BY ROBERT KOGON OCTOBER 2023 READ

In what seems like an inevitable development, scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their role in developing the mRNA technology underlying the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, which were rolled out in late 2020.

But in a paper published as recently as 2018 and which is extensively quoted in an article at MedPageToday, none other than Drew Weissman warned that prior clinical trials of mRNA vaccines had produced results which were “more modest in humans than was expected based on animal models… and the side effects were not trivial”, including “moderate and in rare cases severe injection site or systemic reactions”.