Tag Archives: SARS CoV-2

The COVID mRNA vaccines were not rushed

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There seems to be a lot people who feel that the COVID mRNA vaccines were produced “too quickly” during the pandemic.  I myself had not really known much about mRNA vaccines before the pandemic (other than that they were in development for cancer trials), but it doesn’t take a high search-engine-midichlorion count to verify that these mRNA vaccines have been in development for decades.  Three papers should prove the point:

The earliest paper I could find in pubmed.gov (with about 10 minutes of searching) documenting that scientists have been trying to get RNA into cells to make them express proteins those cells wouldn’t ordinarily make for over 50 years:

(link)

The earliest paper I could find with about the same amount of searching documenting that scientists have been working on using mRNA as vaccines for at least 30 years:

Induction
 
 Finally, the earliest example I could find of a early stage safety study injecting mRNA vaccines into humans –  2009:
 
I imagine someone might point out that none of these are the SARSCoV2 mRNA vaccine, but that is the thing about these mRNA vaccines – once you know how to generate the formulation that is injected, you can *easily* change the sequence of nucleotides in the mRNA and it really doesn’t chemically change what the vaccine is made of.  That is the whole point –> its a very easily adapted platform.  Expect more and more mRNA vaccines to rapidly appear.

Is Orf9b special?

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As I was making the graph from the output on those 200 recent BA.5.2.1 genomes from Georgia, the number of changes to the Orf9b protein stuck out to me.  For such a small protein (97 amino acids versus the 1,273 in Spike) it sure has a lot of mutations.  That could mean something (that its under a lot of selection pressure) or it could be that this isn’t truly area of expertise and I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t think so.  Below I charted for each viral gene the total number of changes in the protein due to mutations divided by the length of the protein – an incredibly simplistic (and perhaps foolish) way to normalize for protein length. Still, kind of interesting. 

Oh, and PS, I should have taken Orf1a and 1b out of this graph because each of those makes lots of smaller proteins, and I didn’t have time to look up the lengths of each… so the fact that those are zero means… zero.