued the drug company, claiming over 100 people experienced bad reactions from the vaccine, often citing crippling arthritis. And more lawsuits followed that one of

[Vijay Secand]

the people who enrolled in the class

action lawsuit to sue the company, and indirectly me, was the wife of a doctor colleague of mine at the hospital. So it got that close, the pressure

[Meredith Hodinot]

ratcheted up, and the FDA called back the advisory panel in 2001 to go over all of the safety data again. Reports from the time say the meeting was riotous. By this point, scientists had learned a little more about the interplay between the immune system and the rare treatment resistant Lyme arthritis that had originally sparked confusion back in 1998. They found that these patients were more genetically vulnerable to getting arthritis with or without getting Lyme disease, and that the Lyme disease antibodies weren't necessarily causing an autoimmune reaction. I mean, scientists still don't fully understand all of the complexity of Lyme disease and the immune system, especially for people with chronic Lyme. So while there were no absolute definitive answers, this research made the hypothetical connection between autoimmune arthritis and the vaccine even more tenuous. Once again, the FDA found that Limeryx was safe and effective, a recommended tool against a significant disease that was spreading fast. But sales of the vaccine took a nosedive, and by 2002, the Lyme vaccine just wasn't good business.

[Vijay Secand]

I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that meeting because I actually almost missed the ferry. Gosh, those were the days. There was a ferry across the island

Sanris to give this talk about Lyme disease to doctors.

And there happened to be an accident

on Route 95 that shut down the highway.

On my cell phone, I called the ferry. Gosh, are you running late by any chance? It turns out the woman who answered the phone was a patient of mine. She recognized my voice. This is what happens when you're in a small community.

She says, hey, doc, I know it's you.

Just get here as soon as you can. Don't bother to park the car, hand your keys to the attendant, and jump

on, which is what I did.

So that in itself was hairy. I get on the ferry. We cross Long Island Sound and reach this lovely restaurant. There's a whole bunch of doctors, about 40 of them, gathered to hear about the Lyme vaccine. And I start my talk always by

showing photographs of the disease and just little education about the disease itself.

And then what we did in the study, what did we find, how did we do it, why is it safe, et cetera, and how to go about

giving it to your patients.

So even though I was sponsored by

the company that makes the vaccine to give the talk, I spent at least half the time just teaching them stuff about the disease. And that's the fun I get out of it.

So we had a nice dinner, a nice evening, and then I was tapped on the shoulder.

I think it might have been during dessert. I was tapped on the shoulder by this person who worked for the pharmaceutical company. He said, I want to have a word with you.

And so we ducked into a hallway.

And then I find out the vaccine's been pulled.

I just gotten through a lecture to about 40 physicians about the vaccine and

how great it was for their patients.

And I found out the end of

that meal, after that meeting that the vaccine was withdrawn.

[Meredith Hodinot]

The drug company, now GlaxoSmithKline, after a merger, said that they were expecting so few sales that it just wasn't worth manufacturing the vaccine anymore. They settled the lawsuits without emitting any wrongdoing and covered legal fees without paying any other damages. It was like limericks had never happened. Vijay was shocked.

[Vijay Secand]

Here's something that I had invested many

years of my life into.

I'd given up my private practice. I really had devoted many years of my life to not only doing the study, but doing it well. And you wanted to do something in a way that you knew you could hang your hat on it. You knew, at the end of the day, it wasn't just because you're checking off boxes and, yeah, this patient had

this blood test done.

No, it was your life.

[Meredith Hodinot]

What did we lose when we lost this vaccine in 2002?

[Vijay Secand]

We lost a very valuable tool that came into existence because of incredibly complicated

and careful science, which had been conducted over years by truly, truly dedicated, brilliant scientists with all stripes.

We had microbiologists, immunologists, regular family docs. We had all kinds of people, people in the lab creating the vaccine. We had people who were putting together the data for us or opening the FedEx packages, or there were just thousands and thousands of people who devoted untold hours to this vaccine coming into being.

And we knew it was safe, we knew it was effective, we knew it worked. And yet this had happened.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Limericks wasn't a perfect vaccine, but now there are a lot of unanswered questions because of how it ended. Questions that could have only been answered with follow up studies and closely monitoring millions of people taking the vaccine. And in a lot of ways, we're living in the shadow of limericks. This was a big win for the nascent anti vax man movement. They had the power to face down a giant pharmaceutical company and get a vaccine pulled by going around the official government systems. And now they are a big influence within those very same government systems.

[Vijay Secand]

I wouldn't want to bring out a

new vaccine this year with the current administration. In terms of vaccine acceptance, is it worth it?

[Meredith Hodinot]

For years, Limericks has been seen as a cautionary tale of science communication gone wrong. How mixed messages can confuse people and lose the trust of communities that this science was supposed to help. But for Vijay, it's more personal than that, because for him, this science was a part of bringing his community together.

[Vijay Secand]

Even years later, I can say, even way after the studies ended, I will meet people on the street who will say, wow, those were the days we remember. They call it the Lyme study.

[Meredith Hodinot]

Over 25 years after the Lyme study, Pfizer and a French drug company, Valneva, are testing a new Lyme disease vaccine based on similar science. And as of this spring, Pfizer is planning on submitting the vaccine to regulatory authorities. This episode was produced by me, Meredith Hodnot. It was edited by Lissa Sop. Christian Ayala did the mixing and we collaborated on scoring with music. Noam Hassenfeld, Melissa Hirsch, Check the facts. Joanna Solotarov and Sally Helm are having fun in the sun. And thanks as always to Brian Resnik for co creating the show with Bird, Pinkerton and Noam. If you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us@ unexplainableox.com and if you'd like to support this show and the journalism that Vox does, you should become a member. It's really easy to do. Just go to vox.com members and for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up to be a member because of Unexplainable, thank you. It really means a lot. Thanks Also to those of you who have left us a nice review wherever you listen to your podcasts or, you know, just told somebody about the show, your best friend, your cousin's wife, your boss's janitor. Anyways, you're all the best. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network, and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not know just yet.

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