The Vaccinators Will Never Stop Vaccinating
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel discusses his plans for continued vaccination in the post-Corona world.
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Stéphane Bancel, radical vaccinator. The vaccinators are deranged lunatics, and whatever happens with Corona, we now face a prolonged, multi-year struggle to retain control of our bodies and our bloodstreams. This is what I get from COVID-19: What’s Next?, a World Economic Forum panel discussion featuring Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel.
Like everything produced by the WEF, it’s stultifying, boring and terrifying all at the same time. Below the fold, I’ve transcribed the key moments for you, but the takeaways are simple enough:
—Moderna, just one of multiple pharmaceuticals eager to exploit our new vaccine mania, are expanding their manufacturing capacity to produce as many as 6 billion mRNA vaccine doses per year.
—Moderna will have an Omicron-specific vaccine as early as March, and they won’t be the only ones. The compliant triple jabbed can look forward to having their fully vaccinated status revoked once again.
—Moderna are working in close collaboration with “Dr. Fauci’s team” and with public health experts to develop an annual combined mRNA flu, RSV and Corona vaccine to reduce “compliance issues.”
—The industry more broadly has targeted about 20 pathogens for vaccine development, from Zika to Nipah, with a view towards being able to rapidly deploy mRNA vaccines against future virus threats.
The vaccinators are a great sword of Damocles over our heads. As I type this, they are scouring the earth for the novel pathogens their products require, and they, together with their bureaucratic and academic allies, will do their level best to call into being new pandemic scares and vaccination campaigns whenever possible – perhaps every flu season.
At 6:25, Bancel discusses where he thinks we are in the pandemic:
We are first very happy, that with such a change like Omicron and a variant like Omicron, the vaccines are holding very well, and the third dose has proven to be very important. What we’re doing right now is to prepare for what should the vaccine be in the fall of 2022, and what should it contain. And our experts are working with public health experts like Doctor Fauci’s team to figure this out. Because soon we’re going to have to decide what goes into the vaccine for Fall of 2022.
The other piece we’re doing of course is around manufacturing capacity. You know, in 2021, we shipped 807 million doses. We’re very proud that around 25% went to middle income and low income countries. And we’re continuing to ramp up, we have a lot of capacity coming on line in Q1, this quarter, with the goal to be able to make 2 to 3 billion doses for this year.
And the other piece we’re working on is for 2023, is how do we make it possible from a societal standpoint that people want to be vaccinated. And we’re going to do this by preparing combinations, we’re working on the flu vaccine, we’re working on an RSV vaccine, and our goal is to be able to have a single annual booster, so that we don’t have compliance issues, where people don’t want to get two to three shots a winter, but they get one dose, where they get a booster for Corona, and a booster for flu and RSV, to make sure that people get their vaccine.
The moderator asks: How close are we to that?
So the RSV program is now in Phase 3, the flu program is in Phase 2 and soon in Phase 3, I hope as soon as second quarter of this year. So the best case scenario would be the fall of 2023, as a best case scenario, I don’t think it would [be available] in every country, but we believe it’s possible to operate in some countries next year.
At 15:00, the moderator wants to know: “How do you encourage vaccination? Is there a way that companies like Moderna need to communicate differently or put up data differently that encourages people to get vaccinated?”
Bancel responds:
Yes, so the vaccination question is of course a very complicated one, I mean many public health experts ... have tried really hard now for two years to get people to believe in the vaccines. And of course there’s always a better job that we can all do, starting from the companies. In terms of explaining the science, explaining the side effects, explaining the long term benefits, and the risk reward of getting a vaccine vs. not getting a vaccine. I think a lot has been done but clearly more can be done. But as Tony [Fauci] said, what is sad is all the misinformation that we are seeing every day, online, sometimes on TV, about the vaccine and what they do and what they don’t do. Is very sad ...
At 16:45, Bancel discusses the effectiveness of the current Moderna vaccine against Omicron:
What we saw was an important drop of neturalising antibody after 2 dose of vaccine [against Omicron], but what we saw thankfully, is after a third dose there was very strong protection, which is why you saw around the world all the public health experts go on urging people who had not been boosted to get a third to protect them, especially people at high risk. What we’re doing, and we started this the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when we saw the sequence, is developing an Omicron specific vaccine. That vaccine is being finished to be made, it should be in the clinic in the coming weeks, and we’re hoping in a March time frame to be able to have data to share with regulators to figure the next step forward. And that’s always been a great partnership between public health experts, the regulators and the vaccine makers, to figure out what’s the best path. As Tony said, for two years we’ve all worked literally seven days a week together to figure out how to fight this common enemy of the virus. The enemy is not another company or another group, the enemy has only been the virus and will stay the virus.
At 43:45, Bancel discusses future plans:
I’m optimistic. I mean I’m an entrepreneur so I’m optimistic by nature, but I’m optimistic that what is being done today is going to help tremendously. We’re working with Dr. Fauci’s team, we’re working with Richard [Hatchett], to work on many more pathogens. ... The entire scientific community has known for years that there’s at least around twenty-ish pathogens that are a risk for which we need vaccines, you know we have Zika vaccine in Phase 2 ... we’re working on a Nipah vaccine, those are viruses that not everybody has heard of. Because we need to have the data. What dose, what construct from a genetic standpoint is required ... so that if a new pathogen emerges from that family we can very quickly move into a Phase 3. …
The other piece is manufacturing. If you look in 2020, we were able to ship 20 million doses to the US government when the vaccine was authorised. That is not a lot. But this year we’re going to have 2-3 billion doses of capacity in a 6 month time frame, which is what I believe it will take us to get authorisation of a vaccine, if all the work has been done before ... you could have 1.5 billion doses available in six months, and that’s just from Moderna. And you have other platforms, it could be a much bigger number ...
Source: eugyppius: a plague chronicle
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