Students produce hand sanitizer to fight COVID

• I’ll get the door. - Well this all started three weeks ago when my colleague and friend Yvonne Howe and I, before going to shelter in place, we decided to make some sanitizer according to a World Health Organization formula for ourselves, for our lab mates, and for some of our friends. And it didn’t take long for us to realize that there was something deeply unfair about the fact that we could easily make this for ourselves, but that there were many thousands of people living in the streets, cramped in shelters, working in healthcare facilities who did not have access to this. So right away we got to work making as much of this as we could. Yvonne and I kind of presented this idea to our professors and they were fully on board and they said that they were willing to do whatever it would take to cut through the bureaucracy and make sure that the supplies coming in were consistent, and they’ve been enormously supportive throughout. The production process begins when we get a shipment of ethanol, which we get twice a week.

01:08 - We also have a number of other chemicals which are required for this recipe either in lab, or some of them are being donated from people offsite, like Impossible Foods for example. And we initially create this big master mix by putting glycerol and hydrogen peroxide and water and shaking it up, mixing it up really well. And then we take our ethanol and we denature it, which is basically just a term for making it undrinkable using some isopropanol. And then in that denatured ethanol, we then pour that big master mix with the glycerol and hydrogen peroxide, shake it all up, and at the end of that we have four liters in a single gallon sized jug. The Berkeley community has come together to pool together its resources so that we can purchase these reagents in an automatic, reliable, consistent way.

02:05 - Our lab alone at this point is producing upwards of 120 gallons of this every week. In addition, another of other labs that heard about this project have come to help! And so very soon I think we’re gonna be producing well over 200 gallons, perhaps over 300 gallons every week. And this distribution team made up of dozens of very brave, wonderful volunteers will show up at the drop of a hat to pick up supplies that we give them and hand them out to the shelters, the hospices, elderly care centers, healthcare centers, wherever it is that these things need to go. And when we discovered that a number of sheriffs and wardens in the San Francisco county jails had tested positive, that day we immediately shifted all of our supplies to make it so that the next day we could make a big delivery of this stuff to every single county jail inmate in San Francisco. So when you have that kind of ability, you want to exercise it, you want to help as many people as you can.

03:12 - So it’s been an enormously gratifying, exhausting, but very fulfilling thing for I think all of us to engage in. .