Pioneers of mRNA COVID vaccines win medicine Nobel
 

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman laid the groundwork for immunizations that were rolled out during the pandemic at record-breaking speed.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to biochemist Katalin Karikó and immunologist Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

The vaccines have been administered more than 13 billion times, saved millions of lives and prevented millions of cases of severe COVID-19, said the Nobel committee.

Karikó, who is at Szeged University in Hungary, and Weissman, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (UPenn), paved the way for the vaccines’ development by finding a way to deliver genetic material called messenger RNA into cells without triggering an unwanted immune response.

They will each receive an equal share of the prize, which totals 11 million Swedish krona (US$1 million).

Karikó is the 13th female scientist to win a Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology. She was born in Hungary, and moved to the United States in the 1980s. “Hopefully, this prize will inspire women and immigrants and all of the young ones to persevere and be resilient. That’s what I hope,” she tells Nature.

A new chapter
The COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and the Pfizer–BioNTech collaboration deliver mRNA that instructs cells to create copies of a protein that is found on SARS-CoV-2 virus particles, called the spike protein. This stimulates the body to make antibodies that target the protein, as well as triggering other immune responses.


The tangled history of mRNA vaccines
For decades, mRNA vaccines were considered unfeasible because the injection of mRNA into the body triggered an immune reaction that immediately broke down the mRNA. In the mid-2000s, working at UPenn, Karikó and Weissman demonstrated that swapping one type of molecule in mRNA, called uridine, with a similar one called pseudouridine bypasses the cells’ innate immune defences1.

“I’m delighted to see them recognized,” says Robin Shattock, a vaccine scientist at Imperial College London, who has worked on mRNA vaccines. “Their contribution was really fundamental in the success of the COVID-19 vaccines, and I think will underlie RNA technology for some time to come.”

“They demonstrated that changing the type of the RNA nucleotides within the vaccine altered the way in which cells see it,” said John Tregoning, a vaccine immunologist at Imperial College London, in a press statement for the UK Science Media Centre. “This increased the amount of vaccine protein made following the injection of the RNA, effectively increasing the efficiency of the vaccination: more response for less RNA.”

“This discovery has opened a new chapter for medicine,” said Nobel committee member Qiang Pan Hammarström, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, at a press conference after the prize announcement. “Investment in long-term basic research is very important.”

Vaccine revolution
There are now mRNA vaccines in development for a number of other diseases, including influenza, HIV, malaria and Zika.

“It’s really like a revolution starting since the COVID pandemic,” says Rein Verbeke, an mRNA vaccine researcher at the Ghent University in Belgium. He adds that Karikó and Weissman’s contributions were essential to the vaccines’ success during the pandemic, and beyond. “Their part was really crucial to the development of this platform.”

A COVID-19 mRNA vaccine containing unmodified RNA, developed by CureVac, based in Tübingen, Germany, was widely seen as a flop after its mediocre performance in clinical trials.


COVID advances win US$3-million Breakthrough prizes
Another key component of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines was the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that surround the modified RNA and ease its entry into cells. Numerous scientists contributed to the development of LNPs, says Verbeke, and it would have been nice if the Nobel committee had also recognized their contributions to mRNA vaccines. The modification of mRNA and the development of LNPs “were the two major steps that were necessary to have mRNA vaccines working”, he says.

Many people were involved in developing LNPs, however, and it would be difficult to single out any one contribution, says Pierre Meulien, who worked on using mRNA to trigger immune responses in the 1990s at Transgène, a small biotech firm near Strasbourg in France. Karikó and Weissman “really created the key to success of the whole enterprise around mRNA vaccines”, he adds.

The development of mRNA vaccines and therapeutics is still in its infancy, says Shattock. Scientists and biotechnology companies are busy coming up with new applications for mRNA technology, from cancer treatments to next-generation COVID-19 vaccines. Many teams are also working on improved ways of delivering mRNA. “What we see used today is not what’s going to be used in the future,” he says. “We’re at the beginning of an RNA revolution.”

Although COVID-19 jabs put mRNA vaccines on the map, the technology’s impact is likely to reach far and wide, says Karikó. “It is just limitless.”

Biggest fucking scam ever perpetuated on the American people.

Yeah what in the world would a bunch of the world renowned scientist know about saving millions of lives.

1. They dont use live virus to create the vaccine.
2. They take a section of the viruses genetic information, the section of RNA that your immune cell recognizes as a foreign body, and starts the process of activating the immune system.
3. As the virus evolves, pharmaceutical companies can counter faster than past methods.

And if you go compare the amount of mRNA vaccine distributed and rate of decline in illnesses, PROVES that it works. More evidence, rate of boosters has declined and covid illness are increasing.

Experts mock Trump whining it’s “unfair” he doesn't get jury after lawyer “messed up
 

Gee hizz, only the “best” lawyers work for trump

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...5750af85&ei=19

New York judge issues limited gag order
 

New York judge issues limited gag order after Trump makes disparaging post about court clerk

What kind of person attacks the court clerk in his own trial? Thats Trump, and has always been. Attacking those who cant fight back. So arrogant that that he thinks no one will fight back.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-let...516f29b5a43d33

Wisconsin capitol police need to do some explaning
 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/us/to...tol/index.html

Man returns to Wisconsin Capitol with assault rifle and asks to see Gov. Tony Evers, hours after being arrested for bringing gun inside.

Video Fed Ex plane landing wheels up
 

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/1...contd-orig.cnn

Holy shit

MyPillow lawyers say CEO Mike Lindell owes them millions of dollars
 

Why getting eaten by a shark is more likely than winning the $1.4 billion Powerball j
 

Why getting eaten by a shark is more likely than winning the $1.4 billion Powerball jackpot

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wh...8f0202da&ei=16

o


The lottery preys on the lower-middle class, and the poor ...... you don't see upper-middle class executives standing on line at the grocery store like idiots, deciding which ticket to buy, and which game to play.

The jack-offs that play actually stand there on line at the courtesy desk, pondering which form that they should throw away the little bit of money that they have.




The Lottery: The Poor Are Playing, and the Wealthy Are Winning

(FFH Foundation)

https://www.focusforhealth.org/the-l...y-are-winning/

o

absolutely love to see it

Trump sharing nuclear information
 

Glad I could help

Yes, lets just act like the people who got sick, or died from the shot didn't matter, or all the scientist who said the shot didn't work and would never work. Lets not look at how the CDC has walked back its take on the shot. Also, stop calling it a vaccine. Its not.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...se-events.html

I just got my covid and flu shot today. I feel fine. The above link is the CDC report.

Soon, the flu shot will be mRNA vaccine. They work. My kids and my grand kids never got mumps measles. We have practically wiped those virus off the planet.

Data is on my side. I got covid after first booster. I had a cough for a day, and then felt normal. My wife was sick for two days, then recovered. My grand boys both have Asthma, and I know the vaccine prevented them from getting very sick.

Look at the death rate in India before vaccination and after.

of course he is


and republicans couldn't care less

At the end of the Mississippi, a saltwater wedge overwhelms a community
 

Newly discovered snail in Florida Keys is named after Jimmy Buffett song
 

Israel Said to Be Source of Secret Intelligence Trump Gave to Russians
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/w...ce-russia.html

Israel Said to Be Source of Secret Intelligence Trump Gave to Russians

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President Trump escorting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel into the White House in February.
President Trump escorting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel into the White House in February.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

By Adam Goldman, Eric Schmitt and Peter Baker
May 16, 2017
WASHINGTON — The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to an episode that has renewed questions about how the White House handles sensitive intelligence.

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and runs one of the most active espionage networks in the Middle East. Mr. Trump’s boasting about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries and raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the region.

Israeli officials would not confirm that they were the source of the information that Mr. Trump shared, which was about an Islamic State plot. In a statement emailed to The New York Times, Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, reaffirmed that the two countries would maintain a close counterterrorism relationship.

“Israel has full confidence in our intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and looks forward to deepening that relationship in the years ahead under President Trump,” Mr. Dermer said.
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Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he had an “absolute right” to share information in the interest of fighting terrorism and called his meeting with the Russians “very, very successful” in a brief appearance later at the White House.

On Capitol Hill, reaction split along party lines, but even many Republicans indicated that they wanted the White House to show more discipline.

“There’s some alignments that need to take place over there, and I think they’re fully aware of that,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “Just the decision-making processes and everybody being on the same page.”

In the meeting last week, Mr. Trump told Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, details about the Islamic State plot, including the city in Syria where the ally learned the information, the current official said. At least some of the details that the United States has about the Islamic State plot came from the Israelis, said the officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It was not clear whether the president or the other Americans in the meeting were aware of the sensitivity of what was shared. Only afterward, when notes on the discussion were circulated among National Security Council officials, was the information flagged as too sensitive to be shared, even among many American officials, the officials said.
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Intelligence officials worried that Mr. Trump provided enough details to effectively expose the source of the information and the manner in which it had been collected.

More on Israel
The Roots of Turmoil: A contentious judicial overhaul has plunged Israel into political chaos. The crisis can be traced back to the outsize personality of Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving prime minister.
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Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, defended Mr. Trump’s move, saying the president made a spur-of-the-moment decision to tell the Russians what he knew and did not expose the source of the intelligence because he was not told where it came from.

Moreover, General McMaster said that by discussing the city where the information originated, the president had not given away secrets. “It was nothing that you would not know from open-source reporting in terms of a source of concern,” he said. “And it had all to do with operations that are already ongoing, had been made public for months.”

Two senior United States military officials said that Mr. Trump’s disclosures seemed to align with an increasing concern that militants responsible for such attacks were slipping out of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, and taking refuge in other cities under their control, such as Deir al-Zour and Mayadeen.

These officials said they had no specific knowledge of what Mr. Trump told the two senior Russian diplomats in the Oval Office last week, or how that related to a likely decision expected soon by the Homeland Security Department to expand its ban on carrying portable electronics. But the officials said the timing of the events seemed hardly a coincidence.
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American and British authorities in March barred passengers from airports in 10 predominantly Muslim countries from carrying laptop computers, iPads and other devices larger than a cellphone aboard inbound flights to the United States after intelligence analysts concluded that the Islamic State was developing a type of bomb hidden in batteries. Homeland Security officials are considering whether to broaden the ban to include airports in Europe and possibly other places, American security officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Trump’s disclosure was also likely to fuel questions about the president’s relationship with Moscow at the same time that the F.B.I. and congressional committees are investigating whether his associates cooperated with Russian meddling in last year’s election. Mr. Trump has repeatedly dismissed such suspicions as false stories spread by Democrats to explain their election defeat, but his friendly approach toward President Vladimir V. Putin in spite of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine and other actions has stirred controversy.

The timing of the episode also threatened to overshadow Mr. Trump’s first trip abroad as president. He is scheduled to leave on Friday for Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and Belgium.

In Israel, he was already likely to contend with Israeli officials rattled by the administration’s refusal to say outright that the Western Wall, one of the holiest prayer sites in Judaism, lies in Israel, and is not subject to territorial claims by the Palestinians. The wall is in Jerusalem — part of what is known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary — and is considered one of the holiest sites in Islam. Both the Israelis and Palestinians claim the city as their capital.
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Now, the Americans and Israelis will have to contend with the serious breach of espionage etiquette. Israel had previously urged the United States to be careful about the handling of the intelligence that Mr. Trump discussed, the officials said.

Former officials said it was not uncommon for presidents to unintentionally say too much in meetings, and they said that in administrations from both parties, staff members typically established bright lines for their bosses to avoid crossing before such meetings.

“The Russians have the widest intelligence collection mechanism in the world outside of our own,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the C.I.A. who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program for three years. “They can put together a good picture with just a few details. They can marry President Trump’s comments with their own intelligence, and intelligence from their allies. They can also deploy additional resources to find out details.”

Nonetheless, General McMaster said he was not concerned that information sharing among partner countries might stop.

“What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” General McMaster said at a White House briefing, seeking to play down the sensitivity of the information that Mr. Trump disclosed.
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Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, declined to tell reporters whether the White House had reached out to the ally that provided the sensitive intelligence.

But General McMaster appeared to acknowledge that Thomas P. Bossert, the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and counterterrorism, had called the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency after the meeting with the Russian officials. Other officials have said that the spy agencies were contacted to help contain the damage from the leak to the Russians.

General McMaster would not confirm that Mr. Bossert made the calls but suggested that if he did, he was acting “maybe from an overabundance of caution.”

The episode could have far-reaching consequences, Democrats warned. Any country that shares intelligence with American officials “could decide it can’t trust the United States with information, or worse, that it can’t trust the president of the United States with information,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“I have to hope that someone will counsel the president about just what it means to protect closely held information and why this is so dangerous, ultimately, to our national security,” Mr. Schiff said at a policy conference in Washington sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group.
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Russia dismissed the reports. A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry denied that Mr. Trump had given classified information to Russian officials, and she denigrated American news reports of the disclosure as “fake.”

Sharing the United States’ own intelligence with Russia, much less information from a foreign ally, has long been a contentious issues in American national security circles. In fact, many Republicans strenuously objected last year when the Obama administration proposed sharing limited intelligence about Syria with Russia.

One of the Republicans was Mike Pompeo, the former congressman from Kansas who now runs the C.I.A. In an appearance last year on a podcast hosted by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official now best known for his anti-Muslim views, Mr. Pompeo said sharing intelligence with the Russians was a “dumb idea.”

The climate crisis is coming for your hoppy beer
 

US and Qatar reach ‘quiet understanding’ not to release $6 billion sent to Iran for n
 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/polit...nds/index.html

A sign the other Arab nations do not support Hamas

Court voids Trump campaign’s non-disclosure agreement
 

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...reement-478648

Court voids Trump campaign’s non-disclosure agreement

Trump criticizes Netanyahu over Hamas attack, calls Hezbollah 'smart'
 

Its all about him.