Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine — great science, Covid-19 and the salting of fresh wounds

It is Nobel Prize season. In physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace and economics. For my part, I rather like the Stem awards, mainly due to their occasional incomprehensibility to those of us outside the ivory towers of research. Like the chemistry award this year for “quantum dots”. Yup, sure, of course.  

But the award this year of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman caught more of my attention than usual because it immediately reignited the unholy Covid-19 war between science, superstition, policy, politics and culture. This war has poisoned the air since January 2020 when the first reports of sickness and death were reported and the virus was subsequently identified and gene-sequenced. 

The grandees of the Nobel Prize always attach a simple one-liner to their awards to indicate the particular area of study recognised. In this case, the award was given “for their discoveries concerning base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19”. This was an interesting statement, and I wonder how long it was discussed. The original work by Karikó and Weissman, for which they won the award, was done decades ago, long before Covid-19. Tethering it to Covid-19 was clearly intentional. 

But so what? 

My first Facebook post about Covid was in January 2020 when I saw a report out of China and wrote a moderately alarmist post on my personal timeline. Over the next year I became increasingly vocal on social media and found myself getting into all manner of scientific and political spats with people who held different views. Some resulted in permanently frayed friendships.  

But, over the next two years, a few things happened. As the data started rolling in, as peer-reviewed research started to be published and as the virus itself mutated, I felt myself on less and less solid ground. Not only did I become unsure about certain matters, but I watched with growing alarm as some globally respected scientists were provoked to criticise hegemonic and inflexible policy declarations as well as bad science, only to face brutal censorship of their views. Those two years were not our finest moment when it came to free speech.  

Which brings us to today, when many things that were taken as read in 2020 are either now demonstrably false (like the promised vaccine-produced herd immunity) or were (with the benefit of hindsight) catastrophically ill-conceived and poorly implemented in various countries, with terrible results. Such as various non-pharmaceutical interventions, which in some cases caused permanent damage to some sectors of society, particularly children at the early education stage.  

And, of course, grievous damage was done to the reputations of health authorities. As a consequence, we have now, in late 2023, a significant drop-off in critical childhood vaccinations for polio and MMR worldwide, and countries offering divergent health directives with regard to vaccines and nonpharmaceutical interventions. Compare, for instance, the US, where vaccine mandates and masking are starting to return, with South Africa, where most of the doctors I know do not even bother to test patients any more, because there is not much to be done and most will be just fine. And some South African doctors do not even recommend boosters. 

Fooling the immune system