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There’s Gold in Them There Ills

Alison Bevege

Sep 26 2024

18 mins

Australia is entrenching a new mRNA industry at break-neck speed, fuelled by the Covid-era panic budgets that rained money on drug companies and distorted the economy. The universities have gold fever and they don’t want to hear about the inconvenient people injured by the covid gene-vaccines after the technology was mass injected for the first time. Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into gene-vaccine factories, laboratories and translational research hubs that are mushrooming over the nation’s tertiary institutions like fungus after a flood.

The largest and most advanced factories are being built in Victoria, Sydney and Brisbane, with more planned across the nation. State governments and the intelligentsia, unperturbed by the threat of unintended consequences, are celebrating the jobs growth. And yet the unintended consequences are there. The mRNA gene-vaccines were not proven safe during Covid.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) received 140,000 injury reports to November 2023, through a system widely acknowledged as under-reported. More than 8000 doctors, scientists, academics and health workers have signed a declaration, called the Hope Accord, calling for an immediate halt to the mRNA gene-vaccines on safety grounds. Pfizer’s own Non-clinical Evaluation Report from January 2021 to the TGA, released under a freedom of information filing, shows it did not stay in the arm where it was injected but traveled all around the body, including to the liver, brain, heart, lungs, bone marrow, testes and ovaries.

But nobody wants to know because the brightest research bauble is mRNA technology. Everyone can see that the billions made by Moderna and Pfizer during the Covid scare are not a one-off. Powerful international lobby group CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), chaired by Australia’s former Health Department head Jane Halton, is pushing mRNA as a platform technology for all future jabs worldwide.

CEPI, together with vaccine lobby group Gavi, have set up a funding body called Covax, to make developed nations pay for spreading mRNA factories and products into poorer countries. Gavi says it has raised more than US$12 billion for Covax since 2020, and Australia has committed $215 million, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

This vaccine colonialism will open new markets for profits and patent revenues in nations that avoided the covid gene-vaccines, and at the same time create a new class of influential scientific elites in those countries which will be enmeshed in the mRNA ecosystem and promote its objectives.

It poses the question: why is so much capital being pumped into this one boutique technology?

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), discovered in 1961, is a single strand of genetic instructions that tell a cell how to make and express a protein. Researchers hoped this would be useful in all sorts of treatments, for example to fix rare genetic disorders and cancers, a lucrative area. But the immune system would always destroy the cells that took up the foreign genetic material. This gave rise to the idea that mRNA technology could be repurposed for vaccines, since it provokes an immune response.

According to Dr Robert Malone, one of the co-inventors of the technology, the US military fell in love with mRNA over a decade ago and decided to force it into the market space. Malone is well-placed to know. He once worked for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a branch of the US military whose tasks include countering biological attack. The thinking was, as Dr Malone said in a lecture uploaded to his Rumble channel, that a rapidly made vaccine could be used to counter a bio-attack, but it would need to be made far quicker than the ten years which typically is needed for safe development.

If a platform technology such as mRNA could be approved, several safety steps could be cut. All that would be needed would be to insert the genetic instructions of the new pathogen into the already-approved mRNA platform, test it for a few weeks on a handful of mice and – voilà. As CEPI says on its website, it wants vaccines produced “lab to jab” in under 100 days.

You can see how this would appeal to a military mind unconcerned with medical principles such as “first do no harm” or “informed consent” and the right to say “no”.

Dr Malone believes it is the Five Eyes intelligence community and the new biodefence industrial complex that has pushed the mRNA agenda through the government with a fear campaign. He said the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) “basically funded and built Moderna”.

The case of Moderna’s commercial success certainly raises eyebrows. The company never had a product approved for sale before its mRNA gene-vaccine Spikevax was rubber-stamped by the US Food and Drug Administration with emergency authorisation in December 2020, less than five months into its Phase III trials.

Founded in 2010, Moderna had tried for years to produce gene therapies for rare diseases from its mRNA patents, but failed. The company kept on failing for a decade, but unlike other struggling startups it didn’t go broke. Billions of dollars poured in from hedge funds such as Thélème Partners, co-founded in 2009 by former French naval officer Patrick Degorce and Rishi Sunak, who went on to become the British Prime Minister.

Thélème was one of the earliest investors in Moderna, starting in 2011 when the start-up had only a handful of employees. In 2013, Moderna attended World Economic Forum networking events as a WEF Global Growth Company, and in that same year signed a US$240 million partnership with British drug giant AstraZeneca that was called “staggering” by life sciences trade publication Stat News. “It was the most money pharma had ever spent on drugs that had not yet been tested in humans,” Stat reported in 2016.

Moderna has entered into “strategic collaborations” with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, AstraZeneca, Merck, DARPA and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). BARDA is the militarised wing of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which also researches countermeasures in case of bio-attack.

According to Stat, Moderna was unusually secretive, requiring some job candidates sign non-disclosure agreements just to be interviewed. In 2017 after Moderna pivoted to vaccines, Stat reporter Damian Garde wrote with surprise about its US$4.7 billion valuation.

“At its current valuation, Moderna’s IPO would be the biggest in biotech history, leaving some investors scratching their heads as to how the company’s vaccine-heavy pipeline could justify such a number,” Garde wrote.

It’s worth noting that Moderna and its competitors had trouble commercialising mRNA treatments because of safety concerns. The lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the mRNA into the cell can lead to dangerous side effects, especially with repeated doses, Stat wrote, noting Novartis, Merck and Roche had all abandoned the field because of toxicity concerns. Despite all the financial support, by September 2019 Moderna’s stock price was in decline, perhaps presenting a final buy-in opportunity before Covid brought salvation.

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb detailed how Rick Bright, then-head of the Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and now at the Rockefeller Fund, and Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Investigative Diseases (an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services) came to Moderna’s rescue, investing billions of dollars and co-developing Spikevax.

The US military signed the first contract for 500 million Spikevax doses in August 2020. By April, 2021, Stat reported that the US Government had invested about US$6 billion into Moderna’s Covid gene-vaccine. That’s a big bet for a failed gene therapy never before tried at scale in human vaccination.

Moderna owns key patents on the mRNA platform technology, and profits from its use by others. Pfizer used Moderna’s mRNA patents for its covid gene-vaccines and the two drug giants are still fighting in court over the intellectual property rights. Covid turned Moderna into a billionaire factory from the only product it ever brought to market. Moderna made a handful of founding academics and shareholders, whose names are hidden behind trusts invested via venture capital firms, into lords of wealth.

The billionaires whose names are known include Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Bob Langer, Moderna chief executive Stéfane Bancel, co-founder Noubar Afeyan and Harvard University professor Timothy Springer. It took them over a decade, but they struck the jackpot.

Perhaps it is the glittering allure of unimaginable wealth backed by the shadowy power of the US war machine that has turned heads in Australia.

It’s a simple truism that a misallocation of capital will benefit some people, and that those people will seek to perpetuate it. As the late investment genius Charlie Munger is famed for saying, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

The fire-hose of money that turned on mRNA in Australia has been eye-watering. It sucked the oxygen from worthy research and funnelled it into a boutique high-end technology, producing a burden of injury across Australia that is, for the most part, unacknowledged.

According to the Federal Department of Health and Aged Care’s website, Australia spent more than $18 billion on “vaccine and treatment supply” during the covid panic for a virus that only ever had an infection fatality rate of 0.07 percent for the entire working-aged population under 70, which is comparable to a bad flu year.

In December 2021, then-Health Minister Greg Hunt announced the “investment” of more than $8 billion in Covid vaccines alone, the bulk of which was handed over to Pfizer and Moderna under secret contracts for mRNA products which were never going to stop the transmission of a respiratory-spread virus.

From early 2021 to June 2023, Pfizer booked US$79 billion in global sales for Comirnaty, while Moderna sold US$38 billion worth of Spikevax, which are sums greater than the GDP of several small nations. The enormous river of pharmaceutical money is hurtling Australia headlong into entrenching an mRNA ecosystem that will divert funds into boutique high-end manufacturing and away from simple necessities such as IV drip bags, which Australia no longer knows how to make.

The excitement is bubbling from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), which published a report on Australia’s RNA potential in July. The report, titled Australia’s RNA Blueprint, said the global RNA market was estimated to be worth up to US$107 billion by 2030. The department wants to seize the opportunity for Australia to become a regional developer and manufacturer, adding up to $8 billion to GDP in the decade to 2033.

But the department doesn’t just want to build an industry, it wants an ecosystem. It’s the very first goal listed in its blueprint. An example of a self-reinforcing ecosystem can be seen by the way a group of seemingly unrelated drug companies, global governance organisations, charity foundations and security state organs all helped each other to increase market penetration for the mRNA platform. These entities include: Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, the World Health Organisation, the Wellcome Trust, Gavi, BARDA, DARPA, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and CEPI (itself founded by Wellcome, the WEF and the Gates Foundation).

These groups also have the money to hire the most influential talent such as former drug regulators, prime ministers and high-level public servants.

It was Jane Halton, a respected Canberra bureaucrat who spent nearly 15 years as secretary of Australia’s Health and Finance departments, that CEPI hired to chair their organisation, which seeks to push the mRNA platform worldwide. Halton sat beside CIA deputy director Avril Haines and Gates Foundation global development program president Chris Elias at Event 201 in October 2019, where the world war-gamed how to manage a response to a novel coronavirus pandemic, just like the one that was declared less than six months later.

Professor Halton was appointed as a key advisor to the Federal Government when Covid struck. She was a commissioner on the National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board at its inception in 2020. Later, in 2022, she conducted the review of Australia’s Covid vaccine purchasing.

That is how an ecosystem works.

Professor Halton’s expertise made her extremely valuable, but as chair of CEPI her role was also to promote the uptake of the mRNA platform as part of their 100-day vaccine mission. This potential conflict of interest has never been answered, and never will be because Australia wants an ecosystem of its own.

It’s damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!

The Department of Industry’s RNA blueprint surveyed the money available to fund this new ecosystem. It includes: $2.5 billion from the National Reconstruction Fund for medical manufacturing and critical technologies, $392 million from the Industry Growth Program for commercialisation, $1.6 billion from Australia’s Economic Accelerator to support university translation & commercialisation.

The Federal Government is also paying $490 million over four years from 2024–25 (and $107.4 million per year ongoing) to continue the National COVID-19 Vaccine Program, according to Federal Budget papers.

The Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) & Medical Research Endowment Account has more than $1.5 billion each year combined to spend on research investment. The MRFF has a 10-year plan in which it wants to “accelerate development of mRNA based vaccines and therapeutics” and to develop the mRNA sector with “technology enablers”, accelerated mRNA gene-vaccines and therapeutics.

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and Business Grants Hubs administer the MRFF grants and selection processes. The NHMRC says it has allocated more than $35 million so far in research grants involving mRNA.

Moderna’s factory (artist’s concept below) on the Monash University campus in Victoria is scheduled to open this year and will churn out 100 million mRNA gene-vaccine doses per annum under a 10-year deal with the Federal Government, with secret levels of public funding.

BioNTech is building a factory at La Trobe University to produce mRNA products for clinical trials – for 1200 more local jobs. Grants are flowing from the mRNA Victoria Research Acceleration Fund with beneficiaries including the mRNA Innovation Hub and the Burnet Institute.

In New South Wales construction works officially began at Macquarie University in September on a $96 million RNA “research and pilot” factory. The project will be overseen by RNA Australia, a newly formed joint venture between the NSW Government and four NSW universities plus the Australian National University (ANU). The NSW Government will pay a further $119 million for research and development, tying academia and industry to a public-private partnership that will cheerlead for the mRNA that funds them. They do not want to hear about unwanted side-effects.

In addition, the NSW Government has given $25 million to the RNA Institute to develop mRNA products. It has secret agreements with a variety of entities in industry, government and academia, but openly partners with Merck.

Several medical institutes and four universities have also received $15 million in funding from NSW Health for an RNA Production and Research Network, and a new prototype manufacturing plant is being built in a University of Technology Sydney partnership with the University of Sydney.

In Queensland, a $280 million “Translational Science Hub” has been developed with French drug giant Sanofi. The research contracts will primarily involve Sanofi-funded fee-for-service work, which makes it appear as though the Queensland government is funding Sanofi to patent expensive mRNA products for easily treatable illnesses, benefiting Sanofi. For example, it will pioneer a novel mRNA vaccine for chlamydia, a sexually transmitted infection that is easily and cheaply treated with existing antibiotics.

South Australia and Western Australia are linked by the BridgeWest Group, which owns BioCina. The Federal and South Australian governments have given BioCina $10 million for clinical trial and commercial production of mRNA products at its Adelaide factory, in partnership with the University of Adelaide. BridgeWest Group, a US-based venture capital firm founded by the Tayebi family has also bought Pfizer’s plant in Western Australia.

The state governments are excited about jobs. The universities are tied in with research and can’t wait for the prestige to push up their rankings. They will not encourage staff to speak against the mRNA technology or pursue research into mRNA injuries that might get in the way. Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them.

Moderna has created a system called mRNA Access where researchers send in their genetic sequences, Moderna plugs it into mRNA and sends it back for use in clinical testing. Those who have signed on to the platform include the Doherty Institute, the Burnet Institute, the University of Queensland and James Cook University.

Hopeful academics will always speak well of the mRNA ecosystem because their career chances depend on it. Researchers are rushing for potential funding with prestige, industry partnerships, jobs and 20-year income streams from patents up for grabs.

Very few are sounding the alarm and the injured are ignored at every turn.

As journalist Rebekah Barnett reports, two thirds of submissions made to the Senate’s recent Excess Mortality Inquiry were suppressed, including those of the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society and of Dr Melissa McCann, who is suing the government in a class action on behalf of the gene-vaccine injured. The inquiry left key evidence out of its final report, dismissing the potential impact of the Covid gene-vaccines in just one cursory page. They just don’t want to know.

Once Australia’s mRNA factories go into mass production, they will need consumer markets for their products. They cannot be shut down until a pandemic rolls around some time in the next 100 years. They have to be kept in constant production, which means they need customers.

We must not allow ourselves to be coerced into mass-injecting these products ever again.

* Australia’s Department of Health and Aged Care, and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, declined to give a summary figure of how much funding has been given to the mRNA industry

Sources:

Charlie Munger: psychology of human misjudgement, speech, Harvard 1995, transcript – how incentives produce outcomes https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charlie-munger

John Ioannidis Stanford, study showing IFR was only 0.07% (global IFR) for anyone aged under 70 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/

AIHW suicide data

https://web.archive.org/web/20240402045942/https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/ambulance-attendances/ambulance-attendances-for-suicidal-behaviours

https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2022/03/budget-2022-23-mental-health-suicide-prevention-pillar-2.pdf

BioNTech building a factory in Melbourne at La Trobe

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2023/release/biontech-to-establish-mrna-facility-at-la-trobe

Moderna tried for years on genetic therapies: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

Pfizer profits $100.3b 2022 https://insights.pfizer.com/fourth-quarter-fy-earnings/

Pfizer expects $8b Paxlovid/Comirnaty in 2024 https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizer-beats-profit-estimates-cost-cuts-rsv-vaccine-sales-2024-05-01/

Pfizer covid patents case: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/uk-court-gives-mixed-ruling-pfizer-v-moderna-covid-vaccine-patents-case-2024-07-02/

Robert Malone says the problem with mRNA for gene therapy was that the body would attack the cell, says the CIA fell in love with mRNA and wants rapid vaccine as a biodefense response https://rumble.com/v1qeo55-mrna-vaccines-the-cia-and-national-defense-this-isnt-going-to-end-well..html?e9s=src_v1_ucp

Gavi $12b since 2020 raised for Covax https://www.gavi.org/gavi-covax-amc

CEPI 100 days mission https://cepi.net/cepi-20-and-100-days-mission

Jane Halton’s review of Australia’s covid procurement https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/foi-4049-and-4062-release-document-the-review-of-covid-19-vaccine-and-treatment-purchasing-and-procurement.pdf

Jane Halton advises govt on covid response https://web.archive.org/web/20200728063016/https://www.pmc.gov.au/ncc/who-we-are

Farragut quote from battle of mobile bay https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/2347790/damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead-navys-first-admiral-was-hispanic-hero/

Australia’s DFAT gave covax $215m https://indopacifichealthsecurity.dfat.gov.au/covid-19-vaccine-access/covax-advance-market-commitment

Moderna’s strategic collaborators archived 2020 – Gates Foundation, Barda https://web.archive.org/web/20200407042326/https://www.modernatx.com/about-us/mrna-strategic-collaborators

Moderna’s contract with US Dept of HHS https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-contract.pdf

Dept of Industry report from July – RNA Blueprint: https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/australias-rna-blueprint

Australia spent $18b on covid vax and treatments, current figures https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/about-rollout/vaccine-agreements

NHMRC is $800m per year funded https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/funding/new-grant-program/overview

MRFF is $22b https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/mrff