Commentary
As my Pfizer-BioNTech “placebo” report from last July has for some reason just gone viral again, this is a good time to address an important detail which I did not cover in the original report and which was neglected in the, sometimes heated, discussion which followed. “Placebo” does not necessarily mean saline solution. Placebo in this context could just as well mean “no mRNA:” i.e., a solution containing all the ingredients of the drug except the mRNA which is supposed to be packed into the lipid nanoparticles which serve as delivery system in the BioNTech platform. The lipids are empty: they have nothing to deliver. The “active drug substance,” the mRNA, is missing.
