Nonetheless an impressive story of conviction and perseverance. Penn has decades-old egg on its face, rather than months-old fresh egg.
Working with synthetic mRNA was hard during my time. I would imagine that it was many times more difficult in the 90's. Just as an EE analogy, working on mRNA in the 90s is like working on extreme UV lithography in the 80s. It was too far into the future to be useful, and there were better research funding opportunities for other things. But if one was smart, one could see the potential. It's not so surprising that she got passed for tenure, working on something so crazy wild. It was around 2005-2010 time frame when mRNA synthesis became affordable enough to become an applied science rather than basic research.
It sounds like Kariko lost her associate professor position in the 90s, but continued her work as a postdoc for more than 10 years. That's some awesome dedication to something that almost nobody thought would work out. It's not so surprising she jumped ship around 2010 when the mRNA tech caught up.
I hope she gets her Nobel prize. She deserves it.
Only through good fortune did SARS flame out.
Im in SA and the new strain is the real deal. Four people I know have perished in one week. I don't even know who to call or what to say.
I have not seen any research that the new strains are more deadly, only that they are more infectious.
It is not enough to write something and promise to link a source later.
But now that mRNA vaccines have been proven, they might be mass distributed in about 9 months in a future pandemic.
You realize such a delay would mean many more people would die not to mention the overall damage to society from lockdowns? I can’t understand how that would possibly be not “too bad.”
Science really came through this time. We not only had a new vaccine platform that arrived just in time (mRNA), but our conventional vaccine development was also able to get a good vaccine out much sooner than scientists originally thought.
> You realize such a delay would mean many more people would die not to mention the overall damage to society from lockdowns?
Yes.
> I can’t understand how that would possibly be not “too bad.”
Compare it to not having a vaccine ever.
https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
Also the population would have been younger, with fewer vitamin-D deficient migrants.
It would have been explained as a very bad flu season.
If you don't trust me perhaps you'll listen to Donald Trump, who told Bob Woodward in early February 2020: "And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.... This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”
For example, COVID's current "death rate" estimate is ~3x worse than flu. Versus Trump's "~5x" in your quote from Feb 2020¹.
People love to argue about such overall rates but for practical purposes, they're too crude a hammer – too aggregate, too high-level to be actionable. More importantly, we now have a better understanding of the groups at risk.
> [Infection fatality rate] measuring 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at 25. However, the rate progressively increased with age, growing from 0.4% at 55 to around 15% at 85.
Age and certain comorbidities seem critical. This knowledge shapes the global COVID response, allowing help to be significantly more targeted and effective. For instance, when rolling out national vaccination plans.
___
¹ Whichever rate Trump was talking about – there's case fatality rate, crude fatality rate, infection fatality rate…
COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate is estimated at around 0.6% whereas H1N1/09 Flu infection fatality rate was estimated to be less than 0.03%. Not sure where you get “3x”, I think the correct number would be 20x based on these numbers.
* Covid-19 IFR source: https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html where a chart indicates an IFR between 0.5 and 0.75% for USA and England
* H1N1/09 IFR source: https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b5213.full “We estimate that 0.026% (range 0.011-0.066%) of these individuals died from causes related to this infection”
But that's exactly the discussion I called out as not terribly relevant: The variance within Covid (due to age, location, comorbidities…) is much greater than variance between Covid and flu.
In other words, even a Covid-vs-flu rate difference of 20x (as you say) is dwarfed by the 1000x difference between Covid age groups (which you didn't contest). Can we agree on that?
My point is that a broadly aggregated statistics like "global IFR" is too crude to be actionable. Easy to put in a headline, sure, but more potential for confusion than good.
[1] https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
0.6% of the population in the USA, for instance, would mean about 2 million people would be killed by uncontrolled and massive COVID-19 spread.
Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
P.S. the paper you cited is by John Ioannidis. He has become notorious in 2020 attempting to prove Covid-19 isn’t very dangerous. Worth consideration as this version has managed to pass peer review, but keep in mind it’s outside the mainstream of opinion. IMO, the 0.2% estimate is pretty clearly low and I’ve read a good debunking of that specific paper in the past. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1316511734115385344.html
Technically yes, such average exists – the population is finite. But taking a population-wide decision based on such estimate is suboptimal. We already know a population parameter (age, comorbidities) that gets us an actionable segregation!
I personally see such "hiding behind an average of an exponential" as scientific fraud. Misinformed at best; disingenuous and murderous at worst (such as with Covid).
> He has become notorious in 2020
Interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware of John Ioannidis' pedigree. For those curious – this article does a good job summarizing the controversy (April 2020):
https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-...
> Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
A magic wand to seal off over-60 olds? How do you feel about sealing off everyone?
Worked great in New Zealand and Taiwan, and pretty dang good in Singapore, Australia, and even China. A pity we weren’t fast enough to do it here.
I haven’t seen any society successfully execute a strategy to exclude the aged from human society or viral transmission yet, and we’ve had 9 months to experiment. If such a strategy existed and was proven to work, your theory that it was idiotic to ignore it would make sense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to exist.
Yet still we have people to this day repeating his knowingly and now admittedly false claims as though they are true. That's how deep the hook line and sinker got swallowed. It's fascinating psychology. Even when the con artist admits and explains the con, some people prefer to stay conned.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...
Suicides and homicides also up. Given that these deaths will occur for people with a typical age of 40, vs 80 for COVID, substantially more years of life have been lost from lockdown (which seems to have achieved little anyway), than from COVID.
That is the opioid crisis.
Source: The CDC WONDER database, group by year, and by "UCD - Drug/Alcohol Induced Case". (Deep link doesn't work)
Info on the vaccine https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/17/si...
They were using it in a limited way back in June https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma-asia/china-s-sinopharm-t...
and has recently got approval. I can't help but wonder if they'd offered it generally with a not fully tested warning when it was offered to "employees of some large state-run companies" presumably in April/May, how many lives would have been saved.
If she and the others involved in identifying the root cause and coming up with the vaccine, do not get the Nobel in Medicine/Chemistry i will consider the whole "Nobel Prize" system to be a complete tool and sham.
What was Obama given the Nobel Peace Prize for?
That said, AFAIK Obama himself found it somewhat cringeworthy when he was awarded the price, which - if it is true - makes it a lot less embarrassing on his part.
Also it seems they really haven't had reason to be happy with a couple of other candidates too, one leading a country that massacred Rohingas under her leadership and one starting another war in Africa.
Oslo, October 9, 2009"
They are different.
If you dilute a brand name with controversial actions or products, it drags the whole brand down. And it does not matter of parts of it are still good.
"Hakuin used to tell his pupils about an old woman who had a teashop, praising her understanding of Zen. The pupils refused to believe what he told them and would go to the teashop to find out for themselves.
Whenever the woman saw them coming she could tell at once whether they had come for tea or to look into her grasp of Zen. In the former case, she would server them graciously. In the latter, she would beckon to the pupils to come behind her screen. The instant they obeyed, she would strike them with a fire-poker.
Nine out of ten of them could not escape her beating."
If a big part of the nominations is obviously politically motivated, should the others get the tea or the poker?
Not returning her to tenure track once her research proved fortuitous is much more concerning.
Trying to take credit now for facilitating her research when they actively worked against it at the time is damning.
https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-12-26/la-madre-de-la-vacuna-...
edit: Also very curious about the "attempt to have her deported" as I've heard of many threats of that nature against foreign post-docs.
Very right! I fear that the cancer of "shortsighted quick returns" in the Research field has been the death of many a talented researcher. Research/Education should really be treated very differently from Industry/Productization and the same yardstick should not be applied to both.
Is innovation required to be only in safe and comfortable baby steps.. Or whatever can be controlled or understood..?
Maybe this is in part a reason why so many of our leaders, institutions and experts in so many fields revealed themselves not to be .. during COVID.
There are more voices starting to speak that the clock is starting to tick on some academic brands for failing to exist in the future, and the digital transformation of society has already left them behind.. While some remain at maintaining a present that is anchored in the past.
I'm passionate about the value of an education to improve your life and hope this rapidly improves with the the other rapid changes occurring during the pandemic.
Still, devaluing someone, marginalizing their contributions, and then continuing to own their intellectual property for the long game doesn't seem entirely reassuring behavior for any post secondary.
If it wasn't valuable then, why not let the prof walk with IP ownership if it's so worthless?
I mean this is really the ABCs of modern business.
If not for that, it would indeed be decades-old egg on their face. I think they’ve done a fair job of freshening up that egg, though.
https://biontech.de/sites/default/files/2019-08/20140202_Bio...
> "We are grateful for Dr. Karikó's important contributions both during her time at Penn," said university spokesperson Maccarthy, "where she continues to hold an appointment as an adjunct associate professor." The school's promo video about mRNA technology focuses on Weissman, mentioning Karikó only in passing.
It should be pointed out that the university holds the patent for the vaccine:
> In 2005, Karikó and Weissman published their groundbreaking study. The University of Pennsylvania licensed the technology and patented it. (Researchers' patents are often held by the institutions where they work).
It seems unfair that UPenn gets the patent in spite of practically thwarting the research on the subject (cutting Dr. Karikó's salary).