(LifeSiteNews) — Two scientists were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for helping to develop mRNA technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID injections.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced that Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are being jointly awarded the distinguished prize for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications” that helped enable the creation of mRNA “vaccines.”
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus then congratulated the pair for their contributions toward what he described as “safe and effective vaccines” against COVID.
Critics of the shots argue that this description of the COVID shots as “safe” is at odds with reams of documentation of serious adverse side effects induced by the jabs, as shown, for example, by Pfizer documents revealing tens of thousands of serious adverse events and thousands of deaths after COVID shot injections, as well as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports of tens of thousands of deaths and over a million adverse reactions after Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots.
The award fails to recognize the crucial role of Dr. Robert Malone — now a firm critic of the COVID shots — and other scientists in inventing mRNA. A now-deleted paragraph in the Wikipedia page on RNA “vaccines” notes that even before Karikó’s work with mRNA, P. Felgner and others “developed a high-efficiency in-vitro and in-vivo RNA transfection system using cationic liposomes,” which were used “to directly introduce RNA into whole tissues and embryos,” as well as various cell types.
Malone recently slammed the development and rollout of the COVID shots as throwing “ethics right into the trash can,” by tossing regulations out the window in order to rush the deployment of the so-called COVID vaccines.
Not only were regulations regarding the length and monitoring of COVID shot trials tossed aside for the rollout of the jabs, but the shots used a novel technology that was known for safety risks, and that was often dumped by pharma companies for that reason.
It is noteworthy that Weissman himself, along with three colleagues, noted in a paper published by Nature Reviews Drug Discovery in 2018 that in trials for rabies and flu mRNA vaccines, the “side effects were not trivial,” and that mRNA “vaccines” could trigger both inflammation and autoimmune reactions.
“A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity,” Weissman and his fellow researchers wrote. “Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken.”
The researchers also acknowledged that trials showed “moderate and in rare cases severe injection site or systemic reactions.”
For these and other reasons, by the time the mRNA COVID shots were rolled out, the development of an mRNA-based flu vaccine had not passed the preclinical trial phase, and either had most of BioNTech’s mRNA-based treatments. Aside from their COVID-19 mRNA “vaccine,” only one other mRNA treatment had passed Phase 1 of clinical trials, after BioNTech — founded in 2008 — spent a few years publishing research results on mRNA mechanisms.
Likewise, Moderna had failed to prove the safety and efficacy of its mRNA candidates during the whole span of its work with mRNA treatments, up until the COVID outbreak. As of May 2020, only one of Moderna’s mRNA candidates had passed Phase 1 trials, and not one had been brought to market since 2013, when it signed an agreement with AstraZeneca to develop and commercialize mRNA therapeutic treatments.
StatNews noted in 2016 that mRNA-based treatments are “highly risky,” and that “[b]ig pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.”
“Novartis abandoned the related realm of RNA interference over concerns about toxicity, as did Merck and Roche,” StatNews continued.
In explaining why earlier mRNA “vaccines” “stall[ed,]” Dennis Burton, Ph.D., of Scripps Translational Research Clinic in La Jolla, California, told MedPage Today, “A major factor is that there’s not a sense of urgency,” without acknowledging that “nasty side effects” have been a frequent problem with mRNA therapeutics, or that inflammation and autoimmunity is an admitted risk of mRNA-based “vaccines.”
It is also noteworthy that in its article announcing the awarding of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine, the BBC appears to try to downplay the experimental nature of the COVID jab at the time it was administered to the public.
“The technology was experimental before the pandemic but has now been given to millions of people around the world to protect them against serious Covid-19,” wrote James Gallagher, as if the shot was no longer experimental merely because it had been released to the public.