Vaccines save more lives than any other treatment, messenger RNA (mRNA) pioneer and Tang Prize winner Drew Weissman told a news conference in Taipei on Wednesday, adding that although “anti-vaccine” sentiment was not new, its snowballing into a wider political issue was concerning.
“The anti-vaccine response surprised everyone. Scientists are still at fault for letting it get to the point it got to without addressing it appropriately,” said Weissman, who was one of three people awarded the Tang Prize on Tuesday for work on mRNA COVID-19 vaccine development.
There have always been people who subscribe to anti-vaccine views. There were people who refused vaccines during the Spanish flu. That is not new. What is new is how it has become a polarizing political issue around the world, the University of Pennsylvania professor said.
The US, Germany and Russia among many others have seen a large backlash against the vaccine based solely on conspiracy theories, he said.
“To me the biggest problem was social media, because it gave everybody microphones to express their crazy ideas and repeat their crazy ideas ... all while we were setting up the RNA Institute,” he said.
The institute brought together a large group of people who investigated how to address misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, Weissman said, adding that for now, there was still no clear path to solving the issue.
“Vaccines clearly save the most lives compared to any other treatment, but we are now having outbreaks of measles and even polio in the United States, which we haven’t seen for decades, because of people refusing vaccines and that’s a critical problem,” Weissman said.
Hungarian-American biochemist Katalin Kariko said that the gap between reality and anti-vaccine ideology was huge, adding that there is a real need to educate people about mRNA vaccines, because the technology used to create them has been in development for decades.
Canadian researcher Pieter Cullis was also awarded the Tang Prize for achievements in biopharmaceutical science.
Kariko and Weissman discovered a way to modify mRNA so that it would not cause an inflammatory response when injected, technology that is used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
Cullis is a pioneer in the development of delivery systems for mRNA to human cells through the use of lipid nanoparticles, which are bubbles of fat that protect mRNA.
Kariko told the news conference that mRNA technology had undergone a transformative journey since its discovery in 1961 to the groundbreaking development of the first US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
The initial years were challenging due to mRNA’s inflammatory nature, which hindered its use in medical applications, before she and her colleagues hit a milestone by replacing uridine with a modified nucleoside called pseudouridine, rendering mRNA non-immunogenic, stable and highly translatable, Kariko said.
Weissman said that nucleoside-modified mRNA, developed more than 15 years ago, became the backbone of the COVID-19 pandemic response, with the first two FDA-approved vaccines being highly effective and safe.
Cullis spoke about the potential of gene therapy to revolutionize disease treatment.
However, effective delivery systems are crucial to harness the power of nucleic acid polymers, which are rapidly degraded in biological fluids and struggle to penetrate target cells, he said.
The Tang Prize was established in 2012 by Taiwanese entrepreneur Samuel Yin (尹衍樑), chairman of the Ruentex Group, to honor individuals or organizations that make significant contributions to human society in four categories: sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, Sinology and the rule of law.
