Taipei, Aug. 2 (CNA) Vaccines save more lives than any other treatment, messenger RNA (mRNA) pioneer and Tang Prize winner Drew Weissman said Wednesday, adding that although anti-vax sentiment was not new, the fact it had recently snowballed 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," Weissman, who was one of three people awarded the 2022 Tang Prize Tuesday for their work on mRNA COVID-19 vaccine development, said during a press conference held in Taipei.
There have always been people subscribing 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 Pennsylvania University professor said.
He highlighted that it is not just the United States, but countries like Germany and Russia among many others have seen a large backlash against the vaccine based solely on conspiracy theories.
"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.
His institute brought together a large group of people who investigated how to addressmisinformation and vaccine hesitancy, Weissman said, adding that for now, there wasstill no clear path to solving the issue.
"Vaccines clearly save the most lives compared to any other treatment, but we are nowhaving outbreaks of measles and even polio in the United States, which we haven't seenfor decades, because of people refusing vaccines and that's a critical problem,"Weissman urged.
Echoing Weissman, Hungarian-American biochemist Katalin Karikó said the gapbetween reality and the ideology anti-vaxxers subscribed to was huge, adding there wasa real need to educate the public about mRNA vaccines because the technology used tocreate them has been in development for decades.
As well as Weissman, Karikó and Canadian researcher Pieter Cullis were also awarded theTang Prize for their achievements in biopharmaceutical science.
Karikó and Weissman discovered a way to modify mRNA so that it would not cause aninfl ammatory response when injected into the body, and that technology is used in thePfi zer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
Cullis is a pioneer in the development of delivery systems for mRNA to human cellsthrough the use of lipid nanoparticles (LNP) which are bubbles of fat that wrap aroundand protect mRNA.
In her speech Wednesday afternoon, Karikó highlighted the transformative journey ofmRNA from its discovery in 1961 to the groundbreaking development of the fi rst FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
The initial years were challenging due to mRNA's infl ammatory nature, which hinderedits use in medical applications, before she and her colleagues hit a milestone whenreplacing uridine with a modifi ed nucleoside called pseudouridine, rendering mRNAnon-immunogenic, stable, and highly translatable, Karikó noted.
Meanwhile, Weissman said nucleoside-modifi ed mRNA, developed over 15 years ago, hasbecome the backbone of the COVID-19 pandemic response, with the fi rst two FDA-approved vaccines proving both highly eff ective and safe.
