Is it true that many people died because of the vaccine of Katalin Karikó but she still received a Nobel prize? No, that's not true: According to the CDC "COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, and severe reactions after vaccination are rare."
The claim appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) where it was published by @www.tiktok.ernesto62. The user says that (Translated from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff):
I blame Katalin Karikó. Her vaccine is the reason - it's not just her, she had partners - why a lot of people died. Many people had heart attacks and other diseases.
This is how the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Oct 11 12:52:33 2023 UTC)
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19."
Karikó was born in Hungary and left the communist-ruled country in 1986 to continue her research in the US. The mRNA technique, developed by Karikó and her colleagues was a key feature of Pfizer-Biontech's and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines.
Lead Stories has debunked the "vaccines kill masses" claim several times. According to the CDC "COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, and severe reactions after vaccination are rare" and they highlight that the benefits of these vaccines outweigh any potential risks.
Since December 2020, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has received 18,007 preliminary reports of death (0.0027%) in people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. These are unfiltered user reports, they are uploaded by the patients but not verified by medical professionals. "CDC and FDA clinicians are reviewing reports of deaths in VAERS, including death certificates, autopsies, and medical records. Ongoing surveillance has identified nine deaths causally linked to the J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine." The J&J/Janssen vaccine does not use mRNA technology.
