Part 1: Moderna Had a Long History of Failure. Then Along Came COVID. \ stacker news ~conspiracy

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Part 1: Moderna Had a Long History of Failure. Then Along Came COVID.childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/moderna-history-failure-covid-vaccine/

20 sats \ 5 comments \ @Bell_curve 16 Aug conspiracy

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our favorite Whitney Webb

From Brave search ai... Whitney Webb, a journalist and researcher, has written extensively on Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine and its development. Here are some key points from her work:

Moderna's "Hail Mary" Moment: In late 2019, Moderna was facing significant challenges, including regulatory hurdles and lack of progress in human trials. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a "Hail Mary" opportunity for the company, allowing it to bypass traditional testing and approval processes.
DARPA Funding: Moderna received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for its mRNA vaccine technology, which was initially developed for infectious diseases like Chikungunya. DARPA's involvement in mRNA vaccine development predates the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wellcome Trust and Galvani: The Wellcome Trust, a global health foundation, partnered with Galvani, a biotech company, to develop mRNA vaccines. Galvani's chairman, Moncef Slaoui, was also involved in Operation Warp Speed, the US government's COVID-19 vaccine development program.
RNA Vaccine Technology: Moderna's mRNA vaccine technology was marketed as a "precision medicine" treatment before the pandemic. Webb argues that this terminology was misleading, as the technology was not yet proven safe or effective for human use.
NIH Trials and Commercial Candidate: Moderna claimed that its vaccine being tested in NIH trials was different from its commercial candidate. Webb questions how Moderna knew that COVID-19 would create the conditions for its vaccine to succeed months before the pandemic.
Stock Value and Company Survival: The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant increase in Moderna's stock value, from $18.89 per share to over $339.57 per share. This surge in value saved the company from financial ruin and secured its future.

Key Quotes and Sources

"Moderna's salvation hinged on the hope of a divine miracle, a 'Hail Mary' save of sorts, as stated by one former Moderna employee." (Source: Whitney Webb, "Your Never-Ending COVID-19 Booster Cycle & Moderna's Miracle") "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?" (Source: Whitney Webb, "COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle")

Conclusion

Whitney Webb's investigations into Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine highlight the company's precarious financial situation before the pandemic and its reliance on government funding and partnerships. Her work also raises questions about the expedited development and approval process for mRNA vaccines, as well as the potential long-term consequences for public health.

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2 replies \ @Bell_curve OP 16 Aug

From perplexity ai...

The article from Children's Health Defense discusses the history of Moderna, focusing on its struggles and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the company. Before the pandemic, Moderna faced significant challenges, including safety concerns with its mRNA delivery system, a lack of successful products, and a high turnover of executives. These issues threatened its financial stability and ability to attract investors. The emergence of COVID-19 provided a critical opportunity for Moderna, allowing it to overcome previous hurdles and rapidly develop a COVID-19 vaccine with support from the U.S. government.

The article suggests that the pandemic shifted how vaccines were developed and approved, favoring speed over thorough safety studies. This shift benefited Moderna, which had previously been unable to bring a product to market. Despite the success of its COVID-19 vaccine, the article raises concerns about unresolved safety issues and the company's reliance on continued vaccine sales to maintain financial stability. The piece draws parallels between Moderna and Theranos, highlighting secrecy and a focus on image over scientific transparency. It also notes that Moderna's technology faced persistent challenges, particularly with its lipid nanoparticle delivery system, which had previously hindered the development of other therapies[1].

Citations: [1] https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/moderna-history-failure-covid-vaccine/

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve OP 16 Aug

Indeed, from 2016 right up until the emergence of COVID-19, Moderna could barely hold it together, as it was shedding key executives, top talent and major investors at an alarming rate.

Essentially, Moderna’s promise of “revolutionizing” medicine and the remarkable salesmanship and fund-raising capabilities of the company’s top executive, Stéphane Bancel, were the main forces keeping it afloat.

In the years leading up to the COVID-19 crisis, Moderna’s promises — despite Bancel’s efforts — rang increasingly hollow, as the company’s long-standing penchant for extreme secrecy meant that — despite nearly a decade in business — it had never been able to definitively prove that it could deliver the “revolution” it had continually assured investors was right around the corner.

This was compounded by major issues with patents held by a hostile competitor that threatened Moderna’s ability to turn a profit on anything it might manage to take to market, as well as major issues with its mRNA delivery system that led them to abandon any treatment that would require more than one dose because of toxicity concerns.

The latter issue, though largely forgotten and/or ignored by media today, should be a major topic in the COVID-19 booster debate, given that there is still no evidence that Moderna ever resolved the toxicity issue that arose in multi-dose products.

In this first installment of a two-part series, the dire situation in which Moderna found itself immediately prior to the emergence of COVID-19 is discussed in detail, revealing that Moderna — very much like the now disgraced company Theranos — had long been a house of cards with sky-high valuations completely disconnected from reality.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve OP 16 Aug

https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/13/moderna-therapeutics-biotech-mrna/

https://www.sciencealert.com/an-invisible-quantum-dot-tattoo-is-being-suggested-to-id-vaccinated-kids

In September 2016, Damian Garde, the national biotech reporter for the medical media company STAT, wrote a lengthy exposé of the “ego, ambition, and turmoil” plaguing “one of biotech’s most secretive startups.” The article focused on the company Moderna, which had been founded in 2010 to commercialize the research of Boston Children’s Hospital cell biologist Derrick Rossi.

The effort to turn a profit by creating Moderna, which intimately involved controversial scientist and close Bill Gates associate Bob Langer as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Flagship Ventures (now Flagship Pioneering), began soon after Rossi published a report on the ability of modified RNA to turn skin cells into different types of tissue.

Despite teaming up with pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca and raising record amounts of funding, Moderna still had no product on the market six years after its founding, and, as STAT revealed, the “company’s caustic work environment” had led to a persistent hemorrhaging of top talent, though little of its internal conflicts was publicly known due to “its obsession with secrecy.”

Bancel, prior to joining Moderna, had spent much of his career in sales and operations, not science, making a name for himself at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly before heading a French diagnostics firm called bioMérieux.

Although lacking a background in mRNA and the science behind its use as a therapeutic, Bancel has made up for it by becoming Moderna’s salesman par excellence. Under his leadership, Moderna became “loath to publish its work in Science or Nature, but enthusiastic to herald its potential on CNBC and CNN.”

When two of its vaccine candidates entered phase 1 human trials in 2016 (trials that ultimately went nowhere), the company declined to list them on the public federal registry ClinicalTrials.gov.

According to former Moderna scientists who spoke to STAT, the company was “a case of the emperor’s new clothes.” Former employees further charged that Bancel was actually “running an investment firm” and “then hop[ing] it also develops a drug that’s successful.”

As STAT noted in 2016, the people who were tasked with making “the science work” were those who most frequently resigned, which led to Moderna losing two heads of chemistry within a single year, followed shortly by losing its chief scientific officer and its head of manufacturing.

Whatever the exact cause of the resignation of the head of R & D, it only added to the mystique around Moderna’s inner workings and its ability to deliver on its promise to “revolutionize” medicine. It also reveals more than a few similarities between Moderna and the now-disgraced company Theranos.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

Yet, employees of Alexion, the company co-developing the drug with Moderna, blew the whistle on the project in 2017, revealing that it “never proved safe enough to test in humans” and that the failure of this therapy and the technology platform it sought to use had been responsible for prompting Moderna to abandon the class of drug therapies that, for years, had justified its sky-high valuation and attracted hundreds of millions in investor cash.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/21/moderna-loses-exec/

https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/17/moderna-zika-vaccine/

https://www.statnews.com/2017/07/27/moderna-alexion-partnership/

https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/28/moderna-writedown/

https://www.statnews.com/2018/03/06/modernas-head-of-vaccines-quits/

As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as Jan. 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals.

Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval.

As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine.

That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.

However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last — that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide.

Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna — and its stakeholders — cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/moderna-a-company-in-need-of-a-hail-mary/

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/covid-19-moderna-gets-its-miracle/

64 sats \ 0 replies \ @wingalt fwd 22 Aug

Moderna's approach to drug development is very appealing on paper, the prospect to modify RNA sequences to address multiple medical conditions is unique and has attracted a lot of funding...maybe too much actually because the technology, initially heavily targeted at cancers just did not work. Translating cell results to a medicine where delivery is a big challenge has led to many disappointing results in the clinic. But investors want to get paid right? So with covid Moderna got its miracle, the push for vaccines was endorsed by the US government, regulatory/safety bars were lowered, and corners were cut just right for a big payout. Corporatism at its finest, the state picking winners and losers at the expense to the public, actually it is also called fascism

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve OP 16 Aug

This is Part 2: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/covid-19-moderna-gets-its-miracle/