Thursday, December 30, 2021

The Truth About Moderna - What You Need To Know

   


Moderna Admits Vaccines Increases Rates Of Infection






MAY 14, 2020

The Truth About Vaccines 2020—Vaccine Roundtable Part 2, Video and Transcript

 

THE TRUTH ABOUT VACCINES 2020 | VACCINE ROUNDTABLE WITH THE EXPERTS | PART 2

 

Thank you to Anne Dachel and Age of Autism for transcribing this for our readers. Anne wrote:

“This was one of the most informative and empowering talks I’ve ever listened to in all the years I’ve been working as an autism advocate. Every person concerned about what the COVID 19 pandemic will do to our medical freedom needs to hear these speakers and learn the truth about what’s coming. There is no walking away from this threat to our liberties.”

May 3, 2020, Panel discussion the COVID 19 crisis and what a vaccine could mean to the American people.

TRANSCRIPT:

Panelists:

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, Dr. Judy Mikovits, Del Bigtree, Ty and Charlene Bollinger, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Dr. Rashid Buttar.

Here are excerpts from the discussion.

Charlene: “…the year 2020 was a big deal. … This is the year, if we don’t help people understand this critical issue we may loss our freedoms, and they may be able to come in and try …to force us into these vaccines. But we did not know what we were getting into….

“I was watching Tucker Carlson  [Fox, Tucker Carlson Tonight]. He’s actually had Bobby Kennedy on…  We couldn’t believe that mainstream media outlet was covering that. We felt like Tucker’s our friend…

“Last night…on Tucker Carlson Tonight … He had a guest and they talked about Operation Wrap Speed, the COVID vaccination where they’re literally going to pass through the trials that they should be doing. They’re going to skip all that safety measures to get to this vaccine. They’re going to have a hundred million ready to go. …

“The guest talked about this as if it’s a good thing, and Tucker Carlson who has interviewed our good friend Bobby Kennedy, ….  I was really letdown by the fact that Tucker Carlson allowed that guest to say that and didn’t dig in. …”

5:42 Kennedy: “There’s now eighty separate vaccine projects. Bill Gates has eight of them. Bill Gates is now the biggest vaccine producer in the world, bigger than any other company.

“One of Gates’ vaccines is the Moderna vaccine, which is the first one out of the gate. The Moderna vaccine is a really dangerous human experiment. It’s shockingly reckless. And to particularly go forward without any kind of animal test at all, they went right to phase one human trials. …

“Tony Fauci has arranged for that company, Moderna, which has never produced a vaccine, …which was on the verge of bankruptcy, 1.5 billion dollars in debt, ….

“And Gates, who has been funding it, and Fauci rescued the company from bankruptcy by giving them the first of these projects. The project is an RNA vaccine, which has never been made before.

“What an RNA vaccine does, unlike most vaccines which are injected with an antigen which is a piece of the target virus, a disabled piece, and an adjuvant which shocks the body to increase the immune response. That’s how every other vaccine works.

“This is an experimental technology that has never been done before in history. What is does, it injects a snippet of the virus that carries a genetic code in its RNA that is designed to alter the DNA, the code in every cell in your body to get your body to naturally start producing those antigens.

“It is a form of genetic engineering. It is genetic engineering. It has been condemned by the Geneva Statement because those genetic changes will survive in your sperm and they will live in your children or in your ovaries.

“They are injecting human being with an untested gene-altering technology designed to change the human genome, without having any proof that it actually works. …

“There’s a problem with COVID vaccines that requires that they have to be tested, and that problem is called paradoxical immune enhancement. …

“Here’s what happened. After the SARS epidemic in 2002, there were three SARS epidemics. The first one was a natural one that began in China. There were two that were lab escapees. And that’s not controversial. People acknowledge that.

“After those epidemics the Chinese and western nations all get together and they said we’ve got to develop a vaccine to treat coronavirus, SARS was a kind of coronavirus. 

“They got together and they developed about thirty different vaccines, and they chose the four most promising models. They tested them on ferrets which are the animal that is most analogous to human reaction to upper respiratory infection. They’re very similar to humans. They’re very predictive of what’s going to happen in human beings. 

“The ferrets developed to all four vaccines an admiral immune response. The scientists thought they hit the jackpot. …

“Vaccines are never tested in the field. The FDA never gives 2,000 people a vaccine and 2,000 people a placebo and says go out in the world and see what happens. That never happens.

“The way vaccines get a license is the promoter of the vaccine, the company, injects a couple thousand people with the vaccine and then they test their blood to see of they develop an antibody response.

“The ferrets developed a picture perfect antibody response, so they all thought they hit the jackpot. Then something horrible happened.

“When those ferrets were later exposed to the wild virus, they all had body wide inflammation in all their organs, and they died.

“The scientists then remembered something. They remembered that in the 1960s, the FDA and NIH had tested an RSV vaccine which is very similar to corona virus. …They had skipped animal studies and they had gone right to humans. They had tested on 35 kids.

“The kids again developed a sterling antibody response, so they thought they hit the jackpot. But when those children were exposed to the wild virus, instead of protecting them against it, the vaccine actually enhanced the pathways of the virus. Two of those kids died. They all became horrendously sick. It became a scandal and they dropped it and never touched it again. …

“The corona virus does something interesting when it provokes the antibody response. There are two kinds of antibodies. There are neutralizing antibodies which are the kind that defend you from disease. There’s another kind of antibody called a binding antibody that actually helps the virus stick to your receptors and it makes it much, much more dangerous. That’s the kind that is produced by the coronavirus vaccines. That was in 2012 and they completely terminated the program.

“Then in 2014 Tony Fauci had developed a dengue vaccine, and in the clinic trials for the dengue vaccine they saw some of the same signals. That actually the people who got the vaccine and then later were exposed got very sick. They glossed over that.

“They gave it to the Philippines, the Philippines gave it to 100,000 kids. Many, many of those kids, when they finally encountered the wild dengue virus, became horrendously sick and 600 of them died.

“The Philippine government today is criminally prosecuting the Philippine health officials who waved that vaccine through. They should have known that Fauci in the clinical trials had seen these signals previously.

“So today, all the people on this panel …the people who’ve been our loudest critics: Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Ian Lipkin, all of them are vaccine developers, all of them are bullhorns for the vaccine industry, the generals in the mercenary army that has been fighting us for years—All of them are saying IT IS INSANELY DANGEROUS FOR TONY FAUCI TO GO AHEAD WITH THESE TRIALS to inject human beings.

“He started on March 12th injecting human beings in Seattle, Washington, volunteers who I’m sure had no idea that their genes were being permanently altered for generations. There’s no informed consent because I guarantee you Tony Fauci didn’t tell them that.

“He’s testing his vaccine that he put almost a half a billion dollars into, authorized our taxpayer funds going into that, which gives him control of the patent, of half the patent, and Bill Gates’ vaccine. To fast track this very, very dangerous vaccine without animal studies is reckless and I would say is criminal.

14:35 Dr. Tenpenny: “During the period of time that they were doing those dengue vaccine trials, I was following that pretty closely. The thing that is even more scary than what you said, …and you from your legal perspective, I would like you to add to this, is we are now acting underneath the 2005 Prep Act ..that stand for Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act that was tacked onto the tail end of a defense appropriation bill at 11:20 at night on Friday night December 17th after everybody in the House had already signed off and gone home. The Senate never read it. They passed it. Even your uncle Ted Kennedy said afterwards, ‘We judge how well the pharmaceutical company usually wins around here, and they usually get big wins, but they’ve never gotten a win this big.’

“And you can’t find any of those documents now. I wrote my book Fowl…about the bird flu, and all of that is in my book. I’ve captured that, and if you try to go find that stuff on the Internet now, …all of it has been scrubbed.

“What does the Prep Act actually do? It gives liability immunity for any covered countermeasure that’s made while it’s in place. You can’t sue them. The only way you can sue them if a bunch of people get injured or killed is that you have to go to the U.S. Attorney General and prove willful misconduct, that they were going to intentionally going to create a product intentionally to harm you or kill you. Good luck with that.

“Alex Azar, our great HHS Secretary, instituted the Prep Act on February 4th, he put it in there, and he put it into the Federal Register on March 17th, so we are operating under that now. …”

16:43 Kennedy: “Bill Gates said from the beginning he was not going to allow any of his vaccines to be used unless he got full immunity from all from all the governments in all the countries that use his vaccine because he knows he’s going to kill a lot of people. He himself said this vaccine is only going to be tested on at most only a thousand people.”

“What if there’s an injury rate of one in 10,000? You won’t see that if you test a thousand people. You will never see it.

“Let’s say it’s a death rate of one in 10,000. Very, very possible, and you will never see it. If you give that vaccine to seven billion people, which is what he’s intending, that means the 700,000 people are going to die from it.

“Ultimately you will get to a level where with other injuries etc. that you’re causing more problems than you’re averting. It’s very, very possible.

“If you don’t test it on animals, you go right to humans and you test a thousand humans, plus there’s no placebo, but they don’t care. They’re under the Prep Act, complete, blanket immunity from liability.

“They could end up killing every person they give this to in Seattle. What do they care? It’s a gamble for them because if that Moderna vaccine works Gates is going to make a billion dollars. And if it doesn’t work, he’s got eight others in the pipeline. He’ll just say that was a bad experiment.

“The reason they’re going forward so quickly with that is because there’s no biological material. You don’t have to manufacture anything. With other vaccines you have to start a factory, you have to grow the vaccine… It’s a long process, but with the Moderna vaccine your body becomes the factory because you’re altering the human DNA so that it will produce the antibody.

“They don’t have to build any factory. They just have to take little snippets of the RNA and inject them into human beings and let you do all the work. They can fast track it overnight. They can literally get it to market within months, and that’s what they did. Within weeks, all they needed was that genetic code from the Chinese and they can make this RNA virus.

“It’s never proven in any model, and the company that’s making it has never brought a product to market. They’ve never been through phrase three trials and they were on the edge of bankruptcy.

“It is really, really, really crazy. How willing they are to play God. …Gates…believes is up there and he can experiment with lesser human beings. If there’s collateral damage, then so be it. He’s well-intentioned, and he’s going to save the world….”

20:48  Dr. Buttar:”When you introduce RNA into the body, the implications aren’t something that will be necessarily seen in a week or in a month. It could be a year or two years and then the generational component, because now it’s actually changing the genetic code, and it’s going to be something that’s going to stay consistent and continue to propagate generation to generation. …”

21:18  Bigtree; “One of the studies we were looking at, I believe it was the Moderna study, they are forbidding sexual intercourse without full protection, meaning they are so concerned. There can be no pregnancy allowed by anybody involved in this study, meaning they are so concerned that they may have a generational problem…

“I think one of my biggest concerns when I talk about this, I think Bobby, you put it perfectly, I believe this is the God vaccine. We’re talking about no longer letting the body react… We’re talking about messaging RNA. We’re talking about putting in manmade messages that go to all of your cells to make the cell think it’s getting information from the DNA…

“ Here’s my biggest concern. We do know that they are all focused on this antibody immune enhancement issue that you very well described. The animals all died in the trials and now we’re going on to human beings.

“This is what Hotez sat before Congress and talked about. Even Tony Fauci said on television there is a concern that this vaccine could make people more sick. We don’t want to do that. But the most troubling thing about it that most people don’t understand is how little these virologists know about how a vaccine works, and even more so, what Dr. Peter Hotez said. We don’t know why antibody immune enhancement happens. We don’t know what’s causing it.

“So my concern is that in these small test groups that they’re doing… what happens if let’s say … one of these vaccines gets to one of these small trials and for some reason antibody immune enhancement doesn’t happen. What I want to say is that since the beginning of mankind there’s never been a bacteria or a virus outbreak that took out the species.

“There’s something about nature and our relationship to it that we survive. We even get stronger as we go along. We’re talking about a vaccine that’s being discussed by world leaders, being driven by Bill Gates saying everyone in the world is going to get this vaccine.

“Can you imagine a vaccine that gets to the trials, looks like it’s safe…? Their dream is to vaccinate everyone in the world. And then all of a sudden, maybe the strain that they design the vaccine around avoid that problem, but all of a sudden there’s a mutation …gets out and starts triggering antibody immune enhancement.

“Now all of a sudden, we’re not watching .1 percent of the people die, .3 percent or 10 percent. You could talk about a scenario with 30 percent of those coming in contact with what would have been a cold, like those ferrets, their bodies are over reacting to this and they’re having complete organ failure and shutdown.

“You could honestly be looking at a vaccine for the first time that has the potential to eradicate our species. That is how dangerous this vaccine is.

“…I’ve been interviewed like crazy. I say of all the times we have never put two of the most dangerous words together known to man, RUSHED and SCIENCE, in the same sentence, is the most dangerous statement that could ever be made. And we’re allowing that statement to be made on one of the most dangerous approaches to vaccines there has ever been.

“This is the message that everyone really needs to share with everyone they know. This is not a joke. …This thing is coming for us. I can’t imagine anything more ridiculous than a life-threatening vaccine that has an issue that they don’t even understand why it happens for an illness that kills .1 to .3 percent of the world.”

25:43 Kennedy: “CNN did a really interesting article that appeared this morning about Moderna. …In the last couple of paragraphs they interviewed two of the former officials, people that worked at Moderna till 2018 and one of them was, I think, the CEO of the company.

“He said, I was shocked when I read that the federal government had given that company $438 million. I was shocked.

“The other guy, and he said, I don’t know what they were thinking of. That’s what he said. This is a guy who worked at the company.

“The other guy was their chief chemist, the head of all their chemistry department,  …He said, there is nothing what could make me put that vaccine in my body.”

27:00 Dr. Wakefield: “There’s an extraordinary interview by Peter Aaby . Peter Aaby I’ve known for many years, a very, very good vaccinologist, works for a vaccine maker… He’s worked in West Africa for most of his professional life. He said in that interview, we think we know what our vaccines are doing, we don’t.

“He’s a very, very honest man and he went up against the system and then demonstrated looking at the non-specific effects of vaccines. The DTP vaccine had killed more children in West Africa than it had saved from the target diseases… And that is the most widely used vaccine historically in the world.

“An astonishing admission and it was completely ignored. The only response from authorities was to remove his funding. We really live in an era when we know so little and we assume so much.

“The same happened with pertussis. I remember that Salzberg [Forbes] wrote an article blaming anti-vaxxers for the outbreaks of whooping cough. There was an admission by Christopher Gill from Boston University [Dept of Global Health] saying that we’ve made assumptions upon assumptions. We didn’t understand how pertussis interacted with the human immune system. We’re in the embarrassing position of having to admit that we may have made some serious mistakes.

“That’s the truth. It’s not the anti-vaxxers. It’s the hubris as someone pointed out of the pharmaceutical industry and the vaccinologists. The idea that you can exert dominion, you can mutate, you can adapt, you can change these things… You can assume dominion over organisms…. They mutate at an extraordinary rate because they are destined to survive. They will survive….”

 

29:30 Dr. Tenpenny: “Andy, years ago at a conference…you said, ‘The human race has evolved because of its relationship with microbes, not in spite of it.’

“That has resonated with me and I’ve used that a lot, and I’ve always given you credit. …  It’s so true. …

“Suddenly we’ve got mandatory vaccination right here in people’s faces that first of all never even heard of it, and second of all never gave it any thought. Perhaps this is going to give some clarity and some eye-opening to the whole concept of the germ theory too. That it’s really about the terrain, and vaccinating me doesn’t keep you from getting sick. So maybe there will even be some changes in that. … Maybe people will start to understand our relationship with microbes, and it’s not all bad.”

30: 50 Dr. Wakefield:  “I think that the people who have been telling that story from whatever part of the spectrum of biology that they come from… Those who have been telling that story as the truth emerges are the ones that in the future are going to be trusted by the people. …”

31:42: Dr. Buttar: “What everybody is talking about, I think the most crucial component is that…it’s now being censored. …That’s the question we should be asking, why is this being censored. It was after your uncle was assassinated, Bobby, that term ‘conspiracy theory’ was coined to throw people off from asking those key questions.

“One of the questions we should be asking …is why is information regarding this and a certain type of technology being censored. That in itself sheds light on what’s going on. …To me one of the most important is, why is information being censored?…”

35:40 Dr. Wakefield: “Del gave an outstanding interview in the new movie on this issue of censorship, and it’s something that’s really perplexed us in terms of releasing the movie. …

“As all these traditional platforms are disappearing for the kind of story we’re telling, even those two doctors from mainstream medicine in southern California talking about the facts of COVID the other day, now censored, extraordinary level of censorship, is that we are going out on a new platform, a censorship free platform, SPHIR.IO which provides a specific platform for this very conversation, this growing community.

“I would strongly recommend to people that we focus on a platform such as this to regroup …to have a censorship free environment in which people can disseminate this kind of information. …

 

36:36 Charlene: “The biggest lobby…  is not oil, it’s actually the pharmaceutical companies. They spend more money buying off our lawmakers, our politicians, than any other lobby in D.C.  …

“I think that people are finding us and they’re learning how to find us. …They took us off Pinterest completely because we told the truth about vaccines and we had a pretty big presence there.

“We have close to 2,000,000 collectively on Facebook. They’ve told us we cannot even run a sponsored ad to reach new people with the opportunity to learn the truth about vaccines because what we talk about does not marry into their talking points that vaccines are safe and effective….

“We’re all having issues reaching the people of the world in the conventional ways that we have done. Google took us completely down. …”

42:50 Dr. Tenpenny: “The pro vaccine people, if they really believed what they’re talking about and they really have faith in what they’re doing and they trust their science, they’re missing a great opportunity to put all of us on the stage together somewhere.

“Wouldn’t Peter Hotez and Paul Offit just love to put the heel of their boot on the throat of Sherri Tenpenny and just crush her publicly in front of everybody?…

“Wouldn’t they love to have the opportunity to publicly embarrass us and shame us because they’re so right and we’re so wrong? It should speak volumes to people who hear that.”

43:35 Dr. Buttar:   “In 2006 or 7 I was in Verona, Italy. I was invited by the government of Italy… I was one of the keynote speakers. I had the second to the last lecture as a keynote and the other person… it was Offit.

“What happened, it was beautiful actually because he started showing some of my slides and half-truths to the point that I got agitated. There were three doctors that had to come and hold me back. I was so livid. It was going to be a physical altercation.

“Some woman stood up in the audience and started yelling in Italian. …She’s screaming and Offit had this look on his face. …She was screaming at him.

“The bottom line was one of the neurologist there had started using our protocol for their child who was 12 years old at the time.  After six months the child had started to speak and no longer had to wear diapers.

“She was cursing Offit and he didn’t know what was being said. He had a smile on his face until he put on headphones, …people started clapping and I realized that the truth will be known. …

“I realized they don’t want the opportunity to debate us one-on-one. …

“Vaccines are designed by the way our bodies work, to create immunity. Great concept. …But now you’ve got to start introducing things into the body under the pretense of public safety that suppressing the immune system and giving additional things that are immuno-suppressive and are irritating the immune system …it defies all logic.

“Why are we doing this? I’m not against vaccinations, if you can make something that’s not going to hurt a person. But to make something that’s going to hurt a person more than the original disease that they’re worried about? It’s just  madness.”

49:24 Kennedy: “I’m all for vaccines if they can make them safe and effective. I’ve never seen it happen before. …

“Part of my job is to try and bring in people into this movement who are not part of the choir. …

“You don’t build a movement starting from a position, I hate all vaccines; all vaccines are bad. I always start by telling audiences I’m for vaccines, never for mandatory vaccines.

“If there’s a vaccine that’s good for me, it has no bad side effects, and does everything that it’s advertised to do. …I would of course take that vaccine. I just haven’t seen it happen.

“One of the primary tools of our opponents is to characterize us all as anti-vax. The mainstream of our country and of the world believes all the propaganda about vaccines.

“If the New York Times and CNN can convince someone that you’re anti-vax, they then have a license to shut you up and to marginalize you and to discredit you and to not listen to what you are saying.

“I try to open up all the opportunities and possibilities for people to listen to me. ..

“I’m against bad science. I’m for good science. I’m for robust science and for honest regulators. We don’t have any of those things.

“I’m all for good vaccines that are effective and safe, if they can ever be made. The problem is nobody’s ever done it yet.”

52:02 Bigtree: “… One of our biggest complaints is that the pro vaxxers keep saying the science is settled. …That’s the least scientific statement you can possibly make. That’s why I don’t say I’m anti vaccine. That’s the same as saying my science is settled, nothing will ever happen in the future that could change my mind. That makes you an idiot, and that makes you unscientific.

“…I’m not anti-science. I’m pro science… I think it’s perfectly noble to protect people who are at acute risk from COVID 19 with a vaccine. Here’s my problem. My problem is the vaccine should be designed for people that need it. …

“Ninety-five percent of the people will have no issue with this illness whatsoever. They’re going to have a robust immune reaction …

“Make the product for those that need it. What we cannot allow any longer is this idea that science only knows how to make a product that ninety-five percent of healthy people can take but not the immune suppressed, not those that are in danger. That is such an obvious advertising marketing scheme, you’ve got to hand it to them. …They want the rest of us …to take a product we don’t need….

“Go ahead, make the vaccine. You are capable. I am so sure that the scientists of the world and all the funding coming from Bill Gates, you are completely capable of making a product for that tiny percentage of people that really do need it….”

55:46 Dr Buttar: “I want to say one thing and that is I have publicly stated that I will go anywhere on the planet, no matter how rampant the issue is. I will shake their hand, I will hug them, and if she’s good-looking enough, I’ll even kiss her. I have no problem getting that exposure. …”

55:50 Charlene: “That’s the point of our discussion right now. We want to learn the truth about vaccines, the truth about COVID. What’s really going on. In a free society we ought to be afforded the right to speak and to be heard, to dialogue back and forth. There are talking points that keep people triggered from even listening to us because the term anti vax is somewhat like the term conspiracy theorist. …”

Next the panelists each updated what they’re currently doing.

58:49 Dr. Wakefield: “…The new film comes out in a few weeks time. …It’s called 1986 The Act, and it goes right to the core of the very problems we’ve been discussing. How did this come to pass? What was the catalyst that really drove this pro vaccine agenda worldwide and the push for mandates?

“It was in large part the 1986 act signed into law by Ronald Reagan which gave liability protection to the vaccine makers for damage done by their vaccines. At the time it was a limited liability. It since has become liability for all damage done by all vaccines. …

“What it did was give the pharmaceutical industry the perfect business model of a mandatory market and no liability and that was a profit machine. That profit machine allowed them to buy the politicians, the media, to buy public opinion, and to buy the medical profession. That has made them extremely powerful.

“What circumvents the 1986 Act is fraud. If they can be shown to have committed fraud, they deliberately put people in harm’s way, if they knew they could make vaccines safer and they chose not to and hid that fact, then they’re liable. One way of bringing this act to its knees and forcing revision or repeal is to expose that fraud.

“In my opinion, what the film reveals is premeditated, first degree murder. …

“I urge people to watch it.”

1:01:50 Dr. Mikovits: “You can find us promoting Plague of Corruption, which is what COVID 19 is and what the data in that book support, …

“The subtitle is called Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science. There is promise in science, and if we can show that many, many, many good doctors, good scientists, and it’s only the old boys’ corrupt network that has perpetrated this COVID 19, the largest fraud that is small amount that need to go.

“We can reorganize, shut down, start over again with true public health agencies to protect public health.

“We’ll be at Autism One, which this year is virtual…

Dr. Mikovits also talked about what she had gone through being a whistleblower.

“…How bad our scientific community is, not only with censorship, but with propaganda masquerading as science as they misinterpret data in order to cover up from this ‘plague of corruption.’ …

“Never again will something like William Thompson and the data burning party happen. We’ve got all the data, and the Attorney General has had it on a hard drive since 2015. So we know the FBI, the Attorney General are fully complicit. They know exactly what happened They’re part and parcel to COVID 19 and this plague of corruption. …”

1:12:15 Del Bigtree: “First of all, you can always find me at the Highwire.com of course. I’m doing a weekly talk show, my third year now. I’ve done over 160 episodes of The Highwire with Del Bigtree…

“Of course my nonprofit website is ICanDecide.org, if you want to read about the lawsuits. …I really believe that this is a time of hope. I think we really need to look at this a different way. …Fear is what they’re trying to sell us. … Know that we are powerful. Our bodies are beating this, whether it’s a manmade virus or it’s a virus out of Wuhan, it doesn’t matter. We are amazingly designed….

“The Highwire has grown 25 times, our viewership has increased in eight weeks. We’ve gone from hundreds of thousands of views to millions of views with every form of censorship taking place on our show. …“It’s one person handing it and sharing it to the next person. …

“We all have to do our part. It’s time to come together and take back the world. …”

1:19:20 Kennedy: “I want to share my gratitude …this is such an extraordinary group. I’m so glad I got to sit here with you guys because these people are my friends…

“Children’s Health Defense now is focusing on information,  …getting the information, weaponizing it and handing it to our followers in a form that they can use to change the pharmaceutical paradigm.

“The pharmaceutical companies have subverted our democracy. They are victimizing our children They have captured the agencies that are supposed to protect American citizens from powerful industries. They have corrupted the political process. They have subverted the press.

“They are using this pandemic, some people call it a ‘plandemic’ because it feels so much like there was a plan behind it, to tighten the noose on us and to turn America into a surveillance state where people, because they’re scared of a virus, will accept these intrusions on their liberties, on their civil rights. …

“They’re turning us into production units and consuming entities. They can monitor us anytime. …

“5G is not about bringing you quicker downloads for your video games or for your movies. It’s about surveillance and control. It’s about taking all the data from your devices …so they know what you’re doing, what you’re buying, everything about you. That data is the new oil rush of the 21st century. …

“Gates has a chip that will turn on and off a woman’s menstrual process so she can and cannot have babies. …Every part of our lives is now going to be subject to control.

“This disease [COVID] is about engineering compliance. It’s about training us to do what we’re told, to not go to the beach unless we’re told, to not kiss our girlfriend unless we’re given permission.

“The other day in Malibu police were out on the beach giving thousand dollar tickets to surfers for using the ocean, and people are putting up with this. And when they get this 5G system in place you won’t even see that because they’ll know when you are at the beach by looking at your cell phone, by looking at your GPS, … and they’ll just withdraw one thousand dollars from your payroll account with cryto currency.

“They’re trying to get rid of all the money. That’s one of Gates’ things, to get rid of the cash economy. That way they can monitor and scrutinize every transaction that you make, and if they don’t like you, if you displease them, they can shut it all off.

“We need to understand that is what’s happening here. They are going to rob us not only of our democracy, our liberties, but they’re going to rob us of our souls.

“They’re going to inject us with the medicines that they want and they’re going to charge us for the diseases that they give us.

“They’re going to control our populations, they’re going to control our movements, control every part of our lives. If you are not part of this battle, then you are lost.

“We are the only things that are left for all the things that we value in our lives, all of the things that our country stood for. This is it. And what we’re doing at CHD is we’re suing them. We’re using the last instruments of our democracy that are left.

“…The courts are one of the few places that are left where we can still make a difference, where we can still change policy. They’ve neutralized and co-opted and infiltrated all of the other institutions of our democracy that are supposed to stand between a vulnerable little child and a greedy corporation. They’re gone …

  “We have a very, very important job which is to inform our public, to organize our public to strategize with each other… and I’m so grateful that the people that I’m working with  …are all the major leaders here…

“We are in the last battle. This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of humanity. We all knew this was coming at some point. I never believed it would come in my lifetime, but here it is. We are the happy few, the band of brothers and sisters. We know what our job is in this life. We know that we’re part of this battle. We have to fight and we have to die with our boots on if necessary. Everybody here, I’m confident, knows what their duty is and is going to do that duty, and I’m going to be beside you when you do it. I know all of you are going to be beside me.”

1:31:42 Dr. Tenpenny: “When you look at this whole situation and this whole shutdown, maybe God put the entire world on stop for right now and we can take advantage of that time. …

“And thirdly and most importantly get your spiritual house in order. We’ve got some pretty big battles coming up. We can be as optimistic or as pessimistic as we want to be about what we think the next three to six years is.

“Most of us that are Christians kind of know what the end game is. We know what the end of the story is, and in between now and then, whether it’s six months, six years, sixteen years, however long it is, get your spiritual house in order. God put you in full stop so that you can get your spiritual house in order. What does that means to you? How does that really resonate with you? If you’ve never taken the time to pray, you haven’t had time to do it, now you’ve got the time….

“If people want to find out more about me personally…you can go to drtenpenny.com … and vaxxter.com …

“I’ve been doing this for twenty years and more than 40,000 hours, and I’m one of the physicians on the team that has been able to stand up and say not only no, but hell no, we’re not doing this….

1:41:48 Dr. Buttar: “Fear is an illusion. It exists only in our mind and this is one of the places where they’re trying to take humanity down is from this fear aspect. Fear is not real. Danger is real, but fear is not. …

“What they are painting now is that this COVID 19, the coronavirus is the danger and they’re trying to make you fearful of it whereas in fact the danger is not the coronavirus. The danger is exactly what Bobby talked about, what Del talked about, what Andy talked about… That’s the danger, taking away our rights, our fundamental autonomy over our own bodies, over our own children.

“It is a fight for humanity…if I don’t fight, the rest of us don’t fight, my children will not have children. That’s what motivates me. …

“I believe that we are writing history here and we will be remembered. …

“If you go to AskDrButtar.com/ttav …follow the links, you will get to the part where you can access the dashboard and you’ll be able to see all these videos and you can download them. …It’s not going to cost you a single dime. …

“The most important thing we can do is empower people with knowledge because once you’ve been empowered, nobody can victimize you. Then it doesn’t make any difference what they try to do because now you know what the facts are, you know where the real danger is, and you won’t be fearful anymore.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/us/coronavirus-moderna-vaccine-invs/index.html


In quest for vaccine, US makes 'big bet' on company with unproven technology

(CNN)It almost felt like an episode of "Shark Tank."

One by one, vaccine developers at a White House roundtable convened by President Donald Trump in early March pitched their product as a viable solution to the coronavirus that was spreading globally and killing Americans.
John Shiver, the head of R&D for Sanofi Pasteur vaccines, said he could have a product ready for the clinic in a year -- perhaps a vaccine for the public in as "few as several years."
Trump seemed uninterested.
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    "Right. OK. Thank you very much," he said at the March 2 roundtable, which was captured on C-SPAN.
    Next was Lenny Schleifer, the founder and CEO of Regeneron -- which aims to conduct clinical trials this summer -- who talked of pumping 200,000 doses per month of its therapeutic vaccine from his factory, starting in August, "if all goes well."
    This got Trump's attention. He leaned over the table and interrupted Schleifer mid-pitch.
    "So that process would be faster than John's?" he said, pointing at Shiver.
    "It would be," Schleifer said, adding that the process could take "weeks to months."
    The only way to top that was to start talking about days, and it's exactly what the next CEO did.
    President Donald Trump leads a meeting with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and pharmaceutical executives in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 2.
    Stéphane Bancel of Moderna Inc. glanced across the table at the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and said he is "very proud to be working with the US government and to have already sent, in only 42 days from the sequence of the virus, our vaccine to Dr. Fauci's team at the NIH."
    The French-born Bancel went on to say that he needed just "a few months" to start phase two of a three-part clinical trial of the sort that typifies vaccine development. (The entire process often takes more than a decade.)
    Trump seemed to tune out everything but the talk of time.
    "So you're talking over the next few months, you think you could have a vaccine?" he asked.
    "Correct. Correct," Bancel said, raising a hand to acknowledge Fauci shifting in his chair across the table. "With phase two," Bancel clarified, just before Fauci interjected, for Trump's benefit: "You won't have a vaccine. You'll have a vaccine to go into testing."
    To some observers, it was a classic Bancel performance -- a rare public glimpse into his uncanny ability to say the right thing to the right people in the right moment.
    His supporters say, however, he was doing what he's always done: letting Moderna's accomplishments speak for themselves.
    Either way, it turns out Moderna had an edge. Its scientists had already been collaborating with researchers from the National Institutes of Health on a vaccine for another coronavirus, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). So when Chinese researchers released the genomic sequence for the new coronavirus -- SARS-CoV-2, which causes the deadly disease known as Covid-19 -- in mid-January, they had a jump start.
    On March 3 -- the day after the roundtable -- the FDA green-lit Moderna's product for trial, making it the first vaccine candidate to advance to the first phase of a clinical study, in which an as-yet unapproved vaccine is injected into the arms of a small group of 45 human volunteers.
    Established in 2010, Moderna has never brought a product to market, or gotten any of its nine or so vaccine candidates approved for use by the FDA. It has also never brought a product to the third and final phase of a clinical trial.
    And yet at the moment, it represents one of the country's -- and possibly world's -- best hopes for a return to the normalcy that slipped away when the microscopic enemy brought civilization to a standstill.
    The federally funded trial for Moderna's vaccine candidate began in Washington state on March 16 -- two weeks after the roundtable. With a hope-starved world cheering it on, Moderna officially burst out of the gate, marking the beginning of the race for a vaccine for the new coronavirus.

    Major funding injected into vaccine race

    The effort received another boost on April 16, when the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awarded Moderna up to $483 million to accelerate the development and manufacturing of the vaccine. That amounts to about half of what the federal agency has doled out, with Janssen Research & Development -- part of Johnson & Johnson -- receiving $456 million, and a third company, Sanofi, receiving up to $30 million.
    Johnson & Johnson is a household name with a long list of approved medicines; Sanofi has been making vaccines for more than 100 years. But much of Moderna's appeal is not what it has done, but what it says is possible: to develop a vaccine -- which normally takes years -- in record speed.
    As it happens, although Moderna is not a household name, it's a company with a storied history.
    CNN Investigates interviewed more than 20 experts and former employees for this story and found that while some of the scientists expressed optimism that Moderna can pull it off, others voiced criticism about the hype the company has generated over the years, as well as what has been described as a caustic work culture.
    Others raised concerns about the science, or challenged the wisdom of the federal government-sanctioned shortcuts in the ongoing clinical trial, in particular the FDA's approval to gloss over the animal trials that normally precede injecting an untested vaccine into healthy humans.
    Dr. Joseph Bolen, who served as Moderna's chief scientific officer and president of research and development from 2013 to 2015, believes it was reasonable to give Moderna a shot, but was puzzled by BARDA's massive allocation -- up to $483 million -- calling it a "big bet."
    "I don't know what their thinking was," he said. "Why so much? ... I just don't know. When I read that, I was pretty amazed."
    Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna's chief medical officer, acknowledged that the company doesn't have a product on the market, but said the government's decision was wise.
    "We're a young company with an emerging technology and for that reason we have not yet brought anything to full licensure," he told CNN. "But if you look at the building blocks of what we have been able to demonstrate over time -- from preclinical through our early clinical data -- this is a very promising technology."

    Moderna is ahead of the pack

    Moderna, Inc. -- originally called Moderna Therapeutics -- was founded on a big idea that would disrupt the pharmaceutical industry.
    Its vision is to harness a new technology that synthesizes messenger RNA, or mRNA -- essentially an instruction manual in every living cell for creating protein -- to prompt the human body to make its own medicine. The hope has been to find "transformative" treatments for heart disease, metabolic and genetic diseases, kidney failure, even cancer.
    To be sure, a handful of other vaccine candidates have since entered the human trial phase, and more than 80 companies and academic labs are working on vaccines to add to the mix.
    But Moderna -- which has at least 15 products in clinical trials -- was the first company with an mRNA vaccine that advanced to human trials, though another German mRNA company has since entered the race and another isn't far behind. Moderna also has been allocated the most funding by BARDA, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
    BARDA said it plans to fund a variety of approaches.
    "More than one vaccine is likely to be the solution," a BARDA spokesperson said in an email. "Of note, Moderna was the first into the clinic with a vaccine."
    Meantime, Moderna is indeed moving at a fast clip: On Monday, it submitted a proposal to the FDA to enter Phase 2, subject to final safety findings from Phase 1.
    (The second phase of a typical clinical study ramps up the number of people -- often into the hundreds, including more members of at-risk groups. In Phase 3, the vaccine is given to thousands of people and tested for efficacy and safety, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
    Over the years, Moderna has sold investors on the revolutionary potential of its medicine. Bancel has been the chief narrator of the company's intoxicating story.
    "We feel this is most probably the only time in our lives that we will have a chance to really change the world," he said in a 2013 TED Talk about how mRNA could be used as a way to regrow heart tissue in people who have suffered heart attacks.

    Ambition, secrecy and money has earned Moderna critics

    Two of its four founders -- Derrick Rossi and Robert Langer -- are especially heavy hitters in the science community. Rossi, once an associate professor at Harvard, was hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2011 for a novel stem-cell treatment; Langer of MIT is ranked by Google as the eighth most-cited researcher in the world, just a few notches below Sigmund Freud.
    Moderna's unproven but potentially paradigm-shattering technology has garnered enthusiastic press: Moderna was ranked No. 1 on the CNBC Disrupter 50 list in 2015 for its goal to help "the human body make the medicine it needs to cure a disease," putting it in company with eventually the likes of Airbnb, Lyft and WeWork. More recently, it was praised in an op-ed by Bill Gates -- whose namesake foundation has given millions to Moderna -- though his piece didn't mention the company by name.
    Bill Gates on a possible Covid-19 vaccine timeline
    Bill Gates on a possible Covid-19 vaccine timeline 10:17
    But Moderna's unbridled ambition, reputation for secrecy and preoccupation with venture capital have earned it detractors.
    In 2016, an op-ed published in the science journal Nature scolded Moderna for not having published a single peer-reviewed paper outlining the science of its dazzling product, even as it participated in a "schmoozefest" at a JP Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco that announced $350 million in investments.
    The piece noted that Moderna's then lack of scientific publishing was similar to that of Theranos, now disgraced for raising some $700 million in venture capital for a blood-testing technology that turned out to be a sham, turning the now-dissolved company and its embattled CEO into a symbol of tech hubris run amok.
    Hear what it's like to be part of a vaccine trial
    Hear what it's like to be part of a vaccine trial 04:04
    "Deals don't validate science," the op-ed said. "Biotech is littered with examples of big money acquisitions or licenses written off or abandoned subsequently."
    Articles in the science press sometimes refer to the company as "mysterious" or "secretive."
    "They've been a little tight-fisted about their data," said a former BARDA official who now works as a biotech expert at Biologics Consulting and has worked with Moderna. "And I interpret that to mean the results so far have been disappointing."
    In a rare interview, Noubar Afeyan, one of Moderna's four co-founders and the current board chairman, told CNN the company's reputation for secrecy is misunderstood.
    "They mistake secrecy for ambiguity," he said of critics, noting that the company didn't publish in the early days because it had nothing to publish -- it was in the experimental phase.
    But Matthias John, a molecular biologist who was a group leader and senior research fellow at Moderna for nearly four years ending in 2016, remembers being told not to publish even when he had good data.
    "They had really this fear to disclose results," he said, adding that the company worried it would allow competitors to catch up to their innovations. "It was just a pity. ... We had fantastic data back then."

    Critics call for more skepticism

    In any case, the company has published dozens of papers in recent years, and several experts and former Moderna employees contacted by CNN for this story rejected any comparison to Theranos, saying the science is sound.
    One former employee, who worked at the company for three years ending in 2019 -- most recently as a director -- called the comparison "absurd."
    Director of key vaccine agency says his dismissal was retaliation
    Director of key vaccine agency says his dismissal was retaliation 02:59
    "I think Moderna has a strong compliance culture," said the former director, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying the biotech industry is a small world and he didn't feel comfortable making a public statement. "They are very driven. They have a strong vision, they work really hard."
    But a former company executive had a more mixed take on the question. On the one hand, he said, the science is on a "good foundation."
    "They really are pushing forward the boundaries of understanding RNA," said the former executive, who requested anonymity because he still works in the field.
    In his view, though, Moderna is a company that "believes their own story, spins their own story and has managed to convince a lot of investors -- in-biotech investors and other non-biotech investors -- that it's true," he said. "I think (people) should approach it with a little more skepticism."

    Moderna's turbulent start

    In the early years, Moderna was a chaotic place. Over the span of a decade, the size of its workforce has expanded from four employees to more than 700.
    The culture of the company seems to have stabilized: In the past five years, it has ranked as a top biopharmaceutical employer in Science magazine's Top Employers Survey.
    But there were growing pains, some of which centered on Bancel, the only CEO the company has ever had.
    Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, at the company's office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2017.
    Afeyan, a venture capitalist with a PhD in biochemical engineering from MIT, had tried to recruit Bancel to lead other projects, but Bancel -- formerly the CEO of a French diagnostics company -- had turned him down.
    "I told him I was willing to take a career risk by working on something that might not work," Bancel told Boston magazine in 2013. "But it would have to be something that, if it worked, would change the world."
    When Afeyan asked him to join Moderna, the idea was too big for Bancel to resist. The holder of a Master of Science in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Harvard Business School joined in 2011.
    Bancel's leadership style has come under fire from employees who have described a pressure-cooker atmosphere in which around-the-clock hours were the norm and failed experiments -- a fact of life in the world of science -- could be met with reprimand or even dismissal, according to a 2016 investigation by Stat, a health publication.
    Pandemic expert: 'A vaccine is the holy grail'
    Pandemic expert: 'A vaccine is the holy grail' 19:51
    The former executive, who left in 2016, recalled that Bancel seemed to have two versions of himself: the calm public persona who makes speeches and appears on TED Talks, and the private version in corporate meetings.
    "What you hear in corporate meetings is stuff like this, 'What the f**k are you taking about? It's complete bullsh*t. ... You just said six-to-nine months; I need it done in five.'"
    Dr. Suhaib Siddiqi, a chemist who served for a short time as Moderna's former director of chemistry in 2011, said Bancel was "unfriendly" and "arrogant," and punished technicians for failed experiments.
    "Ninety percent of the things in science fail -- that's the way the inventions are made," Siddiqi said. "When it failed (at Moderna), he just shifted the blame to the technicians and fired them."
    Bancel disputes the characterization.
    "Science is complicated and many things fail," Bancel, who declined CNN an interview, responded in a written statement. "I don't recall one employee being fired since we started the company, because of science failing. If that had been the case, most scientists would have left the company and the company could not have gotten to the point it is."
    He added: "We are creating a new class of transformative mRNA medicines to improve the lives of patients. When there is an opportunity to help patients, every day matters. So, there is an urgency to what we are doing because patients are waiting. We are privileged to be a part of a broad ecosystem of researchers from academia and industry who are expanding the understanding of mRNA."
    Some former employees spoke in defense of Bancel.
    "As a person I like him," said Matthias John, the molecular biologist that left in 2016. "He's a little bit of a fanatic. But he's not in my opinion a cheater or pretender. It is his personality -- that he's pushing hard and he expected everybody's pushing the same way."
    The former director who left in 2019 said Bancel has brought in a leadership team with experience in biopharmaceutical development that has "tempered the intensity."
    But in 2014, the work environment became too much even for Rossi, a co-founder of Moderna, who says his team developed the company's core technology at Harvard Medical School.
    Rossi said he butted heads with Bancel, and that the company and its investors had a way of taking credit for the ideas of its scientists, including his own -- an allegation that Moderna's leadership denies.
    But Rossi, who later went on to become an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and is now the CEO of another biotech company called Convelo Therapeutics, said he believes in the technology. He continues to have a financial stake in the company.
    "I'm very optimistic," he said. "It's still going on the exact concept that it was founded on."
    Rossi, who said that he's heard that the culture at Moderna has mellowed, added that on some level, the cutthroat nature of the place made sense.
    "I founded the company because I wanted to make an impact on human health," he said. "The CEO's job is to make money for investors."
    Afeyan, the Moderna board chairman, fiercely defends Bancel. He told CNN the characterizations of Bancel as a gifted fundraiser are misplaced and even "derogatory," saying it's a way for detractors to smear him with faint praise.
    "He's a skilled team builder, he's a skilled product developer, he's a skilled strategist, he's a skilled partnership forger ... he's all of those things," Afeyan said. "In order to fuel all that, he needs to have come up with money and we did, in a way that's unprecedented in the biotech industry. Also by tenfold. That's why he has detractors."

    The big deals that shaped Moderna

    In 2013, Moderna received $240 million from UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca for a license to develop RNA-based drugs to combat a range of ailments, from cardiovascular disease to kidney failure to cancer. It was one of the largest Big Pharma licensing deals ever conducted for a drug not yet in trials. The next year, Moderna and Alexion Pharmaceuticals inked a $100 million deal to develop drugs to treat rare diseases, including a rare hereditary disease called Crigler-Najjar syndrome, which can cause brain damage in infants.
    Other gargantuan deals include a $325 million multi-part pact with Merck for a cancer vaccine and a $315 million agreement with Vertex for a treatment for cystic fibrosis.
    The clinical trials associated with most of those companies have advanced, but the Alexion agreement cratered. Alexion executives said the company decided to move in a new direction. But safety issues had surfaced in studies, with animals exhibiting liver problems, meaning it wasn't safe enough to test in humans, according to a 2017 Stat investigation.
    A scientist in the lab at Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 28.
    Afeyan said it is true that Alexion's experiments showed animal toxicity, but added that Moderna has since changed its formulations and, in human trials, "we haven't seen any of that."
    Moderna gradually began to shift more focus on vaccines. Experts and former employees say that progress with therapeutics was much slower and more difficult to get to point where it could be used as promised in humans. Messenger RNA activates the body's instinct to get rid of the foreign invader, which works better for single dose vaccines but creates safety issues for longer-term use in chronic diseases.
    Jeff Ellsworth, who served as Moderna's former senior director of preclinical pharmacology and the head of rare genetic diseases until he left in 2013, remembers standing around a white board in his office with two company executives, discussing the data used in animal studies for drugs meant to treat rare genetic diseases.
    "We all kind of looked at each other and said, 'Oh. We should probably be a vaccine company,' because these things stimulate antibody responses," he said.
    Said Rossi: "It's the perfect technology for the threat we face."
    The problem is, in part because the field is crowded, the vaccine arena was perceived as less ambitious than therapeutics among investors, who saw it as a "loss leader" financially -- that is, a money loser, or perhaps a modest moneymaker. Many considered it a low-margin commodity.
    "Most of the biotech community did not value vaccines," Ellsworth said. "It was very hard to move that stuff forward. Because people said, 'Oh, vaccines, nobody's going to pay for that -- it's no big deal.'"
    But Bancel -- who pulled in a salary of more than $920,000, plus a bonus of $1 million in 2019 -- has ably applied his persuasive powers to vaccines.
    In a "Mad Money" interview on CNBC in January, Bancel wowed host Jim Cramer with his description of a potential therapeutic "personalized cancer vaccine" by Moderna using mRNA technology.
    "In our lifetime?" Cramer asked.
    "It's happening actually right now," Bancel answered. "We compare every letter of DNA ... of a cancer cell and a healthy cell, and from that we deduce what do we need to do in our product, just for your cancer."
    "It's almost science fiction, what you're up to," Cramer replied. "I think it's incredible."
    In 2018, the company changed its name from Moderna Therapeutics to Moderna, Inc. and beefed up its vaccine portfolio: flu, Zika and CMV, a common virus that can cause developmental delay in infants. The list would grow, although none yet has been approved.
    For a time, despite its deepening involvement in a supposed money loser, Moderna's bubble only seemed to inflate. In late 2018, it went public. Raising some $600 million, its initial public offering was the largest in the history of biotech -- despite the fact that its technology remained unproven.
    Moderna's valuation ballooned to $7.5 billion -- up from an already impressive $5 billion from a year and a half prior.
    Still, there were signs of an impending nosedive: Moderna -- which currently generates revenue primarily through investments by collaboration partners -- ended 2019 with a $514 million net loss. True to swashbuckling startup form, the nation's wealthiest biotech firm has incurred significant losses since its 2010 inception; at the close of 2019, its accumulated deficit was $1.5 billion, according to a year-end filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
    Then came the new coronavirus and Covid-19, which has killed nearly 63,000 Americans since February and 233,000 people worldwide.
    For the world, it was a disaster. For Moderna, it arrived just in time.
    As the economy tanked, shares in Moderna surged in February when the news of its vaccine emerged. They shot up again -- by more than 24 percent, to $26.49 -- on March 16, the day the clinical trial of its vaccine made headlines. The stock price kept rising and rocketed again on April 17 -- with news of the federal government's nearly half-a-billion-dollar investment -- to beyond $45. Its valuation climbed to $10 billion.
    The new coronavirus, according to Forbes, turned the 47-year-old Bancel into a billionaire.

    Vaccine pipeline is a funnel: 'very few things survive'

    To try to bring a vaccine to market is to try to beat the odds.
    Dr. Myron Levine, a professor and infectious disease expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, cautioned that most vaccines fail.
    "I've been in this business a very long time -- a half a century," he said. "A vaccine pipeline is the shape of a funnel. A lot of things go in one end; very few things survive."
    Still, Levine thinks Moderna could make a breakthrough.
    "There's a real good chance this will be the moment for the RNA vaccine -- they've been improved and tweaked," he said. "I hope and pray that they will work."
    Moderna didn't invent the mRNA approach, but is the company that has "cornered the market" on the idea, said the former executive who left in 2016.
    "Henry Ford wasn't the first carmaker, but he managed to scale in a more effective way," he said.
    The science of messenger RNA is complex, but the oft-touted bottom-line potential benefits are easy to understand: safety and speed.
    Conventional vaccines involve injecting a tiny piece of a weakened or dead virus into the body to stimulate an immune response in the cells.
    In theory, an mRNA vaccine enables scientists to plug a small piece of the coronavirus's genetic code into a human cell to create a synthetic copy of the virus's spike protein. That's the part of SARS-CoV-2 that resembles a plastic bristle on a hairbrush, and which attaches to human cells. Because it is just a small portion of the virus, the synthetically created spike protein can't infect a person. And partly because there is no need to manipulate a virus in the lab, the process is faster.
    A biotech company in Germany has begun its first human trials of a potential Covid-19 vaccine.
    The coronavirus spike-protein lookalike would then be produced by the body's own cells. If all goes well, the body then counterattacks the "invader" -- the synthetic antigen created by a person's own cell -- with antibodies.
    The technology "teaches the human body to recognize the virus by teaching the body to make snippets of the virus on its own," said Zaks, Moderna's chief medical officer.
    On January 11, Chinese researchers released the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, a 30,000-character string of the letters a, u, g and c.
    Largely because of the ongoing cooperation between Moderna and NIH, the process of designing the mRNA for delivery was lightning fast. Indeed, it took just 42 days, as Bancel told Trump.
    Officials with the National Institutes of Health are bullish.
    Lead scientist says coronavirus vaccine could be ready soon
    Lead scientist says coronavirus vaccine could be ready soon 01:35
    "A lot of our work that we've done previously has essentially driven us into what we call a rapid response," said Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, the lead scientist for coronavirus research at the National Institutes of Health, in a recent interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. "The really interesting part about this is that we have a collaboration with Moderna," she added.
    The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- a branch of the NIH -- said Moderna's vaccine platform is well-suited for responding to emerging outbreaks such as novel coronaviruses.
    It "can be produced more quickly than with many other vaccine platforms," the NIAID said in an emailed statement. "Once the genetic information of a given emerging virus becomes available, scientists can quickly select a sequence to express an immunogen in the existing mRNA platform."

    The science has its skeptics

    But some experts are skeptical of the science.
    For starters, in the rush to get started, the FDA allowed Moderna's RNA vaccine -- called mRNA-1273 -- to essentially gloss over the animal-testing that typically precede clinical trials in humans. Given the nature of this emergency, they are happening in parallel.
    Siddiqi said this is cause for alarm.
    "I would not let that [vaccine] to be injected in my body," he said. "I would demand: Where is the toxicity data from the lab?"
    Professor Nikolai Petrovsky at Flinders University in Australia, who is collaborating with Oracle to use computer models and AI technology to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, has concerns about the mRNA trials, insisting the US government has taken an unproven vaccine and "put (it) straight into humans."
    "It's a double game," he said. "An unproven platform for a new disease with no animal testing."
    But while these experts felt dosing humans before animal trials could happen was questionable in practice, Zaks of Moderna said it would be "unethical to wait," given the urgency of the pandemic.
    The FDA, in a statement to CNN, said it was "unable to comment on specific unapproved products." However, it said that when the agency evaluates the need for a vaccine study, it considers the relevant data. "If the FDA's evaluation of these data support initiating human studies of a candidate coronavirus vaccine without first completing additional toxicology studies, then the FDA would consider allowing such human studies to proceed."
    Petrovsky also noted that while NIH and Moderna worked on a MERS vaccine, they hadn't collaborated on a SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) vaccine. MERS is "quite a different virus than SARS and Covid-19," he said. "MERS binds are different receptors, different pattern of disease. ... I would be much more comfortable with SARS data."
    Petrovsky said that while RNA vaccines are very fast to make, evidence that they are going to work is scant.
    "In the past, we've seen they have poor immunogenicity, which means they don't stimulate the immune system very well," he said.
    Said Zaks: "We've demonstrated the utility to generate the right kind of immune response time and again in multiple phase one trials."

    The challenge of a dangerous phenomenon

    One frequent hurdle for vaccine developers is a phenomenon known as disease enhancement, in which the vaccine actually promotes the infection and makes the disease worse.
    "The worst possible thing you do is vaccinate somebody to prevent infection and actually make them worse," Fauci said at a White House briefing last month.
    This phenomenon underscores the importance of animal trials, experts say.
    Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, worked on development of a vaccine for SARS. Some of the animals he vaccinated wound up sicker than the ones he didn't vaccinate, once they were exposed to the virus.
    He told Reuters that he believes the Moderna trial should conduct animal studies prior to injecting the vaccine in humans.
    "If there is immune enhancement in laboratory animals vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, that's a showstopper," he told the news organization.
    A Moderna spokesperson said the company has not seen signs of enhanced disease in animal trials with the MERS vaccine that it was developing with NIH.
    Sean Doyle has his blood drawn as part of a vaccine trial for coronavirus at Emory University.
    "Enhanced disease is a clinical finding that is very rarely seen," she said in an email.
    Potential setbacks fall into two broad categories: the vaccine isn't strong enough to produce an immune response or the vaccine causes safety issues.
    "It's possible there's no actual production of antibodies, in which because either the mRNA didn't get into the cells, the cells didn't make the proteins from the mRNA or the immune system didn't recognize those proteins ... or the dose was too low," Dr. Evan Anderson, the lead investigator of the Moderna vaccine study at Emory University where part of the human trial is taking place, told CNN's Gupta in a recent interview.
    Anderson added that there is a "theoretical possibility" that the vaccine could trigger an "enhanced immune response" that actually worsens the illness.
    Jason Schrum, a founding scientist at Moderna, also pointed out that the vaccine formulation listed on Moderna's clinical trial page for Covid-19 doesn't seem to include a key element to conjure a strong efficacy in any vaccine: the adjuvants.
    Adjuvants stimulate the body's immune system to react to the vaccine antigen -- the molecules that trigger an immune response in the body. In other words, they boost the body's immune response.
    "Typically, what you see in any vaccine if they use adjuvants, they clearly identify that and say this is the purpose of using in the vaccine formulation as an adjuvant," said Schrum, who is no longer with the company. "In that one [Moderna], I just don't see that."
    Moderna confirmed that it is not using an adjuvant.
    "We have not used adjuvants in our vaccine clinical trials," the spokesperson wrote in an email, adding that the trials have shown that Moderna's vaccines induce an immune response similar to that seen with natural infection.
    The former BARDA official told CNN that Moderna generates a lot of "hype" for an organization that has never entered the third and final phase of a clinical trial for a drug or vaccine.
    "I don't think it's misplaced to -- I want to say question -- but have some healthy skepticism about the current efficacy of their technology," the expert said.
    Ian Haydon of Seattle is one of the trial participants who volunteered to take a shot in the arm in April. He said that so far -- after a couple of weeks -- aside from a sore arm for a day or two after the injection, he has experienced no symptoms.
    "I'm eating normally, I'm sleeping normally, I feel fine," said Haydon, a 29-year-old science writer and a biotech consultant.
    Far from assuming he's immune, Haydon said he's being more careful than ever.
    "Now that I am a subject of study, now would kind of be the worst time for me to get sick with the coronavirus," he said. "I'm keeping locked up at my house, only going out to get groceries, hand-washing, wearing a mask, just like everybody should be."
    Petrovsky said the United States is unique in how it has poured so much money into "one experimental technology."
    "The danger here is ... if the US just backs one or two horses and they fall to the back of the pack, we're not going to have an effective vaccine in the US anytime soon."
      But Zaks says Moderna has delivered on its promises to US officials about its coronavirus vaccine, saying, "When our CEO said that we would get this fast into the clinic, we did."
      That, he said, combined with the company's potential, is why "the US government stepped in and picked our platform as one of the major investments that Tony Fauci and the team are making in. And I think if you stay in tuned, you should expect to see us be able to deliver on that."

























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