I think it is very likely that it will be rewarded, just not this year. Some time need to pass, and even though the discovery should be rewarded, it also needs to be figured out who to reward it to. Probably there are more than 3 contenders.
I would bet money that there is one awarded in the next 10-15 years.
Nobel prizes are notorious for not being reactionary, and waiting for the full effects of the work to be realized - i.e. GFP tagging awarded the nobel prize 16 years after it was first used.
mRNA vaccination technology is just getting started, the impact of which will likely be on the level of penicillin.
It might take even longer, though the all encompassing impact of the pandemic might bring it to the forefront. Although there are outliers, at this point the average time from discovery to Nobel recognition is over 20 years for the most recent prizes: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/09/the-nobe...
That's a chemistry prize and most likely will happen in the next 2-3 days. Typically technologies are rewarded in chemistry whereas basic science (physiology) is rewarded in medicine.
I agree, but I guess the challenge here is who are the 3 scientists to credit? Katalin Karikó is certainly one of them, but who are the other two? Weissman? Ugur Sahin? Özlem Türeci? Ingmar Hoerr? Noubar Afeyan? And then there is the weirdo guy that calls himself "mrna vaccine inventor"?
I guess the committee needs another 1-2 years time to decide on that, with the benefit of hindsight.
If you look at the past awards, the Nobel committee prefers awarding those who published the earliest, fundamental results. Even if it was published in some obscure non-English language journal (see the artemisinin prize, for example).
They've given it to organizations before (Doctors Without Borders won in 1999). Give it to Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford University then. Or "front line COVID-workers" or something. Exactly who gets it is not the main point, the main point is rewarding this incredible achievement in medicine (both the science of it, but also the work in testing, manufacturing and delivering it to patients).
MSF won the peace prize, not a science prize. Science prizes have not gone to organizations; if there were ever an opportunity to break that tradition it was with the discovery of the Higgs (the 2013 prize) and they didn't.
I've really been holding out hope for K. Karikó. She put up with such monumental struggles. Obviously the MRNA Covid vaccine is a huge "prize" and vindication for her, but I'd love to see even more. She deserves it.
It's not a popularity content. Nobel prizes are typically not given until several years after the work is complete and enough time has passed to fully appreciate the significance of it.
If you look back it’s usually a decade or more before a discovery gets a Nobel prize. Which makes sense, since it’s relevance isn’t usually immediately apparent.
Considering we’re about half way through an epidemic with new variants on the horizon I’d argue it’s a little early to start patting ourselves on the back?
You can write lists like that for pretty much half the genes in the genome. If you ask a pharma company to rank order genes they would like to get exclusively as targets these would be ranked in 4 digits if not 3. There’s a reason no lab bothered to discover it for so long.
Sydney Brenner said in the 60s that they already discovered all there is to molecular biology and leave the details to the “Americans” (1). These are the details. This work would have been pedestrian back in the 60s, it’s downright boring at this point. When people ask why science sucks today this is a great example. Not that this research was performed, of course someone had to at some point. But that people have been led to believe this is worth of celebration at this level.
Sydney might be proud and vain but his statement of relevance here was not due to that. Scientists are supposed to constantly try and indemnify what’s hard and important and pursue those fields. He said that statement because back then he believed the important fields to explore were developmental biology and neuroscience. More recently he wrote an editorial suggesting how a field like connectomics would be the equivalent new, exciting, important field would be.
The celebration of mediocrity with Nobels for no real reason except probably politics (I sat near to the Nobel cabals in lectures these candidate prize winners will come give talks at) isn’t in the interest of science or progress is all.
On the one side, you are correct and it's only last year / this year that mRNA vaccines have seen widespread adoption.
On the other, mRNA research goes back to the 80's, and mRNA vaccine research goes back twenty years; these facts are often overlooked by the "it was developed too fast" crowds.
That said,
> It's not a popularity content.
And yet, they gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize the year he was elected, without any merit or achievements to back it up. That decision was politically motivated. Same with giving it to Al Gore for his climate activism. They even tried to nominate Hitler in 1939, albeit in jest.
The Nobel Peace prize has always had political motivations that have reduced it's credibility. Last year it was awarded to the "World Food Programme" and in 2001 it was awarded to the “United Nations”. It’s best view the peace prize separately.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been nothing but a meme for a while. The science prizes are still respected, and if they want them to stay that way then they should continue to award them based on science and not politics.
The Nobel peace prize is handed out by a different committee compared to the other prizes, so how its handled should generally not be seen as an indicator for the other Nobel prizes.
I don't know and I don't care about that faux prize.
The Peace prize is handled by a special Norwegian committee in accordance with Nobel's wishes, so it has its own everything (including its own ceremony), while the other prizes are all under the same umbrella in some form (although I believe the scientific subcommittees doing the acual awarding are independent).
>On the other, mRNA research goes back to the 80's, and mRNA vaccine research goes back twenty years; these facts are often overlooked by the "it was developed too fast" crowds.
I am on that camp, that it was developed too fast and I do not think people should be mistreated because they think that. After all, there has been some adverse effects for some of the people who took it (like the auto-immune disease for the Janssen vaccine or thrombosis that caused some deaths in women who were taking the pill at the same time). I am not against vaccines in general, I am just worried that, as there is clearly an economic interest in rushing things up, that some bugs may still be on these vaccines that will need to be fixed. We have no idea of the long-term effects these vaccines have, unless someone has invented a time-machine and gone to the future. When concrete, well-made studies have been made that these vaccines are safe long-term and effective, I do not see why should someone not take it. Until then, I will wait at the comfort of my home.
After all, even if I took the vaccine, I would also continue to spread the virus just as someone who did not take it.
Another point is: How deadly is this vaccine to someone who is healthy? Is that value so big that we should rush to take not fully tested vaccines? I would get that criticism if there was a rate of 20, 30% of guaranteed death to someone who contracted the virus. At these current values? I think I will take my chances.
What I fail to understand is how you seem to think that you can can assess the risks associated with contracting the virus better than the risks associated with getting the vaccine.
At this point, so many more people have received the vaccine than have contracted the virus that I think it's fairly safe to say that we know much more about how people react to the vaccine than the virus (which also keeps mutating unlike the vaccine).
It's true that we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine but
1) my understanding is that medically speaking, a few weeks after the shot every trace of the actual vaccine is gone from the body and all that remains is that your immune system has learned how to fight the virus and
2) we certainly do not know the long-term effects of the virus either
So unless you are in a position where you can completely seal yourself off and be sure you will not get the virus, it's a choice between getting vaccinated and getting the virus. Considering what I wrote above, to me that is an obvious choice.
> What I fail to understand is how you seem to think that you can can assess the risks associated with contracting the virus better than the risks associated with getting the vaccine.
As I said, I cannot. Actually, nobody can. What I do know is:
- A vast majority of who gets the virus does not die or get any effects.
- A lot of people who die of Covid-19 has a comorbidity factor of 4 (Which means suffers from 4 comorbidities).
- I am 40 years old and no other comorbidities than a very light asthma. I eat well and try to do some exercise (but not as much as I would like, for sure).
- There are no studies of long-term effects of getting the vaccines or getting the virus.
- Anyone who took the vaccine can be infected and spread the virus just as someone who is not vaccinated.
- Things that are made under political/financial pressure rarely get right the first time.
So, with this data, for me it is logical for people to wait if they can. If they have comorbidities or are old, then it is another story.
>A vast majority of who gets the virus does not die or get any effects.
To the OP's point, the same can be said about the vaccine. Their point being, because of the transmissibility of the virus, it's fairly safe to assume that most people leading normal lives will be exposed to the virus at some point so the choice is whether or not to be exposed while vaccinated or not. There seems to be less uncertainty around the vaccine than the virus, so the risks are better known.
Janssen vaccine is vector based, not mRNA like Pfizer Comirnaty or Moderna.
Although vaccinated people can be infected and even spread the virus, the disease is usually mild, amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller. And that is no speciality of covid immunizations, other vaccines like measles or influenza also don't prevent infection, but aim to prevent the disease.
The "not fully tested" meme is nonsense, many hundred million people have been vaccinated in the meantime, the safety profile is known.
Regarding long time effects beside immunity of vaccines, this interview https://lexfridman.com/vincent-racaniello/ goes into some detail. TLDL: there is nothing to expect/fear.
> Although vaccinated people can be infected and even spread the virus, the disease is usually mild, amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller.
I confess I haven't watched that video yet, but I believe there are not any studies that claim that "amount of infectious virus and the time they are infectious is much smaller". But I will watch it later and see if something new came up. I claim this because not long ago, our prime minister was infected after being fully vaccinated and had to be at home for 10 days before coming back to work.
Like I said, I am healthy and can work from home, so I have the luxury of waiting a little while to make my decision. After all, I am only affecting myself with this decision. A lot of people die from smoking/drinking alcohol as well, should we prevent them from getting it?
Part of the Israeli study showed that the viral count/load of breakthrough infections was not significantly lowered compared to non-breakthrough infections.
I know of one other study (can't find it at the moment though) that specifically looked not for CT value but if they are able to infect cells. The outcome was something like vaccinated people do replicate virus, but the spikes of those viruses are (mostly) deactivated by antibodies and therefore not as infectious as virus obtained from unvaccinated people. In rt-PCR tests you can't really distinguish infectious from deactivated virus.
The correct null hypothesis is that in the counterfactual world where those people had gotten the virus rather than the vaccine, they would have ended up dead anyway.
The news say that it was unrelated to the vaccine and it was a heart attack. However, I do not believe in coincidences and am very skeptical that the vaccine has not had some effect on this. Note that she died 1 day after getting the vaccine.
Such "anecdotal evidence" doesn't say much per se.
In austria, a women died of a heart attack while waiting in line to be injected. Just imagine what would have happend if the heart attack would have happened 30 minutes later, it would have been very hard to convince people the heart attack was not related to the vaccination.
6 billions vaccine doses have been injected, about 1% of the world population dies every year, doing simple math, it means about 160000 people should die less than one day after getting the vaccine from unrelated causes. Heart attacks are a common cause of death, if not the most common, at around 1/4. It means 40000 of these deaths should be heart attacks.
That's what I was hoping to see, an award to Karikó and Weissman for their mRNA research. I'm sure they'll get the Nobel within the next few years, but it would have been appropriate to award it now. The Nobel Committee doesn't rush the prizes, and they don't generally go to new research, but mRNA would be a very justified exception. We're currently in the worst pandemic in a century, and over the last ten months we've seen how the mRNA vaccines provide amazingly high protection against hospitalization and death.
I can only assume they are waiting until next year to be sure how the vaccine picture shakes out. MRNA vaccines are clearly safe and effective, and have saved countless lives, but with the dopey politics in Sweden about Covid, I am not really that surprised.
- Sweden's handling of Covid has not been particularly influenced by politics, it's been run by the government-appointed experts (that were appointed before Covid broke out), so the "dopey politics" referred to have never really been politically motivated.
I don't think there's any reason for connecting Sweden's Covid response with who got the Nobel prize in Medicine this year.
