The 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded today to two of many researchers whose discoveries made possible mRNA jabs for COVID.
This is yet another Nobel Prize that celebrates the close ties of government, academia and the pharmaceutical industry, a tradition that started with the very first prize in 1901 for the diphtheria vaccine.
The Nobel organization website gushes with congratulations for what they regard as amazingly safe and powerfully effective COVID shots, with no mention of uncomfortable facts that would suggest the recognition is a bit premature, to say the least.
In fact today's new laureates had already been collecting honors and awards for the last two years, well ahead of conventional outcome studies.
From the start, the mRNA technology for COVID was admitted to effect a possible reduction in duration or severity of illness, but not generating immunity to the disease, as the lay public was prone to interpret.
As early as 2021 worldwide media outlets were reporting on an alarming surge in COVID among the most heavily inoculated countries.
A number of world class scientists raised safety concerns while unprecedented adverse event statistics accumulated. None of this has provoked an objective re-assessment of risk to benefit ratio.
Even the Swedish public is not entirely buying it, with a vaccination rate of only about 72%.
The Boneheads & Brainiacs series profiles 100 years of Nobel laureates in medicine. The first volume (2020, Linden Publishing) describes some amazing science done by creative thinkers and genuine humanitarians, along with some criminals, Nazis and other infamous racists, and a few who were just dead wrong.
Heroes & Scoundrels, the second in the series (2022, Linden Publishing), continues the story into the second half of the last century, depicting instances of selfless dedication to bettering the lot of mankind right alongside other laureates who competed ruthlessly and profited handsomely.
I can't wait to share with you the final volume, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, coming in 2024. It opens with a National Institutes of Health researcher who was imprisoned for pedophilia. Some of the discoveries challenge the very definition of a gene, explore the development of blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor and Viagra, explain mad cow disease, and more...
Good grief! We live in interesting times.