Thread by @alexandrosM

Sensemaking Robert Malone & mRNA vaccines, part II

In part I, I asked for help in finding pointers to understanding, and Twitter delivered. The arrows point all over the place.

In part II, I will try to build up a factual basis, without yet drawing grand conclusions.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1414820392800178178

First and foremost, many grant Malone credit for writing this paper, but claim that he was but one of three authors. pnas.org/content/86/16/… Indeed, if we look at the authors and their affiliations, it looks like a "normal" paper, coming out of Salk Institute.

If we read the original document though, something fascinating shows up: This paper is not "normal" at all. The affiliation of the 1st author (Malone) is in 3 institutions, while author #2 and author #3 are in one institution each, shared only with Malone. pnas.org/content/pnas/8…

This pattern has only one obvious explanation: This work is Malone's and he's crediting his two supervisors at the two institutions at which parts of the work was conducted: Felgner for Vical and Verma for Salk.

Supervisors almost always get their names in their reports' publications. This doesn't mean that they did (or didn't) do the work. It's a sad part of academic life that your life essentially depends on your super, so it is "tradition" that you put their name in your publications.

However this particular publication, showing a cross-institutional trail, as Malone moved from Salk to Vical the same year as this publication (1989) makes it far less likely the work was supervisor-heavy. Subordinates don't carry their supervisors' projects across jobs.

Does this mean Malone invented mRNA vaccines? we're nowhere near proving that claim. But it means that whoever states that Malone was but one of three researchers in one of the important papers aren't paying attention. There are strong indications he was the main actor involved.

I will continue to update the thread as I make more factual discoveries, please post *hard facts* you can find as replies here and I will incorporate them to the thread if it makes sense.

An interesting piece of evidence contributed by @Volishun. Katalin Karikó's first publication on the subject in 1998 acknowledges Malone (and 2 more) for his contributions to her project. Not yet seeing why Malone says "Enough said.", but seems relevant. -

https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1404079365441347594?s=20

The link to the full original is here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Ok, this is fascinating. Something completely fucked up is going on. I think it's a completely accidental bug, but it's causing a real distortion of perception. Walk with me through the garden of the internet...

So, this Stat News article that focuses on Katalin Karikó as a major contributor has a very interesting passage... statnews.com/2020/11/10/the…

See the link near "researchers at University of Wisconsin managed to [make it work in mice.]? Where does it lead?

It leads to this page, that only shows an affiliation for the first author, who is indeed from the University of Wisconsin. I haven't seen Malone, the second author, having worked at UW though. What gives? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1690918/

Well, if we dig for a digitized form of the original, we are blessed with a very cute little footnote....

It seems that whatever happened to the first paper that attributed it to Salk, happened to this paper too and attributed it solely to UW. However the original is clear - Malone and Felgner were working at Vical, not UW.

Given that this it covid-twitter, I should note that I don't think this is intentional. I think you'll see similar problems in many digitized old publications in these platforms. They only had access to limited information, who knows what db they inherited, and now it's gospel.

So, to summarize, this paper has the following structure.
Author 1 - UW
Author 2 - Vical
Author 3 - UW
Author 4 - UW
Author 5 - UW
Author 6 - UW
Author 7 - Vical

I.e. there is a lead author and supervisor from Vical, and there is a lead author and several collaborators/supervisor(s) from UW. So, the paper is a UW-Vical collaboration, and for whatever reason they agreed that the contribution from UW was somewhat greater.

Thus, the UW authors got inserted ahead of the Vical authors. And by numbers alone, it seems UW did invest serious resources into this work, which alone could have given them the lead. And of course even in fully-equal collaborations you still have to break the tie somehow.

I don't really know what this means, but in two of the important papers it seems that Vical, the company for which Malone worked at the time, has been wiped from the easily accessible sources, due to what seems like a bug/concatenation in some old pre-web era database.

So when you see "a team at University of Wisconsin" and "a team at Salk institute", know you're being given a partial picture. It is "UW & Vical" and "Vical and Salk Institute" respectively, and the common thread is... Vical.

So, how long did Malone work at Vical? Given that two of the majorly cited papers from that era were written there, you'd expect a significant stay. Linkedin however offers us a surprise--- "less than a year" linkedin.com/in/rwmalonemd/

Not only did he leave, but it seems that Vical's attitude to Malone was not the best after his departure. In this 1990 article about the experiments with UW, his former supervisor seems to have... forgotten who Malone was. latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

Robert Malone, rap name "others".

Reading articles from that time is incredible.. Follow this: Theodore Friedmann at UCSD was working on a different technique using viruses. One of the Assistant Profs in his lab, magically shows up with a blockbuster paper using a different method. How long was he working on it?

And the answer is (drumroll) ... 1989. He was actually intending to abandon the whole gene therapy field before Vical got in touch. It seems we know which way the technology flowed, and we have it from the horse's mouth.

MC Others makes another guest appearance, literally the only time the name appears in the whole article. This is conspicuous.

Until this point I haven't introduced a very interesting document that tells the story, but has a massive asterisk. It is the account written by Dr Malone's wife, Jill. We won't take it at its word, but we can see if the claims fit what we know already. static1.squarespace.com/static/550b0ac…

This paragraph seems to fit like a glove -

- Malone joined Vical in January.
- It was an 8 month position.
- Felgner's expertise was in a different field.
- Malone brought his research materials over from Salk, which is why the work proceeded very fast.

I think we can bring in one more piece from Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone (Robert Malone's wife and author of this piece) that does seem to gel with Vical's earsure of Malone in their LA Times coverage in 1990:

If this were false, if Malone's role were indeed minor, we'd have expected the superstar team at UW & Vical to continue the work. It seems though that neither Vical, nor Merck, who later bought the patents, were able to do anything more. Oddly, with Malone gone, progress halts.

For any readers who have followed me up to here, please let me know if there was indeed further progress, new ideas generated after Malone was gone from the Vical lab.

Jill Malone's document is not in the least positive on Robert Malone's supervisor at Salk, so I Googled around and yeah, her claims are more than corroborated: sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/f…

Another tidbit: I knew Malone's role in mRNA vaccine was the subject of edit wars in Wikipedia. I didn't know his page had been deleted whole from the English Wikipedia. It still exists in the German Wikipedia however, and this seems to be a translation: vetapedia.se/dr-robert-w-ma…

From that page we learn one more interesting fact: Felgner was not just an employee at Vical, but a founder, corroborated in this article with more backstory on Felgner: ocregister.com/2021/07/02/uci…. The fact that he was a founder definitely adds to the power differential at play.

Ah, finally, the date of founding of Vical: 1988. library.ucsd.edu/sdta/histories…

Vical appears to have gone public in 1993 and in one of its 10K regulatory filings years later we find this nugget: sec.gov/Archives/edgar…

It looks like Vical licensed its intramuscular delivery IP to Merck in 1991 to develop of human vaccines for flu, HIV, & 5 other viruses.

From the same translated German Wikipedia page, we see this link, reviewing the progress towards mRNA vaccines. Published in 2019, it is both recent enough to contain most relevant progress, and old enough to not have been infected by the Malone edit wars. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

And a full pdf link for the non academics among us, courtesy of Wikipedia Deutch. Vielen Dank! This is extremely helpful to me because it puts in context the timeline in an accessible way. The two first citations? The two papers we've discussed thus far. biblio.ugent.be/publication/86…

Is there reason to doubt this timeline/attribution? Else, things seem pretty clear: Malone was core to the work on effective mRNA delivery to cells, in vitro & in live mammals, demonstrating vaccine potential strongly enough for Merck to license it for human vaccines by 1991.

In fact, it appears that Malone has shared the first experimental data delivered to USPTO already in March 1990 showing immunity generated in mice by the Vical team. rwmalonemd.com/s/First-mRNA-v…

I know I said this would be a facts-only thread, and I probably strayed a step or two farther, but not by much. At this point I'll pause to see if other relevant materials emerge, and I'll probably work to summarize all this in a more crisp part III.