Early Monday morning as I was getting ready for work, I was perusing X, a.k.a. the platform formerly known as Twitter, and came across an announcement from the Nobel Prize committee that Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman had the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of RNA modifications that made possible the incredibly rapid development of mRNA-based vaccines against COVID in 2020, from conception to testing to emergency use approval (EUA), within nine months:
My first thought was: Good! They deserve it! My second thought was: Antivaxxers are going to lose their minds over the creators of mRNA vaccines. Let’s just say that their reaction didn’t take long to manifest itself, and they didn’t disappoint.
I first wondered what Dr. Robert “inventor of mRNA vaccines” Malone would say about Karikó and Weissman’s becoming Nobel Laureates. If you’ve been paying attention to antivaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories, you know that, since the mRNA vaccines were announced to be in development over three years ago, Dr. Malone has been claiming to the the True Inventor of mRNA Vaccines, to the point where his wife tried to edit his Wikipedia entry to play up his role in the discovery far beyond his relatively minor role in getting mRNA to express protein in cells. He even posited a conspiracy theory that he was being “erased” from Wikipedia’s entry on mRNA vaccines. Since then, he’s gone full antivax conspiracist in a big way. So naturally, it was entirely to be expected that he might not react…well…to this announcement.
That’s putting it mildly. Three hours after the announcement, here he was on X/Twitter:
Of course, here Dr. Malone is parroting a common false antivax claim, namely that the mRNA modified by using pseudouridine to prolong its half-life results in “unlimited” spike protein being produced by the cells; i.e., that the vaccine results in basically endless production of spike protein (which they view as far more toxic when made in infinitesimal amounts that the vaccine induces muscle cells to make than when being made in much larger amounts by an actual…oh, you know…COVID-19 infection). He also repeats his false claim as having been the inventor of mRNA vaccines. Also note the conspiracy theory that Pfizer has been campaigning for this and that Karikó and Weissman got the award because Pfizer supposedly donates heavily to the Karolinska Institutet.
I was naturally curious about this claim; so I looked into it. On the Karolinska Institutet’s website, I learned:
Research accounts for 84% of Karolinska Institutet’s annual turnover, and the revenues for the research area in 2021 were just over SEK 6.3 billion. External funders account for about 53% of research revenues. The largest financial contributions, except government base-funding, come from the Swedish Research Council, the EU, the Swedish Cancer Society, and the Wallenberg Foundations. The public healthcare system within Region Stockholm is also a significant research funder.
From the US, a number of sources contribute:
Karolinska Institutet is the largest recipient of external research funding from the United States among Swedish universities. In 2022, US financiers contributed almost SEK 103 million to KI’s research, with grants from both federal funders such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and private foundations.
The EU has also contributed. Nowhere could I find a listing of how much Pfizer might have contributed to the Karolinska Institute or what for. Surely Dr. Malone has a source, right? Even if Pfizer does fund research at the Karolinska Institute, of course, the Nobel Assembly there that picks the Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine is made up of 50 professors from the Institute. It is a private body that is not actually part of the Institute, as well. But, again, I’m sure that Dr. Malone has evidence other than insinuation that Pfizer bought the Nobel Prize for Drs. Karikó and Weissman, right?
The next day, Dr. Malone went on quite the rant on his Substack. You could tell he was upset because he didn’t paywall his rant. Clearly he wanted everyone to read it, not just his subscribers. Characteristically, he starts with a self-pitying whine:
So, it finally happened. And with the announcement came yet another wave of troll and bot attacks on my credibility. Coupled with social media calls for me to comment on the event. Commenting on which I am generally not comfortable with, because I am not prone to pettiness. Jill and I gave ourselves a day to just breathe, discuss the meaning and implications, and process and respond to the many kind, supportive comments and condolences from friends and colleagues from all over the world.
Seriously, if you falsely claim the mantle of the “real inventor of mRNA vaccines” for three years while referring to Karikó and Weissman (and, of course, Pfizer and Moderna) as having basically stolen your work and falsely taken the credit, you should expect that when they win the Nobel Prize for the discovery and you do not there will be deserved mockery. It’s equally amusing how you start out with “congratulations to Drs. Kariko and Weissman,” noting that the “award comes on top of having received the Lasker award, and similar awards from the governments of Spain and Israel.” Such faux graciousness is exceedingly transparent.
After once again claiming that he really invented mRNA vaccines, he pivots from his “congratulations” to do everything he can to minimize and downplay Karikó and Weissman’s discovery, first quoting the announcement for the reason that they won the prize: “For their discoveries concerning nucleotide base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”
Naturally, to him it’s all a conspiracy to rob him of his proper due as the One True Inventor of mRNA Vaccines. For example, he whines that Karikó and Weissman’s key scientific papers were published 15 years after his first publications. Again, I note that this would be around 1990, and I happen to know a bit about what was going on with respect to getting mRNA and plasmids to make protein in muscle cells then. The state of the science was quite primitive, but I was in a laboratory where one of the graduate students was. working on a project in which he injected plasmid DNA into chick embryo muscle and measured the expression of a reporter gene. He was able to demonstrate gene regulation with specific gene regulatory elements known as promoters and enhancers, something that had previously only been done in cell culture. Let’s just put it this way. Even if Dr. Malone had come up with the idea of using mRNA to make vaccines then, his work never led to an effective vaccine. To win a Nobel Prize and all the plaudits associated with it, it’s rather a requirement that your discovery lead to something other than a dead end.
Still, Malone tries:
“Enabled the development” is actually a false statement. The incorporation of pseudouridine was not an “enabling” improvement on the existing state of the art. This is demonstrated by the robust clinical (human) adaptive antibody vaccine response to the CureVac SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate, which did not incorporate pseudouridine. The dose (and apparently the toxicity) of the mRNA formulation employed by CureVac in their clinical tests was lower than that employed by Moderna and BioNTech, and the antibody titers were also lower. But still quite substantial. There is no evidence that antibody titer translates to clinical protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 disease, but despite this fact it was widely inferred and publicized that the CureVac product was inferior. Whether or not this was the case we will never know, as further clinical testing at a higher dose was not performed- CureVac basically gave up on competing in the COVID-19 vaccine race, presumably due to lack of sufficient funds. However, there is no disputing the fact that incorporation of pseudouridine is not required for delivered mRNA to elicit an adaptive immune (antibody) response. In sum, the claim that pseudouridine incorporation is an “enabling” improvement on prior art (that being patent and inventorship language) is clearly false for this reason.
This is sophistry at its finest. First of all, note that CureVac, even in Dr. Malone’s telling, produced a lower antibody titer; so he tries his best to claim that that doesn’t mean it was a potentially less effective vaccine. Also, he fixates a lot on the words “enabled” and “enabling.” Let’s put it this way. The Nobel Committee didn’t say that there weren’t other ways, that pseudouridine was the only way. It said that pseudouridine enabled the creation of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Basically, the use of pseudouridine won the race and enabled this generation of COVID-19 vaccines, and that’s a discovery worthy of a Nobel Prize, which led to the predictable outburst of whinging from Dr. Malone, including his parroting of the usual antivax distortions and misinformation about the vaccines not being effective and supposedly not saving many lives.
My favorite part is this:
The remarkably rapid development and deployment of these mRNA products parallel and correspond to the timelines achieved by other more traditional COVID-19 vaccines (“Sputnik” series etc.). This is not the consequence of the mRNA/pseudouridine technology, but rather to the willingness of regulatory authorities worldwide to suspend normal vaccine non-clinical and clinical development processes required to assess safety and efficacy. The committee asserts that these vaccines were “approved” as early as December 2020, which is another falsehood. These products were Emergency Use Authorized via suspension of normal testing, processes and review.
Yes, but guess what? In 2020, as the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the globe, requirements were streamlined not just for COVID-19 vaccines but for any vaccine against COVID-19. Governments didn’t care how a vaccine was produced or whether it was mRNA-based or the “old-fashioned” variety based on using a a protein antigen; they just wanted safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines—STAT!—to use to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. And guess what kind of vaccines won the race? The mRNA vaccines. That’s because, as the Nobel Committee noted, that’s one key advantage of the mRNA technology, the ability to take the gene coding for the protein that you want to use as an antigen and use it to make mRNA to use in vaccines to drive production of that protein antigen in the vaccinated subject. If you know the gene sequence, it’s almost trivial to make the mRNA. As for the EUA, an EUA is not full approval, but it is a regulatory approval. Also, the US isn’t the only country in the world, although American antivaxxers like Malone frequently seem to think that it is.
Amusingly, not all antivaxxers side with Dr. Malone. A lot of them consider mRNA vaccines to be pure evil and therefore find Dr. Malone’s thirst to be given credit for them to be…unseemly—sometimes in hilarious ways.
However, leave it to John Leake over at COVID-19 quack Dr. Peter McCullough’s Substack to bring the antivax stupid to the party. Unable to deny that Karikó and Weissman had been key to the development of COVID-19 vaccines, Leake does the only thing that’s left. he tries to discredit the Nobel Prize itself by pointing out its stumbles over its century-long history:
Without question, the German chemist Fritz Haber was a genius, but he was a spectacular example of a scientist whose work came unmoored from ethics. In reviewing his career, I am struck with both admiration and horror.
On the one hand, Haber largely invented the Haber–Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas, which enabled the industrial-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. About one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, supporting nearly half of the world’s population. It seems to me that for this achievement, Haber definitely deserved the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
What remains controversial about this decision was that Professor Haber is also widely regarded as the father of modern chemical warfare. A fierce German nationalist, he applied his genius to developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases for the German military during World War I. His work directly resulted in the widespread practice of mustard gas attacks.
His wife, Clara Immerwahr, was so horrified by reports of the Second Battle of Ypres, where mustard gas resulted in 67,000 casualties, that it my have contributed to her decision to commit suicide with his service revolver.
Though Professor Haber always defended his work on chlorine gas weapons, it is a notable irony of history that his technology was used to develop Zyklon-B, which was later used for the mass murder of Jewish concentration camp inmates during the Nazi era. Haber was born into a prominent Jewish family in the Prussian city of Breslau.
Got that? A chemist who developed a chemical process that could be used for evil—the Holocaust, even!—won the Nobel Prize. So that must mean that the Nobel Prize is corrupt. Of course, Professor Huber didn’t win the Prize for a process that was intended to produce Zykon-B. (His process was used to produce Zyklon-B without his involvement.). He won it for a process that produces large amounts of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen that can be used as fertilizer and explosives, the latter of which have numerous peacetime uses as well. It is true that his discovery was also used for other purposes, and, yes, unfortunately he himself did develop it for use it for warfare. One can argue whether he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize, given how, when World War I began, he immediately saw how his process, which could be used to produce huge quantities of nitrogen-containing fertilizer that could help feed the world (indeed, it is estimated that half the world’s agriculture is supported through the Haber-Bosch process), could also be used to produce chemical warfare gases, but there is no doubt that his process was also a boon to agriculture. Ironically, because Huber was Jewish by birth, he was forced to flee Germany when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, even though he had converted to Christianity, laboring under the delusion that his service in WWI would shield him. He died less than a year later.
Still, to Leake, Haber’s Nobel Prize obviously means that the award to Karikó and Weissman must be totally suspect, akin to awarding the prize to the “father of chemical warfare” and enabler of the Holocaust. Subtle. And dumb. The story was much more complex than that. Nor was Mr. Leake the only one making this offensive analogy:
Going from an arguably poor choice for Nobel Prize based on moral considerations, Leake then predictably goes deep into the stupid to cite Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his 1939 discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT for controlling vector diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Of course, in 1948, when Müeller was awarded the prize, the harmful effects of DDT hadn’t come to light yet. That would be 14 years in the future with Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring.
I feel obligated to point out here that in 1948 DDT was definitely a seemingly miraculous finding. It was not inherently harmful in and of itself. What caused the harm was its massively irresponsible overuse during the 1950s and 1960s, which selected for resistant mosquitoes and caused the environmental harms warned about by Carson, to the point where governments were decreasing their use of DDT before Silent Spring was ever published. Not coincidentally, the pesticide and agriculture industries and their allies mounted a well-funded campaign to deny the harm being done. In addition to taking a page from the tobacco industry and publishing bad science, they tried their best to defame Carson in order to discredit her, an effort that continues to this very day with the lie that Carson “killed millions” through her work warning about DDT. It’s misinformation and revisionist history that has even been promoted by a hero of mine, Dr. Paul Offit, much to my extreme disappointment. He even parroted the right wing lie that Rachel Carson was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. It is ironic to see someone associated with right wing COVID-19 minimizers and antivaxxers implicitly saying that Rachel Carson was correct in order to attack the Nobel Prize and two Nobel Laureates.
The only example that Leake cites that was inarguably—to me, at least— a major misfire by the Nobel Assembly was its award to in 1949 to Antonio Egas Moniz for inventing the lobotomy for treating mental illness, a truly horrific operation whose use in the 1940s and 1950s spread like wildfire without any good scientific evidence. That was a bad one, for sure and will forever be a blight on the Nobel Prize (along with Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize). However, how many Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine have there been? (The answer is 227 sharing 114 Nobel Prizes.) Leake could only come up with one clear stinker. (I dispute that, given what was known at the time, the award for the discovery of the utility of DDT was actually a horrific misfire. At the time, it no doubt seemed like a huge contribution to massively decreasing the number of people who suffered and died from malaria and other insect-borne diseases.)
All of this leads Mr. Leake to predict darkly:
Yesterday I was reminded of the Nobel Prizes for Fritz Haber, Paul Müller. and Antonio Moniz, when I saw that the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet had awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
I suspect that in the years ahead, there will be a dawning realization that a medical technology celebrated for advancing human progress was in fact poorly understood at best, and resulted in an array of unforeseen harms.
Suspect all you want, Mr. Leake. Your attempts to downplay the significance of Karikó and Weissman’s work and their deserving of the Nobel Prize is transparent as hell. In the meantime, the tears of antivaxxers trying to portray the discovery as either insignificant or to portray the Nobel Prize as not indicative of scientific significance are delicious.
88 replies on “Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman win the Nobel Prize, and antivaxxers lose it”
I expected feedback from the anti-vacc people too when I heard the news this week. I heard one of our faculty make a conspiracy comment about it too, which surprised me [I gave a not very polite response, faculty to faculty, but I’m retiring in June so IDGAF any more].
I will mention one other massive screwup by the Nobel folks, although not in science: the 1973 peace prize that went to henry kissinger, the man who is so evil the only reason he hasn’t died yet is that not even the devil wants him around.
Yeah, I think that non-scientific Nobel Prizes definitely have a worse track record than the scientific Nobel Prizes, and Henry Kissinger is definitely a good example.
Maybe the committee has learned from their mistake.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/11/nobel-peace-prize-henry-kissinger-vietnam
At least they haven’t awarded a prize to a certain someone for taking the U.S. out of the war in Afghanistan.
I think with Nobel peace prizes things can get pretty nasty:
Aung San Suu Kyi did not much on the genocide on Rohigya people.
And even more notorious: Abiy Ahmed whose administration is accused of severe human rights violations.
I think you’re reinforcing Orac’s point about the difference between the medicine/science prizes and others.
Others may be a lot more vulnerable to politics.
Indeed. I think that Nobel Peace prize is probably the best example for this differnce. One might still wonder why president Obama got the prize.
What a masterful display of disingenuousness!
“ I suspect that in the years ahead, there will be a dawning realization that a medical technology celebrated for advancing human progress was in fact poorly understood at best, and resulted in an array of unforeseen harms”
These unforeseen harms are largely to the egos and schemes of the disinformation mongers
The literature prizes, too. I’ve read works by some of the more obscure or unknown winners and have had many head-scratching moments. Let’s not even go to the Land of Ridiculous for giving Bob Dylan a prize for literature (huh? whahh?) Next there will be a literature Nobel for a rapper, I guess.
Only one? That’s actually quite good. I would have suspected more than that. After all, a Priest at my Parish once said during a sermon “even Jesus picked twelve Apostles, and one of those was a bust.”
In addition, if that was a valid reason to revoke a Nobel Prize, then Luc Montagnier should have had his revoked.
I’m sure that there are some that were a bit dodgy, but I can’t find any that were just obviously horrible choices even given what was known at the time.
I do like to ask people like Mr. Leake: Should all the Nobel Prizes given to nuclear physicists whose discoveries contributed to the development of nuclear weapons be revoked because of what their discoveries were ultimately used for?
As for Luc Montagnier, his descent into quackery and antivax occurred decades after his scientific achievements and his sharing the Nobel Prize for the discovery of HIV. Unfortunately, there’s no way to predict which Nobel Laureate will turn into cranks later, and Montagnier was not the only one.
Even that right there; it’s hard to argue that there are no truly beneficial direct peace-time uses for nuclear power. People are afraid of it because of the whole “toxins” gambit regarding nuclear waste, not because that is the inerrant truth. In a way, love it or hate it, I would also argue that nuclear weapons deserve the Nobel Peace prize. A number of wars have not actually been fought because of them.
I celebrated the Nobel prize yesterday by getting my 2023 Covid vaccine (Pfizer). Minor arm pain today.
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There is no way to detoxify radioactive waste except through time.
We have made a nuclear war’s worth of fission products in reactors over the last eight decades. It’s not a “gambit” to point out that fission products are incompatible with life.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, the pioneer of the nuclear powered submarine program (which served as a prototype of nuclear power reactors), eventually had second thoughts. He told the Congress in 1982 that
“I think from a long-range standpoint–I’m talking about humanity–the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too.
“Until about two billion years ago it was impossible to have any life on Earth. That is, there was so much radiation on Earth you couldn’t have any life … Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system became reduced. That made it possible for some form of life to begin and it started in the seas …. when we use nuclear weapons or nuclear power we are creating something which nature has been eliminating. Now that is the philosophical aspect, whether it’s nuclear power or using radiation for medical purposes or whatever. Of course, some radiation is not bad because it doesn’t last long or has little effect on the surroundings, but every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”
from a hearing held in the Joint Economic Committee, January 28, 1982
Dr. Alice Stewart: “single-celled organisms could not exist until background radiation fell to present levels millennia ago. And it requires just as delicate an environment for us to survive. Yet today, in the arrogance of humankind, we are raising the levels of background radiation and setting back the evolutionary clock.”
Admiral Hyman Rickover, the pioneer of the nuclear powered submarine program (which served as a prototype of nuclear power reactors), eventually had second thoughts. He told the Congress in 1982 that
“I think from a long-range standpoint–I’m talking about humanity–the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too.
“Until about two billion years ago it was impossible to have any life on Earth. That is, there was so much radiation on Earth you couldn’t have any life … Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system became reduced. That made it possible for some form of life to begin and it started in the seas …. when we use nuclear weapons or nuclear power we are creating something which nature has been eliminating. Now that is the philosophical aspect, whether it’s nuclear power or using radiation for medical purposes or whatever. Of course, some radiation is not bad because it doesn’t last long or has little effect on the surroundings, but every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”
from a hearing held in the Joint Economic Committee, January 28, 1982
While it’s true the radioactivity can be frightening, this set of posts is slightly naive. The bad aspects of nuclear power, and yes, they are bad, have very significantly hindered the development of an entire line of technologies for the simple fact that people are blindly afraid of it –especially due to fear mongering like you’ve placed in the two preceding posts.
This is a huge distortion (and dated by the way: 1982 is not state of the art). The half-life number assumes implicitly that the radioactive material being considered is not being attenuated by external sources. When you are in a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb, half-life is very significantly shortened because that’s exactly what a nuclear chain reaction does… it reduces the number of atoms at the top of the decay chain to someplace lower by releasing an enormous pulse of neutrons that promote decay to occur outside of the normal stochastic rate by which half-life is computed. Induced reaction does not only occur with weapons grade uranium and plutonium, it occurs with everything lower in the decay chain too. All this radioactive waste that has been built up can be placed into a different kind of reactor and also “burned” to produce power at the expense of getting rid of the radioactive wastes to produce less radioactive byproducts, even as far down as iron. If only we were not so afraid of it that we haven’t develop the technology.
And, no, this is not to say that we can’t produce this kind of technology, it’s because people are afraid enough that they won’t –the designs and concepts for reactors fueled by previous generations of reactor waste exist. Nuclear power is extraordinarily and maliciously maligned based on naivete and fear. Performed correctly, it isn’t an open question. The ideas and related technology is decades old now.
And if you think I’m some denizen of the far backwater internets for claiming so, be aware that my perspective has come out of discussions among physicists who specialize at this on a professional level.
So why exactly does this “waste” exist you ask, since I’m telling you it can be thrown back in a reactor and burned still… why not just leave it in a reactor until it’s gone? Well, that’s because reactors are designed to operate in a steady state around particular temperatures and at certain radiation fluxes. As the fuel rods decay in a reactor, they deviate away from being able to maintain this steady state because the radioactivity and cross-sections of the isotopes change as a direct result of being altered by the reaction. The materials need to be collected and processed in such a way that they can be used to produce a steady state in a different reactor of different tolerances. That takes engineering and engineering takes time and money, which almost nobody has really spent to make it economical.
As for organisms and nuclear power, I suggest that you look up Deinococcus Radiodurans. This bug can live quite happily inside a nuclear reactor. People who make claims about the durability of life in the face of radiation and nuclear power generally don’t know jack or haven’t looked at all the evidence. The story is more complicated than “radiation = bad, therefore don’t ever touch it!”
@foolish physicist: Interesting — hadn’t heard of that. I looked up a read a bit about the little devil. Also
I liked the tale of its discovery
“…it has been nicknamed Conan the Bacterium ” 🙂
It’s a shame the SyFy channel has stopped making their really cheesy monster movies: they could do wonders with this.
There’s some ultimately stupid postings flying around the conspiracy nets that a baby in the NICU with a single-ventricle heart and tracheosephageal fistula died from a post op blood transfusion because the blood had likely been from someone who had had the COVID-19 vaccine and that this is why (per the parents) the infant died from a clot that went from his leg to his heart because of all the spike protein that must have been in that transfused blood.
No. Just no. Infants like this are sick as sick can be. I saw two during my residency. One didn’t survive, the other barely made it out of the NICU.
Expecting this lot to appreciate this Nobel Prize is optimism on the grandest scale.
“Should all the Nobel Prizes given to nuclear physicists whose discoveries contributed to the development of nuclear weapons be revoked because of what their discoveries were ultimately used for?”
Not only that, but many actually worked directly or indirectly on the Manhattan Project.
Yep. Very much like Prof. Haber, who did work during WWI on finding ways to use his process to produce chemical weapons.
As reported by Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland, Kariko and Weissman were not the strongest contenders. However, the Nobel prize committee awarded the prize to them to combat COVID vaccine hesitancy:
This persuaded me and I am strongly considering the Covid vaccine.
But I also noticed that the 1949 Nobel prize was given for lobotomy.
So I wonder, is it safe to get the Covid vaccine and lobotomy on the same day, or should I spread them apart? Which procedure first? Any suggestions will be appreciated
Bullshit, Igor. None of the stories quoting Olle Kämpe or any other Nobel Academy member about the award say anything of the sort. The quotes clearly show that combatting vaccine hesitancy is just an added bonus of the award.
I also found another (English language) quote of Olle Kampe:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/nobel-prize-medicine-1.6984244
Which also does not demonstrate that the main reason the Nobel Academy chose to award this year’s Nobel to Karikó and Weissman in order to combat vaccine hesitancy.🤦🏻♂️
Igor doesn’t want to make any specific point – just to present an alternative narrative that makes you question the ‘official’ one.
Igor wants to deal with questions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘truth’ etc., framing the ‘science’ in a way that has nothing to do with any thing scientific.
Not the Nobel group igor. Your vaunted “critical reading” crap failed you again. And notice even if Olle had direct influence over who received the award, nothing here gives proof of cause/effect. You’re really not very good at the understanding part of life.
My critical reading is fine.
Olle Kampe is a member and a vice chair of the Nobel committee:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olle_K%C3%A4mpe
Now if today is not your best day, perhaps you can blame the 5G emergency broadcast activation…
Well I’ll be damned. I didn’t find that. Apparently for the first time ever you got something right — about his identity at least. Still no evidence for your assertion about the reason this particular reward was given: that’s still your conspiracy nonsense kicking in. I will assume that your 5G comment is an attempt at snark and not real.
@ldw56old:
It’s okay, must be due to 5G emergency broadcast yesterday. 🙂
What exactly is nonsense, though? A vice chair of the Nobel committee explained, that despite having better candidates, they chose Kariko and Weissman. The reason for their decision was their hope that giving Nobel prize to Covid vaccine inventors would convince hesitant people to take Covid vaccines.
That’s the Nobel vice chair’s explanation, not mine.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory for a reason – it is because what they did does not pass the smell test.
But the conspiracy theory (report of his words) is absolutely correct and they said exactly what I said they did.
You are exemplifying the conspiracy theory denial handbook. It works like this.
Deny it happened
Call the proponent crazy
When confirmed, say that is not enough evidence
When more evidence is supplied, finally say “okay, it is true but it is good for you”.
You worked through steps 1-3, so you will now proceed to Step 4 and say that the Nobel prize committee indeed did what the “conspiracy theorist” alleged, but it is actually good for us so, I should stop complaining.
And yes, my comment about 5G was snark – I do not believe in any 5G related conspiracy due to wave length of 5G being incompatible with what the theories suggest.
@Igor Chudov Kämpe is indeed member, but is just amswering to a reporter (would this impact vaccine hesitancy,)
Actual citation
for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19
The discoveries by the two Nobel Laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020. Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.
No doubt Gates again.
Nothing in the link
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/nobel-prize-medicine-1.6984244
suupports your claim that there were better candidates. There is this
About this bullshit
Spare me. You don’t like being fact checked because you don’t like your lies and misrepresentations pointed out. Tough shit. If you don’t like your repeatedly demonstrated flaws pointed out work on being a better person. Until then: stop pretending you understand or even care about science — your posts from demonstrated from day one neither of those things is true
A problem with being a conspiracy theorist: when you try to employ irony, it’s so out of character people take you literally.
Rebecca Watson just put out a new video about Kariko, I recommend you watch it if you have any questions about whether she deserved the award:
https://youtu.be/u88wW_RkQCo?si=SXYtR3Fb3TgS9ism
If the link gets my comment flagged, basically the video (Rebecca Watson on YouTube) talks about the history of Kariko’s work with mRNA, how she pursued the research persistently for over 30 years despite lack of support from her big university employer and difficulty securing funding from people who didn’t see the potential she saw, and if she had not done so, she would never have been in a position in 2020 to mobilize that work to address the covid pandemic, where it was successful in saving millions of lives. It’s not just one small simple discovery she made but a career spent working on technology that few other people believed could have an important application and she turned out to be right about it. Fascinating story and 100% well deserved award.
Not the strongest Candidates? Were votes for Gwyneth Paltrow in the mix?
Anyone surprised that igor jumps on the Nobel Prize conspiracy bullshit train? Anyone?
That’s been pointed out and noted as a bad move igor. Not in any way related to the latest prize, except in the “mind” of a serial science denier like you.
Igor, with all due disgust, because you don’t deserve respect – you are far worse off than the poor souls who had lobotomies. And your “Question” shows just how low you will go to be a disgusting person.
@ Igor Chudov
I doubt a lobotomy will have any effect on you given just how stupid, scientifically illiterate & “intellectually” dishonest you are. I put “intellectually” in quotation marks to emphasize doesn’t really apply to you.
Yep, the Noble Prize committee over 70 years ago made one stupid mistake. Typical of you to focus on it and not all the Nobel Prizes given for major advances in science. And you find one website that claims Nobel Prize given to encourage people to get COVID vaccines, ignoring that mRNA has literally 10s of thousands of papers going back to its discovery in 1960s and over 70 papers prior to COVID on mRNA vaccine research. And overwhelming data from around the world on effectiveness of COVID vaccines in preventing serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths. And you ignore that the current vaccines went through ALL phases of clinical trials.
And your immense stupidity in wanting vaccines to be 100% effective with zero risk for adverse events. Please, tell us any medical intervention that is 100% effective with no risk? Car seatbelts only reduce risk of serious injury and death by ca. 50%, so given your perspective, not worth having or using car seatbelts.
As an almost 80 year old man, I was volunteer in Phase 3 of Moderna COVID vaccine clinical trials and Phase 2 of bivalent COVID vaccine trials. Have gotten all vaccines and boosters and Monday got the Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccines. I understand immunology and how vaccines work and besides getting smallpox vaccines as infant, was in first cohort, 1955, to receive Salk polio vaccine. Before that my mother wouldn’t let me go to municipal swimming pool or movies, went afterwards.
WHY DO YOU KEEP MAKING A FOOL OF YOURSELF
He can’t help it Joel, it’s in his mRNA
Reading about lobotomies always gets to me. This weekend I got to help a cousin celebrate her 90th birthday. Back in the 50s a doctor or doctors talked her father into authorizing a lobotomy for her older brother for what would probably have been characterized as a “nervous breakdown”. He had served in the Marines but not AFAIK in combat.
When I met him, he was quiet and withdrawn. He mostly sat around and did what his father told him. (His mother had died of colon cancer.) One minor blessing was that he was a very good pianist and continued to enjoy playing the piano throughout his life. She mentioned that he could hear a song on the radio and sit down at the piano and play it.
My mother (an RN) told me she had tried to talk him out of this because the procedure was experimental, but he didn’t take her advice.
Well, the Great 18 Gigahertz Pulse Marburg Graphene Oxide Event has come and gone. No zombies yet.
Wonder how many of Igor’s followers went to retrieve cellphones out of their microwave ovens, only to realize that they weren’t actually supposed to turn the ovens on?
It did, however, scare the crap out of me. I was sitting in my office working on patient charts, and my phone blew up. I jumped out of my chair.😂
I had a company here taking down two huge trees – both were in bad shape and leaning over our house. The boss had the main cutter, crane operator, and ground guys with chain saws stop and give him their cell phones at 2pm. Smart move: I knew it was coming and I jumped, and I wasn’t holding anything that could take off my leg in a blind second.
Just today I made fun of conspiracy theorists who suggested that the emergency broadcast would turn people into zombies. (I thought that the theory is total BS).
And then guess what happened an hour after the emergency broadcast: a semi truck showed up in my yard, tried to turn around, and swiped and broke a mirror from one of my PARKED trucks.
Yes, I do have a surveillance video.
Was that a 5G Marburgified zombie driver or a regularly zombified truck driver? You tell me.
So now I go hmmmm connecting the dots. The incident is not funny to me because I have to waste time with insurance companies, but the 5G marburg connection is funny
“Yes, I do have a surveillance video.”
Upload it to YT. It can join the millions of other videos depicting people leaving their cars in drive, forgetting the handbrake and accelerating through walls. All without the benefit of a 5G buzz.
Amazing! Never before in the history of lots with trucks being moved and parked has a moving truck brushed against a parked vehicle. It has to be the 5G signal!!!!1111!!! Luckily igor was able to rush to the truck’s driver and give him some ivermectin to snap him out of his Bill Gates’/Club of Rome induced stupor, and now that man is such a fantastic driver he’ll be replacing Max Verstappen in the inaugural Las Vegas F1 Grand Prix race.
Igor,
It’s your right to have fun by pretending to be stupid on the Internet, but if you want to be believed, you’ll have to dial it back a little bit. No one could see a bad driver and leap to “Zombie Marburg Virus” and still be competent enough to find a computer and post that comment (if you come back and tell me that your first two attempts at posting left you soaking wet because you mistook (first) a puddle in your back yard and (second) a septic tank with the computer, then I will gladly withdraw my comment).
In the spirit of helpfulness
Emergency broadcast interferin brain function. No wonder you believe Gates rules the world, by connecting the dots.
I had the television on and my black cat certainly did not enjoy the 2 minute long alert-
in fact, it made her look like the world’s best Halloween decoration.
Igor, you’re only allowed to have one lobotomy.
Dr. Chris us on fire with the Igor smack today!🔥🔥🔥
From the article:
Denn zu den Favoriten gehörten sie nicht. Schaut man sich Publikations- und Zitationsdaten an, so wie es das Institute for Scientific Information des Datenkonzerns Clarivate jedes Jahr macht, um seine Nobelpreisfavoriten zu ermitteln, so hätte man Karikó und Weissman noch nicht einmal unter den Top 3 gefunden.
Nobel prizes are not rewarded by using citation analysis. I am afraid that Clarivate promotes its product (by inventing citation Nobel) and the journalist took it seriously.
A brave maverick doctor who lost her job because she wouldn’t drop her startling new ideas won the Nobel Prize. You’d think that antivaxxers would be delighted. Isn’t that what they’ve always dreamed of?
This on the day that thousands of Anti-vaxers claimed the emergency test today would, “using 5G” would “activate the Marburg virus in people who have been vaccinated and turn them into zombies, while others claims it would activate nano-machines from the vaccine to enforce government control over those vaxxed.
The contrast between what science is achieving and what the AV cult believes could not be more stark
I am in the US at present and the alert turned up on my phone. I didn’t have my phone on, because I was presenting a seminar at the time.
I don’t feel like a zombie yet and haven’t noticed any nanomachines. I asked Mrs P. If my behaviour had changed and she asserted I was as difficult as always.
The conspiracy theories get more and more outrageous, because that is required to keep the attention coming.
I was actually on my dumb SmartPhone when the alert went off. I didn’t know it was scheduled, nor had I heard it might be persona-altering. Well, I certainly haven’t turned into a zombie either, nor any more prone to submitting to government control than I was before.
OTOH, I have noticed my reflection in the bathroom mirror seems to be fading. But that’s probably just a coincidence… Anyone know what’s in that new booster; I’m thinking I should go get it after it gets dark enough to ho outside.
[/s]
“nor any more prone to submitting to government control than I was before.”
I find that a 50 pF cap across the PONS can remedy that for you.
I feel your pain. Somebody mentioned PKD. They go Boyl!
Orac writes,
“To win a Nobel Prize and all the plaudits associated with it, it’s rather a requirement that your discovery lead to something other than a dead end.”
MJD says,
The word “lead” in your statement reminded me of the peer-less genius Clair Cameron Patterson who campaign against lead poisoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson
Each year the Nobel prize for medicine should have one posthumous award, it wouldn’t cost them any money and would provide enlightenment.
@ Michael J. Dochniak
He wasn’t the only one who campaigned against lead poisoning and certainly wasn’t the first.
From Wikipedia. Lead Poisoning:
“Lead poisoning was among the first known and most widely studied work regarding environmental hazards. In the 2nd century BC the Greek botanist Nicander described the colic and paralysis seen in lead-poisoned people.[32][5] Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived in the 1st century AD, wrote that lead makes the mind “give way”.
“At the request of the Illinois state government in the US, Alice Hamilton (1869–1970) documented lead toxicity in Illinois industry and in 1911 presented results to the 23rd Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association.[286] Hamilton was a founder of the field of occupational safety and health and published the first edition of her manual, Industrial Toxicology in 1934”
@ Joel,
Heroically battling “big oil” to get lead out of gasoline speaks for itself.
@ Michael J. Dochniak
It really isn’t worthwhile replying to your comments. Going back quite a while I have read your comments. Most basically worthless. Some partially correct. As for “Heroically battling “big oil” to get lead out of gasoline speaks for itself.” He wasn’t the only one and he based his fight on what others had written and spoken as well. Nobel Prizes go to “original” “ground-breaking” research. Given your comments clearly indicates a poor understanding of science.
Joel writes,
“Given your comments clearly indicates a poor understanding of science.”
MJD says,
Pioneering efforts (i.e., original or ground-breaking research) are, in part, a creation of the prior art. In my opinion, determination is an attribute which ultimately creates Nobel Laureate’s. Clair Cameron Patterson’s determination was extraordinary and must continue to be celebrated, posthumously.
@ Joel,
Get the lead out and recognize the contributions of determination to science.
RE anti-vax scare mongers in general..
I just watched Dr Dan Wilson’s video** with 3 immunologists which clearly illustrates why and how anti-vaxxers/ alt med advocates/ chaos agents operate: the material is so detailed, dense and recent that there is plenty of room for fantasy and confabulation: it is a fertile ground for creating fearful scenarios especially because most people haven’t the slightest idea of what the reality is.
Substack provocateurs drum up first edition controversy for their disaster porn stoked audience and REVEAL the Truth. This is easy to do – talk about little understood research and pretend expertise- even ultimate expertise beyond that of established experts- posing as a scientific iconoclast but there’s a world of difference between Galileo and Substack books of revelation- cut rate version. See Naomi Wolf, Covid contrarians
** BillyJoe’s comment on Dr Novella’s latest post, SBM
re: Naomi Wolf
I’ve started reading Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein, which has considerable discussion of Ms. Wolf. Highly recommended. Klein has had numerous interviews recently including on the Conspirituality podcast and by Mehdi Hasan (my favorite journalist in corporate media).
I like Mehdi Hasan too.
He has to be the toughest interviewer on TV these days.
Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker is a great (print) interviewer:
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/isaac-chotiner
I was glad to see Hasan interview her: they make the public aware of faux experts/ celebrity prevaricators/ Substack messiahs.
As I wrote above, we may expect certain realms of inquiry to ‘invite’, by their very nature, this type of response: complex bio like how cancer develops/ its treatment, novel viruses and new vaccine tech, the aetiology of autism, how SMI comes about/ is treated.
Far from being “antiscience”, as we are incorrectly portrayed, we are pro-good-science, always eager to review interesting recent scientific findings.
Our science-minded critically-thinking subscribers, likewise, appreciate that and follow us for this reason, subscribing, discussing, and commenting on the latest relevant scientific findings.
We have not given up on science!!!
You wouln’t even recognize good science if it bit you in the…
He might: if it’s well written and he can’t understand it, it’s probably good science: that’s how he decides which topics to misrepresent and spread conspiracies about.
Let’s see if you can read and understand this:
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/science-and-ethics-curing-misinformation/2023-03
See what the authors say about “inoculation against misinformation”, a highly unethical technique of essentially lying to uninformed people about the ideas that the “inoculators” want the public to NOT see:
I discussed “inoculation techniques” a year ago, before the above article was published, but I just found it.
“See what the authors say about “inoculation against misinformation”, a highly unethical technique of essentially lying to uninformed people about the ideas that the “inoculators” want the public to NOT see:”
Absolutely right. Not sure how it applies when the uninformed people are the ones spreading the misinformation though. Follow the money back up the pyramid, possibly? The big alt-fact names all make money or kudos out of spreading doubt whilst the cannon fodder at the bottom do the donkey work.
igor, that is exactly what you do: you lie about the vaccines to the clowns who subscribe to your subcrap and repeatedly claim you have uncovered things that “they” don’t want them to know.
Are you really stupid enough to not realize that the item you quoted refers to your own actions?
@Igor Chudov Even in your citation. authors say that inoculation against misinformation without consent is both unethical and counterproductive. So much about bad ethhics.
I do not how one can change peoples’ opinion without their knowledge. Give an example
“we are pro-good-science, always eager to review interesting recent scientific findings.”
Translation:
We are pro whatever we agree with, whether it is good science or not (we can tell because, you know, no training) and we are always eager to brown-nose those who seem to give us some scientific credibility.
“we can tell”
Heh. “We can’t tell”. Damned auto-correct even messes with swearing. Just useful enough that I wouldn’t want to get rid of it, annoying enough that I hope the inventor wakes up one morning to discover their relatives are all know-it-all conspiracy theorists.
“Far from being “antiscience”, as we are incorrectly portrayed, we are pro-good-science”
A familiar cry.
“We’re not antivaccine, we’re pro-safe vaccines (don’t ask us to list any though)!”
“We’re not anti-immigrant, just against those ones south of the border!”
“We’re not anti-Semitic, we’re OK with the good Jews!”
Your good goodscience is connecting dots. Like: Gates established world wide conspriracy to earn 4.5 million. Bribing everybody would cost more. In addtion Gates net worth is 104 billion. 4.5 million is small change to him.
Actually you did even check SARS CoV 2 sequence making good science claims.
As a sometimes reader, I totally disagree:
I read you posts to understand what people who think that they are “science-minded critically-thinking” think – because there is no evidence that you, or your readers, are “pro-good-science”, or even know what “good-science” is.
I stopped commenting because you, and your readers, seemed totally un-interested in anything that didn’t fit the story.
Yes, I know you stopped commenting, which is sad, but I understand.
I made a change to sorting comments – all comments start out with “sort by top” but after a while I change them to “newest”.
It used to be that only the first comments ended up as “top” and everything else was languishing.
[…] Medicine went to the scientists who developed the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. It is well-deserved. And the tears of anti-vax hysterics are a particularly yummy frosting on that […]
@ Igor Chudov
You have made it clear that you DON’T understand virology, vaccinology, etc. And you certainly don’t understand the immune system. And have NEVER given any explanation of your understanding even the basics of science in general. You have an MBA, a degree not even remotely related to science.
Igor Chudov
says:
April 19, 2023 at 6:45 pm
Just like Orac, I find it odd that Dr Bridle wants to debate Covid vaccines with Dr Caulfield, but for a different reason.
Dr. Bridle is a viral immunologist, an expert in vaccinology and virology, and an author of dozens of related scientific studies.
Dr. Caulfield is a professor of law, with zero education pertaining to virology or vaccinology. His level of expertise in vaccines, virology and vaccinology is on par with my own. In other words, he is an amateur to the field of vaccines and viruses.
Joel A. Harrison, PhD, MPH
says:
April 21, 2023 at 12:10 pm
@ Igor Chudov
You write: “Dr. Caulfield is a professor of law, with zero education pertaining to virology or vaccinology. His level of expertise in vaccines, virology and vaccinology is on par with my own. In other words, he is an amateur to the field of vaccines and viruses.”
So, why don’t you follow your own advice, that is, “zero education pertaining to virology or vaccinology”, and stop posting stupidly ignorant biased unscientific antivax comments???
YOU ARE A COMBINATION OF AN INCREDIBLY DISHONEST PERSON, STUPID, AND PROBABLY MENTALLY DISTURBED.
[…] Medicine went to the scientists who developed the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. It is well-deserved. And the tears of anti-vax hysterics are a particularly yummy frosting on that […]
Are Robert Malone’s sour grapes over Nobel Prize justified?
Back to the Science
Oct 8, 2023
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was recently jointly awarded to Drs Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Dr Robert Malone appears to have sour grapes about this because he thinks that he invented mRNA vaccines.
In this video, Dr Susan Oliver and Cindy the dog go back to the science and show that a number of scientific advancements were necessary for the development of mRNA vaccines, and Robert Malone’s sour grapes are not justified.
Not getting into the Malone stuff, but…
My dog Teddy is much smarter than Susan Oliver’s dog Cindy.
Teddy my dog can read, here’s the proof:
https://twitter.com/TotallyCanc3l3d/status/1596523711401979906/photo/1
Luckily anything by Alex Jones will be large print and simple language so is not much of a test.
Letting your dog read Alex Jones is animal abuse. The Anti-Cruelty Society will be informed.
Igor’s trying to turn the
Friggen
DOGS
GAY!!!
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/alex-jones-gay-frogs-rant
Out of curiosity what did the antivaxxers “have” before that they’ve now lost? It can’t be ethics or knowledge (since it’s clear they never had either).