Here’s Why Miami Shark Researchers are Concerned About a Potential COVID-19 Vaccine - Miami Herald

The Miami Herald wrote a great piece on the #SharkFreeVaccines initiative, click the button below to read the full story. And we're only 300 petition signatures away from 100K, can you help us hit it?! Updates coming later this week...⁠

"A sudden spike in squalene demand would be a significant concern, (Catherine Macdonald, a marine conservation biologist and ecologist at UM’s Rosenstiel School) said, in part because the liver oil is more abundant in deep sea sharks that are vulnerable to overfishing.⁠

Though GSK says it’s using sharks that were fished for other purposes, Macdonald said 'asking for greater supply chain transparency is still a reasonable thing to do.'⁠

'Some fisheries associated with squalene production are targeting deep sea sharks,' Macdonald said. '... We know that deep sea environments are evolved with very low natural levels of disturbance, so any time we are having meaningful effects on deep sea populations, we know less about them, and we’re less able to detect the effects we’re having.'

…The initial controversy over whether shark-derived squalene in COVID vaccines would result in the slaughter of half a million sharks did miss the nuance of the situation, said Stefanie Brendl, the founder and executive director of Shark Allies, the group that produced the estimate that led to the news coverage.

Brendl said she was hesitant to have Shark Allies weigh in on shark-derived squalene because she didn’t want to be seen as calling a crucial public health need into question. But the organization, Brendl said, needed to ‘get ahead of a problem which could potentially take us in a really bad direction.’

‘Is this a hill we want to die on? Do we want to fight COVID vaccines when we have so many other problems? No,’ Brendl said. ‘But we don’t want it to turn into another hill.’”