Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.

Scientists and doctors critical of COVID-19 vaccines had harsh criticism for the Norwegian Nobel Committee after it awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to a pair of University of Pennsylvania biochemists for their work in developing “effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”

Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., and Drew Weissman, M.D., Ph.D., on Monday were awarded the prize for their “groundbreaking findings … of how mRNA interacts with our immune system [and for contributing] to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” according to the Nobel Committee press release.

Dr. Robert Malone, the reputed inventor of mRNA technology, responded on X/Twitter:

“Karikó and Weissman get the Nobel, not for inventing mRNA vaccines (because I did that) but for adding the pseudouridine that allowed unlimited spike toxins to be manufactured in what could have been a safe and effective vaccine platform, if safely developed.”

Malone challenged the integrity of the award, claiming Big Pharma was behind it.

“Pfizer has been campaigning for this since 2020 — at first, they’ve claimed (as did Karikó) that she invented the mRNA vaccine technology,” he said, noting that “Pfizer donates heavily to the Karolinska Institutet, which awards the Nobel.”

“Science has been hijacked again by big pharma,” he concluded.

Dr. Peter McCullough said, “This Nobel decision will not do well over the course of history,” citing the World Council for Health’s pharmacovigilance report of adverse events for the COVID-19 vaccines:

Other notable researchers, scientists and organizations also weighed in. Here is a sampling:

Children’s Health Defense President Mary Holland told The Defender:

“Scientific evidence suggests that mRNA products will never be safe for all people or animals, and yet the headlong rush to ‘immunize’ everyone in the world continues.

“The gap between evidence and propaganda has never been greater; it’s revolting to see the Nobel Prize serve propaganda rather than science.”

A photo of Karikó and Weissman, both wearing face masks while holding prize plaques, surfaced on Twitter soon after the announcement. Some claimed it was photoshopped, although PBS/NPR posted it in an article about the Nobel Prize winners. The photo was later identified as originating from a 2022 event in Japan.

Nobel committee members ‘underplaying’ long-term myocarditis lethality

Jikkyleaks on Twitter Wednesday reposted a short video of a Chinese journalist asking Nobel committee members Olle Kämpe, M.D., Ph.D., and Rickard Sandberg, Ph.D., “With the mRNA, we don’t know the long-term effects yet. So do we have any concern over that?”

Sandberg answered, “The mRNA that is given is very transient … The amount of side effects noted to date is extremely limited, so I don’t think it’s a major concern.”

Kämpe added, “Well it can’t be integrated into the nucleus, into the DNA, and that’s a safety precaution. The effects noted are mostly myocarditis and perimyocarditis, mainly affecting young males, but that normally resolves without any long-term effects.”

Commenting on their answers, Jikkyleaks wrote, “Not only are two senior scientists overtly lying about the mechanism of these drugs … But to underplay myocarditis (with long-term lethality) just shows how lab scientists can be turned into Joseph Mengeles with a bit of propaganda.”

Jikkyleaks followed with a post stating myocarditis carries a prognosis of 50% (death) at 10 years, referencing a German study in the PubMed database on the mortality rates of different types of myocarditis.

Chris Martenson, Ph.D., responded to Kämpe’s and Sandberg’s statements, calling them “blatant misinformation.”

“If ‘transient’ now includes the prospect of something lasting for *at least* 60 days,” Martenson wrote, “then this statement is accurate.” He shared a paper from March 2022 showing mRNA was detected in lymph nodes 60 days after the last injection.

Challenging Sandberg’s claim about limited side effects, Martenson pointed out the more than 300,000 serious adverse events recorded by Germany’s Paul Ehrlich Institute. “Germany’s own health minister at the time now admits up to 1 in 1,000 vaccinees experience a bad side effect,” he said.

Regarding Kämpe’s claim that mRNA cannot be integrated into DNA, Martenson pointed to #plasmidgate research and the work of scientist and genomics expert Kevin McKernan and others.

Lots and lots of DNA, encoded with a nuclear transport signal, for some reason, came along for the ride with the mRNA shots,” Martenson said. “So, instead of a ‘safety precaution,’ the exact opposite was included in every vial.”

Martenson called the claim that myocarditis normally resolves without long-term effects “spectacularly untrue,” saying Kämpe’s statement “doesn’t even qualify as ‘misinformed’ — it’s either pure ignorance or straight-up lying.”

He added:

“The annals of science are now stocked full of people who have died from this ‘mild’ myocarditis or continue to suffer from the effects years later.

“But, as bad as the myocarditis is, it’s just one of dozens of different and quite serious side effects, so it represents a serious deflection as well as a material misstatement of fact.

“CONCLUSION: It’s not possible for such intelligent and accomplished people to be this badly misinformed. It has to be a willful act. That means their moral character is permanently stained and they should be shunned from polite society.”

McKernan called Kämpe’s and Sandberg’s answers, “The ‘Nobel Lie,’” and in another tweet said, “Usually the Nobel committee likes to wait a decade to see if things really pan out … lest they award another lobotomy medal.”

‘Manipulating our cells … might have its downsides’

Karikó’s and Weissman’s mRNA breakthrough was first published in a 2005 paper, where they shared their solution to the problem of synthetic RNA causing inflammatory responses — “a strong immune reaction to elevated protective antibodies” — according to an article in Scientific American.

That reaction caused the mRNA to degrade and therefore to lose its ability to replicate.

The researchers solved the problem by modifying one of the mRNA nucleoside bases, replacing uridine with the isomer pseudouridine.

This change allowed the synthetic RNA to “evade our immune defenses and trick human cells into producing whatever proteins the injected RNA might code for,” wrote Substack author Eugyppius.

In 2015, the pair found a way to deliver mRNA into mice using lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that further protect its mRNA payload from degradation, allowing it to be delivered into cells.

Karikó’s and Weissman’s work “made the Moderna and the BioNTech/Pfizer jabs possible,” Eugyppius wrote, adding, “That our natural biological defenses might have a purpose, and that manipulating our cells to manufacture pharmaceutical products in our own bodies might have its downsides, are reservations that the Nobel Committee do not share.”

Doctors for COVID Ethics (D4CE) in their book, “mRNA Vaccine Toxicity,” released in July, said LNPs not only “fly under the radar of the immune system,” making their way into many different kinds of cells — with liver, spleen and ovaries accumulating particularly high amounts — but also produce an immunosuppressive effect on our body’s lymphocytes (T cells, B cells and others).

They cited a study showing changes to the pattern of immune responses are passed on to the offspring of LNP-injected mice.

Prize awarded with hope it would ‘make hesitant people take the vaccine’

Eugyppius claimed Karikó and Weissman were not obvious candidates for the Nobel Prize because “neither their publications nor their citations were sufficient to place them among the frontrunners.” 

Phys.org also took note of the unusual choice, writing “The Nobel committee broke with its usual practice of honoring decades-old discoveries.”

But Kämpe, in what Eugyppius called a “backhanded acknowledgment,” tipped his hand when he said he hoped the award “may make hesitant people take the vaccine and be sure that it’s very efficient and safe.”

Nobel committee chair Gunilla Karlsson-Hedestam said in the prize announcement, “What’s important here I think is that vaccines could be developed so fast,” and credited Kariko’s and Weissman’s contributions for making that possible.

Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at the Washington advocacy group Public Citizen, applauded the recognition of mRNA but said Western countries should find it “deeply embarrassing” that only a small number of the shots were made available to poorer countries months after vaccination started in rich countries, PBS/NPR reported.

“The award, to me, is really a victory for vaccines and the potential for vaccines to advance health and improve equity,” Kathleen Neuzil told Scientific American.

Neuzil is a vaccinology professor and director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She said:

“We’re coming off the worst pandemic in more than a century, and certainly these vaccines contributed to lives saved and to less morbidity …

“I think an adaptation of this technology and mRNA vaccines could really be transformative, particularly for low- and middle-income countries, because of the adaptability and flexibility of the platform.”

However, Dr. Byram W. Bridle wrote in his Substack that the mRNA shots were not only ineffective but that data showed “they may have predisposed people to getting COVID-19.”

Bridle added:

“The day the Nobel prize gets awarded for a medical technology that has dramatically underperformed and possibly backfired, and that still has not undergone full and proper clinical trial testing, is the day that I lose all respect for the once noble award. Sadly, that day has come.”

Weissman issued warning about mRNA dangers in 2018

In a tweet Monday, Andrew Bostom, M.D., M.S., noted that Weissman in a 2018 Nature article issued an “honest warning” about the potential toxicity of mRNA vaccines, specifically listing hyperinflammatory responses, autoimmune triggering and thrombosis.

Weissman wrote:

“Potential safety concerns … clinical studies include local and systemic inflammation, the biodistribution and persistence of expressed immunogen, stimulation of auto-reactive antibodies and potential toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components. …

“Extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination [can promote] blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation [blood clots].

Responding to Bostom’s tweet, @CdnFreedomGirl wrote:

“So basically Dr. Weissman was well aware of these potential side effects, then these side effects actually occurred in real life. Some people paid with their lives. Yet these shots are still being peddled as safe and effective and Dr. Weissman gets a Nobel Prize and accepts it with complete disregard for humanity.”

Chief Nerd posted a tweet Monday featuring a brief clip from a 2021 video of Weissman denying the vaccine would cause any harm. Weissman said:

“The mRNA in the vaccine is identical to the RNA in your cells. The RNA in your cells isn’t causing long-term adverse events so the RNA in the vaccine won’t either. The RNA is degraded, probably within a week it’s completely gone … Nothing of the vaccine is left after days two to a week or so … The only really serious adverse event is this anaphylaxis-like reaction.”

Weismann is knowingly misspeaking here, for as already noted the pseudouridine used to alter the RNA turns it into modified RNA (or modRNA) specifically designed to make it more stable and long-lived, less immunogenic and more efficient at self-replicating.

Penn also considered mRNA research risky

Karikó joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 as an adjunct professor and researcher, before she began collaborating with Weissman in 1995.

However, in 1995, the university considered Karikó’s mRNA research too risky — even calling it “not of faculty quality.” Because she failed to attract sufficient grant funding, it offered the tenure-bound professor a choice either to leave or be demoted with a pay cut, according to Forbes.

Karikó accepted the demotion and continued her work. But in 2013, she left her senior research investigator position to become vice president at BioNTech, co-manufacturer with Pfizer of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

Members of the Penn medical and academic communities criticized the university and urged it to apologize for its celebratory page on the Nobel Prize winners that omitted any reference to Karikó’s earlier demotion.

‘The potential is just enormous’ for mRNA applications

Karikó, Weissman and other mRNA researchers are already working to apply the technology to autoimmune diseases, cancers, food and environmental allergies, bacterial and insect-borne diseases, including “HIV, norovirus and malaria” according to Scientific American.

“Now we can give them an off-the-shelf injection of RNA and cure their disease,” Weissman said. “And then you can expand that to liver, to lung, to brain, to every other organ therapeutics … The potential is just enormous.”

Weissman is currently developing a pan-coronavirus mRNA vaccine that would “defeat COVID forever,” according to a France 24 article. He claimed it would be better than annual booster shots and “should cover all future variants — and any bat coronaviruses that might cross over into people.”

“We’ve really expanded our scope of research — and that’s been allowed because the world … now recognizes RNA as important,” Weismann said, adding that it’s “an incredibly important thing to give access to RNA technology to every part of the world.”

In their book, “mRNA Vaccine Toxicity,” D4CE warned about the future use of the biotechnology:

“Every future mRNA vaccine will induce our cells to produce its own specific antigen, related to the particular microbe it targets. We must therefore expect each such vaccines to induce immunological damage on a similar scale as we have witnessed with those directed against COVID-19.”

In the foreword to the book, Holland noted that despite the well-documented harms of the mRNA shots, “the CDC has the audacity to call the vaccines ‘safe,’” adding, “This undeclared war against humanity is not over, and we must arm ourselves with knowledge.”

The authors concluded the book with this warning:

“It is not possible to interpret the actions of the authorities as ‘honest mistakes.’ Too much has occurred that points unequivocally to a sinister agenda behind the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines. The rushed approval without necessity, the outright threats and the coercion, the systematic censorship of honest science and the suppression of the truth about the numerous killed or severely injured vaccine victims have all gone on for far too long to permit any doubts as to intent and purpose.”

The book is available to download free of charge or order in print.