New evidence that modified mRNA can cause unwanted consequences

Unintended protein products

A fascinating new study

A new paper just came out that sheds more light on how the mRNA vaccines “work”:

N¹-methylpseudouridylation of mRNA causes +1 ribosomal frameshifting

Recall that the mRNA vaccines encode for spike protein; they are supposed to get into your cells and get the cells to produce spike protein. In other words, your cells—specifically, your ribosomes— “translate” the mRNA into spike protein.

However, the mRNA in these vaccines is not like normal mRNA. The mRNA vaccines were modified to replace all the uridines with N¹-methylpseudouridine (1-methylΨ).

This new study looked at how this mRNA modification can affect protein translation. Turns out that it can lead to unexpected consequences.

What the study found

Here’s what the study found.

“Frameshifting”

Incorporation of 1-methylΨ in Fluc+1FS mRNA significantly increased ribosomal +1 frameshifting to about 8% of the corresponding in-frame protein, which was not observed for other ribonucleotides (Fig. 1c).

Translation:

They found that the mRNA modification, aka incorporation of 1-methylΨ, increased something called “frameshifting”; as ribosomes are translating the mRNA, a shift can occur such that the mRNA is “read” differently than it was supposed to. This will result in the mRNA not getting translated properly.

In the case of the mRNA vaccine, that means that instead of making your cells produce spike protein, it can make your cells produce some other protein(s), or protein fragments.

Ribosomes “stalling”

They found that “translation elongation of 1-methylΨ mRNA was slower than for unmodified mRNA” and “there was less full-length protein produced from the translation of 1-methylΨ-containing mRNAs, suggesting a slower elongation rate compared to that of unmodified mRNA, with a greater proportion of premature polypeptide products.”

So it was as if the ribosomes were getting stalled or gummed up when they encountered the modified mRNA.

Unexpected proteins getting produced

They found that the modified mRNA made some of the expected spike protein, but also some additional, unexpected proteins:

Translation of 1-methylΨ mRNA produced the expected in-frame product, but also produced two additional bands at higher molecular weight (Fig. 1e).

They sequenced some of the proteins produced from the modified mRNA. This table (Extended Data Table 1) shows what they found:

The last column shows whether the protein product was “in frame,” (an expected protein product), or “+1FS,” which is a frameshifted product. The last 9 rows show the frameshifted products. The “Sequence” column shows the exact amino acid sequence of the protein product.

The unexpected protein products can trigger an immune response

When they vaccinated mice with the Pfizer vaccine, the mice not only made these unexpected protein products, but elicited a T cell immune response against the unexpected protein products.

They did not look into B cell or antibody responses against the unexpected protein products.

What about “adverse outcomes”?

There is a fascinating line in the abstract of the paper:

…although there are no adverse outcomes reported from mistranslation of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in humans, these data highlight potential off-target effects for future mRNA-based therapeutics and demonstrate the requirement for sequence optimization.

Technically it’s true that there are “no adverse outcomes reported” from the mistranslation of mRNA vaccines, but that’s because we don’t even know what that would look like. Does anyone walk into the ER and say “I experienced a ribosomal frameshift?”¹

No one knows what that would look like, and the authors of the paper don’t either.

All the authors can say is that they didn’t see any obvious evidence of harm in the (8?) mice they vaccinated with the Pfizer vax. And even that is iffy: after all, they only looked at what happened to the mice in the short term.

We should also mention that it’s possible that some of the authors of this paper have some conflicts of interest:

We already had evidence of unexpected protein products

We already had evidence of unexpected protein products from the mRNA vaccines, and this was discussed in one of my previous articles:

What proteins are we actually getting from the COVID vaccines?

One of the papers discussed in that article showed that some people who had gotten an mRNA vaccine exhibited long term symptoms that were similar to long COVID, and some of them were found to have mutant spike sequences in some of their cells; aka, they seemed to be making unintended protein products as a result of the vax.

So this new study corroborates that earlier study.

Further commentary on this study

David Wiseman, Kevin McKernan, and others have commented on this study here.

Here’s a great quote from it:

The premise for the study reveals a developmental and regulatory failure to ask fundamental questions that could affect the safety and effectiveness of these products. This is no better exemplified by Pfizer’s retired head of vaccine R&D who was quoted in Nature as saying: “We flew the aeroplane while we were still building it.”

I highly suggest looking at the commentary.

The Nobel Prize

By the way, the inventors of this mRNA modification technique were recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It was probably premature to do that, given that we don’t know the full long term (or even short term) effects of those modifications.

But then again, we shouldn’t expect much from the Nobel Prize committee. They have been known to make some awfully regrettable mistakes:

Nobel Prize history: from lobotomies to mRNA vaccines

Doctors or “scientists” who can’t think for themselves

It’s been interesting to see how this study is getting covered. Here’s how the journal Science covered the finding:

Again, how can we say there is no “evidence of harm,” when we are not even sure what to look for?

Lots of people seem to go to Eric Topol for his opinion on vaccines and other medical related topics, and here’s what he had to say on the study:

When Topol says that this modification is “not linked to adverse outcomes,” again, how does he know that?

He seems to just be parroting what the abstract of the paper said about “no adverse outcomes reported.”

Should we be listening to doctors or “scientists” who don’t actually think for themselves or add anything to the analyses of papers beyond what an average junior high school kid can get from the abstract?

1. Thanks to Matthew Shaw for this brilliant quote.