I've seen things down in the tunnels. A rat in a hazmat suit selling hand sanitizer by the drip. A storm drain that requires a booster. But I had never seen a stock car get its shot and still catch something on the backstretch.

Here's the case file.

On Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace rolled out the No. 23 Toyota for the YellaWood 500, wrapped in sponsorship from Kroger Health and Nuvaxovid, a COVID-19 vaccine. In Alabama. In late October. In front of a crowd that came for engines, beer, and the specific joy of a 200-mph traffic jam.

Wallace did not pretend this was an accident of marketing. Asked about it by The Athletic, he said the paint job was "feeding right into" people uncomfortable with the vaccine, and laid out the mission: "Just pissing off the keyboard warriors. Man, why not, right? Here we are."

Here we are, indeed. A man who drives in circles for a living announced he was driving in circles to make people mad online. That's not a race strategy. That's a comment section with a fuel cell.

He did add a public-health message. "Get your flu shot," Wallace said, before predicting that "people are going to lose their minds over the COVID-19 stuff." Then he closed with the line every great health campaign ends on: "We're all in it together."

I took the evidence to my source, Gus, a sewer rat who has survived three plagues, two of them in the walls of a Boston dentist's office.

"A vaccine car," Gus said. "At Talladega. That's like handing out umbrellas at a car wash and calling it outreach."

Then the race started, and the science got tested.

On Lap 132, according to NASCAR's own race recap, Ryan Blaney's car got knocked toward the outside wall and lost speed right in front of Wallace, who was being shoved along in the outside lane and couldn't slow down. The result was a 12-car pileup down the backstretch. Twelve cars. One contact. Spread through the field faster than a group chat rumor.

Turns out the vaccine car was fully protected against everything except other cars.

And there were other cars. The wreck took out eight drivers still fighting for the championship, including Wallace himself. When the checkered flag finally fell after an overtime finish, Wallace was credited with 22nd place, 185 of 189 laps, still running. Kyle Larson won. No sponsor has yet claimed credit for Larson's immune system.

So let's review the outcomes. The keyboard warriors were, by all accounts, pissed off. Mission accomplished. The car was in a 12-car crash. Mission partially accomplished, if the mission was spreading. And the fans in the grandstand went home with one clear health takeaway: the only thing at Talladega that's actually contagious is the Big One.

Gus has a theory about the side effects.

"Mild soreness at the point of contact," he said, squinting at the replay. "Which, in this case, was the entire right side of the car."

I've closed a lot of cases down here. This one I'm filing under public health. We're all in it together. Especially on the backstretch.

The Demorat is satire. Tunnel Tucker is a fictional character, and so is Gus. Quotes from real people are taken from their public statements, interviews, and reporting; everything else is made up for laughs.

The real story that inspired this