Wanda is an Android manufactured by Aoba Lifelike Systems Specialists who is presently working with the Beltway Quarantine Collective as a Mobile Field Chemist. She's a very direct and fact-driven person, always picking at free-wheeling assumptions and trying to measure their weight against verifiable and empirical truths- this is a valuable quality to have within her professional career, but it does make it difficult to speak casually about low-stakes topics a friend hasn't devoted a tremendous amount of research into scrutinizing. There's no hard feelings and she doesn't mean ill by it, but she's got a thing about letting unsourced fact-shaped information chunks transmit from one person to another without first passing through a screen of veracity. Wanda's role on a Viral Corral and Round-Up Team means she's often working in close coordination with Plep, a medtech agent who loves to share factoids and tidbits as a kind of social icebreaker, which means after-hour gatherings amongst her crews may involve Plep dealing fast fact off the top of their deck and Wanda pressing them on the accuracy of that claim, where they heard it, and what her own thumbs can dig up on her own personal commphone. In professional terms, Wanda's vigilance about the foundations of facts encourages those around her to understand what ideas about infectious diseases, their risks and what actually inhibits their spread are true, which are gut feelings and which are non-facts seeded by actors with alternative motives. She sincerely wants to make sure everyone she's deployed to help actually receives the tools they need to protect against extraplanetary vectors, and she always does what she can to make sure the function those tools serve aren't unwittingly filled by ineffective tool-shaped substitutes.
As a Field Chemist, Wanda's role on a Viral Corral and Round-Up Team is to coordinate with front-line team members in identifying which known strain of an extraplanetary virus has found its way to their deployment site, what the origins and history of that strain are and how it may have mutated in other environments before arriving at their present site of outbreak. Known vectors often have known vaccines, but those vaccines are prepared in the context of the vector's world of origin and the physiology of the people native to that planet. One of the difficulties in administering vaccines for an invasive extraplanetary virus is those vaccines may not be compatible with how the local people's bodies work, particularly mixed-species communities with members from different homeworlds. Field Chemists like Wanda are responsible for concocting helpful medicines and adapting known vaccinations to infectious vectors that are effective for blunting the spread of disease within a regional populace whose immune systems have never encountered them before. The science of our age is only beginning to understand exactly how medicine for one species can be adapted to another species, universal medicines are not presently a reality and it's hard to prepare formulas ahead of time to account for the myriad ways any given vector from one world can mutate in transit to, or upon arrival on another world, so Field Chemists are a vital aspect of the Beltway Quarantine Collective. They're often the ones who brew up the sauce that can contain and, hopefully, eliminate an outbreak before it has a chance to become endemic.
It's here where Wanda's and Plep's roles often intersect. When their team arrives at a quarantine site, Field Chemists like Wanda analyze data collected about the relevant contagions, check census data about the species present in the local population and begin creating adaptations of known vaccines that can collectively provide inoculation for the complete range of people at risk of infection. Multiple batches are prepared in cases where species are incompatible for receipt of the same dose, but where possible a Field Chemist will prepare batches whose active elements help one species produce a neutral reaction in another species- negative reactions are not considered an acceptable consequence of the Beltway Collective's harm-reduction mission. Once these batches are prepared, documented and labeled, they're handed off to Technicians like Plep who in turn distribute them to as many local people as possible. Matching batch numbers' compatibility to a patient's immunity profile is important- depending on the vector, vaccine and species of a patient, multiple batches may have overlapping compatibility with a given patient, and while use of the more plentiful batch is recommended, it's up to the Technician's judgement which dose to administer at point of contact. Wanda always provides comprehensive documentation about who each batch of vaccine is for, and who it is NOT for, and she's very thorough in making sure none of her peers are guessing, assuming or just kinda feeling out that an incompatible batch might be fine, it either is or it isn't, and she as the Chemist is the authority that sets those guidelines. We're not TV doctors, we don't wing it when people's safety is concerned, we follow the facts and help as many people as we can as certainly as is possible for us.
Every member of the Beltway Quarantine Collective serves an important role in mitigating the spread of extraplanetary vectors introduced into worlds that are not equipped to contain them. The Sol System has always been a vast and vibrant collection of biomes, each bristling with unique lifeforms woven together in a delicate balance within the sphere of their own world, but today those worlds are stitched together by crisscrossing threads of interplanetary transit, and while we as starfarers cross those threads and bridge the gaps between our worlds, it's important to keep in mind what unseen passengers we're bringing with us. Even a minor illness on our homeworld can become an unchecked catastrophe on someone else's, so if you plan to travel, be sure to stay up-to-date on your vaccinations. Be mindful, take precautions and leave at home any presumption of that seasonal sickness not being a big deal to you meaning it isn't a big deal to someone else. It's the mission of the Beltway Quarantine Collective to ensure microscopic stowaways do not complete their journey from one world to another, and should they evade notice, the Viral Corral and Round-Up Team will be there to find them at their destination. The little inconveniences we take for ourselves can have an outsized impact on people we may never meet in person, it's always worthwhile to make the effort and prevent an outbreak from spreading where it shouldn't spread- and that's no matter of opinion, those are just the facts.