This week, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ‘for their discoveries… that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19’. The ‘efficacy’ of their vaccines was illustrated by a photograph of the pair at a prize-giving event wearing large face masks, a medieval method of reducing viral transmission in the absence of any protection from their award-winning vaccine.

The Nobel Foundation wrote that ‘The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.’

This is false on two counts. First, a vaccine was developed in the US in only four months in response to the 1957 Asian flu whereas the mRNA vaccines took almost a year. Second, the notion that Covid poses one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times is absurd. The virus poses a threat to the elderly and the ill and the vaccines have done little to mitigate that reality. Sweden, home of the Nobel, had no lockdowns in 2020 and didn’t use repurposed drugs to treat Covid yet still had only half the excess mortality (7.7 per cent) of fully vaccinated Australia in 2022 (15.3 per cent).

The Nobel comes with prize money of more than a million dollars but Karikó at least shouldn’t be hard up since she was senior vice-president until 2022 at BioNTech which generated 36 billion euros in vaccine sales in 2022 and 2021. The timing of her departure was fortuitous. Demand for vaccines is down and BioNTech faces hundreds of claims for compensation for vaccine injuries in its home country, Germany.

The  long-term safety of the vaccines was raised at the announcement by a Chinese journalist. The committee members looked gob-smacked but they shouldn’t have been. BioNTech’s Chinese partner was never allowed to sell the Pfizer vaccine in China presumably due to safety concerns.Professor Richard Sandberg said 13 billion people had got the virus before correcting himself and saying the vaccine. It was not so much a Freudian slip as a statement of fact since virtually everyone who has got the vaccine has got the virus. He then said there had been very few adverse events so he didn’t think safety was a major concern. In reality, there have been more serious adverse events and deaths reported after mRNA COVID-19 vaccines than for all non-Covid vaccines combined.

Professor Olle Kampe followed Sandberg saying the mRNA ‘can’t be integrated into the nucleus, into the DNA, and that’s a safety precaution’. Worryingly, this may not to be true.

Thanks to Kevin McKernan, who previously worked on the Human Genome Project at MIT, we know that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are both contaminated with DNA plasmids, tiny fragments of DNA that were produced as part of manufacturing process. Six independent laboratories around the world have confirmed this.

The DNA may be transported, along with the vaccine, into any cell in a vaccinated person. From there, at least five features of Covid mRNA vaccines may facilitate the transport of the DNA into the nucleus of the cell and its integration into a vaccinated person’s DNA. (An excellent substack by the pseudonymous Dr Ah Kahn Syed titled ‘5 ways to skin a (genetically modified) cat’ sets out the details.)

DNA contamination is very serious. It may be responsible for a range of serious adverse events including death as well as potentially harming the descendants of vaccinated people.

Professor Philip Buckhaults, a cancer geneticist who was one of those who independently confirmed the presence of the DNA, has called for vaccinations to stop until  the DNA has been removed.

Others, such as Dr Janci Lindsay, a toxicologist who, together with Buckhaults, testified in a South Carolina Senate hearing on the vaccines, have joined McKernan and a throng of doctors and scientists calling for the complete withdrawal of the Covid vaccines while a full safety audit is conducted.

But it gets worse. Professor Retsef Levi of MIT Sloan and Dr Josh Guetzkow of the Hebrew University wrote to the British Medical Journal in May warning that the vaccine used in the Pfizer clinical trials was not the same as the vaccine given to the public. The DNA contamination was introduced in the process of mass production and only 252 people in the trial were injected with the mass-produced version of the vaccine. Pfizer has so far not released any details about the adverse events in people who received the mass-produced vaccine but the adverse event rate for those in the placebo group, who were vaccinated after the trial ended, was 2.5 times higher than for the rest of the trial participants. Did they get the mass-produced vaccine?

In a final response to the Chinese journalist about long-term safety, Professor Kampe said that adverse events are ‘mostly myocarditis and pericarditis, mainly affecting young males, but that normally resolves without any long-term effects’.

This is an outrageous claim because it is impossible to know the long-term effects of mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis after only 2.5 years but there is no reason to think there will be no long-term effects. A Danish study published in 2021 found that even in younger healthy patients who were free of adverse events and medication one year after discharge, myocarditis was associated with a long-term excess risk of heart failure, hospitalisation, and death.

A paper published in Nature on 27 September shows that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA  spike protein routinely persists up to 30 days after vaccination. In autopsies of people who died after mRNA vaccination, the mRNA-generated spike proteins are present in the heart surrounded by immune cells trying vainly to kill them. Commenting on the recent revelations, Dr Bluemke Professor of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine said they show that ‘mild asymptomatic myocardial inflammation could be more common than we ever expected’ and patients who present with myocarditis may have more severe systemic inflammation related to mRNA vaccination.

None of this should be a surprise. In a 2018 paper, Drew Weissman warned that mRNA vaccines could provoke autoimmunity, blood coagulation, and pathological thrombus formation.

This year’s Nobel for Medicine isn’t the only one riven with controversy. In 1949, António Egas Moniz won the Nobel for inventing the lobotomy. The butchery of the prefrontal cortex was intended to treat mental illness but as Soviet psychiatrist Vasily Gilyarovsky said it simply turned the insane into idiots. To his credit he got the procedure banned in the Soviet Union in 1950. In the West, however, the Nobel added cachet and thousands of lobotomies were performed, particularly on women, gay men, even on children, despite side effects which included severe brain damage, seizures, suicide, and death. Lobotomies eventually fell out of favour in the West but the Nobel Foundation still defends the award.

The scientist who invented mRNA vaccine technology (and holds the patents, with others) is Dr Robert Malone. He was asked this week if he should also have been given the Nobel. His reply? ‘Probably not because the technology has not been proven safe’.