The Brownstone Institute fear mongers about mRNA vaccines

Earlier this month, I discovered a new antivaccine flack named Alan Lash, who writes for the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD),” the Brownstone Institute and caught my attention by regurgitating an old common antivax trope about distrusting physicians. The GBD, as you might recall, was a declaration created at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a right-wing “free market” think tank, by three libertarian-leaning scientists who served as useful idiots for AIER to drape its pro-business, anti-government leanings into a scientific-seeming “declaration” advocating a eugenicist “let ‘er rip” approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in early October 2020. Whenever I discuss the GBD, I like to note two things. First, there was no vaccine yet. Second, the entire idea of the GBD was to let SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, rip through the “young and healthy” population to build up “natural herd immunity” by letting them go about their business with no pandemic restrictions while using a vaguely defined—nearly completely undefined, actually—strategy of “focused protection” to keep the vulnerable (e.g., the elderly and those with chronic health conditions that put them at high risk of dying of COVID-19) supposedly safe. It was a strategy that obviously never could have worked, and epidemiologists pointed out that it would never work at the time. This time around, Mr. Lash is regurgitating antivax disinformation about mRNA vaccines in general in an article entitled The mRNA Platform: What It Is, What It Means.

Of course, the first person to whom I’d go for an opinion on mRNA vaccines (or any vaccines, for that matter) would be someone like Mr. Lash, who appears to have no detectable expertise in infectious disease, virology, public health, vaccines—or, as far as I can tell, even basic biology. He is, as I mentioned last time, a software developer with a PhD in physics. I realize that antivaxxers sympathetic with the sorts of garbage opinions thrown about by people like Mr. Lash might refer to this as an ad hominem, and so it could be; that is, if I were to stop right there and not go on to explain how much he gets wrong about mRNA vaccines, thanks to a major case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Expertise matters, though, and it is not inappropriate to mention that Mr. Lash clearly lacks expertise in topics relevant to the discussion of mRNA vaccines and the mRNA platform beyond what one might expect of a layperson who “did his own research” and posts conspiracy theories on Facebook, to the annoyance of his relatives. Perhaps that is why he attacks the mRNA platform with antivax tropes that we’ve heard time and time again since the COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines first started to be distributed—heck, even while they were still in the pipeline and hadn’t received emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDA yet!

I’m going to start by zeroing in on a fundamental error that antivaxxers like Mr. Lash make when ranting about mRNA vaccines as something radically new compared to previous generations of vaccines:

Back in the spring of 2020 we learned that Operation Warp Speed was hard at work creating a vaccine faster than one had ever been created before. From the decades-long history of vaccine development, we knew that vaccines took 5 to 10 years to make. The subsequent clinical trials could take longer. 

How was this possible? When did this scientific leap take place? What was this fantastic new technology that would make such rapid development a reality?

We quickly learned that the new vaccine would use something called mRNA technology. And there were several companies ready to make it happen. 

The way mRNA works is not like the way any vaccine worked before. Formerly, vaccines were created by taking a weakened or dead form of the virus and injecting that into humans. The human body would create antibodies to fight and beat the weakened virus, thus giving the body the instructions to create antibodies against it if the full force virus were to ever attack. The individual was immune. 

This is not what mRNA does. 

Actually, yes it is. It is exactly what the mRNA vaccines do. Although it is true that, prior to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, the mRNA platform had not successfully been used to create a vaccine before, it is not true that the way mRNA works is “not like the way any vaccine worked before.” Notice how Mr. Lash refers to vaccines in the past being created by “taking a weakened or dead form of the virus and injecting that into humans.” I will give him the point that mRNA vaccines are not like vaccines made from killed organisms, whose proteins would then provoke an immune response. However, in concept, mRNA vaccines actually do function a lot like vaccines made from “weakened” virus, commonly called live attenuated virus vaccines. Let me explain.

Live attenuated virus vaccines were made by taking the pathogenic virus being vaccinated against and altering it so that it is weakened, so that it could infect cells but not cause the disease that the normal—”wild type”—virus would cause. In the old days, before genetic engineering, creating such a virus would generally involve selecting for weaker forms of the virus, but since genetic engineering the process generally involves manipulating the nucleotide sequence of the virus (be it DNA or RNA) in order to remove or inactivate key genes necessary for virulence and decrease the ability of the virus to replicate robustly:

Live-attenuated vaccines differ from traditional inactivated vaccines where the pathogen is “killed”, and as the name suggests the pathogen (typically a virus) remains active in live vaccines, however, is attenuated or modified in a way that the pathogen is not able to cause disease itself but can produce a robust immune response. Typically, live vaccines lead to a stronger, more prolonged and robust immune response in comparison to inactivated vaccines.

Live-attenuated vaccines can be produced by reverse genetics including RNAi. Briefly, reverse genetic tools are used to create live-attenuated vaccines. Genes from current (novel) viruses are combined with previously altered (attenuated) viruses belonging to the same generic strain.

However, due to these live viruses being attenuated, they are unable to replicate to the same extent as live unattenuated viruses. This means that they are no longer able to sufficiently infect the host, but can do so enough for the host to develop broad and robust immunity.

Think of it this way. Live attenuated vaccines “hijack” cells in the body to make more virus, which the immune system recognizes, mounting a robust immune response to the virus. Because the virus is much less virulent and doesn’t replicate as quickly, no disease results from infection, and this immune response can wipe it out. The weakened virus, of course, must be sufficiently similar to the wild type version of the virus so that the immune response to the weakened virus also attacks the wild type virus. Since many of the proteins are shared between both versions of the virus, this is usually not an issue. Live attenuated vaccines are an established platform and have been used to create vaccines against prevention of a variety of diseases including influenza, chickenpox, measles, polio and tuberculosis. Indeed, the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is a live attenuated vaccine, with weakened versions of all three viruses in it. The chickenpox vaccine uses a weakened version of the varicella virus.

Conceptually, mRNA vaccines work in much the same way as live attenuated virus vaccines in that the overall idea is to “hijack” the body’s cells to make antigen, or a protein from the pathogen that the immune system can recognize and target. In the case of live attenuated virus vaccines, it’s multiple antigens from a weakened version of the virus, while in the case of mRNA vaccines like the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines it’s a single protein from the virus, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Recall that the spike protein was chosen as an antigen because it is both displayed on the outside of the virus and it is the key protein used by SARS-CoV-2 to bind to the ACE2 receptor and thereby gain entrance to the cell which means that antibodies against it not only “tag” the virus for the immune system but interfere with the virus being able to enter the cell.

It’s not true that the mechanism by which mRNA vaccines work is “not like the way any vaccine worked before”; that is, unless you understand so little biology that you can’t see that both live attenuated virus vaccines and mRNA vaccines “hijack” the host’s own cells to generate protein antigens that the immune system can recognize and target, resulting in an immune response that can prevent infection and disease caused by the organism targeted by the vaccine. In fact, mRNA vaccines have a number of advantages over live attenuated vaccines. For example, live attenuated vaccines still require infection by a virus to produce the protein antigens and generate an immune response. This can be a problem in immunosuppressed people, for whom even a weakened virus could be potentially dangerous and cause disease, hence the warnings not to use live attenuated viruses in patients who are significantly immunosuppressed. After all, live attenuated viruses still hijack the same cellular machinery that their wild type counterparts do to generate more virus. Another problem with live attenuated vaccines is that, in rare cases, they, if allowed to continue replicating, revert to a fully virulent version of the virus, able to cause disease, a problem particularly with oral polio vaccines.

None of the above can happen with mRNA vaccines, which consist only of the mRNA sequence that codes for the antigen of interest (the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the case of COVID-19) encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticle. It’s one nucleotide sequence designed to make one protein; the vaccine cannot produce the original virus or replicate. Also, while it is true that a chemically altered form of mRNA is used in order to increase its half-life, mRNA is by its very nature not very stable and tends to degrade fairly rapidly. (Just ask someone—like me—who’s worked a lot with RNA in the laboratory how easily it can degrade and how careful we have to be to prevent it from doing so by storing it at very low temperature and treating everything used that might come into contact with solutions containing RNA to destroy all the RNases, enzymes that chew up RNA.)

None of this stops Mr. Lash from ranting later in his article, contrasting using mRNA technology for gene therapy to using it to make vaccines thusly:

So originally, the technology was developed to produce something your body needed that it wasn’t producing. Now the technology would use your own body to create an enemy that it then had to fight. This had never been done before. 

While it is true that “it had never been done before” when it comes to using mRNA technology to “use your own body to create an enemy that it then had to fight,” it is not at all true that there had never been vaccines that “use your own body to create an enemy that it then had to fight.” Again, live attenuated vaccines had long been used to do exactly that. If anything mRNA vaccines refined that approach to be much more specific and targeted, without the danger to the immunosuppressed or the danger that the weakened virus might somehow revert back to its wild type version, fully capable of causing the disease that the vaccine had targeted.

Once you see that Mr. Lash understands basic biology, virology, and vaccine development so superficially that he can’t see the commonality between how mRNA vaccines and live attenuated vaccines work, even though he seems to understand the basics of how mRNA vaccines work:

When the mRNA Covid vaccine is injected into a person, it moves to the cells and creates the portion of the virus known as the spike protein, the active part of the virus that causes all the harm. The body reacts and fights it off. It’s a biological Trojan Horse. 

So why would anyone expect this to work like a traditional vaccine, one that bestows immunity for many years, often a lifetime? We have already seen that this method often does not. Didn’t the companies selling these drugs as a vaccine and the FDA know this from the beginning? 

So close…and yet so far. Of course, the spike protein is not what “causes all the harm” in COVID-19 infection. It’s the actual infection and replication of the virus in cells in the respiratory system and elsewhere in the body that cause all the harm. The spike protein is simply a convenient protein to use because it is the protein that allows SARS-CoV-2 entry into the cell, making its targeting a “double whammy” in that the immune response will, in targeting the virus, hone in on the very protein that the virus uses to gain entry into cells and thereby replicate itself.

When you realize just how much Mr. Lash fails at conceptual molecular biology, it becomes clear why he is so susceptible to the usual antivax tropes. For example, he rants about how COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are “gene therapy,” not vaccines and the common antivax claim that the CDC “changed the definition of vaccines” in order to accommodate the new mRNA COVID-19 vaccines because they were gene therapy and didn’t work. In reality, the CDC changed the wording in order to be clearer and more accurate. Indeed, the pre-2015 definition of “vaccine” on the CDC website was hopelessly outdated:

Massie shared an image containing three definitions for the word “vaccination” with his 326,000 followers on Sunday. One was labeled “pre-2015” and described vaccination as: “Injection of a killed or weakened infectious organism in order to prevent disease.” Another was dated 2015-2021 and said: “The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” The third was from September 2021, calling vaccination: “The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.”

Even eight years ago, vaccination involved more than using a killed or weakened virus, as genetic engineering had long ago allowed the use of recombinant proteins as vaccine antigens, a platform that had been used for many years before COVID-19 and is now being used for a COVID-19 vaccine. Guess what? The platform used to produce that vaccine is being demonized by antivaxxers too!

Then there are the conspiracy theories spun by Mr. Lash, for example that, rather than being all about the ability to create new vaccines quickly, the mRNA platform was all about profit:

Another limitation of using this technology as a vaccine is that the immune response becomes tuned to the particulars of that virus. If the virus mutates to a variant, the antibody response is not likely to work against it. The spike protein is slightly different.

It is, of course, true that scientists always knew that SARS-CoV-2 would likely evolve. That’s what viruses do, some faster than others. Just look at the influenza virus if you don’t believe me. Here’s the thing, though. This particular coronavirus has proven itself adept at evolving into new variants that can escape immunity due to previous infection with prior variants, as well as vaccine-induced immunity. I like to point out any time anyone associated with the Brownstone Institute and the GBD attack vaccines that “natural immunity” has not proven itself to be superior to vaccine-induced immunity. I also like to point out that, once again, it is far better to achieve whatever immunity one can against a virus like SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination rather than infection, because vaccination does not involve actually suffering through the disease caused by the virus and facing the risk of severe complications up to and including death. Actually, that is the entire point of a vaccine—any vaccine.

It’s also long been a highly desirable characteristic of a platform to make vaccines to be able to be able to use it to respond rapidly to new variants with updated vaccines. (There’s a reason why mRNA vaccines are being used to target influenza, in order to develop new flu vaccines faster, and with more accurate strain matching with in-season circulating strains than those currently available. Indeed, that was one of the first proposed uses for the technology before COVID-19 made the development of a new vaccine to counter the pandemic so much more urgent.)

To Mr. Lash, though, it’s all about profit and only profit:

When the pandemic hit, the folks in the companies that make mRNA saw this as a huge opportunity. Moderna was founded in 2010. Up until this point, they never talked about vaccines, only the therapeutics they were developing, which was their sole focus. Up until the bonanza of 2021, the company never made any money at all. Curiously, there is a huge overlap in the financial interests of high-ranking executives in Moderna and Pfizer and high-ranking officials in the FDA and CDC.

What a boon for these companies! If they could pull it off, they would have a drug they could quickly create for new antigens, and keep selling them over and over. This is why it is called a new platform for drug delivery. It’s a platform because it’s one technology that can be used to quickly create a vaccine when new antigens appear.  

Funny, but he says that part about how the mRNA platform could be used to quickly create new vaccines in response to new variants as though it were bad thing. Any least near the end, Mr. Lash concedes that the mRNA “technology was a remarkable advancement with untold potential benefit for humanity.” Of course, he quickly follows that by concluding that the “interests of power have leveraged it into something inhumane and destructive.”

Say what you will about vaccine mandates, big pharma (which deserves much of the criticism that it gets) or how the mRNA vaccines were granted EUAs, whenever I see someone like Mr. Lash fail at even very basic biology and science as he spins conspiracy theories about big pharma and mRNA vaccines, I know that I’m looking at a propagandist, not someone with good-faith concerns. No wonder he writes for the Brownstone Institute, which excels in spreading right wing propaganda designed to cast doubt on any public health interventions, including vaccines, that require collective action.