Decades of Research: the Story of How mRNA Vaccines Were Developed (yahoo.com) 121
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot wanted to share this New York Times article which makes the point that "The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics..."
They remain a marvel: Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.
Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.
For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.
The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.
In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.
The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.
Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.
For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.
The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.
In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.
The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.
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Re:No thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
Siphoning a sewer of lies directly into Dear Leader's mouth isn't really speaking to power.
And Fox is a bunch of easy marks. Dear Leader's spokes automatons seed Fox with bullshit, then Fox spews it back out again, then Dear Leader responds by "Well, people are saying...".
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Siphoning a sewer of lies directly into Dear Leader's mouth isn't really speaking to power.
And Fox is a bunch of easy marks. Dear Leader's spokes automatons seed Fox with bullshit, then Fox spews it back out again, then Dear Leader responds by "Well, people are saying...".
Um ... you literally control all branches of federal government. You. You are the power that needs to be spoken to. You ARE "dear leader".
If you are confused about this, check who is being censored, and who is doing the censoring. It's a pretty handy diagnostic.
You fantasize about being 1960's liberals, but in 2022 you ARE "the man". (Er, "the human"? Whatever we are allowed to say now ...)
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That does not mean that there are no religious believers in vaccine X where X is a particular brand. They are something new which we did not have before. Prior to COVID19 the situation was simple - we had idiots repeating fakes about vaccines which have not changed since the 18th century and people who believed in the science behind modern vaccine. COVID19 and the disinformation campaigns which major powers threw at each other in order to wage biological war through the backdoor changed that. We n
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There are no vaccine "skeptics". There are various individuals spreading lies for various reasons, either out of self-importance, or out of fear of Covid (if you get vaccinated you accept that Covid exists), or just because they are trolls.
Or simply because they make $$$ spreading misinformation and fear to people (audience) who are easily manipulated because they want an alternative narrative to be true ... I'm betting the former don't even believe the things they're spreading.
Re:What skeptics? (Score:5, Informative)
It seems what we have is a vaccine that doesn't work. What's so stunning about that?
What's stunning is that despite a 12x reduction in hospitalization, some people still believe that it doesn't work.
Oh, you mean that it doesn't completely prevent transmission of a novel strain that is massively different from the original strain? That's why they should have adapted the vaccine every few months to be multivalent, combining the original strain with whatever strain or strains were primarily circulating, instead of just delivering a monovalent vaccine derived from a one-to-two-year-old strain. That mostly comes down to a failure by governments to request and approve boosters. At least two manufacturers (Pfizer and Moderna) had boosters ready to go for alpha and delta, but nobody was interested. Had we gotten boosters for those two, our immune system would already have seen a significant percentage of the spike protein changes from omicron already.
But at its core, the vaccine does work. Between that and natural infection, it has all but wiped out transmission of the original strain and strains derived from several variants, including the alpha/delta lineage. And it massively reduces deaths even for viruses from the omicron lineage. We just need an omicron-specific booster to wipe out that second, highly diverged lineage. That might not have been necessary if the powers that be had updated the vaccine quickly enough and deployed it quickly enough, but now all we can do is try to deal with the consequences of that mistake.
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Re:What skeptics? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're also obviously not a statistician either. Start with the word "disproportionate", as in the unvaccinated despite making up only 20% of the population are accounting for over 50% of the hospitlizations and an even higher percentage of deaths (3.57 per 100k unvaccinated vs 0.54 vaccinated, a 5x increase, and that is old data, its only leaned more in favor of my argument today).
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Re: What skeptics? (Score:2)
Did you break your neck pivoting off the point so hard? You have said nothing.
Stop obsessing about Fauci and bring an actual argument.
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Re: What skeptics? (Score:2)
I am still going to ask what your point is, whether it's over reporting of cases or covid isn't actually real but in any case to those or the idea that people are mis reported as covid deaths I would ask for an explanation to this:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
Your answer could be "I don't care that all those more people are dying because of x, y and z" and that's valid but at least own it, or have a coherent position at all.
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Re: What skeptics? (Score:2)
What sources do you trust for the information that guides your thoughts here?
What are your metrics for you being proven right? What's your prediction as to what will happen? We're on the two year mark now, that's a lot of "fakeness" over time.
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Re: What skeptics? (Score:2)
So... Vagueposting. Got it, I suppose that lets you keep those goalposts on wheels.
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It has been unraveling for 2 years. Time to admit that your anti-science posturing is exactly that, rejecting the mountains of evidence in favor of some loud people.
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Re: What skeptics? (Score:2)
Oh, ok. I never thought of it that way.
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At least two manufacturers (Pfizer and Moderna) had boosters ready to go for alpha and delta, but nobody was interested.
From what I can read at https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2... [clinicaltrials.gov] and https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2... [clinicaltrials.gov] phase II studies for modified vaccines are still ongoing, with primary results not before April / June 2022.
I'd say that much more than politicians, the manufacturers of the existing vaccines have an interest in selling more (and more frequently!) of what they already have approved, rather than selling less of a vaccine that still needs investments.
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Funny, I don't see the original strain still circulating. I don't see much of alpha, beta, gamma, delta, or eta, either. That's not evidence of slightly reduced transmission. That's evidence that it pretty much stopped transmission.
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Decades of obscure work and research delivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Decades of obscure work and research delivers (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition, even in cases where an objective wasn't met, like a workable HIV vaccine, the work done trying to achieve that goal is often useful elsewhere, for other things or similar endeavors. That seems to be the case here with COVID mRNA vaccines.
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Absolutely. Careful experiments gather data that can be used later and you never know when a skill (like knowing how to make a lipid coating for an mRNA molecule) is going to come in handy.
Re:Same basic tech, was used for gene manipulation (Score:4, Informative)
You are thinking of DNA manipulation, the article concerns mRNA. You either didn't read the article or failed to understand what you wrote or are just out to spread misinformation.
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A really good article on the Vaccine (Score:3)
https://berthub.eu/articles/po... [berthub.eu]
There is a lot more to it than just being able to manipulate RNA. And it is not actually RNA, but a modified version that is designed to evade the cell's protective systems.
Yes, these technologies were not primarily designed for vaccines, they have other applications.
Just like there was a lot more to actually making the virus in the first place. Getting any virus let alone a man made one to grow in a culture and then humanized mice is a real technical achievement.
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Wow, you win the Humanitarian of the Year award for 1984
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Appeals to "natural order" are the epitome of dishonest arguments. How far do you walk that back? Middle ages? Bronze age? Prehistoric humans? Great apes in the jungle?
The basis for human civilization is combining forces for an overall better social situation for a majority of people. By the "natural order" we should have stopped before agrarian society since farming more food than you yourself needs is giving up my living for a " a few frail people and a few old people."
Frankly it's long been time to mov
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Re: Pandemics are Made by People (Score:2)
In my opinion that is a very reductive view of how we construct policies and government around societal good. I can just as easily point out atrocities and death over history caused by individual selfishness or in the name of capital interests, landscapes and people blighted in the pursuit of profit. That doesn't make either of us right.
There is always a balance between collective good and individual rights and I would make the argument that maximizing freedom for people is best guaranteed collectively ha
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I think the government has a role in all those essential goods and really always has. The government regulated housing in terms of zoning, safety regulations and other subsidies. The government regulates food and provides benefits for many families. The government regulated health care in a number of ways. Now that we have admitted there is and has to be some amount of regulation in those markets the argument is how much and what type.
Every other developed nation on the planet has some form of universal
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Lot's of people live in Section 8 housing, while not government built housing it is subsidized. Many people still live in the project housing developments as well, including a bunch in my hometown that are still very populous, never to mind the so called "commie blocks" in many parts of europe are still in many cases very successfull and affordable housing projects. I am not even in real support of the government going and building housing but the idea of just "the free market will fix this" is proven to n
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Without common care, every greedy bastard buys the land on both sides of the school, demanding payment to NOT build a toxic waste dump on one side and a sewer on the other.
The inevitable consequence of uncontrolled Capitalism is fascism to enforce maximum gain without resistance.
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Dump and panic ripoffs, Bernie Madoff, we know all we need to know about greed.
It is not good
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ISP? Monopolies.
Operating system? One and a smattering of hobbyists
Cell Phone Carriers? 4
When they own the markets, they own the customers.
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Monopoly is the ordinary goal of all Capitalists. ALL.
Government, when working, prevents this.
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Or did you miss the Micro$ judgement issued in the Netscape case?
The "computing market" is not where Micro$ "Competes", it is in the small / personal computer market they rule. What a fool.
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Except that by your definition of "drag on society" which you have only defined as "frail and old". 50% of the US population does not contribute to the labor pool (children, elderly, disabled) so do they just get left to the whims of nature? Society for centuries has looked at your line of thinking and rejected it, wholesale. You want to take us backwards to some indiscriminate point wher eyou think you'll be in charge. In the end though you are just a coward hiding behind an AC tag. Get fucked with your
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The Italians half-assed the whole thing, but that's how they do everything. South Africa is where it was raised to an art form.
That arsehole A/C probably thinks he would survive the purges, but he's an idiot and would be on one of the first trains to the camps.
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There's something amusing about this.
It's category-ism. Category-ists love categorizing people. The Other Category had a whole bureaucracy set up to do it. The group half-assed the whole thing, but that's attribute to that group. Other group raised it to an art form...
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That is NOT an edge case. It's part of the cost of exploiting labor for 50 years. You have either to care for them once age has caught up, or they will have to take their produce from you while they still can.
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So who deserves care in these well staffed hospitals? Seems to me that anyone you feel is "unfit" should just be allowed to die. If you're OK with people dying from COVID who aren't strong enough, are you OK with people who get cancer dying since they had some kind of exposure or mutation that makes them incompatible with life? People with heart attacks dying because their hearts were too weak? People who get pneumonia? Sepsis?
Please tell us what your specific criteria is for illnesses that we should interv
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"I would suggest that if the medical system was based on need, versus profit"
What? and have Republicans keeling over from heart attacks? Shame on you.
You mean (Score:4, Funny)
The origin did not start out like .. scientists were looking for ways in which to boost the 5G signal when..?
Re: You mean (Score:2, Flamebait)
That is correct. 5G signal boosting wasn't working in a cost effective way, so a top scientist realized one day what we really needed was for everyone to carry a repeater and make us all part of a mesh network. It could be put on a nano-chip.
But how to get everyone to accept having a nano-chip 5G repeater with GPS tracking injected into their arm? And so Covid was born.
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I'm triple vaccinated and my 5G signal is still shit. I want my money back.
<sarcasm>Outdated technology. 5G Release 16 (a.k.a. phase 2) wasn't finalized when the vaccine shipped, so it turns out that they need an omicron-specific booster to fully take advantage of it. :-D</sarcasm>
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Uhh.. (Score:5, Informative)
I read the article and saw that they actually did not mention how mRNA vaccines were developed. Probably because they did not want to mention that scoundrel Robert Malone. While I agree he is a prick, he the origin should mention the 1989 and 1990 papers for which he is first author. They could also mention that he should not hog all the credit though because his name is not first on the mRNA vaccine patent.
Here is a better history of the mRNA vaccine: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Malone is bitter about not getting licensing royalties for the mRNA vaccine and has become a strong anti-vaxxer as I suppose he has had to double down on his position (despite admitting to getting the vaccine himself but with side effects.)
Re:Uhh.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's nothing political about leaving a money grubbing asshole out of a story.
Yes, politicians are largely money grubbing assholes, but not all money grubbing assholes are politicians.
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Re: Uhh.. (Score:2)
They didn't mention the names of the scientists in the 60s that found rna molecules so it's political? Wtf?
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1989, and actually the originators of the mrna vaccine conccept .. read what I wrote carefully .. jerk.
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Exactly. The idea here is that in the future, this NYT story will be seen as the "definitive" summary of how mRNA vaccines were developed. Malone will be air-brushed out from history, Soviet-style.
Re: Uhh.. (Score:4)
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"The debate over who deserves credit for pioneering the technology is heating up as awards start rolling out — and the speculation is getting more intense in advance of the Nobel prize announcements next month. But formal prizes restricted to only a few scientists will fail to recognize the many contributors to mRNA’s medical development. In reality, the path to mRNA vaccines drew on the work of hundreds of researchers over more than 30
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History of RNA started around 1960, so he was not the first. There are also hundreds of scientists involved. He had a short role few decades ago, but you could not vaccinate with his inventions.
It is the same with light bulbs. Edison did not invent them, he just improved them or actually he hired some people to improve it. Of first airplane. Wright brothers did not invent airplane. They were just the first people who managed to create actual working implementation according to specific rules. So yes. I thin
Re: Uhh.. (Score:2)
But there is a chance he might have been first to try to, and come up with the idea of, making an RNA vaccine, or deliberately inserting RNA into a cell to make a target protein. I donâ(TM)t know enough of the history to be certain that is true though, I mean it is quite fuzzy.
Development history, and Dr. Malone (Score:2)
After a bit of reading, my recommendation is to assign extra credibility to any source about the history of the vaccines which uses the word "tangled".
True part -- no lipid coat, no vaccine, and he really did pioneer work on that.
I am unwilling to call Dr. Malone a prick, though. Anyone who tells me I'm suffering from "psychosis" when I'm not gets to deal with my anti-gaslighting defenses. "Prick" is not the term I use when I detect that going on.
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Anti-vaxxers are right (Score:1, Funny)
When anti-vaxxers say they're not getting vaccinated because the vaccines were created in too short a time to be fully tested, they are correct. After all, they were created in nine months and look how they turned out.
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When anti-vaxxers say they're not getting vaccinated because the vaccines were created in too short a time to be fully tested, they are correct. After all, they were created in nine months and look how they turned out.
The vaccines or the anti-vaxxers?
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- - - whoosh!!! - - -
Human gestation period is 9 months, if that helps your understanding of quonset's comment.
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Cool story (Score:2)
Too bad I cannot read it.
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Take all of 5 seconds to paste the url into http://archive.is/ [archive.is]
You’re welcome.
I was today years old... (Score:2)
...when I realized the name 'Moderna' came from their focus on modifying RNA (their stock ticker 'MRNA' was a hint).
Connections (Score:2)
There was a British Documentary in the 1978 called Connections [wikipedia.org] where a science historian walks through the history of different technologies and shows how a bunch of often unrelated discoveries led up to something we take for granted today. When I was a kid that was one of the things that really got me interested in science.
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I love that show, i keep looking for it on a streaming service.
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No they are saving lives, there are very few vaccinated people in the ICUs that's mostly the unvaxinated now. It's not helping much for transmission but it's doing wonders for keeping people out of the iCUs and off the ventilators. a far cry from "shite".