A friend sent me a link to this video, asking me of my opinion (here). IMHO this video is basically rubbish from beginning to end and I’m going to write an extensive review of all the silly crap in it. But for now;
In the video Dr. Robert Malone MD claims to have invented the mRNA vaccines and has claimed this in several other venues. Did he though? He worked as a graduate student in a PhD program in UCSD and the Salk Institute in the late 80s. He wrote one paper here showing that mRNA containing sequence encoding a reporter protein could be mixed with lipofectin, a commercial lipid product, and applied to mammalian cells grown in a dish. The cells then expressed the reporter protein. How surprising was this? Lipofectin was already widely used to introduce DNA into cells for expression studies so it wasn’t exactly stunning that with a bit of playing around with conditions you could do it with mRNA also. A step forward but hardly a breakthrough. A second paper lists Malone as second author here, and this shows that certain of his mRNA constructs and others could be injected into the muscles of mice and express encoded reporter proteins there. In this case the lipofectin was not used, the mRNA was just injected directly. Typically the first author on a paper is responsible for most of the work and second authors did some of the work but basically had a lesser role. The work was done in Madison, Wisconsin, not the Salk or UCSD, and it appeared in 1990, by which time Malone had quit the PhD program, he later went on to obtain an MD degree. On this basis he is claiming he invented the mRNA vaccines. While he may have thought that mRNA might one day be used to develop vaccines I seriously doubt that nobody else had the same thought. At the time proteins were being routinely expressed in cells using engineered DNA, and the added DNA made mRNA which made the protein. It was obvious that putting in mRNA was a more direct approach but everybody knew the problem with this; mRNA is extremely unstable. So to get anything useful you had to figure out how to stabilize the mRNA and get it into cells and you also had to figure out how to manufacture whatever you had developed in bulk. So practical mRNA vaccines did not emerge until 30 years later. Lipofectin would not work well with humans, a more advanced lipid formulation was needed and it needed to be coupled to the mRNA in a reliable way that could be scaled up for mass manufacture. These problems were solved in 2000 by Peter Cullis, Ian MacLachlan and collaborators at a company called Protiva, which developed the lipid nanoparticles and methods of manufacture used by both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. A problem was that the mRNA/nanoparticle complexes induced a strong inflammatory response which resulted in the mRNA being inactivated. The solution to this problem came in 2005 when Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman and others showed that modification of certain bases of the mRNA would make the mRNA much more stable and much less inflammatory, see here. Much work was performed refining this approach, with safety, animal work and further research both in academia and industry over the next years. So everything, fortunately for the world, was fully worked out early in 2020 when Covid-19 hit. So Moderna and Pfizer could very quickly develop effective mRNA/nanoparticle based vaccines once the Chinese released the nucleic acid sequence of the virus which they did very quickly, on the 10th of January 2020. Despite all the nonsense spouted in this video, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are safe and very effective and will save millions of lives. And you haven’t seen anything yet, the mRNA/nanoparticle approach is being investigated for treatments for a host of other diseases. So there is talk of an mRNA Nobel Prize. One of the rules of the Nobel foundation is that a maximum of three individuals can share a single prize. It seems very likely Kariko and most likely Weissman and possibly MacLachlan or Cullis will win. Numerous others who have contributed to the mRNA work one being Malone. However, look at the awards Kariko has already got on her Wikipedia page. In summary Malone made a small contribution early on but if he says he deserves full credit for inventing the mRNA vaccines he is either self delusional or dishonest.
I wrote this based on my own research which included reading the original research papers I cited. I then found that there was a commentary in Nature concerning the history behind the mRNA vaccines, see here. Although the Nature article was longer and more detailed than mine we came to same basic conclusions. Interestingly they made at least one mistake- the second Malone paper did not use lipofectin/mRNA as stated in Nature, but pure mRNA.
Gerry Shaw Blog 