It has been hailed by many as one of the greatest clinical miracles of all time.
Statistics show that between 14 and 19 million deaths have been prevented worldwide by the COVID vaccine.
Yet there will always be vaccine skeptics.
Lately, even those in high government circles in the U.S. are casting doubt about the COVID shot and other vaccines, claiming they are a root cause of autism and myriad other maladies. Many now feel that it is no longer a necessity for all to get the vaccine despite the fact that COVID has not gone away, as the evidence clearly shows.
(Even in Quebec, the government's approach is disconcerting: the COVID vaccine is recommended but free only for those over age 65, the immunocompromised, pregnant women and health-care workers, while everyone else has to pay up to a hefty $180 for a shot.)
Dr. Drew Weissman continues to be confounded by all the skepticism.
He is one of the masterminds behind the COVID vaccine, along with co-creator Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist. They were jointly awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19."
"With free speech, people can say whatever they want and unfortunately it's supported by our (U.S.) government," says the soft-spoken Weissman, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation at the Perelman School of Medicine, in a phone interview.
Weissman will be speaking about his work on the COVID vaccine and explain how research is not always a straight path to discovery at this year's Trottier Public Science Symposium, Tuesday at 7 p.m. in McGill University's Leacock Building. Admission is free, and following the delivery of his speech, titled "Serendipity, Rejection, Grit and Determination -- The Genesis of the Covid Vaccine and the Path to the Nobel," Weissman will talk with McGill Office for Science and Society director Joe Schwarcz and later participate in a Q&A with the audience.
Weissman was one of 77 signatories, all Nobel Prize winners, who sent an open letter on Dec. 9, 2024 to the U.S. Senate opposing the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, citing his "lack of credentials" and "anti-vaccine beliefs."
It's also worth noting that in his first presidential mandate, Trump, who had once suggested that injecting bleach could cure COVID and later came down with a bad case of the virus, also fast-tracked the development of the vaccine -- for which he enjoyed taking much credit. But his enthusiasm for the vaccine seems to have wavered under RFK Jr.'s tenure.
"It's just so mind-boggling to me that people don't seem to understand what's going on despite all the science, so we just have to keep going -- and we will," Weissman says.
"Anti-vaccine people have been around since the first vaccines. When Edward Jenner first developed the cowpox vaccine in the late 1700s to treat people for smallpox -- which was a horrible disease -- there were people (drawing images) of people seemingly developing cows' heads on their heads after being inoculated. Anti-vaccine hesitancy has been around for a very long time."
Fortunately, Weissman has never been dissuaded from his vaccine pursuits.
"Kati (Karikó) and I started working together in 1997 and our belief was always that by doing something to RNA, we could make it work better and that was our goal," explains Weissman in referring to RNA -- ribonucleic acid -- a life-essential molecule that carries instructions from DNA to create proteins.
"We focused on two things: the inflammation that unmodified RNA caused and the low amount of protein that it produced. So by modifying the RNA, we made a lot more protein. By addressing both problems, it could be used for many different things and vaccines were the first thing, for gene therapy and a whole bunch of other therapeutic applications."
Among them, COVID.
"Kati and I used to joke a long time ago that we always knew our RNA research would have very useful therapeutic applications but we both guessed that we would both be dead before that ever happened."
No one could predict the pandemic, which began in early 2020.
Their discovery was to lay the foundation for effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 (mRNA is a sub-type of RNA). Apart from clinical trials, the first COVID‐19 vaccine was administered on Dec. 8, 2020.
"The biggest concern to me now is that for the next pandemic -- and there will definitely be another one -- we are not going to be prepared, we are not going to be ready to develop a vaccine quickly, yet we did it in 10 months for COVID. But even at that, 10 months was still too long a time. We saw how much damage that caused to economies, to social lives and to so much more. And people are still suffering and dying from COVID, so people must continue to get vaccinated. We now have a measles epidemic in our country and Canada from people who don't want to take vaccines," he said.
"With everything that's going on, it will take more than 10 months to come up with a treatment for the next pandemic. And we have no idea what the next one will look like. There have been three coronavirus epidemics in the last 25 years. We also have so many frequent influenza epidemics."
Weissman warns that people do not understand the pandemic risks ahead.
"It's not over. It's a pretty scary situation. We just have to work around all that."
So what keeps Weissman and fellow researchers still going amid the challenges?
"We keep seeing the importance of the development of new vaccines that have come out of this RNA work, to prevent pandemics and epidemics and to treat potentially deadly diseases like cancer and auto-immune disorders. To those of us in the medical field, that's what matters most, but it's a concern that everyone in the world should have."
AT A GLANCE: