mRNA derived vaccines are indeed great (I am a beneficiary), and the researchers who did the foundational work on mRNA richly deserve the honor. 

A lot of people have already weighed in on the mistreatment/shutting of one of the winners, Katalin Kariko and the brokenness of academic research, bias against women, incentive structures, awards, grants etc.,

However, there is myopia/distortion/rank hypocrisy on other fronts that deserves ridicule as well. 

This sentence in the citation, to put it mildly, is preposterous:

" ... contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."

In a world of roughly 8 billion people,  roughly 13.5 billion doses of Covid19 vaccines have been  administered so far. About 3 billion of those are mRNA vaccines (you can guess who got them). So, what do they mean when they say "human" health? Which humans are they talking about? Who do they think vaccinated the world?

This has to be either the greatest sleight of hand or complete ignorance/denial of how and what kind of Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out to save the world. It's as if the rest of the world doesn't exist or didn't as well develop vaccines quickly and save themselves. 

What we witnessed the last three years was not "unprecedented ... development" using mRNA techniques to counter "one of the greatest threats to human health" as the citation points out, instead it was how the entire rich world failed so completely and spectacularly to see itself as part of a common humanity even after it had the means to do so. 

#Vaccines #mRNA #NobelPrizeMedicine #Research #Covid19 #Inequality #Health 

 @02ecde16
Fucking Amen. If there's anything to be learned, its precisely the opposite of "academics are more effective in industry" - the intellectual property regime of for profit science actively prevented the rest of the world from being able to manufacture and access the vaccines. It is a bad thing that two companies manufactured all the mRNA vaccines, as opposed to putting that tech in the public domain and actively assisting with tech transfer. 

If theres one thing we learned from  https://www.peoplesvent.org/en/latest/ it was just how strongly the medical intellectual property and liability regime is designed to favor profit at the expense of health