Scientific Miracles Are No Match for the Morons

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12 - 15 minutes

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Scientific Miracles Are No Match for the Morons

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If you look at it isolated from its place in the 48 contiguous United States, Idaho looks like someone might write a capital "L." As in, "Libertarian." Also, "Lunatic." Idaho has been a repository for the country's most extreme extremists for decades now.

In the 1970s, Richard Butler founded the murderous Aryan Nations cult in Kootenai County. In 2000, after two victims of Aryan Nations violence won a $3 million verdict against the organization, the plaintiffs ended up owning the group's compound near Hayden Lake. It's a peace park now. Which doesn't mean that Idaho's politics have in any way tamed themselves. As journalist David Neiwert, perhaps the country's leading chronicler of right-wing extremism, put it in a 2017 interview:

“We thought we'll do the smart thing and ignore them. We'll pretend they're not there because they just want publicity. But that doesn't work. It has the opposite effect. They fester in darkness. They grow in darkness. They interpret the silence as tacit acceptance and tacit approval...They're profoundly anti-democratic. They have nothing but open contempt for democracy and its institutions, including free speech.”

In other words, what happens in Idaho doesn't stay in Idaho anymore, not with outright white supremacy all the rage among Republican governors and Republican state legislators. So when a zany notion emerges in The Gem State, it's now obligatory for the rest of the country to take note of it. Which brings us to State Senator Tammy Nichols and State Representative Judy Boyle. These two public servants have proposed to make providing mRNA vaccines—such as the COVID vaccines—a misdemeanor offense under Idaho law. From the Idaho Press:

Nichols said during her presentation to the committee, “We have issues, (the vaccines were) fast-tracked.” Nichols said there is no liability, informed consent or data on mRNA vaccines. She later clarified she was referring to the two COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. “I think there is a lot of information that comes out with concerns to blood clots and heart issues,” Nichols said.

The Idaho legislature has been alive with anti-vax enthusiasm for a while now. In the state senate, a bill has advanced that would prohibit the use of vaccination records in child protection proceedings. And, last month, Senator Nichols proposed a ban on "vaccination materials" in food. From the Idaho Capital Sun:

“This is sort of a newer issue that’s come to pass,” Nichols told the committee. “I can tell you right now that in California they’ve been given grants to start introducing vaccine products into food for human consumption.” Nichols did not specify which grants or vaccines she was referring to. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not reported problems with vaccine-contaminated food reaching consumers. Both Sen. Todd Lakey, R-Nampa, and Sen. Jim Guthrie, R-McCammon, told Nichols they expected to see more information from the agricultural community and livestock owners if the bill received a hearing. Guthrie said the livestock community vaccinates their animals and he was unclear on what a “vaccine material” in food meant. Nichols reassured the committee she would have more information if she received a hearing.

Nichols graduated from Brigham Young University-Idaho with “a degree in science.” She represents Middleton, a town of roughly 5,500 people that is so resolutely against intrusive government that, when it built a new high school in the 1960s, it installed the sprinklers that the nanny state required, but not through the entire building—and anyway, the town never hooked them up to a water supply. In 2007, the high school burned down.

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Idaho is some beautiful, crazy country.

Despite Senator Nichols is heavily wired into the national wingnut-welfare databases, including ALEC. Also from the Capital Sun:

The State Policy Network recently credited its think tanks across the country, which include the Idaho Freedom Foundation, for a string of successes in states adopting education savings account programs. One of its affiliates is the American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — a corporate-backed organization that drafts and disseminates model legislation geared toward conservative policies. The model legislation on ALEC’s websites for education savings accounts is similar in structure and wording to the education savings account bill introduced by Nichols on Tuesday, which was modeled after Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Program. A 2019 investigation showed Arizona’s version was even closer in wording and structure to ALEC’s model.   

So given her permanent residence in the conservative policy hothouse, it's no surprise that Nichols wound up sponsoring this radical extension of anti-vax legislation. Rep. Judy Boyle, who co-sponsored the anti-mRNA legislation with Nichols, represents Midvale, where 193 people live, and is notable for her desire to absorb the more conservative counties of eastern Oregon into Idaho. She also was vociferous in her opposition to mandated COVID mitigation strategies. So this is what may be coming to your town soon: a new front in an unprecedented war, not against the disease but against the cure, an appeal to scientific unreason, a heresy against the idea of a miracle.

In 1987, a researcher named Robert Malone had a very good idea. From Nature:

He mixed strands of messenger RNA with droplets of fat, to create a kind of molecular stew. Human cells bathed in this genetic gumbo absorbed the mRNA, and began producing proteins from it. Realizing that this discovery might have far-reaching potential in medicine, Malone, a graduate student at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, later jotted down some notes, which he signed and dated. If cells could create proteins from mRNA delivered into them, he wrote on 11 January 1988, it might be possible to “treat RNA as a drug”. Another member of the Salk lab signed the notes, too, for posterity. Later that year, Malone’s experiments showed that frog embryos absorbed such mRNA. It was the first time anyone had used fatty droplets to ease mRNA’s passage into a living organism. Those experiments were a stepping stone towards two of the most important and profitable vaccines in history: the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines given to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Global sales of these are expected to top US$50 billion in 2021 alone.

It took years, and millions of dollars, for mRNA to get from the laboratory into the arms of millions of human beings. There were fierce disputes among scientists. Malone insists that his contribution to the development of mRNA vaccines essentially has been written out of its history.

Malone contends that [another researcher, Inder] Verma and [a company called] Vical struck a back-room deal with a company called Vical so that the relevant intellectual property went to Vical. Malone was listed as one inventor among several, but he no longer stood to profit personally from subsequent licensing deals, as he would have from any Salk-issued patents. Malone’s conclusion: “They got rich on the products of my mind.”

Verma and [biochemist Philip] Felgner categorically deny Malone’s charges. “It’s complete nonsense,” Verma told Nature. The decision to drop the patent application rested with the Salk’s technology-transfer office, he says...In 2001, [Malone] moved into commercial work and consulting. And in the past few months, he has started publicly attacking the safety of the mRNA vaccines that his research helped to enable. Malone says, for instance, that proteins produced by vaccines can damage the body’s cells and that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits for children and young adults — claims that other scientists and health officials have repeatedly refuted.

From the 1990s through the 2000s and 2010s, the research continued until several breakthroughs made mRNA research into a very hot research topic among medical startups.

By the late 2000s, several big pharmaceutical companies were entering the mRNA field. In 2008, for example, both Novartis and Shire established mRNA research units — the former (led by Andrew Geall) focused on vaccines, the latter (led by [Michael] Heartlein) on therapeutics. BioNTech launched that year, and other start-ups soon entered the fray, bolstered by a 2012 decision by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to start funding industry researchers to study RNA vaccines and drugs. Moderna was one of the companies that built on this work and, by 2015, it had raised more than $1 billion on the promise of harnessing mRNA to induce cells in the body to make their own medicines — thereby fixing diseases caused by missing or defective proteins. When that plan faltered, Moderna, led by chief executive Stéphane Bancel, chose to prioritize a less ambitious target: making vaccines.

And, when COVID broke out, Moderna managed to create a prototype mRNA vaccine against it extremely quickly. All the wrangling over who should get credit and for what quickly receded into the background, drowned out by the trumpets heralding another triumph for modern medicine.

Although some involved in mRNA’s development, including Malone, think they deserve more recognition, others are more willing to share the limelight. “You really can’t claim credit,” says Cullis. When it comes to his lipid delivery system, for instance, “we’re talking hundreds, probably thousands of people who have been working together to make these LNP systems so that they’re actually ready for prime time.”

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Malone says he missed out on the proceeds from his mRNA research.

“Everyone just incrementally added something — including me,” says Karikó. Looking back, many say they’re just delighted that mRNA vaccines are making a difference to humanity, and that they might have made a valuable contribution along the road. “It’s thrilling for me to see this,” says Felgner. “All of the things that we were thinking would happen back then — it’s happening now.”

At which point, of course, politics took a hand, and the Age of Morons took an even weirder turn.

The complicated history of mRNA research is bound to have dozens of avenues through which ambitious conservative politicians can find angles of attack. And I expect we'll witness many of them when the new subcommittee tasked with "investigating" the response to the COVID pandemic gavels itself into existence. In the Age of Morons, complexity is a fatal flaw in the defense of any position, no matter how scientifically valid that position may be. There are Tammy Nicholses and Judy Boyles in positions of power right now in too much of the country, and in too many of the institutions of our government. From the AP:

Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December served as Biden’s chief medical adviser, say they still believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to humans, a well-documented phenomenon known as a spillover event. Virus researchers have not publicly identified any key new scientific evidence that might make the lab-leak hypothesis more likely. But Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a virology lab in Wuhan. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci’s statements. Fauci, who served as the country’s top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has called the GOP criticism nonsense. Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have previously said that an October 2021 letter from NIH to Congress contradicts Fauci. But no clear evidence or scientific consensus exists that “gain of function” research was funded by NIH, and there is no link between U.S.-funded research to the emergence of COVID-19. 

For years, we were raised to expect miracles from medical research. We had the Salk polio vaccines and then the Sabin vaccine, which meant No More Shots(!). But, in the Age of Morons, there are no miracles that can't be coined into cheap political advantages. Molecules, no matter how therapeutic, don't vote.