Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected. It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment.
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"In the last decade Open Science principles, such as Open Access, study preregistration, use of preprints, making available data and code, and open peer review, have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in many different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of some of these Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly"
With this, we now know the exact mRNA contents of the BNT162b2 vaccine, and for most parts we understand why they are there:
The CAP to make sure the RNA looks like regular mRNA
A known successful and optimized 5' untranslated region (UTR)
A codon optimized signal peptide to send the Spike protein to the right place (copied 100% from the original virus)
A codon optimized version of the original spike, with two 'Proline' substitutions to make sure the protein appears in the right form
A known successful and optimized 3' untranslated region
A slightly mysterious poly-A tail with an unexplained 'linker' in there
The codon optimization adds a lot of G and C to the mRNA. Meanwhile, using Ψ (1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl) instead of U helps evade our immune system, so the mRNA stays around long enough so we can actually help train the immune system.