Pandemic Timeline

Uncategorized

2023 Nobel prize in medicine is awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman

Tags:

The 2023 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

— The Nobel Prize

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who together identified a chemical tweak to messenger RNA, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Their work enabled potent Covid vaccines to be made in less than a year, averting tens of millions of deaths and helping the world recover from the worst pandemic in a century.

— The New York Times

These vaccines work by smuggling the genetic instructions for making viral proteins into our cells, enabling them to churn out large amounts of this protein and prime the immune cells to fight the virus.

A significant obstacle in the development of such vaccines was early prototypes of these synthetic mRNAs provoked inflammatory reactions, making them unsuitable for medical use.

Together, Karikó and Weissman discovered that by making small chemical tweaks to the mRNA molecules, they could not only abolish these unwanted inflammatory responses, but also markedly increased production of the target protein. This approach became the basis for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

— The Guardian

Fantastic statements that the Nobel-Prize-winning COVID-19 vaccines saved millions (and tens of millions) of lives are based on the theoretical scenarios of Watson et al. (2022), published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Watson et al. (2022) theoretically inferred massive mortality reductions distributed globally, occurring solely during vaccine rollouts. We calculated the quantitative consequences of Watson et al. (2022)’s low-value (14.4 million lives saved) theoretical scenario on all-cause mortality by time (by week or by month, 2020-2022) in 95 countries. Our calculations provide graphical proof that the theoretical proposals of Watson et al. (2022) are untenable, compared to measured all-cause mortality. Therefore, the characteristics of the COVID-19 vaccines (efficacies in preventing infection or serious illness, duration of protection, waning, etc.) and of COVID-19 spread input by Watson et al. (2022) must be invalid.

— Rancourt and Hickey

Sources:

Related:

Comments are closed.