New Cool Trick To End Corona Just Dropped

Virus moron Eric Topol and snakeoil saleswoman Akiko Iwasaki plug mRNA nasal spray hocus pocus, demand a second Operation Warp Speed to further tinker with billions of human immune systems

Iwasaki while sciencing

From Operation Nasal Vaccine—Lightning speed to counter COVID-19, in Science Immunology:

Just 10 months after the initial genome sequencing of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, two mRNA vaccines were demonstrated to provide 95% efficacy against symptomatic infections … That unprecedented success was, in part, fueled by the $10 billion governmental investment in Operation Warp Speed (OWS) … We urgently need such an accelerated initiative now for nasal vaccines.

During the first year of the pandemic, meaningful evolution of the virus was slow-paced … but since that time, we have seen a succession of important variants of concern with increasing transmissibility and immune evasion … With that, there has been a marked falloff in the capacity for vaccinations and booster shots to block infections and transmission. A major unmet clinical need has arisen to block the transmission chain …

That has spotlighted the possibility of nasal vaccines, with their allure for achieving mucosal immunity, complementing and likely bolstering the circulating immunity achieved via intramuscular shots. A new report … sheds considerable light on the shortcomings of mRNA vaccines for not achieving respiratory mucosal immunity against Omicron in people while also showing how well this can be accomplished with a nasal vaccine in mice.

The early and striking success of the initial COVID-19 vaccines led many to believe that this shot strategy would ultimately achieve global containment. Had the virus not evolved to its current strains, that might have been possible.

Shorter Topol/Iwasaki: “If we hadn’t failed, we would’ve succeeded.”

However, now we have a global surge of Omicron BA.5 that is occurring, in large part, because of our inability to block infections and transmission … The likelihood that at least one of these nasal vaccine programs will be successful is high, but the lack of an OWS-like push means that there will be substantial delays in manufacturing at scale, regulatory approval, and distribution.

As the virus continues its accelerated ability to evade our immune response and increase its transmissibility, we urgently need to achieve population-wide respiratory mucosal immunity. The objective of breaking the chain o f transmission at the individual and population level will put us in a far better position to achieve containment of the virus, no less reducing the toll of sickness and long COVID-19. The prospect of achieving this with nasal vaccines is high but will only be possible with dedicated funding, priority, and breaking down of any regulatory hurdles. While we have waited far too long to take such initiative, a new operation at lightning speed could help us get ahead of the virus and build on the initial success of COVID-19 vaccines.

Oligarchic support for nasal spray vaccines proceeds primarily from the beleaguered mind of Bill Gates, who is quietly disappointed in the performance of the mRNA elixirs and now places the better part of his hope in masking. Thus efforts to stir up enthusiasm for snortable SARS-2 countermeasures are worth watching, as a test case for assessing the extent of Gates’s influence.

Topol is just a mentally vacant Corona brigadier, but Iwasaki is co-founder of the pharmaceutical startup RIGImmune, which has received two million dollars from the Gates Foundation “to develop novel innate immune activators to protect against infectious diseases that disproportionately impact the developing world.” She’s also co-founded Xanadu Bio, which is trying to come up with nanoparticles that won’t kill you when you inhale them:

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) enable the intramuscular administration of mRNA, but research suggests they may be unsuited to nasal delivery. In one study, giving LNPs to mice intranasally caused inflammation of the lungs and death. The Yale researchers designed the PACE materials licensed by Xanadu to be “relatively immunologically silent” to enable their use in the respiratory tract.

Early evidence that the researchers may have achieved their objective emerged late last month, when the Yale scientists published a preprint paper describing the effect of giving mRNA encapsulated in PACE polymers to mice. 

Xanadu will now take responsibility for advancing candidates based on the technology. The biotech has exclusively licensed PACE and executed options with Yale for the nasal delivery of PACE/spike mRNA and spike recombinant proteins.  

Too bad for all those who hoped for deactivated or attenuated virus nasal spray vaccines. In this pandemic you can only add measures, never subtract them. You’re going to get the mRNA elixirs up your nose only after you’ve gotten them in your arm.