Research finds COVID mRNA vax makes 'Pfrankenstein' proteins, but feds seem unfazed

Three years after federal regulators granted emergency use authorization to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for older teens and adults, mainstream scientific research is confirming suppressed warnings from two years ago that the novel technology has a problem with "translation fidelity."

Translation: it tends to make a bunch of wacky "off-target" proteins whose effects and severity are unknown.

The University of Cambridge paper, published in Nature this month, found that Pfizer's vaccine increased "ribosomal frameshifting," in which proteins are copied incorrectly in "slippery sequences" of code.

The vaccine technology relies on replacing the RNA base uridine, which provokes the body to attack the jab, with a synthetic version, according to The Telegraph report on the U.K. government-funded research.

The ribosome "slips around 10% of the time" when it confronts N1-methylpseudouridine modified bases, "causing the mRNA to be misread and unintended proteins to be produced – enough to trigger an immune response" in a third of the study's 21 subjects, the University of Cambridge release says.

While the paper's authors said they found no association with "adverse outcomes," they called for modifying mRNA sequence design to reduce frameshifting, "as this may limit its future use for applications that require higher doses or more frequent dosing."

Some outside scientists weren't so sure the unintended response was always benign.

The "horrible irony" of the switch from natural to synthetic uridine is that it "proved to be overtly immunogenic" for so many subjects, epidemiologist Allison Krug wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

"The FDA allowed mRNA technology to slip through a loosened regulatory framework for vaccines […] incomprehensible given that vaccines are given to healthy people," she said.

"Would you take a vaccine that makes your body produce uncharacterized Pfrankenstein proteins?" researcher David Wiseman quipped, referring to Pfizer.

"The shift is about to hit the fan," veteran genomics researcher Kevin McKernan, who managed MIT's research and development for the Human Genome Project, deadpanned in a blog post while crediting Wiseman for the turn of phrase. 

The Cambridge research adds to the list of growing headaches for American regulators and mRNA vaccine makers, and isn't necessarily the most serious documented integrity issue for COVID vaccines of late. 

Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, tried to shame Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo for highlighting "DNA contamination" in COVID vaccines, recently documented in a preprint by McKernan, Wiseman and others awaiting peer review.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an "emergency" alert Dec. 14 to healthcare providers, urging them to "leverage all available tools to increase immunizations against influenza, COVID-19, and RSV."

Estimated flu vaccination rates fell a few percentage points from last season in every age group and hit a low of 34% among pregnant women as of Dec. 2, while only 8% of minors, 17% of adults and 10% of pregnant women got the latest COVID vaccines. The flu vaccine is as popular with minors as the COVID vaccine is with adults 65 and up (36%).

Pfizer has repeatedly lowered its sales projections in recent months, telling investors last week it expects $8 billion in revenue next year from its fully approved Comirnaty vaccine and rebound infection-prone antiviral Paxlovid. That's $4.5 billion lower than those products' anticipated 2023 revenue as of October, which itself had fallen $9 billion from "original expectations." 

The company's share price has fallen 13% in the past month and a whopping 48% year-to-date as of closing Friday, while Moderna's is up 14% in the past month but down 52% year to date.

McKernan discovered the ribosomal frameshift two years ago and wrote a paper with another repeat target of social media censorship, cardiologist Peter McCullough.

"If the frameshifting occurs anywhere near the end of the sequence (3’UTR) you will skip over the stop codons and read into human peptides," McKernan summarized in his Dec. 9 blog post. "Spike-Human peptides present an autoimmunity risk."

But their preprint got stuck in editorial purgatory, McKernan recounted last year with screenshots of several months of communications with the Hindawi journal Advances in Cell and Gene Therapy. Rebel News also covered the dispute.

The authors made the changes suggested by the reviewers in March 2022 to address "minor concerns" in the otherwise "favorably" reviewed paper but then heard "crickets" through the spring, according to McKernan. 

Journal staff told them it was held up by the "Academic Editor" and under "Research Integrity team" investigation and repeatedly failed to answer their questions about the timeline. The authors gave up by the end of June and retracted the manuscript.

McKernan threatened to sue Twitter for repeated sanctions on his account before Elon Musk purchased the company. It once suspended him for publicly challenging the National Institutes of Health's claim that the synthetic mRNA in the vaccines acts the same as the cells' own mRNA.

"You can’t get patents on natural RNA" and the only basis for NIH to sue Moderna for royalties on its vaccine is that it's not natural, McKernan told Just the News, yet "if you challenged them in this you got TwitMo’d" (a portmanteau of Twitter and Gitmo).

McKernan, Wiseman and colleagues submitted a comment on the Nature paper, challenging the authors' claim that they observed no adverse outcomes and noting the university's release quoted one of them as saying that "mis-directed immunity has huge potential to be harmful."

The study was "not a controlled trial," the sample was only 21 and it was "subject to selection bias" because no one had "reported undue effects of vaccination," the comment says. "The toxicology of these unintended proteins must be studied" and "may already have contributed to vaccine toxicity, which now must be the subject of investigation."

The commenters asked for Nature's explanation of the "rather protracted timeframe" for publication: receipt Jan. 25, acceptance for publication Oct. 31 and online publication Dec. 6.

"We must assume UK regulators, manufacturers, and international regulatory agencies, including FDA, were apprised of the data many months ago," and the commenters want to know "what steps they have taken to investigate" why the off-target discovery was so late, toxic effects and plans to inform the public.

Asked for its response to the Nature study, FDA spokesperson Jeremy Kahn told Just the News it "routinely reviews scientific findings published in peer reviewed resources" but "in general" doesn't respond to specific studies. 

"With over a billion doses of the mRNA vaccines administered, available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the vaccines are safe and effective," he wrote in an email. "The FDA stands behind its findings of quality, safety, and efficacy for the mRNA vaccines."

Kahn reprinted the same paragraph Marks used against Ladapo implying that questioning vaccine integrity was tantamount to misinformation that leads to lowered vaccine uptake and resulting deaths.