State power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. The state can train subjects, but it can never develop free people who take their affairs into their own hands, for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.
--Rudolf Rocker
Suggest that magic plays a massive role in American politics today
and most people will look at you as though you just sprouted an extra
head. There’s a reason for that reaction, rooted in an impressive
ignorance about the nature of magic. A century or so of pop-culture
fantasias of the Harry Potter variety, using inaccurate notions
of magic as a dumpster for the human needs and longings that our
gizmocentric society does a poor job of fulfilling, stands in the way of
understanding what it is and how it shapes our political realities.
The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has
to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s
leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a
better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science
of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That
definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will?
Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.
Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the
last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar
water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction
— think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the
sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you
of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did
it aim anything else at your rational mind.
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No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that
have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a
billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re
wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having
a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar
water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of
those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d
roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind
absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad
cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in
accordance with the advertiser’s will.
This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface
of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll
find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that
most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown.
Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged
images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic —
punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic
primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust
for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy
brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only
thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.
This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance,
Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world
had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned
authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic.
The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states”
in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by
manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a
persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in
modern societies.
Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals
as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider
the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of
the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back
Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using
the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar
water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the
contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly
miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same
strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing
product.
Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent.
Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary
Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for
example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of
identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes
it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had
to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on
much more powerful emotional drives.
Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another
critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and
content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic
varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a
handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status,
which are common to all social primates and affect most people in
something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably
crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway
elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic
is needed.
But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here
we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society —
the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public
decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is
always a minority, and often a very small minority, however
enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its
hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably
effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils
this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and
goes on with life.
Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to
address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a
matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those
problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which
the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose
12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in
detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a
political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a
creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant
minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.
Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class
loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of
its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to
our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity
— and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that
individuals practise on themselves, using rituals,
meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change
their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a
period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that
era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems
that are not being addressed.
In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age
between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those
years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government
as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew
from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their
needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings
of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical
lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the
Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant
kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off
sharply.
Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when
the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started
treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be
brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly,
partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly
inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still
ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations
of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen
to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power
wrenched from its hands.
Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society
ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a
whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the
underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way
of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut.
Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your
consciousness in accordance with your own will.
That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade
the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by
the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than
being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t
as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently
fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness
can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various
avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more
respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning
consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity.
Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield
from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult
tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them
here.
So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the
overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants
to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of
every political class is the notion that its members deserve their
privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue.
Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the
political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good
people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and
privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of
the ways they prop up that illusion.
Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard
practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their
ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the
motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that
matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of
today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples
here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of
shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable
awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the
underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.
American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the
various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the
robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such
important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so
assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers.
Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara
Ehrenreich in her bookBright-Sided,
which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is
well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other
examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of
goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.
It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social
phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the
political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let
themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on
working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a
family of four in the United States with one working class income could
afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities
of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a
family of four in the United States with one working class income is
probably living on the street.
That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into
poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result
of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American
political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit
encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and
working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations
that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational
corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American
political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and
science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is
an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.
That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that
encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along,
convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,
while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline
around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great
enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in
the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and
Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember
what happened thereafter in each of these cases.
John Michael Greer is the author of over thirty books. He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.
There are theories that the ‘Great Reset’ of the World Economic Forum
is a programme for a technocratic fascist coup or revolution. There is
little current Marxist analysis of these theories, which no doubt
explains the comment in the otherwise informative book Pseudopandemic
by Ian Davis: ‘Neither free market liberalism nor Marxist theory
provide and adequate framework to describe the emerging Technate’ (p.
243)
However, the theory of emerging fascist Technate[s] was the subject
of a wide ranging and explosive Marxist debate 80 years ago. Although
that debate has since been sent down the “memory hole”; it did inspire
and enter into the content of Orwell’s book 1984.
Here we need to briefly understand an integral part of Marxist
theory: the core or essences of ideas associated with historical events
can reappear in different forms or costumes.
This is a method to analyse history for a comparative analysis of
modern events that removes potentially superficial differences in order
to focus on common causes. Thus from one of the most famous opening passages of Karl Marx:
‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and
personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time
as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ And for example, regardless of
the specific accuracy this application; the comparison of Stalin to Napoleon.
James Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution,
made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country
at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much
discussed that a detailed exposition of it is hardly necessary. As
shortly as I can summarize it, the thesis is this: The rulers of this
new society will be the people who effectively control the means of
production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and
soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These
people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working
class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege
remain in their own hands.
Burnham does not appear to draw on the historical antecedents to this kind of idea which in fact had been quite widespread,
perhaps to generate the illusion of more originality than his idea
deserved. However, Patrick Wood has drawn on this material whilst
analysing the Great Reset in the context of the ‘pseudopandemic’ (here and here).
Burnham’s thesis was that the Italian and German fascism of the 1930s
was a manifestation of his “managerial [ie, technocratic] revolution”.
The sensational part of his thesis? So was the Bolshevik revolution.
And thus fascism and Bolshevism were essentially different forms of the
same thing. That part of the idea in 1941 was not particularly original either.
Now we need to understand another part of Marxist theory (which
unfortunately is already fairly well understood by people who have never
read a word of it): the ruling class will often pursue an agenda with
the necessary support of a subservient class that is not in the ultimate
interests of that subservient class.
Thus, spurious noble justifications or rationalisations have to be
employed, whilst the real reasons have to be sublimated beneath the
surface (like the oil in the Iraq war). Burnham draws attention to this
early on in his book towards the end of chapter 2 and it is a reiterated
theme throughout the book.
He would have warned us against the noble goals of technocracy, such as the following manifesto:
By clinging to an outdated
economic structure that often directs technology’s uses strictly for
profit we are missing the full value of technology for the betterment of
society and the environment […] Technocracy is a better way to confront
social problems than authoritarian politics divorced from technical
expertise. Technocracy is about making scientifically proven decisions.
We are about making balanced and responsible choices for society and the
environment
Equally, concerns about sustainable development and global warming
might be merely a cover stories for a ruling class to pursue its
material and economic interests. And the more they adopt, sponsor and
support those advocating the noble ‘communitarian’ ideas the more they
believe in those ideas themselves. Meanwhile, many of these advocates
become either ‘useful idiots’ or cynics.
So when we read the World Economic Forum on stakeholder capitalism,
for example, we should be highly suspicious, but should also take into
consideration that Klaus Schwab and others may actually believe in it
themselves.
There was an extremely impressive Marxist analysis of Burnham’s book from a young Tony Cliff in 1943. (Note:
I am a libertarian communist so I am certainly not prejudiced in favour
of famous Trotskyist theoreticians). Here, Cliff asks the question:
Is it possible for the servants of
the oligarchy – namely the managers – to free themselves from its rule
and become the workers’ exploiters? Before answering this question, let
us deal with Burnham’s third argument, namely, that the process of
displacement of capitalism by the ‘managerial society’ is taking place
already?
In this debate or analysis you don’t need to agree or disagree with
one side or another. It is about learning from history – which may about
to repeat itself. It is possible that this pseudopandemic is:
An attempt at a capitalist global transnational totalitarian coup to subvert populism and a “crisis in democracy”
A
recognition by the capitalist class themselves, or sections of it, that
capitalism has arrived at its own limitations and contradictions and
requires some dramatic structural overhaul
Or it could be something else: perhaps, once its goals are achieved,
the whole Great Reset agenda stop and the World Economic Forum will be
the ‘Patsy’. Whatever the case, it is worth considering the possibility
we have been here before.
A
vast sweeping change towards a “green economy” is now being pushed by
forces that may make an educated citizen rather uncomfortable.
Of
course, news reports flash daily showcasing the brave young movement of
“eco-warriors” led by Sweden’s “forever 15 year old” Greta Thunberg or
America’s 17 year old Jamie Margolin who have become a force across
Europe and America leading such movements as the Extinction Rebellion,
This is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and Children’s eco-crusade. The
young face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez daily sells the idea that the
only way for outdated capitalist forces that have plagued the world for
decades to be replaced is by imposing a sweeping Green New Deal that
priorities de-carbonization as a goal for humanity rather than
continuing to allow the mindless forces of the markets to determine our
destiny.
When EU President Ursula von der Leyen had stepped into
her office, she lost no time attacking China’s Belt and Road Initiative
(which is ironically representing a true 21st century New Deal) by
saying “some are buying their influence by investing in dependence from ports and roads”… but “we go the European way”. What is the “European way”?
Not the development plans of Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer who
envisioned industrial growth and increasing population as positives, but
rather a Green New Deal. Von der Leyen then announced that “I want
Europe to become the first CO2 neutral continent in the world by 2050! I
will put forward a Green New Deal for Europe in my first 100 days in
office…”
Attacking the “mindless forces of the market” and
vested power structures of capitalism are not bad things to do… but why
must we de-carbonize? Re-regulating the too-big-to-fail banks is long
overdue, but why do so many assume that a “Green New Deal” won’t just
empower those same forces that have run havoc upon the world for the
past half century and just cause more death and starvation than has
already been suffered under Globalization?
One might only think to
even ask such questions by first confronting the uncomfortable fact
that behind such young cardboard cut outs as Thunberg, Margolin, Cortez
or the Green New Deal are figures whom one would not associate with
humanitarianism by any measure.
Green Bonds and Oligarchs
When
we begin to pull back the curtain we quickly run into figures like
Prince Charles, who recently met with the heads of 18 Commonwealth
countries to consolidate climate emergency legislation which was
promptly passed in the UK and Canadian Parliaments. At the end of the
meeting Charles said that we “have 18 months to save the world from climate change” and called for “increasing
the amount of private sector finance flowing towards the supporting
sustainable development throughout the commonwealth”.
Following
the royal decree, the Bank of England and some of the dirtiest banks in
the Rothschild-City of London web of finance have promoted “green
financial instruments” led by Green Bonds to redirect pension plans and
mutual funds towards green projects that no one in their right minds
would ever invest in willfully. The Ecological, Social, Governance Index (ESGI)
has now been set up across 51% of Germany’s banks including the
derivatives-bomb waiting to blow named Deutschebank. Leading bankers
supporting the ESGI like Mark Carney of the Bank of England have said
that over 6.5 trillion Euros could be mobilized under this new index
(which currently accounts for about $160 billion). The creation of these
“green bonds” run hand-in-hand with the Bail-in mechanisms which have
now been implemented across the trans-Atlantic nations in order to steal
trillions of dollars of from pension funds, RRSPs and Mutual funds the
next time a bail out is needed to prop up the “too big to fails” which
currently sit atop a $1.2 trillion derivatives bubble waiting to blow.
On top of heading the Bank of England, former Goldman Sachs-man Carney has also endorsed the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures which was created in 2015 and was used as a guideline for the UK government’s July 2019 White Paper “Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a Greener Future”. The White Paper proposed to
“consolidate the UK’s position as a global hub for green finance and
positioning the UK at the head of green financial innovation and data
and analytics… endorsed by institutions representing $118 trillion of
assets globally”. The Carney-led Task Force also spawned the Green Finance Initiative in 2016 which is now a primary vehicle designed to divert international capital flows into green tech.
Carney’s
former employer at Goldman Sachs has also created a “Green Index for
‘virtuous investing” including two new sustainability indices to promote
heavy investment in to green infrastructure called CDP Environment EW and CDP Eurozone EW. The acronym CDP originates from the Climate Disclosure Project –
a London-based think tank that generated Goldman Sachs’ program.
Goldman Sachs’ Marine Abiad promoted the CDP index saying on July 10 “we are convinced that sustainable finance enables financial markets to play a virtuous role in the economy.”
Just
in case you thought the Extinction Rebellion was somehow untouched by
the hand of social engineers, a leading figure behind the movement named
Alex Evans was a former consultant on the Prince’s International Sustainability Unit, and co-author of the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World which became an environmental/foreign policy blueprint for the Obama Administration in 2008. Currently Evans also runs the Collective Psychology Project“where psychology meets politics”.
Other
leading British intelligence figures managing the Extinction Rebellion
movement included Farhana Yamin and Sam Gaell of Chatham House (the
controlling institution behind the New York Council on Foreign
Relations).
Could a ‘Benevolent’ Green Dictatorship be a Good Thing?
The
devil’s advocate speaks: Can’t we presume that these central banks,
oligarchs and hedge fund managers just care about the environment? So what if
they are trying to modify humanity’s behaviour in order to save the
environment? After all, humanity itself is a selfish, gluttonous
pollution-making machine and isn’t better for everyone if those
enlightened elite just transform the world economy so that we consume
less, and think more about the future?
If this line of thinking approximates something you’ve felt inside yourself then you’ve been brainwashed.
Of
course, the world has turned into a consumerist cult over the past few
decades which has sacrificed long term thinking for short term gain and
of course we need a re-organization of the system. Thunberg and the
Green New Dealers aren’t wrong about that stuff. That’s all fine and
dandy.
But if you think that going along with the types of reform
that aspires to put dollar values on reducing carbon footprints or
spreading low quality (and very expensive) windmills and solar panels
across the globe with the expectation that somehow these sources of
energy will not cause a vast collapse of industrial capacity of civilization
(and an associated loss of capacity to sustain human life), then you
are fooling yourself. One kilowatt of windmill energy is only the same
as one kilowatt of nuclear power when applied to a mathematical equation
but not in real life. When applied to capital-intensive work
functions needed to melt industrial steel, run machine tools, power a
vast agro-industrial complex, high speed rail system or construct things
like Belt and Road Initiative, “green” energy sources do not come even
close to cutting the iron.
The issue has always been population control
The
oligarchs running the “grand green design” since the Club of Rome’s Sir
Alexander King began the Limits to Growth study in 1970 knew that green
“low energy flux density” sources of energy would constrict global
population and that is exactly what they wanted. Sir King said so much
in 1990 when he wrote“In
searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that
pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the
like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human
intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that
they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
Sir King was, after all just following the lead of UNESCO founder (and Eugenics president) Sir Julian Huxley who wrote in 1946“Political
unification in some sort of world government will be required… Even
though… any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically
and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see
that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that
the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now
is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
It was only a
few years later that Huxley would co-found the World Wildlife Fund
alongside Prince Philip Mountbatten and Prince Bernhardt of the
Netherlands. All three were present at Bernhardt’s founding meeting of
the Bilderberg group to advance this grand conversion of society into a
willful self-extermination in 1954 and while Huxley wasn’t present in
1970, the other two oligarchs co-founded the 1001 Nature Trust
alongside 999 other wealthy misanthropes to fund the blossoming
environmental movement. These forces were also behind the coup d’état in
America which put the Trilateral Commission in power under Jimmy Carter and unleashed the “controlled disintegration of the US economy” from 1978-1982 (this will be the topic of another study). This grouping, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski not only played the radical Islam card against the Soviet Union,
but also established a program of population reduction through the
promotion of green energy sources long before it was popular.
The
oligarchs that are currently trying to reform humanity today don’t care
about the environment. Prince Philip and Bernhardt have been recorded to
have killed more endangered species on safari than most people have
killed mosquitos. They just don’t like people. Especially thinking
people. Thinking people who question how and why arbitrary rules are
applied to justify wars, poverty and oligarchism which destroys lives
both now and in the future.
The Belt and Road Initiative and the
tendency to grow the human population both quantitatively and
qualitatively which such great projects entail is the target of the
Green New Deal.
The legacy of scientific and technological
progress that launched western civilization out of a dark age and into a
renaissance in the 15th century is under attack because it is that lost
ethic which the oligarchy KNOWS may yet be awoken and which would bring
the west into harmony with the Russia-China program for growth and
development under a philosophy of “win-win cooperation” both on Earth
and also in space.
The
effects of the ideas of the renaissance coincided with the greatest
rate of discoveries of universal principles as mankind sought to come to
know the mind of god by studying the book of nature with a heart of
love and attitude of humility exemplified in the figure of Leonardo Da
Vinci. The explosion of new technologies that arose not only
revolutionized astronomy, medicine and engineering but gave birth to the
modern industrial economy which coincided with the greatest rise of population in history.
This exponential rise has been used by Malthusians for centuries as the
proof that mankind is “just another cancerous growth” on the “purity of
mother Gaia”.
So if you don’t agree with humans=cancer philosophy
and want something a bit more optimistic in your life, then support a
real New Deal today.
Gaslighting America: It’s time to put political purity aside and do what’s right
Yesterday, we witnessed a historic moment: US assistant health secretary Rachel Levine was sworn in
as the first ever female four-star admiral of the Public Health Service
Commissioned Corps. Wait, no. That’s not right… Let me start again.
Yesterday, the man President Joe Biden selected as assistant health secretary became the sixth man to be named four-star admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
Yesterday, America became a laughing
stock, as the president elected by the good people of America (not to be
confused with the bad people of America) and all of mainstream media
presented the appointment of an old, fat white man (with long hair!) as
admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps as a historic
moment.
“Dr. Rachel Levine,
the nation’s most senior transgender official, made history again
Tuesday by becoming the first openly transgender four-star officer
across any of the country’s eight uniformed services,” NBC News reported.
“Dr. Rachel Levine
was sworn in as the first female four-star admiral in the history of
the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a uniformed service
of more than 6,000 health, science and engineering professionals.”
To be fair, they were only repeating what had been announced by the
Biden administration, which was that “Admiral Levine now serves as the
highest ranking official in the USPHS Commissioned Corps and its first
ever female four star admiral.” But to also be fair, it is the job of
the New York Times (and all media) to report the truth, not to simply
parrot whatever the government feeds them. And, to be fair, Rachel
Levine is not female and never will be. And, to be fair, everyone knows
it.
What kind of planet are we living on wherein we all pretend putting
yet another man into a role that has always been filled by men equates to “a giant step forward towards equality as a nation”? Or
“a history-making show of diversity and inclusion”? Has there never
before been a man who enjoys wearing women’s clothing in such a
position? Do they screen men for fetishes before they can be appointed
to admiral? Clearly they don’t screen them for having spent time as
military officers, as Levine has not had any military career to speak
of. I suppose his time spent in dresses makes up for his lack of
service.
To be fair, political appointees are sometimes granted
admiral status, though it is unclear whether or not this is determined
by heroic acts like directing long-term care facilities to accept Covid
patients, leading to the deaths of thousands of elderly people in said
facilities, which Levine did, removing his own mother from her care
home, to be safe. It is also unclear whether one’s belief that giving puberty blockers to kids,
effectively preventing them from developing normally and into healthy
adults, can be “life-saving” qualifies one to such a high rank.
To be fair, I don’t know much about military rankings. But I do know
that adult male fantasies should not be imposed on children. And that
just because an adult male suffers from mental health issues that lead
him to spend an inordinate amount of time and money attempting to
feminize his appearance, it does not mean children should be robbed of
their health and futures. And while I have never been particularly
cognizant of these kinds of appointments, I feel quite strongly that men
who hold dangerous beliefs about children’s health, who are mentally
unwell, and who knowingly make harmful decisions about the lives of
others should not be celebrated or appointed to leadership positions
responsible for responding to health crises on behalf of the federal
government.
Even more troubling, though, is the fact that the President of the
United States has claimed that a male is a female right in front of our
eyes, and believes he will get away with it.
This should come as no surprise, as Joe Biden told Americans what he promised to do, in terms of institutionalizing gender identity ideology, and Americans voted for him anyway.
Progressive Americans rejected the Orange Menace and all those who
did not support the Democrats, as well as rejecting all so-called “right
wing news,” in favour of the outlets now reporting on the “first ever
female four star admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned
Corps.” In many ways, Americans did this to themselves, by playing
purity politics; by failing to reject a political binary maintaining
that there was one Bad Guy and one Good Guy, and that an individual was
also Good or Bad depending on whom he or she voted for; and by propping
up progressive media institutions as legitimate despite their commitment
to lies, because at least they aren’t the Bad Guys.
Is your progressive status really worth your sanity? Is a 1984-style
world wherein war is peace, freedom is slavery, and males are female a
fair exchange for being able to maintain that at least you didn’t vote
for That Man?
To be fair, this is not about Trump being “good,” so much as it is
about Biden and his administration being bad. It is not about suggesting
one should exclusively subscribe to right wing media outlets either. It
is about how our knee-jerk political polarization has become our
destruction. And about how independent thought should take precedence
over virtue signalling and blind allegiance to a political tribe that
threatens to destroy women’s rights, free speech, and society as we know
it.
Women are currently facing the biggest threat to their rights and
dignity they have in decades. A triumph for men is being claimed as a
triumph for women. We are being mocked, publicly and unabashedly. This
is no time for politeness or public self-righteousness. You are not
better for having avoided those outside your political tribe. It is long
past time we learn from our mistakes as current or ex-leftists and
ideologues, which is that doing what is right and telling the truth is
not a partisan matter.
Call me Bad, but I will never vote for anyone who says a man is a
woman, nor will I trust any media outlet or journalist who repeats that.
I will not respect an individual who pretends they cannot differentiate
between male and female or who believes those who do are “bad” or
“mean.” It’s time for the truth and integrity to come first. Otherwise, I
am quite certain we are doomed.
Do you marvel, as I do, at this malignant hive organism — arguably
worse than the Covid-19 chimera virus — that calls itself “Joe Biden?”
The personage of that name is a mere effigy, of course, like one of
those grotesque mummies hoisted above the mob in a religious procession
from some primitive cannibal kingdom. It’s the mob itself that actually
matters, though, the twerking parade of Woke-Progressive Democrats,
because it is bent absolutely on rooting out, punishing, and torturing
its perceived enemies, which in this case are about half the people in
the country. That’s really all it seeks to do. It has never been about
anything else, because, get this: the Woke mob is insane.
But now this other half of the country has raised a war cry, “Let’s
go Brandon,” in objection. In case anyone does not know what the phrase
means, peruse the actual lyrics from one of four rap chants topping the
Apple music charts right now: this ditty by entertainer Loza Alexander:
Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe
Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe
Is that too subtle for anyone? Do you catch the drift? (Know what they sayin’?)
The sentiment is timelier and apparently more popular than “I Want to
Hold Your Hand” was in 1963. America has had enough of the Woke
religious cult and its cavalcade of depravities. America is about to
bum-rush the darn thing, seize the ghastly mummy from its skull-bedecked
palanquin, and knock the living sawdust out of it.
Doings in the Loudon County, VA, school board lately became the
rectified essence of the wild, irresponsible, Woke derangement
overtaking the land. The board authorized a sex education booklet that
instructed teenage boys how to perform oral sex on each other — with
explicit illustrations of one boy on his knees servicing another boy
standing — while the board backed the sowing of maximum gender confusion
among high schoolers who, under the best conditions, have a tough time
adjusting to the hormonal storms of adolescence… all in the name of
promoting a Woke brownie-point-collecting exercise called “Pride Week.”
And guess what? The parents of Loudon County began to object to this… meshugas.
And then the school board proceeded to squash and evade their
objections, and even enlisted that degenerate troll Attorney General
Merrick Garland to intimidate objecting parents with the FBI and federal
writs against “domestic terrorism.” For his trouble, Mr. Garland was
unmasked as a prevaricating tool in a US Senate hearing this week,
nicely captured by the TV cameras so the citizenry could see him in
weaselly operation.
It also came out that twice this fall a teenage boy wearing a skirt — ostensibly gender-confused
in exactly the way promoted by the school board — committed two rapes
of teenage girls in the girls’ bathrooms of two Loudon County schools,
to which he was granted access as someone pretending to bethink himself a
girl — though it turned out he knew quite well how to deploy his male
generative organ. The crimes were reported to the Loudon County
Sheriff’s Office and shared with the County School Superintendent, who
covered it up… not a smooth move, as things turned out, because now the
country can see exactly how criminally dishonest the Wokesters are.
And as all this rolled out, Woke-Progressive Democratic candidate for
Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, made the supernaturally doltish
utterance that “parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach.” His
campaign even put out roadside signs under his name repeating the
statement-of-principle, in case anyone missed it. The result: McAuliffe
dropped about eight points almost overnight in the polls. The voters are
about to pop him out of the political universe like a watermelon seed
between their fingers.
Meanwhile, the mummy known as “Joe Biden” has ventured abroad, first
to Rome to be feted, his handlers thought, by the Pope. But his
excellency Pope Francis ordered the TV cameras turned off, apparently
unwilling to be seen consorting with the inanimate, disintegrating
graven image of a US president — anymore than he would want to be caught
conversing with a statue of the Medici Pope Leo X in his Vatican
garden.
Also meanwhile, the stage managers back at the White House, Chief of
Staff Ron Klain and Susan Rice, shadowy Director of the Domestic Policy
Council, floated an initiative to give half-a-million dollars to each
family member of children and parents who had gotten separated while
attempting to enter the US illegally. That ought to warm the hearts of
US citizens thrown out of their jobs and their livelihoods for demurring
to take a vaccine that doesn’t work and which causes havoc in the
organs, blood vessels, and immune systems of many who have taken it —
against a disease the engineering of which was paid for by their own tax
dollars.
Now, cue the Mother of all Migrant Caravans marching north to the
wide-open US / Mexican border — because “Joe Biden” wants it that way —
just what millions of broke, thrown-out-of-work, soon to freeze and
starve US citizens will be treated to watch on their flat-screens before
the cable service is switched off for non-payment. “Joe Biden” just
wants to rub their faces in it, or rather the folks behind him pulling
his strings want to do that. Maybe the time has come to cut “Joe
Biden’s” strings. And just maybe it’s time to put an end to the Woke
march through our history.
COVID-19 erased the regulatory and trial-related hurdles that
Moderna could never surmount before. Yet, how did Moderna know that
COVID-19 would create those conditions months before anyone else, and
why did they later claim that their vaccine being tested in NIH trials
was different than their commercial candidate?
In late 2019, the biopharmaceutical company Moderna was facing a
series of challenges that not only threatened its ability to ever take a
product to market, and thus turn a profit, but its very existence as a
company. There were multiple warning signs that Moderna was essentially
another Theranos-style fraud, with many of these signs growing in
frequency and severity as the decade drew to a close. Part I of
this three-part series explored the disastrous circumstances in which
Moderna found itself at that time, with the company’s salvation hinging
on the hope of a divine miracle, a “Hail Mary” save of sorts, as stated
by one former Moderna employee.
While the COVID-19 crisis that emerged in the first part of 2020 can
hardly be described as an act of benevolent divine intervention for
most, it certainly can be seen that way from Moderna’s perspective. Key
issues for the company, including seemingly insurmountable regulatory
hurdles and its inability to advance beyond animal trials with its most
promising—and profitable—products, were conveniently wiped away, and not
a moment too soon. Since January 2020, the value of Moderna’s
stock—which had embarked on a steady decline since its IPO—grew from
$18.89 per share to its current value of $339.57 per share, thanks to
the success of its COVID-19 vaccine.
Yet, how exactly was Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment realized, and what
were the forces and events that ensured it would make it through the
FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) process? In examining that
question, it becomes quickly apparent that Moderna’s journey of saving
grace involved much more than just cutting corners in animal and human
trials and federal regulations. Indeed, if we are to believe Moderna
executives, it involved supplying formulations for some trial studies
that were not the same as their COVID-19 vaccine commercial
candidate, despite the data resulting from the former being used to sell
Moderna’s vaccine to the public and federal health authorities. Such
data was also selectively released at times to align with preplanned
stock trades by Moderna executives, turning many of Moderna’s
highest-ranking employees into millionaires, and even billionaires,
while the COVID-19 crisis meant economic calamity for most Americans.
Not only that, but—as Part II of this three-part series will show,
Moderna and a handful of its collaborators at the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) seemed to know that Moderna’s miracle had arrived—well
before anyone else knew or could have known. Was it really a
coincidental mix of “foresight” and “serendipity” that led Moderna and
the NIH to plan to develop a COVID-19 vaccine days before the viral
sequence was even published and months before a vaccine was even
considered necessary for a still unknown disease? If so, why would
Moderna—a company clearly on the brink—throw everything into and gamble
the entire company on a vaccine project that had no demonstrated need at
the time?
The Serendipitous Origins of Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine
When early January 2020 brought news of a novel coronavirus outbreak
originating in Wuhan, China, Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bancel immediately
emailed Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at
the National Institutes of Health, and asked to be sent the genetic
sequence for what would become known as SAR-CoV-2, allegedly because
media reports on the outbreak “troubled”
him. The date of that email varies according to different media
reports, though most place it as having been sent on either January 6th
or 7th.
A few weeks before Bancel’s email to Graham, Moderna was quickly approaching the end of the line, their desperately needed “Hail Mary”
still not having materialized. “We were freaked out about money,”
Stephen Hoge would later remember of Moderna’s late 2019 circumstances.
Not only were executives “cutting back on research and other
expenditures” like never before, but – as STAT News
would later report – “cash from investors had stopped pouring in and
partnerships with some drug makers had been discontinued. In meetings at
Moderna, Bancel emphasized the need to stretch every dollar and
employees were told to reduce travel and other expenses, a frugality
there were advised would last several years.”
At the tail end of 2019, Graham was in a very different mood than Bancel, having emailed
the leader of the coronavirus team at his NIH lab saying, “Get ready
for 2020,” apparently viewing the news out of Wuhan in late 2019 as a
harbinger of something significant. He went on, in the days before he
was contacted by Bancel, to “run a drill he had been turning over in his
mind for years” and called his long-time colleague Jason McLellan “to
talk about the game plan” for getting a head start on producing a
vaccine the world did not yet know it needed. When Bancel called Graham
soon afterward and asked about this new virus, Graham responded that he
didn’t know yet but that “they were ready if it turned out to be a
coronavirus.” The Washington Post
claimed that Graham’s apparent foreknowledge that a coronavirus vaccine
would be needed before anyone officially knew what type of disease was
circulating in Wuhan was a fortunate mix of “serendipity and
foresight.”
Dr. Barney Graham and Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, VRC coronavirus vaccine
lead, discuss COVID-19 research with U.S. legislators Sen. Chris Van
Hollen, Sen. Benjamin Cardin and Rep. Jamie Raskin, March 6, 2020; Source: NIH
A report in Boston magazine offers a slightly different account than that reported by the WashingtonPost.
Per that article, Graham had told Bancel, “If [the virus] is a
coronavirus, we know what to do and have proven mRNA is effective.” Per
that report, this assertion of efficacy from Graham referred to
Moderna’s early stage human-trial data
published in September 2019 regarding its chikungunya vaccine
candidate, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), as well as its cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine candidate.
As mentioned in Part I
of this series, the chikungunya vaccine study data released at that
time included the participation of just four subjects, three of whom
developed significant side effects that led Moderna to state that they
would reformulate the vaccine in question and would pause trials on that
vaccine candidate. In the case of the CMV vaccine candidate, the data
was largely positive, but it was widely noted that the vaccine still
needed to pass through larger and longer clinical trials before its
efficacy was in fact “proven,” as Graham later claimed. In addition,
Graham implied that this early stage trial of Moderna’s CMV vaccine
candidate was somehow proof that an mRNA vaccine would be effective
against coronaviruses, which makes little sense since CMV is not a
coronavirus but instead hails from the family of viruses that includes
chickenpox, herpes, and shingles.
Bancel apparently had reached out to Graham because Graham and his
team at the NIH had been working in direct partnership with Moderna on
vaccines since 2017, soon after Moderna had delayed its Crigler-Najjar
and related therapies in favor of vaccines. According to Boston magazine,
Moderna had been working closely with Graham specifically “on
[Moderna’s] quest to bring a whole new class of vaccines to market” and
Graham had personally visited
Moderna’s facilities in November 2019. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director
of the NIH’s infectious-disease division NIAID, has called his unit’s
collaboration with Moderna, in the years prior to and also during the
COVID-19 crisis, “most extraordinary.”
The year 2017, besides being the year when Moderna made its pivot to
vaccines (due to its inability to produce safe multidose therapies, see Part I), was also a big year for Graham. That year he and his lab filed a patent
for the “2P mutation” technique whereby recombinant coronavirus spike
proteins can be stabilized in a prefusion state and used as more
effective immunogens. If a coronavirus vaccine were to be produced using
this patent, Graham’s team would financially benefit, though federal
law caps their annual royalties. Nonetheless, it would still yield a
considerable sum for the named researchers, including Graham.
However, due to the well-known difficulties with coronavirus vaccine
development, including antibody dependent enhancement risk, it seemed
that commercial use of Graham’s patent was a pipe dream. Yet, today, the 2P mutation patent,
also known as the ’070 patent, is not just in use in Moderna’s COVID-19
vaccine, but also in the COVID-19 vaccines produced by Johnson &
Johnson, Novavax, Pfizer/BioNTech, and CureVac. Experts at New York
University School of Law have noted
that the 2P mutation patent first filed in 2016 “sounds remarkably
prescient” in light of the COVID crisis that emerged a few years later
while later publications from the NIH (still pre-COVID) revealed that
the NIH’s view on “the breadth and importance of the ’070 patent” as
well as its potential commercial applications was also quite prescient,
given that there was little justification at the time to hold such a
view.
On January 10, three days after the reported initial conversation
between Bancel and Graham on the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan,
China, Graham met with Hamilton Bennett, the program leader for
Moderna’s vaccine portfolio. Graham asked Bennett “if Moderna would be
interested in using the new [novel coronavirus] to test the company’s
accelerated vaccine-making capabilities.” According to Boston,
Graham then mused, “That way . . . if ever there came a day when a new
virus emerged that threatened global public health, Moderna and the NIH
could know how long it would take them to respond.”
Graham’s “musings” to Bennett are interesting considering his earlier
statements made to others, such as “Get ready for 2020” and his team,
in collaboration with Moderna, would be “ready if [the virus then
circulating in Wuhan, China] turned out to be a coronavirus.” Is this
merely “serendipity” and “foresight”, as the Washington Post
suggested, or was it something else? It is worth noting that the above
accounts are those that have been given by Bancel and Graham themselves,
as the actual contents of these critical January 2020 emails have not
been publicly released.
When the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was published on January 11,
NIH scientists and Moderna researchers got to work determining which
targeted genetic sequence would be used in their vaccine candidate.
Later reports, however, claimed that this initial work toward a COVID-19
vaccine was merely intended to be a “demonstration project.”
Other odd features of the Moderna-NIH COVID-19 vaccine-development story emerged with Bancel’s account
of the role the World Economic Forum played in shaping his “foresight”
when it came to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine back in January
2020. On January 21, 2020, Bancel reportedly began to hear
about “a far darker version of the future” at the World Economic Forum
(WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where he spent time with
“two [anonymous] prominent infectious-disease experts from Europe” who
shared with him data from “their contacts on the ground in China,
including Wuhan.” That data, pBancel, showed a dire situation that
left his mind “reeling” and led him to conclude, that very day, that
“this isn’t going to be SARS. It’s going to be the 1918 flu pandemic.”
er
Stéphane Bancel speaks at the Breakthroughs in Cancer Care session at WEF annual meeting, January 24, 2020; Source: WEF
This realization is allegedly what led Bancel to contact Moderna cofounder and chairman, as well as a WEF technology pioneer,
Noubar Afeyan. Bancel reportedly interrupted Afeyan’s celebration of
his daughter’s birthday to tell him “what he’d learned about the virus”
and to suggest that “Moderna begin to build the vaccine—for real.” The
next day, Moderna held an executive meeting, which Bancel attended
remotely, and there was considerable internal debate about whether a
vaccine for the novel coronavirus would be needed. To Bancel, the “sheer
act of debating” pursuing a vaccine for the virus was “absurd” given
that he was now convinced, after a single day at Davos, that “a global
pandemic was about to descend like a biblical plague, and whatever
distractions the vaccine caused internally at Moderna were irrelevant.”
Bancel spent the rest of his time at the Davos annual meeting
“building partnerships, generating excitement, and securing funding,”
which led to the Moderna collaboration agreement with the Coalition for
Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—a project largely funded by Bill
Gates. (Bancel and Moderna’s cozy relationship with the WEF, dating back
to 2013, was discussed in Part I as were the Forum’s efforts, beginning well before COVID-19, to promote mRNA-based therapies as essential
to the remaking of the health-care sector in the age of the so-called
Fourth Industrial Revolution). At the 2020 annual meeting attended by
Bancel and others it was noted that a major barrier to the widespread
adoption of these and other related “health-care” technologies was
“public distrust.” The panel where that issue was specifically discussed
was entitled “When Humankind Overrides Evolution.”
As also noted in Part I
of this series, a few months earlier, in October 2019, major players in
what would become the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, particularly Rick
Bright and Anthony Fauci, had discussed during a Milken Institute panel
on vaccines how a “disruptive” event would be needed to push the public
to accept “nontraditional” vaccines such as mRNA vaccines; to convince
the public that flu-like illnesses are scarier than traditionally
believed; and to remove existing bureaucratic safeguards in the vaccine
development-and-approval processes.
That panel took place less than two weeks after the Event 201
simulation, jointly hosted by the World Economic Forum, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health
Security. Event 201 simulated
“an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus” that was “modeled largely
on SARS but . . . more transmissible in the community setting by people
with mild symptoms.” The recommendations
of the simulation panel were to considerably increase investment in new
vaccine technologies and industrial approaches, favoring rapid vaccine
development and manufacturing. As mentioned in Part I,
the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security had also conducted the
June 2001 Dark Winter simulation that briefly preceded and predicted
major aspects of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and some of its participants
had apparent foreknowledge of those attacks. Other Dark Winter
participants later worked to sabotage the FBI investigation into those
attacks after their origin was traced back to a US military source.
It is hard to imagine that Bancel, whose company had long been
closely partnered with the World Economic Forum and the Gates
Foundation, was unaware of the exercise and surprised by the closely
analogous event that transpired within three months. Given the accounts
given by Bancel, Graham, and others, it seems likely there is more to
the story regarding the origins of Moderna’s early and “serendipitous”
push to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, given that Moderna was
in dire financial circumstances at the time, it seems odd that the
company would gamble everything on a vaccine project that was opposed
by the few investors that were still willing to fund Moderna in
January/February 2020. Why would they divert their scant resources
towards a project born only out of Barney Graham’s “musings” that
Moderna could try to test the speed of its vaccine development
capabilities and Bancel’s doomsday view that a “biblical plague” was
imminent, especially when their investors opposed the idea?
Moderna Gets to Bypass Its Long-Standing Issues with R & D
Moderna produced the first batch of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate on
February 7, one month after Bancel and Graham’s initial conversation.
After a sterility test and other mandatory tests, the first batch of its
vaccine candidate, called mRNA-1273, shipped to the NIH on February 24. For the first time in a long time,
Moderna’s stock price surged. NIH researchers administered the first
dose of the candidate into a human volunteer less than a month later, on
March 16.
Controversially, in order to begin its human trial on March 16,
regulatory agencies had to allow Moderna to bypass major aspects of
traditional animal trials, which many experts and commentators noted was
highly unusual
but was now deemed necessary due to the urgency of the crisis. Instead
of developing the vaccine in distinct sequential stages, as is the
custom, Moderna “decided to do all of the steps [relating to animal
trials] simultaneously.”
In other words, confirming that the candidate is working before
manufacturing an animal-grade vaccine, conducting animal trials,
analyzing the animal-trial data, manufacturing a vaccine for use in
human trials, and beginning human trials were all conducted
simultaneously by Moderna. Thus, the design of human trials for the
Moderna vaccine candidate was not informed by animal-trial data.
Lt. Javier Lopez Coronado and Hospitalman Francisco Velasco inspect a
box of COVID-19 vaccine vials at the Naval Health Clinic in Corpus
Christi, TX, December 2020; Source: Wikimedia
This should have been a major red flag, given Moderna’s persistent
difficulties in getting its products past animal trials. As noted in Part I,
up until the COVID-19 crisis, most of Moderna’s experiments and
products had only been tested in animals, with only a handful able to
make it to human trials. In the case of the Crigler-Najjar therapy that
it was forced to indefinitely delay, toxicity concerns related to the
mRNA delivery system being used had emerged in the animal trials, which
Moderna was now greenlighted to largely skip. Given that Moderna had
subsequently been forced to abandon all multidose products because of
poor results in animal trials, being allowed to skip this formerly
insurmountable obstacle was likely seen as a boon to some at the
company. It is also astounding that, given Moderna’s history with
problematic animal trials, more scrutiny was not devoted to the
regulatory decision to allow Moderna to essentially skip such trials.
Animal studies conducted on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine did identify
problems that should have informed human trials, but this did not happen
because of the regulatory decision. For example, animal reproductive
toxicity studies on the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine that are cited by the
European Medicines Agency found that there was reduced fertility in rats
that received the vaccine (e. g., overall pregnancy index of 84.1% in
vaccinated rats versus 93.2% in the unvaccinated) as well as an
increased proportion of aberrant bone development in their fetuses. That
study has been criticized
for failing to report on the accumulation of vaccine in the placenta as
well as failing to investigate the effect of vaccine doses administered
during key pregnancy milestones, such as embryonic organogenesis. In
addition, the number of animals tested is unstated, making the
statistical power of the study unknown. At the very least, the 9 percent
drop in the fertility index among vaccinated rats should have prompted
expanded animal trials to investigate concerns of reproductive toxicity
before testing in humans.
Yet, Moderna declined to further investigate reproductive toxicity in
animal trials and entirely excluded reproductive toxicity studies from
its simultaneous human trials, as pregnant women were excluded from
participation in the clinical trials of its vaccine. Despite this,
pregnant women were labeled a priority group for receiving the vaccine
after Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) was granted for the Moderna and
Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. Per the New England Journal of Medicine,
this meant that “pregnant women and their clinicians were left to weigh
the documented risks of Covid-19 infection against the unknown safety
risks of vaccination in deciding whether to receive the vaccine.”
Moderna only began recruiting for an “observational pregnancy outcome
study” of its COVID-19 vaccine in humans in mid-July 2021, and that
study is projected to conclude in early 2024. Nevertheless, the Centers for Disease Control recommends
the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in “people who are pregnant,
breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in
the future.” This recommendation is largely based on the CDC’s publication of preliminary data
on mRNA COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant women in June 2021, which
is based on passive reporting systems in use within the United States
(i. e., VAERS and v-safe).
Even in the limited scope of this study, 115 of the 827 women who had
a completed pregnancy during the study lost the baby, 104 of which were
spontaneous abortions before 20 weeks of gestation. Of these 827
pregnant women, only 127 had received a mRNA vaccine before the 3rd
trimester. This appears to suggest an increased risk among those women
who took the vaccine before the 3rd trimester, but the selective nature
of the data makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions.
Despite claims
from the New England Journal of Medicine that the study’s data was
“reassuring”, the study’s authors ultimately stated that their study,
which mainly looked at women who began vaccination in the third
trimester, was unable to draw “conclusions about spontaneous abortions,
congenital anomalies, and other potential rare neonatal outcomes.” This
is just one example of the problems caused by “cutting corners” with
respect to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine trials in humans and animals,
including those conducted by the NIH.
Meanwhile, throughout February, March and April, Bancel was “begging for money”
as Moderna reportedly lacked “enough money to buy essential ingredients
for the shots” and “needed hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps
even more than a billion dollars” to manufacture its vaccine, which had
only recently begun trials. Bancel, whose tenure at Moderna had long
been marked by his ability to charm investors, kept coming up
empty-handed.
Then, in mid-April 2020, Moderna’s long-time cooperation with the US
government again paid off when Health and Human Services Biomedical
Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awarded the company $483 million
to “accelerate the development of its vaccine candidate for the novel
coronavirus.” A year later, the amount invested in Moderna’s COVID-19
vaccine by the US government had grown to about $6 billion dollars, just $1.5 billion short of the company’s entire value at the time of its pre-COVID IPO.
BARDA, throughout 2020, was directly overseen by the HHS Office of
the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), led by the
extremely corrupt Robert Kadlec,
who had spent roughly the last two decades designing BARDA and helping
shape legislation that concentrated many of the emergency powers of HHS
under the Office of the ASPR. Conveniently, Kadlec occupied the powerful
role of ASPR that he had spent years sculpting at the exact moment when
the pandemic, which he had simulated the previous year via Crimson
Contagion, took place. As mentioned in Part I, he was also a key participant in the June 2001 Dark Winter exercise. In his capacity as ASPR during 2020, Kadlec oversaw nearly all major aspects of the HHS COVID-19 response
and had a key role in BARDA’s funding decisions during that period, as
well as in the affairs of the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration
as they related to COVID-19 medical countermeasures, including
vaccines.
On May 1, 2020, Moderna announced a ten-year manufacturing agreement
with the Lonza Group, a multinational chemical and biotech company based
in Switzerland. Per the agreement, Lonza would build out vaccine
production sites for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, first in the US and
Switzerland, before expanding to Lonza’s facilities in other countries.
The scale of production discussed in the agreement was to produce 1
billion doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine annually. It was
claimed that the ten-year agreement would also focus on other products,
even though it was well known at the time that other Moderna products
were “nowhere close to being ready for the market.” Moderna executives would later state that they were still scrambling for the cash to manufacture doses at the time the agreement with Lonza was made.
The decision to forge a partnership to produce that quantity of doses
annually suggests marvelous foresight on the part of Moderna and Lonza
that the COVID-19 vaccine would become an annual or semiannual affair,
given that current claims of waning immunity could not have been known
back then because initial trials of the Moderna vaccine had begun less
than two months earlier and there was still no published data on its
efficacy or safety. However, as will be discussed Part III of this
series, Moderna needs to sell “pandemic level” quantities of its
COVID-19 vaccine every year in order to avoid a return of the
existential crises it faced before COVID-19 (for more on those crises,
see Part I).
The implications of this, given Moderna’s previous inability to produce
a safe product for multidosing and lack of evidence that past issues
were addressed in the development of its COVID-19 vaccine, will also be
discussed in Part III of this series.
It is also noteworthy that, like Moderna, Lonza as a company and its leaders
are closely affiliated with the World Economic Forum. In addition, at
the time the agreement was reached in May 2020, Moncef Slaoui, the
former GlaxoSmithKline executive, served on the boards of both Moderna and Lonza.
Slaoui withdrew from the boards of both companies two weeks after the
agreement was reached to become the head of the US-led
vaccination-development drive Operation Warp Speed. Moderna praised Slaoui’s appointment to head the vaccination project.
By mid-May, Moderna’s stock price—whose steady decline before COVID-19 was detailed in Part I
—had tripled since late February 2020, all on high hopes for its
COVID-19 vaccine. Since Moderna’s stock had begun to surge in February, media reports noted
that “nearly every progress update—or media appearance by Moderna CEO
Stephane Bancel—has been gobbled up by investors, who seem to have an
insatiable appetite for the stock.” Bancel’s tried-and-tested method of
keeping Moderna afloat on pure hype, though it was faltering before
COVID-19, was again paying off for the company thanks to the global
crisis and related panic.
Some critics did emerge, however, calling Moderna’s now $23 billion valuation “insane,”
especially considering that the company had posted a net loss of $514
million the previous year and had yet to produce a safe or effective
medicine since its founding a decade earlier. In January 2020, Moderna
had been worth a mere $5 billion, $2 billion less than its valuation at
its December 2018 IPO. If it hadn’t been for the onset of the COVID
crisis and a fresh injection of hype, it seems that Moderna’s valuation
would have continued to shrink. Yet, thankfully for Moderna, investors
were valuing Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine even before the release of any
clinical data. Market analysts at the time were forecasting
Moderna’s 2022 revenue at about $1 billion, a figure based almost
entirely on coronavirus vaccine sales, since all other Moderna products
were years away from a market debut. Yet, even with this forecasted
revenue, Moderna’s stock value in mid-May 2020 was trading at twenty-three times its projected sales, a phenomenon unique to Moderna among biotech stocks at the time. For comparison, the other highest multiples
in biotech at the time were Vertex Pharmaceutical and Seattle Genetics,
which were then trading at nine and twelve times their projected
revenue, respectively. Now, with the implementation of booster shot
policies around the world, revenue forecasts for Moderna now predict the
company will make a staggering $35 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales through next year.
Moderna’s surging stock price went into overdrive when, on May 18,
2020, the company published “positive” interim data for a phase 1 trial
of its COVID-19 vaccine. The results generated great press, public
enthusiasm, and a 20 percent boost in Moderna’s stock price. Just hours after the press release, Moderna announced
a new effort to raise $1.3 billion by selling more stock. It has since
been revealed that that Moderna had hired Morgan Stanley to manage that
stock sale on May 15.
However, left largely unmentioned by the press or Moderna itself was
that the ostensibly “scientific study” only provided data from 8 of the
45 volunteers—4 volunteers each from the 15- and 100-microgram dose
cohorts—regarding the development of neutralizing antibodies. The age of
these mysteriously selected 8 volunteers was also not published, and
other key data was missing, making it
“impossible to know whether mRNA-1273 [Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine] was
ineffective [in the remaining 37 volunteers whose antibody data was not
disclosed], or whether the results were not available at this point.”
Meanwhile, in the highest-dose cohort, in which volunteers received 250
micrograms, 21 percent of volunteers experienced a grade 3 adverse
event, which is defined by the FDA as “preventing daily activity and
requiring medical intervention.”
STAT published a report
the next day that was skeptical of Moderna’s press release and seemed
to imply the data release was aimed at boosting the company’s stock
valuation, which hit $29 billion after the news. STAT reporter
Helen Branswell called this jump in valuation “an astonishing feat for a
company that currently sells zero products.” Branswell’s report noted
several things, including that several vaccine experts had noted that
“based on the information made available [by Moderna], there’s really no
way to know how impressive—or not—the vaccine may be.” Moderna later defended
its withholding of key data in the press release, claiming that it was
done to respect “federal securities laws and the rules of scientific
journals” and to prevent a potential leak of the data from insiders at
the NIH. Moderna executives have more recently claimed
that the “timely” release of these selective data had been linked to
their “desperate” fundraising efforts at the time and ultimately
prevented them from “losing” the COVID-19 vaccine race.
The STAT report also noted that the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which was running the trial
referenced by Moderna in the press release, was completely silent on the
matter, declining to put out a press release that day and declining to
comment on Moderna’s announcement. This was described as
uncharacteristic for NIAID, especially considering they were the part of
the NIH co-developing the vaccine with Moderna and running the trial. STAT
noted that, normally, “NIAID doesn’t hide its light under a bushel. The
institute generally trumpets its findings.” In this case, however, they
declined to do so. It emerged in early June 2020 that Dr. Anthony
Fauci, who leads NIAID, had been displeased with Moderna’s decision to
publish incomplete data on the trial, telling STATthat
he would have preferred “to wait until we had the data from the entire
Phase 1 . . . and publish it in a reputable journal and show all the
data.”
Tal Tal Zaks, Chief Scientific Officer at Moderna; Source: The Forward
It subsequently emerged that Moderna’s top executives, including
chief financial officer Lorence Kim and chief scientific officer Tal
Zaks, had used their insider knowledge
of the coming press release to trade company stock that netted them
several million each following the jump in Moderna’s stock that resulted
from the press release’s positive buzz. A little over a week after the
press release had been published, STAT reported
that the top five Moderna executives had cashed out $89 million in
shares since the company’s stock price had begun to soar earlier in the
year. Per that report, the amount of trades by these five executives
alone between January and May 2020 was “nearly three times as many stock
transactions than in all of 2019.” By September 2020, the amount of
stock shed by Moderna executives amounted to $236 million. Less criticized or even mentioned by the press was Moderna’s move, less than a month later, to create a tax haven in Europe for its European COVID-19 vaccine sales.
Though the trades were deemed slimy but legal, mainstream media reports essentially confirmed
that the early release of the interim data was planned to “raise the
share price of Moderna’s stock so that executives could cash in during
the period of euphoria” that followed. Some watchdog groups
called on the SEC to investigate Moderna executives for manipulating
the stock market. The critical reporting on executive stock trades and
Moderna’s release of incomplete data led the company’s stock to
temporarily trend downward
throughout the rest of May. As previously mentioned, Moderna has
repeatedly attempted to explain away the timing of this particular press
release, offering new explanations as recently as this week.
Moderna’s Shocking Claim about Its Vaccine Candidate
In mid-June 2020, researchers at the NIH and Moderna published a manuscript preprint
of preclinical data for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. This preprint
described the vaccine as employing a delivery system covered in a patent
owned by the company Arbutus Biopharma and described the results of
that vaccine in tests on mice. As discussed in Part I,
Moderna has long been locked in a bitter legal dispute with Arbutus,
which has threatened Moderna’s ability to ever turn a profit on any
product that relies on Arbutus-patented technology regarding lipid
nanoparticle (LNP) delivery systems for its mRNA products. Moderna has
claimed for years it was no longer using the Arbutus-derived system on
which it once entirely relied, with Bancel even going so far as to
publicly call it “not very good.” However, Moderna has provided no real
evidence that it no longer relies on the technology covered in the
Arbutus patents. The June 2020 manuscript preprint from the NIH and
Moderna provided evidence indicating that the same Arbutus-derived
technology that had caused major toxicity issues in multidose products
Moderna had previously attempted to develop was also being used in
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
Yet, when Moderna’s chief corporate affairs officer, Ray Jordan, was challenged on this point by Forbes,
Jordan asserted that the preprint’s data had been generated using a
formulation of a COVID-19 vaccine that is not the same as the vaccine
itself, stating, “While the authors of the preprint used the term
‘mRNA-1273’ for convenience of the reader, the preprint does not
describe the cGMP process by which we make our messenger RNA and LNP or
the final drug product composition in our commercial candidate
(mRNA-1273).” When Forbes asked Jordan if he could provide any
specifics, including the LNP molar ratio of the new LNP technology to
prove that the LNPs in use in the COVID-19 vaccine were in fact
different from those covered by the Arbutus patent, Jordan flat out
refused.
Arbutus Biopharma’s office in Warminster, Pennsylvania; Source: Philadelphia Business Journal
Despite Jordan’s claims, a Moderna preclinical study regarding its COVID-19 vaccine was published a month later, and
that July study noted that the Moderna vaccine used LNPs as described
in a 2019 paper, which in turn reveals that the LNPs in question were
the same as those used in the June study. This paper included the
results from the study originally promoted by Moderna in May that led to
a jump in Moderna’s stock price. Now published in full, the study generated lots of positive press, including a statement
from the NIAID’s Fauci that “no matter how you slice this, this is good
news.” A jump in US government funding of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine also shortly followed the study’s publication. At the time, CBS News remarked
that Moderna’s stock price, which had been sliding since its late 2018
IPO, had been essentially rescued by the COVID-19 crisis, as “shares of
Moderna—which has never brought a product to market over its ten-year
existence—have soared as much as 380 percent since the start of the year
as news emerged [in January] of its promising potential for producing a
vaccine. [Moderna’s] stock price was less than $20 in early January and
around $95 on Friday [July 17, 2020].” Today, by comparison, Moderna
has consistently been trading above $300 a share.
Yet, if we take Ray Jordan at his word with respect to the preprint
published in June, Moderna appears to have been engaged in rather slimy
behavior. If Jordan was telling the truth, it appears that this July
study, which appears to use the vaccine candidate containing the same
LNPs as those described in the June 2020 preprint, also used a
formulation not consistent with the company’s commercial vaccine
candidate. If so, given that the July study was the same study
referenced by Moderna’s controversial May press release tied to insider
stock trades, Moderna appears to have used “positive” data generated by a
vaccine candidate other than its commercial vaccine candidate to boost
stock prices and ameliorate the company’s financial situation while also
generating millions for executives. This, of course, says nothing about
the separate but critically important issue that the vaccine candidate
used in these studies, including the NIH study, is not necessarily the same as the commercial candidate used in clinical trials.
It seems that the only reason that Moderna would make such an outrageous claim to Forbes
would be to distance its COVID-19 vaccine from its past controversies
that largely have their root in Moderna’s LNP-related problems, which it
had claimed to have already resolved. It is not clear if the motive
behind such a gambit is principally related to the legal dispute with
Arbutus or the past safety issues Moderna encountered with multidose
therapies.
Adding to the confusion about the LNPs in use in Moderna’s products is that, a few days earlier in July, Moderna had published results
on a separate vaccine candidate, this one for HIV, that appeared to use
the exact same LNP technology that is covered by the Arbutus patent.
The LNPs described in that study included the same components as those
described in the Arbutus patent and the same molar ratio. Moderna appeared to be referencing
this issue in their August 6, 2020, SEC filing, which states: “There
are many issued and pending third-party patents that claim aspects of
oligonucleotide delivery technologies that we may need for our mRNA
therapeutic and vaccine candidates or marketed products, including
mRNA-1273, if approved.”
By the end of 2020, Moderna claimed in a December filing with the SEC
that, while it had “initially used LNP formulations that were based on
known lipid systems,” that is, the Arbutus LNPs, it had “invested
heavily in delivery science and ha[s] developed LNP technologies, as
well as alternative nanoparticle approaches.” Despite the claims it made
in this filing, however, it remained unclear as to whether the
company’s COVID-19 vaccine was using Arbutus technology or the
technology it purported to have developed on its own without infringing
on Arbutus’s intellectual property.
Moderna’s claims that it now uses a different LNP system than the one
that caused such major issues is based on the company’s development and
implementation of a lipid structure now known as SM-102. This lipid
structure was first revealed by Moderna in a 2019 publication
under the name Lipid H, and, in that paper and since, Moderna has
claimed that its LNP system is now superior to that which it previously
used because it is using SM-102 instead of the original Arbutus lipids.
However, it is critical to note that Moderna’s use of SM-102 does not
necessarily mean the company is not violating the Arbutus patents, which
cover the use of LNPs that combine cationic and PEGylated lipids in
specific proportions.
Despite claims from Moderna that SM-102 resolved both the company’s
patent-related and toxicity issues with its LNP system (as discussed in Part I), Moderna has declined to disclose
SM-102’s exact structure or whether it carries a net positive charge at
physiological pH, the latter of which could lead to proof of continued
infringement on the Arbutus patent. In addition, there are no studies on
the distribution, degradation, and/or elimination of SM-102 from the
body, meaning that the accumulation of the lipids or their capacity to
damage organs is not documented. The obvious lack of study of SM-102’s
properties and effects on the human body was largely circumvented by
public health authorities during the emergency approval process by using
the same criteria for the Moderna vaccine candidate that is used for
traditional vaccines that do not utilize the novel mRNA approach. These
“traditional” criteria therefore do not include any requirements for
data on LNP safety.
Overall, the evidence seems to point toward Moderna’s claims that its
COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t use Arbutus-derived LNPs as being false. The
other possibility is that Moderna attempted to modify the LNP system but
only slightly so that potential identifiers, such as the molar ratio,
remained the same. In this case, Arbutus could still claim that the LNPs
currently in use by Moderna and in its COVID-19 vaccine infringe on
their patent. It is also thus likely that the safety issues Moderna had
acknowledged with this LNP system were largely unaffected if the
potential modifications were indeed minor. Yet, if either of these
scenarios is correct, the question becomes – Why wouldn’t Arbutus
challenge Moderna once again to obtain royalty payments stemming from
its COVID-19 vaccine?
The answer seems to lie mostly in optics and public relations. As STAT wrote
last July, were Arbutus to sue Moderna over patent infringement in the
midst of the COVID-19 crisis, “that would mean taking the substantial
risk that it would be perceived as a company holding up a desperately
needed medicine out of concern for its bottom line.” This also seemed to
be part of the motive behind Moderna’s altruistically framed promise
not to enforce its own COVID-19–related patents until the pandemic is
declared over. Observers have noted that this move by Moderna was not
only a public relations boon for the company but also “set a disarming
tone in the space that may serve to deter others in the space [e. g.,
Arbutus] from acting too defensively or aggressively,” largely due to
“fear of the potential public relations backlash.”
While July 2020 brought a surge in valuation and positive press for Moderna and its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, it also brought an unfavorable ruling
for Moderna in its long-running dispute with Arbutus, one that opened
the door for Arbutus to file an injunction against Moderna’s COVID-19
vaccine, if they chose, to force the negotiation of a license with
Moderna. The news led to Moderna’s stock price falling by 10 percent,
wiping out $3 billion in value. However, most likely for the reasons
outlined above, Arbutus ultimately declined to jump on the decision to
block Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine from advancing in the hopes of securing
royalties. Yet, they reserve the ability to do so, if and when the
perceived urgency of the COVID-19 crisis fades.
Ray Jordan, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Moderna; Source: PRSA
Moderna has asserted that the decision would not affect its COVID-19
vaccine as the company was “not aware of any significant intellectual
property impediments for any products we intend to commercialize.” Thus,
Ray Jordan’s assertions and the lack of “clear and convincing”
evidence that Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine relies on Arbutus-patented
technology appears to have been sufficient for Moderna to make this
claim. This seems to be due to a lack of interest by the mainstream
media or federal agencies/regulators in demanding concrete evidence that
Moderna’s LNP system used in its COVID-19 vaccine does not rely on
Arbutus-patented technology.
Despite the issues raised above in relation to the vaccine study data
published in June and July, the positive press attention—particularly
after the July publication—translated just a month later into the US
government entering into a significant supply agreement
with Moderna on August 11, 2020. Per that agreement, the government
would pay $1.525 billion for 100 million doses with the option to
purchase an additional 400 million doses in the future, all of which it
has since purchased.
Per Moderna’s press release, the agreement meant that the US government
had, by that point, paid $2.48 billion for “early access” to Moderna’s
COVID-19 vaccine.
Roughly a month later, it was revealed that the US government had been paying for much more. On September 10, 2020, BARDA joined
long-time Moderna funder and “strategic ally” DARPA in scrutinizing
contracts that had been awarded to the company due to Moderna’s failure
to disclose the role government support had played in its numerous
patent applications. The announcement came after Knowledge Ecology
International (KEI), which advocates for protecting taxpayer investments
in patents, found that none of the patents or applications
assigned to Moderna in the company’s entire history had disclosed the
considerable US government funding it had received at the time those
patents were filed, which is required by the 1980 Bayh-Doyle Act and by
the regulations of the Patent and Trademark Office. Per KEI, this
translates into the US government owning certain rights over the
patents, and thus US taxpayers may have an ownership stake in vaccines
made and sold by Moderna.
Despite the clear evidence that Moderna failed to disclose the
considerable amount of US government funding prior to and during the
COVID crisis in its patent applications, Moderna responded to KEI and
the BARDA/DARPA “scrutiny” by stating
that it was “aware of and consults with our agency collaborators
regarding our contractual obligations under each of these agreements,
including those with respect to IP [intellectual property], and believe
we comply with those obligations.” As of the writing of this article,
BARDA and DARPA have taken no action against Moderna for their illegal
omission about having received substantial government funding in their
patent applications and filings. Instead, a month after DARPA claimed to
be “scrutinizing” Moderna’s patent applications, it awarded
the company up to $56 million to develop small-scale mobile means of
manufacturing its products—namely, its COVID-19 vaccine and its
personalized cancer vaccine.
Moderna: “Just Trust Us”
What quickly stands out about Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate
over the course of its rapid development in 2020 was the willingness of
federal agencies like NIH, BARDA, and others, as well as the mainstream
press, to take Moderna at its word concerning critical aspects of its
vaccine and its development, even when the evidence appeared to
contradict its claims. This is particularly evident in Moderna claiming
that it resolved its LNP issues,
both in terms of toxicity and patent infringement, and those
claims—despite the company’s refusal to release clear supporting
evidence—being taken at face value. This is even more striking when one
considers the multiple factors that Moderna was facing before COVID-19 and how the company faced collapse
without the success of its COVID-19 vaccine, as this means Moderna was
under considerable pressure to have its vaccine succeed.
While the controversial simultaneous conducting of animal and human
trials was publicly justified in the name of the urgency of the COVID-19
crisis, can the other examples explored in this article be similarly
justified in the name of urgency? Instead, several issues explored above
appear to have been driven by conflicts of interest and corruption.
Adding to the ridiculousness is that Moderna got away with claiming
that the NIH was conducting safety tests on a COVID-19 vaccine product
different from their commercial candidate, without causing a major
backlash in either the mainstream media or from the NIH itself. This is
particularly telling as the May 2020 press release and suspiciously
timed stock trading by Moderna executives and insiders did
garner negative press attention. However, the subsequent revelation, per
Moderna, that its press release was based on the study of a vaccine
candidate that was not “necessarily the same” as their commercial
COVID-19 vaccine candidate received essentially no coverage, despite
raising the unsettling possibility that Moderna could have used another
product to essentially rig preliminary data to be positive in order to
advance their product to market and make millions through insider stock
sales. How can the claims made by such a company be trusted at face
value without independent verification? Furthermore, how can NIH studies
of Moderna be trusted when Moderna has claimed that some of the studies
that were ultimately factors in the vaccine’s emergency use
authorization approval by the FDA utilized a different product than that
which Moderna later successfully commercialized?
Moderna and the NIH were, nevertheless, taken at their word in November 2020 when they said that their COVID-19 vaccine candidate was 94.5 percent effective. At the time, the main promoters of this claim were Moderna’s Bancel and NIAID’s Fauci. The claim came shortly after Pfizer’s press release claiming its COVID-19 vaccine candidate was 90 percent effective. Not to be outdone by Moderna, Pfizer revised
the reported efficacy of its vaccine just two days after Moderna’s
November press release, stating that their vaccine was actually 95%
effective to Moderna’s 94.5%. In the case of these claims, it was
indicative of the now-established yet troubling practice of “science by
press release” when it comes to touting the benefit of certain COVID-19
vaccines currently on the market. Since then, real-world data has shattered
the efficacy claims that were used to secure emergency use
authorization, for which Moderna applied at the end of November 2020 and
received only a few weeks later in mid-December of that year.
As Part III of this series will explore, the EUA for the Moderna
vaccine got around the issues raised in this article by treating the
entire Moderna formulation as a traditional vaccine, which it is not, as
traditional vaccines do not utilize mRNA for inducing immunity, and
their safety and efficacy depend on several criteria that are entirely
different from those of the more novel mRNA. Thus, the LNP issue, a
perpetually sticky one for Moderna that it struggled to circumvent
before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, was largely evaded when it came
down to, not just research and development, but receiving EUA. It
appears that this sleight-of-hand by federal regulators was necessary
for Moderna, after ten years, to finally get its first product on the
market. As noted in Part I,
were it not for the COVID-19 crisis and its fortuitous timing, Moderna
might not have survived the severe challenges that threatened its entire
existence as a company.
Part III will also examine how Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment in the
COVID-19 crisis was only the beginning of its miraculous rescue from a
Theranos-like fate, as the company has not only expanded its partnership
with the government but now with a CIA-linked firm. This shows that
Moderna and key power players in Big Pharma and the US national-security
state envision Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine being sold in massive
quantities for several years to come. As previously noted, without
annual or semiannual sales of booster doses, Moderna’s pre-COVID crisis
will inevitably return. The push for Moderna booster-dose approval has
advanced despite real-world data not supporting Moderna’s past claims of
safety and efficacy for its COVID-19 vaccine, the recent decision of
several European governments to halt the vaccine’s use, and the FDA’s
own infighting and recent admissions that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine
is one of the more dangerous
currently in use, particularly in terms of adverse effects on the
cardiovascular system. The obvious question here then becomes – How
costly will Moderna’s “Hail Mary” save ultimately be, not just in terms
of the $6 billion US taxpayer money already spent on it, but also in
terms of public health?
Author’s Note: Dr. Michael Palmer contributed much-appreciated feedback and guidance on this article.
Whitney Webb has been
a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has
written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer
and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently
writes for The Last American Vagabond.
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