Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Everybody saw this coming.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

This really is a full service blog.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / GOP Death Cult Social Notes Open Thread: At DC’s Myriad Moron MAGA Rally

GOP Death Cult Social Notes Open Thread: At DC’s Myriad Moron MAGA Rally

by | 190 Comments

This post is in: ,

Due credit, they did gin up several thousand kindred spirits to waste a nice November day protesting the cruelty of math and other liberal schemes against FREEDUMB. So even at the worst, it won’t be a Sturgis-level superspreader event when they all go back home to the already-covid-striken Heartland(tm).

The rally was both large enough and small enough that the Squatter-in-Chief’s handlers decided to let him have a drive-thru, as a treat…

… After a week in which more than 750,000 Americans were diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, almost none of the protesters was wearing masks. Among their ranks were white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and far-right activists from across the country.

Trump had thrilled them when his motorcade appeared on Pennsylvania Avenue shortly after 10 a.m., The president smiled and waved from a car window as his cheering fans scrambled to the side of Freedom Plaza to catch a glimpse.

“He drove right past me. I saw him. He waved right past me,” one man said, squatting to collect himself…

Then the appearance of counter-protesters sparked bursts of conflict. When a small group holding bright orange “Refuse Fascism” posters arrived at the corner of Freedom Plaza, they were almost immediately surrounded by Trump fans shouting “USA! USA!” into their faces.

The women leading the tiny march fought their way up 14th Street, repeatedly breaking out of the crowd only to be engulfed again. They yelled into their megaphone, “Trump pack your s—. You’re illegitimate.”

One pro-Trump man attempted to gouge the opposition with a flag bearing the president’s name. Another grabbed a woman’s neon orange poster and hit her with it.

When the women made it to the barrier set up by police across the street, Trump supporters filled the entire intersection, blocking them in. Police arrived on bikes and, after several minutes, moved the crowd back…

Soon after, on the street beside inscriptions from Abraham Lincoln recognizing the District as a place of freedom, people piled atop a U-Haul truck with a flag of a gun and the words, “Come and take it.”

The president’s backers, who include white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and far-right activists from across the country, carried Trump flags and signs demanding action that was already being taken: “Count the legal votes.” One man, dressed in camouflage and a red “MAGA” hat, waved an American flag attached to a baseball bat…

On a day when the president’s supporters touted a vast array of falsehoods, his spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, offered perhaps the most ludicrous.

“More than one MILLION marchers for President @realDonaldTrump descend on the swamp in support,” she tweeted, exaggerating the crowd size by a factor of about 200…

Perfect capper!

Reader Interactions

190Comments

  2. 2.

    West of the Rockies

    Wow.  It looks like they must have drawn dozens

    As for Sturgis… maybe it should be called Stooges.

  3. 3.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud:   I waited and waited and waited and no one put anything up.   But that’s okay, either one thread will die an early death or jackals will have the luxury of two Saturday night threads!

  6. 6.

    trollhattan

    Suppose this is the barking dogs gazing at the passing caravan. And speaking of passing, how many new COVID cases from this thing?

  7. 7.

    There go two miscreants

    squatting to collect himself…

    After the discussion earlier today, I did not need to read that!

  10. 10.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @JaySinWA:

    Pretty much.  Enough and too few for me to come to any conclusions, given it’s only been one week.  I guess you can clearly say the white supremacists are disappointed that the ride is coming to an end.  I don’t see any sign that they think they can influence anyone with this, so they do know their Nazi presidency is on the way out.

  11. 11.

    cmorenc

    Trump can’t bother to show up for a DC rally in his honor on a saturday when he is in town with no other conflicting events beside his golf game?  He cant even delay his game 15 min to stop by and say a few words?

  12. 12.

    FlyingToaster

    The guesstimates for MAGAts I’ve seen are in the 5-6K range.  Which since they were permitted for 10K at “Freedom Plaza”, that’s fine.

    Most counterprotesters stayed away, which reduced the likelihood of violence.  Hard to start a fight with someone who’s absent.

  14. 14.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @cmorenc:

    He’s depressed.  He won’t admit it in public, but he knows he’s lost, so he’s not even going to go through the motions of being president.  It’s all vacation time for the next two months.

  23. 23.

    jl

    Thanks for report. I heard news report that the crowd was closer to  4K or 5K, so smaller than 7K.

    From what I can see, the costumes have changed from some mix of ninja turtle/dirt bike gang/fantasy Viking warrior to to homemade light irregular tactical. Seems to me that there was a fork in the road a while back and they could have gone the way they did, or to Furry. Furry probably too expensive and takes too much planning.

    From what I see in news reports, they have an ever changing system or ranks, with new titles and organizational hierarchies reminiscent of 60s undergraduate dorm lefty revolutionary outfits, with little internal coups and splintering into sects. I wonder if there were any little squabbles over whether a particular group was the Goy Boys run by the Grand Imperial Emperor of Street Combat, or Unmasked Marauders for Unlimited Freedom under the leadership of the Lord High Minister of MAGA Resistance.

    Looked like they were having fun though. The pushy fight between the MAGAs and ferocious antifa forces was amusing, at least on a skip through of the clip. Too boring to watch all the way through, though. Not enough material of a typical SNL skit.

  24. 24.

    Mike in NC

    Latest photos of Fat Bastard appear to indicate he has given up coloring that thing that sits on top of his head.

    By this time next week we are going to be reading about Melania’s search for a good divorce lawyer.

  28. 28.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @WaterGirl: Kayleigh’s not humiliated. She loves what she’s doing. When she was transitioning from anti-republican to full-on trumpkin, she famously told a fellow  talking head, in the elevator at CNN, that there was a lot of money in being a pro-trump “pretty girl”

  29. 29.

    jl

    @Baud: I think this bunch could use the leadership of Baud XXXX!!, who could have introduced much less organization to the protest. Mere mortals may think that is impossible, but all is possible with Baud.

    But, would have made for a more entertaining show.

  32. 32.

    Kent

    My daughter reminds everyone that proper etiquette requires that the Trump flags be flown at half-mast.

  37. 37.

    jl

    @Baud:  ” Maybe he’s out of money. Didn’t we read a while back that his haircut is $750 a pop. ”

    Just shows Trump is bigger than Clinton, I think that white trash could only afford $400 haircuts, and adjustment for inflation won’t change that much.

    I think there is fine print in the Trump election challenge fund that will pay off the haircut bill, along with anything else Trump wants to do with it, such as for example also too, new golf clubs, etc.

  40. 40.

    Alison Rose

    A fucking Nazi flag. You know. I miss my grandparents so much, but every single day since Trump’s first campaign began, every day of his presidency, I’ve been relieved they didn’t live to see this shit. We lost family in the Holocaust, I can’t imagine what it would have done to them to see that fucking symbol proudly flown by supporters of the president of their own damn county.

    And good Lord, aside from being racist and anti-semitic and everything else, these people are so damn pathetic. Running to his car and squealing with joy like he’s Harry Styles or something. What a bunch of insecure little babies with some serious daddy issues.

  41. 41.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @WaterGirl:

    Is Trump really that stupid that he would believe that lie?

    Not the point.  The point is that they get to say it and pretend their rallies are as big as ours.  Whether it’s true or anyone believes is irrelevant.  Like most bullies, that they themselves said it is proof enough for a power thrill.

  43. 43.

    Jeffro

    Btw I copied that multi-Nazi-flag pic earlier and sent it around on social media, asking folks why good, god-fearin’ Americans would have Nazi flags for sale, or what would make them think that this crowd of “very fine people” in particular would want to buy them.

    Also asked for people’s thoughts on the Nazi flag and the ‘thin blue line’ flag being displayed/sold side-by-side.

    (crickets)

    YUP

  44. 44.

    Baud

    @jl:

    He’s gonna need several hundred million dollars soon to pay his creditors.  Can’t afford no fancy orange hair dye right now.

  46. 46.

    jl

    @Baud: The Baud XXXX!! poison of choice, 3 percent flat warm beer, would have made for some fun clips. Farts and falls for all!

    They need the Galactic Battle King of MAGA Galactic Armageddon Baud XXXX!! for their leader.

  50. 50.

    bbleh

    @Baud: I don’t think he hates his followers.  I don’t think he thinks much about them at all, except when they are in front of him and cheering, and even then they are only bit players in the Trump show that plays forever in his mind.

    He certainly doesn’t respect them, but again, he doesn’t really respect anyone who is not him (although people like Pelosi and Putin scare him).

    In some ways I suppose it’s appropriate, because I think many of his followers are similarly self-absorbed: they don’t admire Trump qua Trump, they admire the things in their own heads that Trump maps onto, and the things he says that they think themselves.

    It’s a mutual admiration society, except each admires him/herself rather than the other.

  51. 51.

    jl

    @Baud: The Trump small donor base is infinite, but starting slow. Probably just a temp cash flow problem. A couple of GOP insiders left at Deutsche Bank will fill the gap with a bridge loan.

    Probably will be a good Downfall video based on that idea in a day or two.

  52. 52.

    Baud

    @bbleh:

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mingle with his supporters.  He’s only a stage in front of them.  He’ll mingle with his rich country club cohorts.

  53. 53.

    randy khan

    Every new photo or video I see from this, ah, event, makes it look even more pathetic.  That 5K estimate (1/200th of a million) is pretty generous. I’ve seen random events on a Wednesday that seemed to have more people in Freedom Plaza.

    Oh, and not that anyone cares, or probably should, but Trump’s motorcade was going the wrong way on a one-way street.  It was going east on E Street, and it’s a westbound-only street at that point.

  55. 55.

    jl

    @bbleh: ” I don’t think he hates his followers. ”

    I think contempt is a better characterization. I don’t know how many times Trump has to say he that holds his base in contempt, in both word and deed, before people believe him.

  57. 57.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @jl:

    A couple of GOP insiders left at Deutsche Bank will fill the gap with a bridge loan.

    Supposedly, Deutsche Bank has had enough of Trump and is trying to figure out how to sever ties with him.

  61. 61.

    jl

    @zhena gogolia: Thanks, if that is correct info. I am guilty of not hitting the books to learn up on the history of political haircut scandals to know what I am talking about. Sad, loser, slob, is what I am.

  64. 64.

    jl

    My one quibble is AL making fun of the Secret Service protection. That is a cheap shot. I mean, give them a break, over 100 of them are out sick with covid, right? That guy running by Trump’s armored car might be the WH security  shift scheduler and equipment logistics dude..

  67. 67.

    Jeffro

    This is just fucking amazing (but not entirely unexpected): Want to Know What Determined If Schools Reopened?

    Not science, that’s for sure!

    The strength of trump support and the strength of the local teachers’ union

    The finding is a testament to how the nationalization of partisan politics affects governance at all levels. Traditionally, local governments — and particularly school boards, whose members are often elected in nonpartisan, unusually timed elections — have been more technocratic than their state or federal counterparts. Public officials at the local level concentrate on problems like keeping streets paved and deciding whether to build a new elementary school or buy new buses. Yet this study suggests that the polarizing politics of red and blue caused school boards to drift away from a dispassionate analysis of covid-19 numbers toward the political preferences of their constituents.

    Hey Dems, if you need a good message for 2022 and 2024, just go with Arnold’s classic line, updated: “Come With Us If You Want to Live”!

  68. 68.

    Jeffro

    @Baud: Seriously.

    Watch Republicans applaud themselves for finally finding a way to honor ‘diversity’…”yuh see?  We got alla these kinds of flags representing the diverse intrists inside the trum…er…Republican Party, and y’all only got ONE”

  71. 71.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @HumboldtBlue: cracks me up that she thinks she’s been living in his head. I thought if anything, the way he rather dismissively referred to her suggested it never occurred to him that she would hear about it (I almost said, “read it”.)

    I wonder what it was like hearing all the fawning encomia of John McCain, most of them including something like, “He wasn’t perfect, he did bring Sarah Palin on to the national stage”

  72. 72.

    Ruckus

    @Baud:

    He needs a lot more than $750 haircuts, hair dye and 55 gallon drums of pumpkin juice/florescent orange paint – a day, to make up for what he owes.

  73. 73.

    Haroldo

    @Jeffro:

    On LGM, it was ascertained that the Nazi flag vendor photo was from September, 2020, and was taken in Pennsylvania.  Not that it makes any moral (or political) difference….

  78. 78.

    raven

    @Delk: Forty years ago, in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, a planned Nazi march through a town full of Holocaust survivors led to a years-long legal battle over religious liberties and the strength of the constitution. While hate groups were ultimately not allowed to march on Skokie, their message still resonates with white supremacists and members of the far-right today, according to Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

  81. 81.

    Alison Rose

    @raven: Oh I remember. I was just telling my mom that in general I support the first amendment, but this whole “Oh let’s not hurt the Nazis’ feelings” shit is………..NO. I’d rather we were more like Germany of today where it’s illegal to display that shit. Because fuck them.

  83. 83.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Jeffro:

    Given the MAGAt’s hatred of Fox News, I wonder if they’ll try to turn to OANN? Unless Trump tries to start his own network. Hopefully, he’s too broke to do that

  93. 93.

    Aleta

    A pandemonium of headlines from today alone, about T campaign lawyers and cases

    WSJ: Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.
    USA Today: ‘Abuse of the rule of law’: 1,000 ex-judges, attorneys slam Trump’s false claims of voter fraud
    NYT:  Once Loyal to Trump, Law Firms Pull Back From His Election Fight

    Politico: Giuliani wrecks Trump campaign’s well-laid legal plans
    Raw Story:  Giuliani is dismantling Donald Trump campaign’s legal plans to contest election results
    Several outlets, a few hours ago: Trump puts Rudy Giuliani in charge of 2020 election lawsuits

    NYT:  Trump Loses String of Election Lawsuits, Leaving Few Vehicles to Fight His Defeat
    USA Today: Trump election lawsuit in Arizona’s Maricopa County dismissed, outcome wouldn’t have affected races
    ABC: ‘Not credible’: Michigan court ruling another legal setback for President Trump
    The Hill:  Atlanta attorney backing Trump sues to stop Georgia election results

    Several outlets: Trump Campaign Shuts Down Fraud Hotline After it Gets Flooded With Prank Calls
    ABC: GOP leaders in 4 states quash dubious Trump bid on electors

    NYT yesterday:  On Friday, T’s campaign lost in courts in Michigan and Pennsylvania and dropped a challenge in Arizona.  List of state cases and status (dismissed, pending, etc.)

    Raw Story: Trump spokesman furious after law firms abandon the campaign’s fight to throw out ballots

    In the past few days, as the president’s lawsuits have been thrown out of federal and state courts around the country, multiple law firms representing the campaign — including a firm that has been closely tied to Trump for years — have announced they are backing out.

    “Trump’s campaign has also been abandoned by key members of its legal team. Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, one of the few prominent law firms to represent Trump’s legal efforts to question election results, withdrew from the federal lawsuit it had filed for the Trump campaign that attempted to alter the election’s results in Pennsylvania on Thursday — just days after filing the case,” reported Zeeshan Aleem. “And on Friday, a high level employee at Jones Day, one the largest law firms in the US, announced during an internal meeting that the firm would not be involving itself in election litigation, despite the fact that Jones Day served as counsel to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.”

  94. 94.

    jl

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): ” Given the MAGAt’s hatred of Fox News, I wonder if they’ll try to turn to OANN? ”

    If Trump goes ahead with his rumored media plans, I don’t think anything less than a 100 percent Trump owned, Trump run, 200 proof straight all Trump all the time channel has a chance

    Edit: except, maybe only the basest of the base will watch it. A few hundred thousand of those people around the country won’t have enough money.

  96. 96.

    jl

    @Ruckus: IMHO, Rand Paul is the master of posture and pose. I have no clue what goes on in his head, but that is how it appears to me. At least he thinks it is worth aping. Maybe it’s sincere. My low opinion of Paul opens up room for a variety  of hypotheses.

  99. 99.

    piratedan

    @jl: and even once he leaves office, he’s due protection, although I am unsure how that will be if the NYAG tries and convicts him and sentences him to prison, unsure if he forfeits all of those “rights” in that particular outcome…

  100. 100.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Baud:

    It’s important to remember what monsters Trump and his people are.

    I think it’s important to remember just how quickly people we assume are good, decent, honest Americans but who are willing to turn to Nazi-style oppression at the drop of a maga hat. Trump may have ordered the horror but there are tens of thousand proud to do his bidding. ICE can’t be reformed and must be disbanded.

  102. 102.

    jayjaybear

    @jl:Furry probably too expensive and takes too much planning.

     

    Furries also tend to at least try to put forward a public perception of being empathetic and caring toward their own. That’s too much of a stretch for MAGAts.

  103. 103.

    Another Scott

    @raven: Yeah, Commerce Uber Alles, so to speak.

    J and I vacationed in GSMNP a few years ago (just before the fires) and stayed in Gatlinburg while we were there.  There was a T-shirt shop that had windows with all kinds of crappy slogans.  Dominated by pro-Trump stuff, of course, but all kinds.  I wonder if they drove away more people than they attracted with their displays…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  104. 104.

    Jeffro

    @Haroldo: Thanks (seriously)

    I still think I’m going to wait until some MAGAt points that out and tries to use it to absolve today’s “protestors”.

    ”That was all the way back in September, libtard!  Um, same people supporting the same president*, but still!”

  106. 106.

    Hungry Joe

    The don’t-wear-mask loons seem to believe that it’s part of some evil liberal plot. But it doesn’t pass the “Have you thought about this for, like, two minutes?” test. Let’s assume it’s true, and try to figure out what the Dems are up to.

    Evil Dem leader (Obama, Biden, Soros, whoever): Anybody got a new plan to help us take away freedom and rule the world?

    Lackey: Fake a pandemic.

    Leader: Hmmm …. interesting. But why?

    Lackey: We can tell them they have to wear masks!

    Leader (cackling): Everybody?

    Lackey: Yes! The whole country will be wearing masks!

    Leader: Brilliant! [pause] But why?

    Lackey: Why what?

    Leader: Why do we want everybody to wear masks?

    Lackey: Because … no, see, everybody will be wearing masks!

    Leader: Okay … but … how does that help us take away freedom and rule the world?

    Lackey: Everybody will be wearing masks!

    Leader: …

  107. 107.

    BC in Illinois

    @Jeffro:

    Re: opening of schools.

    Someone pointed out that if a decision about schools was made, and teachers weren’t involved, then it wasn’t an educational decision. It was a business decision.

  108. 108.

    Tony Jay

    How incredibly, astonishingly, absolutely mindbogglingly fucking incompetent at the most basic cognitive tasks necessary to qualify for sentient status do you have to be in order to have spent the last four whole years as President of the United States of America, with all of the powers of that office and unchallenged control over the finances of the wider federal government, while knowing you owe hundreds of millions of dollars to very bad, very impatient, very merciless people, with payments coming due on a certain, very specific date, and still failing to ensure that you end your (hopefully first) term of office with an enormous mountain of legitimately grifted cash bulging out of every bank account you have access to?

    He had one fucking job. Just one, and he couldn’t even manage to get that done. Soooooooooo much money has changed hands all around him but President Pettygrift still comes out bankrupt as ever.

    What a prick.

  109. 109.

    Jeffro

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): looks like some weird combination of OANN, Newsmax, and Parler.

    Good for them. I hope they stay in their wack-job bubble(s) and continue spiraling down until they don’t make sense to a single normal American.

  110. 110.

    mrmoshpotato

    I find it hilarious how Dump hates his own white trash supporters, and it’s so damn obvious.

  116. 116.

    Ruckus

    @jl:

    For all his bloviating and bullshit about his politics and his dad’s, he is still a book standard conservative. IOW his stick is hate. Because that’s all conservatives have is hate. OK the extremely wealthy conservatives have co-opted conservatism for the hate and the economic premise that money = citizenship and that as long as they keep minorities from having money, those minorities can’t be real citizens. Which is of course the only way conservatives can win if normal people speak up and vote.

  118. 118.

    jl

    @Tony Jay: If Trump had bothered to be serious about the covid epidemic, he’d have gotten a big win. And it required absolutely no work from him. The rich lazy man’s approach, ‘find a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy’ to fix it for me, would have worked very well. They’d have dug up Fauci to take care of it. Done.

    Very puzzling unless the imbecile factor is added to swindler, crook and cowardly bully. Edit, sorry, I forgot ignoramus.

  121. 121.

    raven

    @BC in Illinois: Well I live in a very blue part of a very blue town in Georgia and parents and teachers were included in the decision and people in my neighborhood were very relived that there kids were able to go back last week. (about 75%)

  122. 122.

    Ruckus

    @Tony Jay:

    I understood that he would have been the prick if he had gotten the money, but as it stands he’s just the totally lame snotty bastard asswipe that he’s been since he was 4 and decided that he was going to act like a snotty 4yr old spoiled asswipe for the rest of his life. Now that may have been more that he reached his mental limit at 4, rather than it was any irrational decision.

  123. 123.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @HumboldtBlue: I have questions.  Why Fleetwood Mac?  Why is there a bottle of cranapple juice?  Does the kitten have a bladder infection?  If so, is it uncomfortable for the kitten to ride on the skateboard?  Also, wouldn’t regular cranberry juice be better?  And, seriously, why was “Dreams” the soundtrack?

  124. 124.

    Mike in NC

    @Jeffro: All cops are authoritarians by virtue of their profession (to serve and protect the 1%ers). Many are also fascists who would love to live in a police state.

  125. 125.

    sanjeevs

    From a long Financial Times piece on the coronavirus vaccine discovery

    The call came last Sunday evening, as Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci were catching up with paperwork at their modest home near the German city of Mainz. It confirmed that their — at times controversial — lives’ work had produced a breakthrough that could offer humanity a route out of the Covid-19 pandemic.
    A vaccine candidate developed by the company they co-founded 12 years ago, BioNTech, was more than 90 per cent effective in preventing the disease — a far higher level than the widely-used jabs for flu, shingles or rabies. It proved for the first time that the deadly virus could be vanquished by science.

    But even as they basked in the good news — the two teetotallers celebrated on Sunday by brewing some black tea — neither Dr Sahin, nor his research partner and wife, Dr Tureci, are able to explain precisely why their precious product — codenamed BNT162b2 — works.

    That is very much by design.

    The shot, which is being tested in trials held by US pharma group Pfizer involving more than 43,000 people across six countries, is “an almost perfect vaccine, in some respects”, Dr Sahin told the Financial Times, which has had regular access to the company since March. It works by marshalling a number of pathogen-fighting tools simultaneously, in the hope that one, or several, will defeat Sars-Cov-2. But so far, they do not know which ones are actually succeeding.

    We have yet to understand — and this will come in the next six to 12 months — what drives the protection rate,” explains Dr Sahin, who is also BioNTech’s chief executive.

    Unlike the vaccines that have almost eradicated diseases such as measles and polio, the novel platform on which BioNTech’s vaccine is based, known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, does not use a weakened or inactivated virus to trigger an immune response. Instead, it injects genetic instructions into the body — a method that has never before been used in a licensed pharmaceutical and has faced scepticism from the scientific community for decades.

    But the coronavirus crisis gave Dr Sahin and Dr Tureci an opportunity to prove that one of the technology’s key characteristics — the ability to rapidly deploy the immune system’s disparate forces against a precise target — could herald the revolution that they have been forecasting for 25 years.

    “It was a fortunate coincidence that we were in a position to fight this disease,” says Dr Tureci, who is also BioNTech’s chief medical officer. “We had a lot of experience with RNA in the context of manufacturing it for individualised cancer vaccines,” she says, a process which BioNTech only recently managed to make stable enough for high-quality production. “If the pandemic were to have happened three years ago, it would have been much more difficult.”

    For BioNTech, the timing of Sars-Cov-2’s arrival is just one of several serendipitous events that led to the company’s unlikely success.
    Dr Sahin and Dr Tureci, both born in the 1960s to Turkish parents who made their way to Germany after the West German government signed an immigration agreement with Ankara in order to boost its dilapidated postwar labour force, grew up within 150 miles of each other, and pursued remarkably similar paths that would eventually converge.

    Dr Sahin’s father worked at a Ford car factory in Cologne. From the age of 11, he remembers being struck by the “incredibly beautiful and complex” immune system.

    “We didn’t have Google,” the 55-year-old recalls. “Every time we went into town, I went to the bookstore.” He adds: “I also had a good relationship with the local librarian, who ordered new [science and maths] books for me and set them aside for when I came in.” Dr Tureci’s father, a surgeon who had a keen interest in technology and science, played a more direct role in her medical education.

    From a young age, she would follow him as he did his rounds through the wards of his hospital in Lower Saxony, and even into the operating theatre. “I watched my first appendectomy at the age of six,” she says.

    At separate universities, they took almost identical routes, combining a medical degree with a doctorate programme: Dr Tureci’s in molecular biology, Dr Sahin’s in immunotherapy.

    The couple met in the early 1990s: she was on rotation at a ward dealing with blood cancers at a hospital in Saarland, where he was a junior resident and her supervisor. Early dates were spent discussing pre-clinical innovations — the reserved Dr Sahin was already able to quote results from scientific papers by rote — and a shared goal to create cancer therapies.
    Even on their wedding day, the duo made time for lab work. “We found that our academic fields were complementary,” Dr Tureci says, before adding, with a wry smile: “So we married them, and each other.”

    After she abandoned her physician training to dedicate herself to research, the couple, whose preoccupation Dr Tureci now humorously describes as “immune system whisperers”, set about trying to find a unique tool to find and fight antigens on carcinogenic tumours.

    We were broadly interested in [lots of] different technologies, and all of them were not accepted,” Dr Tureci recalls.

    “We were typical nerds.” Methods such as viral vectors, or recombinant proteins, “came with limitations”, says Dr Sahin, until, in the mid-1990s, the couple heard about the niche platform known as mRNA.

    As well as being a “non-infectious platform”, meaning there is no risk of contracting the disease for which one is being inoculated, mRNA vaccines provided “a way to let the patient produce his or her own drug”, by simply sending instructions that can be read by cellular machinery, says Christoph Huber, an immuno-oncology pioneer who helped found both BioNTech and Ganymed, Dr Sahin and Dr Tureci’s first company set up in 2002.

    Proving the science

    Nonetheless, the wider scientific world was largely dismissive of the technology, especially after early experiments with mRNA therapies showed that the body treated them as an intruder, and prevented it from reaching the intended cells.

    “It was a small community, and even within the small community, we were ignoring each other,” says Dr Sahin of the handful of researchers who were devoted to mRNA, and who are now hotly tipped for a Nobel Prize. Capital markets, and large pharmaceutical companies, were also unconvinced, leading them to focus instead on antibody therapies at Ganymed, which was subsequently sold for roughly $1.4bn in 2016.

    At the same time, however, Dr Sahin brought a small team of scientists and collaborators with him to the University of Mainz, which along with Tübingen, 100 miles to its south, was home to a cluster of cutting-edge mRNA expertise.
    That group remains at the core of BioNTech, and their experience with the agile manufacturing processes needed to make mRNA vaccines on an individual patient basis would prove invaluable at the start of the year. In January of 2020, Dr Sahin, whose addiction to scientific journals is gently mocked by friends and colleagues, read an article in the Lancet about a new coronavirus that had emerged in China’s Hubei province.

    He quickly convinced both Dr Tureci, and the rest of BioNTech’s board, that the evidence pointed to a pathogen that had the potential to spread much faster than even the authors of the report realised. Just two weeks after the genetic sequence of Sars-Cov-2 was made public on January 12, BioNTech began its Covid-19 vaccination programme.

    By the time the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic in early March, the company had 20 mRNA candidates in development. Days later, it had signed deals with Pfizer and China’s Fosun to help the company — which had roughly 1,300 staff — with clinical trials and mass production

    Speaking to the FT in March, Dr Sahin said that with the “goodwill” of regulators, an approved product could be available by the end of the year, although he warned this would be “pushing the limits of what is possible”.
    Behind the couple’s quiet confidence that a vaccine could be delivered within a year was a discovery made during the Sars outbreak in 2003, which revealed the existence of “spike” proteins on viruses that bind to a receptor commonly found in lung cells, in which an mRNA vaccine can activate a response that brings antibodies to the fight.

    If successful, those antibodies will bind to the spike protein — which is particularly strong in Sars-Cov-2 — to prevent it from docking, while simultaneously calling on cells to phagocytise, or consume, the virus.

    As it stepped up its Project Lightspeed, and tested its vaccines on mice, rats and monkeys, pre-clinical data was strong enough to convince Germany’s regulator, the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, to allow clinical trials in April.
    whittled down its candidates to four.

    Public interest was immediately strong — more than 1,000 volunteers contacted the trial co-ordinators in a single day. Respiratory viruses, however, are notoriously difficult to tackle, as the pathogen can reach the lungs via the nose or mouth very quickly. If a person is exposed to a high load of the virus, and the antibodies aren’t fast enough, the coronavirus enters the cells’ interior, and proliferates there, creating millions of copies. To fight this, BioNTech engineered its mRNA vaccine to activate a second line of defence, known as T-cells.

    The vaccine produces two kinds of T-cell. The first is known as CD8, and is equipped with scanning molecules that can look into and kill infected cells if it encounters any virus, while also reducing the reproduction of the pathogen. The second is CD4 cells, known as orchestrators, which make sure antibodies are directed against the right part of the virus and bind very strongly. They also help CD8 work, calling on many other parts of the immune system.

    You can switch on, via a snowball effect, an entire cascade of immune mechanisms which you can leverage,” says Dr Tureci.
    Much about how this would work when tested on humans, however, was unknown until this week. After eliminating three of the vaccine candidates — one of them led to 75 per cent of patients getting a fever — BioNTech and Pfizer launched a large-scale, final phase trial in late July, which was expanded beyond the US and Germany to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Turkey, as the virus subsided in some parts of the world over the summer.

    Roughly half of trial participants were given a placebo, and approximately 21,000 were given two shots, three weeks apart, while Dr Sahin and Dr Tureci waited for the requisite 62 volunteers to contract Covid-19, in order for independent observers to be able to calculate the overall rate of effectiveness.

    That threshold was passed soon after the US election on November 3, and news of the external committees finding that the vaccine was 90 per cent effective came days later.

    Dr Sahin, who was expecting about 80 per cent effectiveness and had busied himself in work while waiting for the results, heard the news from the Pfizer chief executive.

    “Albert [Bourla] called me and said ‘do you want to know the data?’ — and I said ‘no’!”, he says. “It was a fantastic relief. There was a lot of indication that there was immunity, but no definitive proof.”

  126. 126.

    Jeffro

    @Tony Jay: yeah..but..all the free golf!

    You know, if you think about it…it’s been a while since trumpov hosted anyone at the WH with his usual fast-food buffet*, paid for on his dime.

    *remember THAT, America?  Good times!

  130. 130.

    dmsilev

    @jl: In this case, it was the narcissist factor that did him in. He had to be the center of attention, the Man In Charge. Calling up Fauci and the CDC and saying ‘do what you need to do, I’m going golfing again’ was never going to happen, instead we got press briefings where he mused about injecting bleach.
    He still did go golf, of course. That’s important.

  134. 134.

    WereBear

    @jl: You forget that any Republican leader CANNOT do what a liberal would do in the same circumstances.

    And once embarked upon a stupid course of action, it is forbidden to acknowledge a mistake and change direction.

    It’s like painting yourself into a corner with paint made of nerve gas.

  137. 137.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @HumboldtBlue: So what you are saying is that you can’t answer any of my questions so you are trying to disguise that fact with a with a squid-ink cloud of intergenerational butthurt?

  141. 141.

    Puddinhead

    Did they televise the part where everybody at the rally got participation trophies for trying really hard in the election?

  142. 142.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Really? Calm down, man, the kitten on the skateboard is a play on the next link I provided you which answered all of your questions. So maybe have a seat, watch the fucking video and catch up to the rest of us? You can write a report about how you found all the answers to your silly questions in the second video and turn it in for extra credit.

    And if I am older than you it’s probably by a year or two. Have some fun, it’s Saturday night.

  143. 143.

    Jeffro

    @Mike in NC: I’ll have to pass on “all” because

    – most cops I have met/dealt with across the decades and in a number of roles (kid, teen, victim, witness, passer-by, irate speeding-ticket recipient, etc) have been helpful, polite, even-keeled, etc.

    – but…I recognize this is basically anecdotal, not data, and that I’m a middle-class white guy so probably something like 500% less friction from the police in general than others in our country.

  146. 146.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @HumboldtBlue: I did see that as a link.  But, in any case, it just moves the questions to the next video.  And no need to be hostile, man, we are just having fun and shit.

  147. 147.

    jl

    @sanjeevs: Thanks for informative excerpt and comment.

    Trump and his flunkies (including, shockingly, Azar running HHS) have been trying to mislead people into thinking that the Pfizer vaccine is a Warp Speed project, and therefore, Trump deserved come credit for it.

    AFAIK, the vaccine was never part of Warp Speed, and the development got absolutely no support from it. Pfizer did get an advanced purchase agreement for the vaccine, if it could be proved safe and effective.

    That does raise the issue of how much Pfizer should earn off the vaccine. My understanding is that Pfizer didn’t even develop it, it was entirely the result of the start up, which Prizer bought. Maybe it’s Pfizer’s problem how much it paid. The initial purchase agreements are good deal, but they are not enough to make a dent in what is needed.

    OTOH, not clear if Pfizer product will be vaccine mostly widely used, if others can get similar results. The extremely frigid cold chain will be a problem for cheap timely deliver to many areas.

  148. 148.

    Jeffro

    @WereBear: I’m trying to picture a lame-duck liberal president casually waving from his limo to his sparse supporters on his way to go golfing during an out-of-control pandemic, and can’t get there.

    (That’s what you said; it’s just what your comment made me try to picture)

    Mind-boggling, isn’t it?  The double standards?

    Obama heading out to golf at a course that he owns, cruising through a couple thousand supporters with an H1N1-depleted Secret Service detail valiantly jogging along beside his limo?  As the whole country is experiencing uncontrolled spread heading into Thanksgiving??/

  152. 152.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    And no need to be hostile, man, we are just having fun and shit.

    Agreed.

    So what you are saying is that you can’t answer any of my questions so you are trying to disguise that fact with a with a squid-ink cloud of intergenerational butthurt?

    That comes off as hostile so I think we are missing each other’s humor mark.

  155. 155.

    Dan B

    There’s an interesting article in Slate about conservatives embrace of anecdotes and dismissal of science and expertise.  They believe what people they’ve heard of tell them but put scientists in the same category.  Liberals believe the experts and discount anecdotes.

    I believe that epidemologists study this complication to effective communication.

  156. 156.

    Tony Jay

    @jl:

    There’s literally no excuse. All he had to do was let the experts run the pandemic response while he nodded blithely in the background and concentrated on re-election.

    Couldn’t even manage that. His need for adoring crowds was really that great? There had to be people telling him how much of a political opportunity Covid could turn out to be if handled right, and reelection had to have been priority numero uno for a guy with his financial commitments, but he still fucked it up.

    No wonder he looks so grumpy.

  157. 157.

    zhena gogolia

    @NotMax:

    Oh, I just replied to that, but I was misreading it as The Master and Margarita.

    Weird that The White Guard would have anti-Semitism in it. The novel is anti-anti-Semitism, as I recall.

  158. 158.

    Tony Jay

    @Ruckus:

    Even 4 year olds understand that defaulting on debts to Russian organised criminals and God only knows who else is something to avoid if at all possible.

    Well, all the 4 year olds I know know that. I do come from Liverpool.

  159. 159.

    sanjeevs

    @jl: Yes it’s not a Warp Speed project. Research was done by BioNTech in Germany.

    I read a piece on Warp Speed in the WSJ many months ago and even then it was obviously a bunch of libertarian wankers in the GOP and Silicon Valley who had convinced themselves that red tape and regulation was going to be a major issue (it wasn’t)

    Pfizer didn’t do the research but they will play a huge role in distribution. I think they also would have done most of the work running the testing. It’s impressive that Dr Sahin is CEO but also a working researcher.

    Financially it’s a game changer for BioNTech but for Pfizer they’re just too big for this to be a home run for the stock price

  164. 164.

    Amir Khalid

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    It’s all vacation time for the next two months.

    Given what is known about his work habits, it has been pretty much all vacation time for the last four years, too.

  165. 165.

    Tony Jay

    @Jeffro:

    Just imagine for a second how shit he feels right now. He was President. The actual President. He could have milked that gig to put tens of billions into companies he would later own controlling interests in. He could be leaving the White House having set himself up as the successful businessman he played on TV.

    But he couldn’t even manage that. Now he’s got to swallow defeat to Barack Obama’s guy and all that awaits him is loserdom, court cases and possibly even a night hanging from meathooks while Sergei and friends work his pasty carcass over for defaulting.

    Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

  167. 167.

    Another Scott

    @Tony Jay: 

    All he had to do was let the experts run the pandemic response while he nodded blithely in the background and concentrated on re-election.

    [Insert Dan Rather tweet about if frogs had pockets.]

    Donnie actively destroyed the US’s pandemic response. He was and is incapable of acting rationally because his brain is broken, his racism makes him push to break everything good that Obama did, and because of his treating everything as a zero-sum battle means that only he can win.

    As Ron Klain said in January – Coronavirus is Coming and Trump Isn’t Ready.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  172. 172.

    Tony Jay

    @Another Scott:

    Exactly. It’s who and what he is. A destructive, failed attempt at a human being without the wit to know when to let someone else get him a qualified win.

    I’m watching A Fistful of Dynamite, and Rod Steiger’s Hong-Kong influenced Mexican accent is closer to authentic than anything Tang Toad Wang has ever managed to pull off. Good ridance.

  175. 175.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @jl: If Trump goes ahead with his rumored media plans, I don’t think anything less than a 100 percent Trump owned, Trump run, 200 proof straight all Trump all the time channel has a chance

    That’s the thing, a Trump doesn’t do running things. They are parasites. Work is for suckers in their minds.

  176. 176.

    jl

    @sanjeevs: Thanks for additional info.

    My point about development is that there is a good case that Pfizer should cough up as many doses as needed without much regard for any patent BS, and to be honest, I don’t know how the patent rights are arranged. I don’t know all that much about the IP, but AFAIK, Pfizer bought the rights to vaccine and had to fund clinical trials, so IMHO, Pfizer bought the product and if they paid too much counting on a high price, then that is their problem.

    Wiki says BioNTech is working on HIV and TB vaccines for the Gates foundation. Also sold rights to flu vaccine development to Pfizer, but new improved vaccines where some already exist, is not a profitable line of work, so there Pfizer is on more solid ground for asserting IP.

    I’m obsessed with the supply chain side, since that has been horrible in the US. After all this time, medical grade PPE, and testing is still a problem, price gouging is still a problem. And the situation is very brittle. In CA the upswing in cases, which is an order or magnitude less than other places, has already pushed time to get test results from a day to 1 or 2 weeks, which makes the tests pretty worthless for epidemic control purposes

  180. 180.

    J R in WV

    @sanjeevs:

    Thanks for sharing this pleasantly technical piece. Amazing breakthrough in the field. May save a billion lives! Certainly millions of lives.

    Sounds as if it will allow us to resume hugging friends and visiting relatives!

  182. 182.

    Ruckus

    @Tony Jay:

    I’m not sure I would have known that at 4, but really by 6 or 7 absolutely. He’s 74 and hasn’t had or gotten a fucking clue. Said clue has probably hit him upside the head 12-200 times in the last 70 yrs and just bounced right the hell off because he has not grown mentally in those 70 yrs. He’s been the recipient of enough clues over those 70 yrs to be at the very least mediocre but maybe the force of all those 2×4 clues smacking him in the head, trying to get in  was just too much for his tiny, narcissistic toddler brain.

  184. 184.

    randy khan

    @Baud:

    They close down the streets anyway so I’m not sure that matters.

    Well, it’s not like they’re going to give the President’s motorcade a ticket.  But the usual route when they go in that direction is Pennsylvania Avenue (which makes more sense for many reasons.  Pennsylvania also is next to Freedom Plaza, so it was kind of strange to see them going down E Street.

  185. 185.

    sanjeevs

    @jl: I don’t think Pfizer will price gouge here but there is definitely a risk of a secondary market developing for the vaccine where that is an issue. Hopefully Biden wil step hard on that

  187. 187.

    jl

    @sanjeevs: I hope that is the case. What I really hope is that other vaccines, much easier and cheaper to distribute, will find similar success in preventing serious infection.

  188. 188.

    NotMax

    @zhena gogolia

    Just returned from the monthly expedition to Costco so only now saw your comment.

    The anti-Semitism is not at all a running theme in the production but the few times it pops up it stands out like a vivid red pustule.

  189. 189.

    matt

    Trump’s whole appeal to the Republican Party voting base is that he can’t watch people doing something competent or decent or reasonable without stomping all over it. That’s what they’re all about. That’s why they love him so much. He’s the avatar of their id.

  190. 190.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    I hate misinformation.

    That’ll put a serious damper on your campaign, if you switch to the Republic Partei, ya know.

Comments are closed.