Part 5 of 7 Parts (Please read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 first)
      Battista said, “I’ve known Michael Daly for decades now. He’s not the kind of guy that’s going to just put stuff together willy nilly and push it out into the press.” Although Battista said that he is still personally confounded by how exactly the bacteria’s manganese-complexes could preferentially protect proteins over lipids (like cell membranes) and nucleic acids (like DNA and RNA), he does think that Daly’s idea could prove to be a really novel twist on the way vaccines are made. “Being perfectly honest with you, the thing that has bothered me the most about it is, ‘Why would one set of macromolecules be protected and the other not?’”
     Daly does not believe that his explanation is complicated, he says that it is just “chemistry”. When a cell is exposed to gamma radiation, the superoxide that is produced does not interact chemically with either DNA or RNA. It does, however, do serious damage to the cellular proteome. Both the intracellular manganese antioxidant complexes present in D. radiodurans (which consist mainly of manganese, orthophosphate, and peptides) and the synthetic version produced by Daly’s team in bulk for their experiments (a manganese-decapeptide complex they named MDP) only scavenge superoxide efficiently. Daly says this means that MDP protects proteins, not genomes.”
   
    For the family of RNA-based viruses in general and the coronavirus in particular, the MDP complexes only interact with the exterior proteins. They never penetrate the capsid shell and thus then never get close enough to protect the RNA genome from the inactivating gamma radiation. The end result is an empty viral husk that drifts inertly through the human body, ready to be investigated, captured and studied by the human immune system.
    In spite of billion of dollars donated by Bill and Melinda Gates, there is no reliably effective vaccine for malaria. In 2018, malaria killed over four hundred thousand people around the world. Most of the victims were under the age of five, according to the World Health Organization. Respiratory syncytial virus is a common precursor for both viral bronchiolitis and pneumonia and it kills an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand people around the world every year. There is no clinically proven vaccine for that. There is no vaccine for chikungunya, no vaccine for HIV/AIDS, no vaccine for hepatitis C. Theoretically, with access to a small amount of radiation and some manganese-decapeptide complexes, viable vaccine candidates could be developed for each of these diseases, in much less time that it takes of many vaccine development schemes to even come up with a working theoretical model of a vaccine.
    Consider just some of the exhausting fifty-three-year history of the quest for a malaria vaccine. It all started with successfully immunizing mice with an irradiated malarial causing parasite in 1967. It then continued decades later with a U.S. military study in which eleven volunteers were bitten by irradiated mosquitos thousands of times on hundreds of occasions across the 1990s. The research has yet to reach a workable solution for a malaria vaccine.
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