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Why Covid vaccines didn’t win a science Nobel this year

nature.com
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“The Nobel Prize folks could have done something with this year’s award to directly aid global health efforts during a 100-year pandemic. And they chose not to. This is utter dereliction. It is an indefensible decision that will cost lives,” Alexey Merz, a cell biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote on Twitter on 5 October.

Why does everything has to be about gestures nowadays? And when some people do the "wrong" thing (as opinionated by someone on Twitter) it's always utter catastrophe.

I suppose I should be replying to the tweet instead of posting about it here..

Wasn’t ‘to be a gesture’ the general point of setting up the original prize? From Wikipedia’s summary:

Having read a premature obituary which condemned him for profiting from the sales of arms, [Alfred Nobel] bequeathed his fortune to the Nobel Prize institution.
Nominations for this year’s prizes had to be submitted by 1 February. This was more than two months after the first mRNA vaccines, and some others, proved their mettle in clinical trials, but before their impact on the pandemic was fully clear

Makes sense.

It did not win this year. So what? If it is important, it can wait.

It is an indefensible decision that will cost lives

"I'll only get the darn shot if it receives a Nobel Prize!"

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