Nobel's Lost Lustre

The beginning of October means Nobel Prize season. Over the course of six days, names of the winners of six prizes will be announced from around the globe, leading to some new faces being added to the world’s most elite roster of scientists, writers, economists and human rights leaders. 

This year’s Nobel season kicked off on Monday with the award in pysiology/medicine, followed by daily announcements: physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was announced on Friday and the economics award is tomorrow. 

The monumental task of determining the final winners for these Prizes – winners get cash prize, diploma, and gold medal – are left to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for physics, chemistry, and economics; the Karolinska Institute for physiology or medicine; the Swedish Academy for literature; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee for peace. 

But these Prizes have lost their lustre for some time now – instead, they are mostly known for their fantastic omissions and dubious awards. 

For a start, historically, these awards favored Western nations:

Besides this, they have more than their fair share of controversy. 

In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many criticized the fact that a musician was receiving a prize for literature whilst supporters believed the decision was based on the innovation of Dylan’s writing style. 

Whether you agree or not, the fact is, he wrote more than 500 songs! Rolling Stone magazine named him the greatest songwriter of all time. 

Things became even more complicated when the singer-songwriter himself refused to acknowledge the honor. His silence led one member of the Nobel Academy to call him rude. 

Yet strangely, the likes of authentically great writers, e.g. Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Philip Roth, RK Narayan, Vladimir Nabokov and WH Auden, never did manage to win the Literature Prize. Many have claimed this is because of political and/or other extra-literary reasons. 

The decision to award the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine to Robert Edwards for developing the technique of in vitro fertilisation was bitterly denounced by the Catholic Church, which object to all artificial methods of human conception and fertilization as well as to contraception. One Vatican official called the award "out of order", and the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations issued a statement saying that the use of human embryos, created and discarded “as experimental animals destined for destruction, has led to a culture where they are regarded as commodities rather than the precious individuals which they are”. 

The 2008 prize was awarded in part to Harald zur Hausen "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer". The Swedish police anticorruption unit investigated charges of improper influence by AstraZeneca, which had a stake in two lucrative HPV vaccines. The company had agreed to sponsor Nobel Media and Nobel Web and had strong links with two senior figures in the process that chose zur Hausen.

And then, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given to Peter Higgs and François Englert for the theoretical prediction of what was later called the Higgs boson, was flawed. It was awarded to only two scientists (even though the Committee allow three winners), when there were six other physicists, working in several teams, who independently introduced the idea and could rightfully claim joint custody of the Higgs mechanism. Higgs himself calls it "the ABE​G​H​H​​K’tH​ mechanism", standing for Philip Anderson, Robert Brout, Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, Higgs, Tom Kibble and Gerard ’t Hooft. All except Brout were still living in 2013. 

In the case of the Peace Prize, it is more often than not, heavy-handed politics invested with Western biasness that govern the final pick. It includes this year’s winners. 

Other problematic winners include: 2019 – Abiy Ahmed; 2012 – The European Union; 2009 – Barack Obama; 1994 – Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres; 1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev; and 1973 – Henry Kissinger. 

Just based on the above, we can already establish that the Nobel Prize has lost its relevance and prestige a long time ago!

Covid-19 Vaccine Update

Two vaccines, developed by China National Biotec Group (CNBG) – and presently undergoing Phase 3 clinical trials – are expected to enter the market as soon as this December, according to a CGTN news report today. 

Already, the two vaccine candidates, together with another one developed by Beijing-based Sinovac, have been approved for civilian emergency use after reliable results in Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. 

"We've drawn up a series of plan packages, including medical consent forms, side-effects monitoring plans, rescuing plans, compensation plans, to make sure the emergency use is well regulated and monitored", Zheng Zhongwei (right), head of China's coronavirus vaccine development task force said. 

An emergency use authorization, which is based on Chinese vaccine management law, allows unapproved vaccine candidates to be used among "high-risk" groups, such as health workers, diplomats, and people who travelled to foreign countries still struggling with the pandemic, to be vaccinated. The emergency program began in late July and thus far, there has been no reported cases of infection or adverse effects. 

Similar authorizations have been adopted in many countries. For example, US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on August 23, 2020 for investigational convalescent plasma on hospitalized patients in the treatment of Covid-19. 

It is part of the agency's ongoing efforts to fight the disease. Based on scientific evidence available, the FDA had concluded this product may be effective in treating Covid-19 and that the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product. 

And trials of the Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca will restart after being paused due to a reported side effect in a patient in the UK. 

Information about the patient's illness hadn’t been disclosed for confidentiality reasons – but the New York Times reported that the volunteer in the UK trial had been diagnosed with transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome that affects the spinal cord and can be caused by viral infections. 

The University announced the resumption on Saturday following the recommendations of an independent safety review committee and the UK regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. 

According to WHO, nearly 180 vaccine candidates are now being tested around the world although none has yet completed clinical trials.

The Vaccine Race

There are currently nine coronavirus vaccine candidates in Phase 3 trials. 

One has suffered a setback when AstraZeneca "voluntarily paused" late-stage trials of the highly-anticipated Covid-19 vaccine they are developing with UK’s University of Oxford. It appears that one of the study volunteers developed an unexplained illness, the company said on Wednesday. 

The drug is in trials involving thousands of people in the United States, Brazil, South Africa and the UK, where the patient who fell ill is. 

Julie Fischer (right), an associate research professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera such a pause was "part of the process" of drug development and clinical trials. 

"For a pause, the event would need to be serious; something related to the heart, lungs, kidneys or other part of the body's health system that required medical attention and was sufficiently serious to merit a pause to this very important vaccine trial in order to make sure it is safe, and that the adverse effect is not due to the vaccine itself". 

Florian Krammer (left), professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said the fact a patient had fallen ill underscored the need for extensive trials. 

"It shows you that the evaluation process works, and why we need Phase 3 trials", he wrote on Twitter. 

Clinical trial holds are not uncommon, but AstraZeneca's is the first phase-three Covid-19 vaccine trial known to have been put on hold. And it is unclear how long the suspension may last. 

Developers globally have yet to produce large-scale trial data showing actual infections in participants – but Russia approved a Covid-19 vaccine last month, prompting some Western experts to criticize a lack of testing. 

The head of China's Sinovac Biotech said most of their employees and their families have already taken an experimental vaccine developed by the Chinese firm under the country's emergency-use programme. 

It is interesting to point out that Dr. Stephen Hahn (right), the head of the Food and Drug Administration, the US regulator, had said last month that the normal approval process could be bypassed for a Covid-19 vaccine if officials were convinced the benefits outweighed the risks. 

Unsurprisingly, the comments prompted a call for caution from the World Health Organization. 

Separately, nine US and European vaccine developers promised on Tuesday to uphold scientific standards in the global race to contain the pandemic. The companies, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, in a joint statement made a "historic pledge... to uphold the integrity of the scientific process as they work towards potential global regulatory filings and approvals of the first Covid-19 vaccines". 

The unusual move to promise to play by well-established rules underlines the highly politicized debate over what action is needed to rein in the spread of the disease. 

In the US, Dr. Anthony Fauci (left), the Director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) himself told The Washington Post's Bob Costa during a Post Live event on July 24 that a vaccine could be approved by or possibly before November 2020. 

As Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar (left) informed CNBC on July 22: "We are literally making the commercial scale vaccine now, as we're going through the clinical trials. We're doing that at-risk, using the full power of the US government and our financial resources to do that. No one's ever done this before". 

And in a radio interview on August 06 with Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, President Donald Trump (right) too suggested that a vaccine for the coronavirus could be ready before Election Day. 

Trump also told an assembly of reporters that he was "optimistic" that a vaccine would be ready around November 03 and noted that while "It wouldn't hurt" his chances for re-election, he was doing it "to save a lot of lives".

The vaccine race is on.