Booster Shot Comics

www.MySCDstory.org won another award! We are happy to announce that MySCDstory.org received a Gold Award in the website category of the Season 3 DANDA (Design+Aesthetics Awards) program!

www.MySCDstory.org is a digital tool for people considering treatment options for sickle cell disease. We produced this project for the Sickle Cell Disease Gene Therapy Working Group led by Liza-Marie (Liza) Johnson MD, MPH, MSB, HEC-C and Akshay Sharma. Special thanks to the patients and families who gave their time and input throughout the development process.

Read the full press release here- https://www.boostershotmedia.com/news/myscdstory-awards-press-release-2025-08-18.pdf

Why so many vaccines?? Another common misconception is that the number of vaccines given to a young child "overwhelm" their immune system and that less should be given.

HHS Secretary RFK Jr has has frequently criticized the number of vaccines in the current schedule compared to when he was a child. He's correct that there are more, but he's very wrong about it being a bad thing. When he was a child, there was no vaccine for meningitis, hepatitis A, mumps, hepatitis B, rotavirus, pneumococcus, measles, influenza, HPV, rubella, or chicken pox. Kids' immune systems were still exposed to all of these pathogens, and there was much more illness (and morbidity and mortality) associated with those infections. With immunizations, kids' immune systems are safely trained to fight these pathogens..... and they are definitely up to the challenge! So by limiting the number of vaccines, you are not doing the immune system any favors, but giving them less tools to stay robust and healthy.

This video explains why the number of vaccines given are important to protect kids from the many dangerous pathogens around us.

Why So Many Vaccines? (Helping Families Understand Childhood Immunizations) Many parents seeking vaccine information have questions about vaccine safety. A common concern is the number of vaccines that are recommended for children....

What are vaccines and why are the necessary? In the first video in the series we made with Boost Oregon . Using the metaphor of a coach, we explain how vaccines help train a young immune system to fight off the most dangerous of pathogens efficiently and effectively.

What are Vaccines? (Helping Families Understand Childhood Immunizations) Many parents seeking vaccine information have similar questions. Booster Shot Media worked with Boost Oregon ( a parent-led nonprofit organization) to creat...

My SCD Story (https://myscdstory.org/) is a project we’ve been working on for a while (we actually presented an early draft at San Diego Comic-Con last year) and we are happy to finally share it (and the journey of creating it) with you!

As newer potential curative treatments for Sickle Cell Disease (such as Bone Marrow Transplantation and Gene Therapy) are available, there was a need to create better educational materials to explain these treatments in context of other more well established treatments. These treatment decisions made in childhood have potentially lifelong implications, and there are pros and cons with each option.

The project started with 2 full days of in-person meetings with Sickle Cell Disease researchers, clinicians, advocates as well as kids and adults with Sickle Cell Disease along with their families/loved ones. This gave us an opportunity to learn about the nuances of having this disease as well how treatments for SCD (compared to other chronic diseases) had not made as many advances for patients until more recently. From hearing from adults with a life-long history of living with Sickle Cell Disease, to parents grappling with a child’s new diagnosis- it was an honor to hear their stories. And they stuck with us.

After these sessions (and some serious brainstorming) we realized the best way to address the need for better educational interventions for Sickle Cell Disease treatment was to create an interactive digital tool to help patients and their families understand the treatment options available for them (and better understand the long term implications of each of them). We wanted to create a tool that could capture the nuances of the patients’ experience, contain practical information as well as scientific explanations of each treatment option. To do this, we imagined an interactive timeline/story tracking the “different lives” of one child with Sickle Cell Disease depending on the treatment decision she and her family made.

So how do you create a tool that contains multiple layers of information, allow for both linear and non-linear ways of reading it, provide the reader a self-paced, customizable reading experience that encourages continued reuse of the tool? Comics, obviously. :)

After we presented a working draft of the project at SDCC 2024, someone in the audience began asking us some amazingly insightful questions. It was freaking Scott McCloud. We connected with him afterwards and he was gracious enough to look at the full draft and provided us incredibly valuable feedback. The work was dense with so much information and he gave us great advice about simplifying the visual content to better promote ease of use and improve the educational power of the tool. We took his advice to heart and worked to create a cohesive, simplified visual language.

We just found out this week that this project was selected as a winner in the Spring 2025 Digital Health Awards® program. MySCDStory.org received a Gold Award for Web-based Resource/Tool. This competition recognizes the best digital health resources.. Our winning entry was chosen from more than 600 entries judged by a panel of distinguished experts in digital health media. The Health Information Resource CenterSM (HIRC), organizer of the Digital Health Awards, is a national information clearinghouse for professionals who work in consumer health fields. Other well-known HIRC programs include the annual National Health Information AwardsSM (healthawards.com), which annually recognizes the nation’s best consumer health information (in non-digital formats).

Man alive, this was truly an adventure to create and we are so happy with the end result. In an age where AI increasingly has the ability to create educational comics and videos at the click of a button that seem “good enough” at the surface level, we’re striving to push the limits and show that good old human effort (from the patients, families and experts who personally provided us the deep foundation of this project, to the experts who thoughtfully gave us feedback along the way and to the past few years of hard work Gary and I put in) can still produce some pretty awesome things.

A humungous thanks to the Sickle Cell Disease Gene Therapy Working Group led by Dr. Liza-Marie Johnson and Dr. Akshay Sharma, both amazing physicians and researchers who were champions of this project from the start.

Check it out!
https://myscdstory.org/

-Alex