THE BIDEN and Trump administrations in the last week threw money and political weight behind mRNA vaccine development, sparking backlash from critics concerned about serious safety and efficacy issues tied to the technology.
The Biden administration on Friday awarded Moderna $590 million to fund its work on mRNA vaccines for bird flu and other influenza strains with ‘pandemic potential’, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced.
During a press conference on his second day in office, Trump voiced political support for a $500billion private-sector project called Stargate.
The joint venture is between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and others to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI). Part of that project involves AI for early cancer detection and the rapid creation of mRNA cancer vaccines.
The Trump administration developed the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines under Operation Warp Speed in 2020. After Trump left office, the Biden administration poured billions into mRNA vaccine development.
Given Trump’s embrace of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement and his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up HHS, some predicted his second administration might take a more critical stance toward such vaccines.
‘It is deeply concerning, though not entirely surprising, that the incoming Trump administration is continuing to pursue massive funding for mRNA technology, including speculative cancer therapies’, author and natural health expert Sayer Ji told The Defender.
‘This direction underscores a troubling bipartisan embrace of experimental biotechnologies, despite the catastrophic fallout from mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which have been linked to unprecedented adverse events, disabilities and deaths‘, he added.
The Biden administration awarded Moderna $590 million through HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, which has been working with Moderna since 2023 to develop mRNA vaccines for flu vaccines with pandemic potential, including avian influenza A.
Last year BARDA gave the biotech company $176 million as part of the same initiative.
HHS said the new round of funding will help Moderna accelerate the development of a bird flu vaccine matched to strains currently circulating in cattle and birds. It will also expand the clinical data needed if other flu strains with pandemic potential emerge.
Moderna said in a statement that it plans to launch a Phase 3 study for its investigational pandemic influenza vaccine (mRNA-1018) after ‘positive’ Phase 1/2 results, which will be released to the public at an upcoming meeting.
‘It seems to me that this last-minute night and fog action by the Biden administration is designed to shovel as much dough to Moderna as possible to mitigate the risk posed by Robert Kennedy, provided he gets through Senate confirmation’, John Leake at the McCullough Foundation told The Defender: ‘Putting the brakes on that is a plausible interpretation.’
With the funding, Moderna also will design and test an H7N9 pandemic influenza vaccine in a Phase 3 trial. The company will design up to four more “novel pandemic influenza” vaccines that it will test in preliminary safety and immunogenicity studies.
‘mRNA technology will complement existing vaccine technology, allowing us to move faster and better target emerging viruses to protect Americans’ against future pandemics,” said Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Dawn O’Connell. BARDA is part of ASPR within HHS.’
The award is the latest component of the BARDA Influenza and Emerging Infectious Diseases Division’s medical countermeasure portfolio, set to continue to make major investments in ‘medical countermeasures’ for potential pandemics as part of BARDA’s 2022-2026 strategic plan.
BARDA administers the funding through its Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV), a technical financial vehicle that allows it to fund private industry through collaborations that are not subject to the same regulations as other federal funding.
On Jan. 16, the day before HHS announced the $590 million for Moderna, the agency announced another $211 million award to BARDA’s RRPV to ‘support development and long-term manufacturing capability of an RNA-based vaccine platform technology to combat evolving 21st century biothreats’.
RRPV is soliciting proposals for mRNA vaccine developers to develop a broad response capability. It seeks proposals that will first develop mRNA flu vaccines and then, once they are licensed, focus on continual pandemic preparedness exercises. Applications are due by Jan 31.
Although the Trump administration did not promise funding for Stargate, the president endorsed the initiative and reversed a Biden administration executive order that Republicans said hindered AI development.
‘I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built,’ Trump said.
During the press conference announcing the initiative, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison touted the promise of AI and mRNA vaccines. He said AI would be able to detect cancer in its early stages and customize mRNA vaccines to treat them within 48 hours.
Critics pointed to the unprecedented number of adverse effects associated with existing mRNA vaccines, the lack of success in cancer vaccines thus far, and ethical concerns associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, Ji wrote on Substack.
‘That is not a vaccine’, Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said, commenting on the concept. ‘That’s a gene therapy. What we’ve seen from the COVID mRNA shots is that they’ve been disastrous for the immune system’. Holland noted that the injections themselves have been linked to turbo cancers.
Other experts also cast doubt on the idea. ‘That’s not going to happen’, oncologist Vinay Prasad wrote on his Substack.
Prasad said hundreds of cancer therapeutic vaccines have been studied and failed. The one that received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration extended survival by only four months.
There is no reason that mRNA vaccines would have greater success, given the compromised immune system of cancer patients, he added.
Additionally, Prasad said, mRNA vaccines, ‘clearly have unique and idiosyncratic toxicity. Because they were pushed so hard for covid-19, there’s a huge fraction of the public who does not want them. They do have unexplored long-term safety questions. I’m not going to be standing in line to get any’.
Ji told The Defender that Trump’s support for the initiative had been ‘particularly disheartening’ for the MAHA movement.
‘Trump ran on a platform of health sovereignty and freedom, yet this Stargate initiative feels like a significant departure from those values’, Ji said. He added:
‘Instead of investing in regenerative, self-healing approaches to health and addressing the root causes of diseases like cancer, resources are being funneled into a technology that many view as inherently transgenic and transhumanistic, violating core principles of health and human dignity.’
Leake, a critic of the COVID-19 vaccines and the power concentrated in the bio-pharmaceutical complex, said he was less concerned about Ellison’s statements than others.
He wrote on Substack that he thinks it’s better for Trump to ‘capture the Billionaire Nerds‘ than to shun them. He told The Defender the tech billionaires already have so much power over the deep state and the legislature that pragmatically, Trump will have to negotiate with them.
‘Trump doesn’t have control over Larry Ellison’s tongue. Larry Ellison is going to say what Larry wants to say’, he said. ‘That doesn’t mean that in any US government deal that is ultimately consummated with Larry Ellison as a partner that his fantasies about mRNA have to be realized. It’s just Larry Ellison spitballing.’
Elon Musk also doubted the claims touted in the press conference. He wrote on X that the companies ‘don’t actually have the money’ to back their pledged infrastructure investment.
This article was first published in The Defender, and republished here with kind permission.
