Two years ago, Robert and his wife, Jill, were living a relatively quiet life on their Virginia farm, training and breeding Portuguese horses.

Everything changed almost overnight after the novel coronaviruses was discovered in China. One of the best bets against the coronaviruses was the mRNA vaccine. Scientists started using the technology to develop shots.

Everyone wanted to know who was responsible for this technique.

Some of the first scientists who figured out how to modify mRNA to get it into human cells more than 15 years ago were written about. The German company BioNTech, founded by Ugur Sahin and zlem Türeci, is working with Pfizer to develop a coronaviruses vaccine.

The man felt slighted. He was not getting any credit for his role in the new vaccines. What about the first time he injected mRNA into mice? He was trying to set the record straight.

People listened. In late December, he spent three hours on Joe Rogan's show. He has become a trusted source for people who are unsure about the safety of the vaccines. By the day, he has become more divided by the call for an indictment of Pfizer and Moderna. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was accused of scientific fraud by another physician who reported his vaccine misinformation campaign to the Maryland Board of Physicians.

He has become a valuable resource after he was kicked off the social networking site for sharing misleading interpretations of Pfizer trial data.

There are reasons people are listening to Malone — he's an expert source, and he's asking interesting questions about the vaccines

dr robert malone on the phone, smiling
Malone has served as a consultant to the US government, exploring the best ways to repurpose medicines to fight new viral threats.
AP Photo/Steve Helber

Some might like to dismiss him as a propagandist who is wrong about everything that comes out of his mouth. It is easy to say that a person is full of it and lying about it, but that is not the real story.

We have a vaccine that works to keep people from dying and staving off severe disease in hundreds of millions of people around the world, but they are not perfect. They don't stop all infections, and it does seem like the immune protection they offer may fade more quickly than many would have hoped, especially now that new variant are at play.

They don't promise to stop all transmission, but they do promise to make people less of a threat to their neighbors by making them less infectious. Some people have rare vaccine side effects. We don't understand why they are triggered in some people and not others.

The sometimes unanswerable and often complicated questions of the pandemic have been a good place for Malone to thrive. He has become an icon and a friend to people who feel left out and dismissed by the scientific community but also ignored and shamed by their exhausted vaccine friends and family.

Left out of the Nobel buzz

kariko cullis and weissman on stage after receiving prize from vietnamese prime minister
The scientists Pieter Cullis, Drew Weissman, and Katalin Karikó alongside Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on January 20.
Nhac Nguyen/AFP via Getty Images

Many others have followed him to work further on his work, and his work is often cited by them. One of the many scientists who made today's vaccines possible is Malone.

He showed that messenger RNA could be injected into mammals by using a fat-based substance. Philip Felgner, who won the Princess of Asturias Award last year, was one of the scientists who worked on that ground-laying research.

Ingmar Hoerr, the founder of the German company CureVac, told Insider that it was hard to distinguish who brought more to the field.

Pierre Meulien said that in 1993 he and his team were the first to demonstrate that you could induce an immune response with mRNA.

Meulien doesn't think there is a single inventor of the vaccine. It is hundreds and hundreds of people who have published in this area over the last 30 years.

He said that Hoerr injected the first human beings ever worldwide with RNA in 2005. Hoerr was one of the scientists who hoped that the use of mRNA for cancer treatment would be a great success.

When he started Mirna Therapeutics in 2007, Matthew Winkler was hoping to develop a therapy to kill tumors.

By that time, he had moved away from the field of vaccine development. He wrote papers on how to fight the mosquito-borne disease, including how to accelerate the development of a vaccine.

He offered some ideas about what doctors could take off the shelf to treat COVID-19. He was part of a research group that won a $21 million emergency contract from the Trump administration to study famotidine as a coronaviruses therapeutic. It is not known whether famotidine does much for COVID-19 patients. It could help decrease inflammation and speed up recovery.

According to Science Magazine, he was part of a classified US government project that used artificial intelligence and computer simulations to identify existing drugs that could be used to fight threats such as new viruses.

An attempt to set the record straight began morphing into an anti-vaccine crusade

dr. robert malone working on his computer at his desk, farmland pictured out the window, with a tractor in view
Malone in his office on July 22, 2020.
AP Photo/Steve Helber

In the spring of last year, he got both shots of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, which was authorized by the FDA in December 2020.

He was hoping that getting jabbed would help with some of the symptoms he was having. The idea of that promise has largely faded as more people have gotten vaccinations and more time has elapsed since their jabs.

Many of the long-COVID-19 patients who got better after a week or two, reverted back to where they were, according to Dr. Bruce Patterson, who runs a long-COVID-19 treatment center.

The side effects from his first shot were nothing remarkable, but after his second, he started complaining of high blood pressure, and raised concerns that the usual protocols weren't being followed.

It is true that vaccination is not one-size-fits-all. Different immune systems will respond differently to vaccines and likely benefit from different COVID-19-vaccine regimen in the future, an immunological truth that everyone agrees on. It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556

It is implied that the FDA has not taken all the appropriate safety measures for these vaccines because people may react differently to getting immunized or experience other issues around the time of their vaccine that may or may not have anything to do with the shot itself. The CDC and FDA keep an eye out for discrepancies in vaccine-batch quality, and no recalls have been issued for any of the COVID-19 vaccines.

The body breaks down the components of the vaccine within 36 hours after vaccination, according to the FDA.

Both the FDA and the CDC watch the safety of vaccines all the time. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System gathers reports from both citizens and healthcare workers nationwide of anything amiss after a vaccine, whether it is directly related to vaccination or not. The FDA and CDC review large, population-based healthcare datasets to round out the picture of what happens after people get vaccine. Given his career trajectory, these are two strategies that he is aware of.

As well as working in California's biotech industry, and on government contracts and scientific review boards for many years, Malone has a good grasp on how the US regulatory systems for vaccines work. He calls out Peter Marks, the head of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, by name. When asked if Marks had spoken with Malone, an FDA spokesman told Insider: "We cannot comment on or confirm any non-public meetings."

The Rogan effect catapulted Malone further into fame and controversy

joe rogan
Joe Rogan.
Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images

Thanks to Rogan, the former host of the "Fear Factor", who has become one of the most popular podcastsers, Malone's celebrity as a vocal vaccine opponent, already many months in the making, skyrocketed to stratospheric proportions in December.

Rogan's strategy is ill-informed.

He said that he had no idea what he was going to talk about until he sat down and talked to people.

This means that people like Malone and Kory have come on his show and remained largely unquestioned as they promoted the use of COVID-19 treatments and said the vaccines aren't safe. One of the most prominent voices advocating for more ivermectin prescriptions isory.

On December 29, Malone was suspended from the social networking site after saying that people who got Pfizer's vaccine were getting sicker than those who didn't. They were not. A small number of people in the vaccine trial group got sick when they did not receive the vaccine. The vaccine versus unvaccinated cohort had the same disease and death rates. On December 30 and December 31, a three-hour interview with Rogan was aired on the streaming service, where he railed against some kind of mass formation psychosis.

He has become a regular on Fox News, even as he describes the experience as a little weird.

Right now, conservative media are the ones that are open, according to him, who is a member of the advisory committee.

He moved to the social-media platform Gettr and became more political and prolific. He speaks to large crowds of cheering fans, as he did most notably this year at a January 23 rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

He told the crowd that the genetics of the vaccine are not working.

With a new, more infectious variant on the scene, and the far-right embracing his guidance far more than the scientific community ever will, he's turned from a vocal asker of vaccine questions to an evangelical, seemingly ignoring any and all evidence of vaccine.

Kory is a leading member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, and he has found good company recently in the ivermectin-promoting the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

As a scientist and clinical trial specialist, I don't see patients and don't prescribe drugs.

US military personnel, among other employees, were being forced to take these products, while they are still experimental, according to an interview with Tucker Carlson.

Malone's concerns, from unfounded to impossible to refute

Many of the loudest concerns about these vaccines are off base, despite his qualifications and industry expertise. When he says the vaccines can enter the blood-brain barrier, or that the tiny particles they are packaged inside might be in women's ovaries, those are gross misinterpretations of how these vaccines work. They are scary but not grounded in good evidence.

Any new drug, vaccine, or treatment will always have questions about what would happen. There are other scientists that are worried about those concerns. Andrew Geall developed some of the first lipid nanoparticles for vaccines.

There was a disease. There is no doubt that the right thing was done. That is the reason his entire family is immunizations.

Scientists are still studying the vaccines to improve them, despite the fact that vaccine research and development doesn't end with the first doses in arms. Canadian researchers have learned that spacing out the first and second doses of the vaccine can help prevent more cases of myocarditis in teens and young adults and improve the body's immune response at the same time.

There is a lot we know about these vaccines.

The data is being collected by regulators in other countries. There are many vaccine-surveillance systems in place around the world, with Japan having its own regulatory agency. There have been no major issues about the vaccine.

There is a huge amount of safety data on millions of people. I don't think we can say these vaccines aren't safe. I think they are safe.

The idea that a terrifying, mysterious safety signal we haven't seen yet might surface years from now is not only highly unlikely, it has never happened with any vaccine, because that is not how vaccines work. Vaccine side effects and human immune responses surface in minutes, hours, days, weeks, or sometimes months.

Take the messenger. It doesn't stay in the body for long. It can be seen for a few days. Your body is told to make a viralProtein to teach the immune system how to fight coronaviruses. It hangs around for a week during boot camp.

The messenger was made by nature. Hoerr, CureVac's founder, said that it was an ideal molecule, which only instructs the body in what to do to fight the coronaviruses.

Scientists agree with Malone on one thing

robert malone on capitol hill, sitting in a suit, with laptop
Malone on Capitol Hill on January 24.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The COVID-19 vaccines can be improved. Vaccine makers will likely do more to refine the vaccines in the coming years, with the goal of decreasing side effects, improving the performance of the vaccines against future versions, and stepping up how long vaccine protection lasts.

It is possible that getting exposed to the virus may give people better immunity than getting a vaccine.

The equivalent of a booster against all 26 proteins in the virus is what Geall calls it. No matter who you are, how old, or how vulnerable, the risks of infections are still much higher than the risks of vaccinations. The best kind of immunity you can get may be the hybrid immunity that comes from vaccinations and infections.

Geall said that it is still important to keep researching and answering questions about the products, in addition to improving how and when they are used.

Would I have preferred that there had been 15 years of research and safety generation? It wasn't an option during the Pandemic.

He and the other scientists who were interviewed for the article got vaccine against the diseases that they helped create over a 30-year period.

When reached by phone, he said he was busy and unsure about giving an interview.

He said he was wary of journalists for some reason.