Security quote of the week [LWN.net]

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 8:08 UTC (Fri) by mpg (subscriber, #70797)
In reply to: Security quote of the week by Wol
Parent article: Security quote of the week

> Case in point, the Covid-19 vaccines that mimic the virus (the majority of vaccines) are all based on research done by a lone researcher who pretty much bankrupted themself trying to fund it while nobody else was interested.

That's the first time I'm hearing about that. Could you share more details (or pointers to sources with more details)? Thanks in advance.

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Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 11:58 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (6 responses)

That claim sounds fishy given that the most successful COVID-19 vaccines don't “mimic the virus”, they contain mRNA that codes only for a specific component of the virus (the spike protein). The vaccine recipient's cells then actually manufacture that protein and that elicits an immune response.

Traditional vaccines often contain attenuated or deactivated versions of the actual virus they're supposed to immunise against, which could be construed as “mimicking the virus”. Unlike these, mRNA vaccines don't come with any part of the virus in question, which makes them inherently safer than some of the traditional vaccines. For example, there were (very rare) cases of the attenuated virus in the Sabin (oral) polio vaccine mutating back into active form and giving vaccine recipients polio; with the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that can't happen because they don't contain any viral material that could even conceivably cause an infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 13:26 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

As usual I'm hazy on the details ... sorry ...

But it could be the manufactured RNA vaccines. Whatever, it's the technology that manufactures the vaccine's active agent.

A lone researcher (Iirc, it was a woman, too, they always get written out of history) spent about five years and all of her money trying to get grants to prove the concept was workable. Finally managed to get a sponsor once it looked viable.

Then a good few more years. If it hadn't been for that, regulatory approval for the vaccines would have been *MUCH* harder, because these vaccines are all 90% well proven vaccine carrier, and 10% artificial active ingredient. Otherwise there'd have been much more risk - is the active ingredient going to stay dead, is it contaminated, is is is ...

And it's why they say they'll be able to roll out new vaccines with minimal testing - all they are is minor changes to the active ingredient.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 14:29 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

The idea of mRNA-based vaccines is almost as old as the discovery of mRNA itself. It's certainly something that various academic research groups and pharmaceutical companies have been spending considerable amounts of time and money on over the years. For example, BioNTech, the German company behind the “Pfizer vaccine” was founded more than a decade ago by two oncologists who wanted to work on mRNA-based cancer therapy (and prevention); in early 2020, they basically put what they'd been doing on hold to apply their pre-existing vaccine technology to SARS-CoV-2. (I've read somewhere that once they'd received the SARS-CoV-2 genome, it took BioNTech two days to come up with a number of likely vaccine candidates, and the rest of the time was spent on picking the best of those, pre-clinical and clinical testing, and getting regulatory approval.) They're back to working on the anti-cancer stuff now, too, and thanks to their COVID vaccine efforts, funding for that is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 17:08 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> was founded more than a decade ago by two oncologists who wanted to work on mRNA-based cancer therapy

ie after this lady near bankrupted herself.

Not to downplay what BioNTech have done (I think my mum invested in them), but they were building on earlier research.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 19, 2021 10:12 UTC (Sun) by gezza (subscriber, #40700) [Link] (1 responses)

See Sam's link below. Turns out that BioNTech licensed the tech from with Katalin Karikó and later recruited her. Interesting read.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 14:13 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

People who believe that Katalin Karikó hasn't been getting the credit due to her will be pleased to hear that in 2022, she, along with her BioNTech colleagues Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci will be awarded the Paul-Ehrlich-und-Ludwig-Darmstaedter-Preis (the most prestigious prize for medical research in Germany) for their work on mRNA technology. The awards committee explicitly cited their basic research rather than their work on the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine. Various recipients of this award have gone on to win the Nobel prize for medicine, too, so that's not entirely out of the question, either.

Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 8, 2021 15:59 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

[mRNA vaccines]

> Then a good few more years. If it hadn't been for that, regulatory approval for the vaccines would have been *MUCH* harder, because these vaccines are all 90% well proven vaccine carrier, and 10% artificial active ingredient. Otherwise there'd have been much more risk - is the active ingredient going to stay dead, is it contaminated, is is is ...

This bears no resemblance to anything I know about mRNA vaccines, which are composed of a lipid coat (a somewhat unusual one, formulated for this purpose) and cunningly modified viral mRNA (only a small part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome), and nothing else. It's impossible for the active ingredient to not "stay dead", although -- as with viruses -- it's a bit hard to define mRNA as either dead or alive. (I prefer to think of viruses as things that are dead outside a cell and alive inside it). It's impossible for it to cause disease. It's definitely impossible for it to revert to being harmful and I've not heard of any regulatory concern over that (only over whether the mRNA protein product or its packaging is *itself* harmful, say, inducing allergic shock or interacting negatively with something else already in the body; a worry with every new medication of any kind).

Even if it's given to someone who's already infected with SARS-CoV-2, the most it'll do is add a tiny bit more spike protein to the huge amounts that the virus is already producing: there's no danger of recombination or anything making the thing dangerous, which is a *definite* risk with attenuated- or dead-virus formulations like some polio vaccines.

(Contamination is a problem, but not one that has anything to do with anything that Katalin Karikó did: she was involved with pseudouridination, which is a change to the *mRNA itself* and has nothing to do with contaminants.)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 22:43 UTC (Fri) by sam.thursfield (subscriber, #94496) [Link] (2 responses)

Perhaps this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-...

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2021 19:39 UTC (Sat) by mpg (subscriber, #70797) [Link]

Thanks for the reference, that was an interesting read! Som she was the person who discovered the trick with the modified U base. (I first heard about this trick here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-sou... and as the blog post points out, the similarity with computer security is striking. I find it amazing that this works with our bodies too.)

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 19, 2021 9:32 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I'm not sure that was the exact article - in particular I don't remember the link to Moderna and BioNTech, but if it wasn't it was almost certainly a summary of that article ...

Cheers,
Wol