The Most Morally Bankrupt Big Pharma Corp Of Them All?

An overview of Moderna's dubious conduct over the last few years...

In the wake of recent revelations that a Moderna representative offered £1,500 to children to take part in their Covid booster trials, the company has faced significant backlash.

An unnamed paediatrician, acting on behalf of an NHS trust, directly messaged a number of 12 to 18-year-olds via WhatsApp, offering them payment to enrol in their NextCove trial in late 2020.

The Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations prohibit the practice of offering financial incentives to encourage children or their parents.

The UK Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA)—the pharmaceutical industry's self-regulatory body—officially reprimanded Moderna at the start of this month.

They ruled the offer amounted to an “inappropriate financial inducement” and said the company brought "discredit upon the pharmaceutical industry." For the violation, they ordered them to pay £14,000—a minor sum considering Moderna earned $6.8 billion in revenue last year.

Molly Kingsley, a member of children’s welfare campaign group, Us For Them, remarked:

“There’s been a long string of decisions against Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and GSK for similar serious violations, yet there have been no real-world consequences for any of these companies. It’s incredible that the PMCPA, as an industry self-regulatory body, has no power to impose significant fines or meaningful penalties for serious breaches. Self-regulation is a privilege the pharma industry is arrogantly exploiting to the detriment of us all.”

Indeed, the PMCPA has “reprimanded” all the major Covid vaccine manufacturers in recent months, including Pfizer for their promotion methods.

However, there has been much dubious conduct that both the PMCPA and other regulatory bodies worldwide have disregarded.

What follows summarises some of Moderna's actions since 2020 under the stewardship of CEO Stéphane Bancel. The likes of which puts them in pretty good stead to be considered the most morally bankrupt entity in the industry—although Pfizer certainly gives them a run for their money.

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Dodging Transparency Rules

In August 2021, Moderna launched an extensive media campaign to promote its Covid product while operating under emergency use authorisation (EUA).

During the ad blitz, investigative journalist Lee Fang discovered that Moderna cunningly bypassed regulations that specified vaccine-makers must disclose the approval status of their products.

For example, the company’s “Make it Yours” campaign, which included partnerships with the Seattle Seahawks and Boston Red Sox, encouraged vaccination without explicitly promoting their vaccine.

In one ad, former Seahawk Jordan Babineaux urged viewers to "protect the team" by getting vaccinated, portraying the vaccine as a key step toward returning to normal life.

At the time, Moderna hadn’t received full FDA approval.

One could argue that they massaged the rules to promote an experimental treatment to the detriment of some Americans, who did not know that their product hadn’t received full approval.

Here is a clip of the 2021 advertisement in question:

Vaccine Mandate Lobbying

In December 2021, the National Hispanic Medical Association (NHMA), a nonprofit dedicated to “improving the health of Hispanic and Latino communities”, collaborated with public relations firm Culture One World, advocating for mandatory Covid vaccinations.

NHMA were among 60 national medical and health organisations that published a Joint Statement in ‘Support of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates for All Workers in Health and Long-Term Care’ in 2021. They also advocated for the Biden administration's vaccine mandates.

Financial records revealed the nonprofit received $30,000 from the Biotechnology Innovation Organisation (BIO), a vaccine industry lobby group that represents Moderna, according to IRS filings.

A representative of Moderna directly funded a nonprofit that campaigned for policies promoting vaccine mandates, which then materialised, financially benefitting Moderna.

In their statement, NHMA did not disclose the payments from BIO. Nor did they mention their ties to Moderna.

Moderna previously listed BIO as a “strategic collaborator” on their website, though they have since removed that page (or it is currently “temporarily unavailable”).

Note lobbyists BIO—who also accepts cash from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson— funnelled funds to both Republican and Democrat nonprofits that aided various election initiatives during the 2020 U.S. election.

Paying Government Advisers and TV Doctors

Throughout 2020 and 2021, Moderna directly paid several government advisors and doctors who publicly voiced support of mass Covid vaccination during various TV segments and press conferences.

Disclosures logged on the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) database showed, for example, that Dr Peter Openshaw—a doctor who enjoyed multiple appearances in major newspapers and on the BBC—received north of £6,000 from the company in 2022.

Similarly, Moderna paid over £2,000 to Deborah Dunn-Walters, a British immunologist, who was a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the chief body that advised government through Covid. She also served as Chair of the British Society for Immunology COVID-19 Taskforce, a group that likewise influenced Covid policy.

In 2022, Moderna announced the appointment of Jonathan Van Tam, England’s former Deputy Chief Medical Officer from 2017 to 2022. Van Tam joined the company as part-time adviser. Not long after he left his post, the government struck a deal worth £1 billion with Moderna to “future proof” the country against another pandemic by making 250 million vaccines a year.

It remains uncertain whether these payments were specifically made to promote Covid-related products. After scouring through hours of press conferences and TV appearances, however, I found no instances in which the aforementioned experts criticised Moderna’s products or conduct.

Failing to Disclose Infection Data

In January 2023, several federal vaccine advisers voiced their "disappointment" and "anger" over Moderna’s failure to present infection data during discussions about the company's new booster.

These meetings, held the previous year, were pivotal in determining whether the booster should receive emergency authorisation.

The missing data—referred to as immunogenicity data—concerned blood tests conducted on study participants, measuring the effectiveness of the vaccine in generating antibodies to fight off the Omicron variant.

Modern failed to provide necessary data that would have facilitated more informed decision-making.

Various studies released around the same time found that receiving three doses of Moderna’s vaccine actually increased the risk of infection from the Omicron variant by as much as 27%.

Similarly, a separate study from Sweden also reported negative vaccine effectiveness after just two doses. Vaccine protection dropped sharply within 15 weeks, with the data indicating a significant decline into negative effectiveness.

Failing to Share Its “Life-Saving” Technology

In 2022, it came to light that Moderna consistently ignored requests from global health advocates and officials to share its Covid vaccine recipe, which delayed efforts to expand vaccine manufacturing in less wealthy countries.

In 2020, they issued a statement, outlining, ​“We feel a special obligation under the current circumstances to use our resources to bring this pandemic to an end as quickly as possible”.

However, when Afrigen Biologics, a South African company, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) directly asked Moderna for help in establishing their new technology transfer hub, they remained silent.

After attesting to the alleged heavy health risks Covid posed to people, particularly in Africa where vaccine uptake was very low, the company impeded efforts to upscale production of a vaccine that could have—according to Moderna and various health authorities—saved thousands, if not, millions.

This ultimately contradicted the notion that they prioritised public health over profits. In 2022, Afrigen Biologics eventually reverse engineered Moderna’s vaccine—well over a year after Moderna had sold millions upon millions of doses. But they couldn’t start human trials til 2023.

Moderna recorded revenues of up to $18 billion in 2021 and $19 billion in 2022.

Spying and Silencing Sceptics

In 2023, investigative journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson got their hands on a number of internal Moderna reports that showed the company had been surveilling and seeking to suppress vaccine critics.

Part of this effort involved collaborating with Public Good Projects (PGP), a drug industry-funded nonprofit that works hand-in-hand with social media platforms to identify and stop vaccine “misinformation”.

Together with PGP, they tracked a wide range of websites, including mainstream media, gaming platform Steam, and Medium.

Their ‘intelligence team’ would then issue regular reports that ranked anti-vaccine narratives by risk level, using colour-coded alerts. If the team deemed certain content high risk, they would provide a recommendation on how to respond.

One report flagged Elon Musk as "high risk" after he shared a video mocking claims that the Covid vaccine was "100% effective."

Another report highlighted Russell Brand, a well-known critic of Big Pharma, for stating that Moderna and Pfizer made “$1,000 of profit every second”.

Leaked emails obtained by Fang and Poulson revealed PGP would send periodic Excel sheets to social media outlets like Twitter, outlining accounts to amplify or censor.

“Many tweets flagged as misinformation were simply critical of vaccine passports”, they wrote. And as we know, pre-Musk Twitter dutifully complied.

Note these reports did not challenge the accuracy of the statements made by Musk or Brand. Seemingly, Moderna labelled as them "misinformation" because they could incite vaccine hesitancy.

Silence on DNA Contamination

Since last year, Moderna has faced ongoing scrutiny over concerns that its Covid vaccines may be contaminated with synthetic plasmid DNA. However, despite repeated requests for comment, the company has yet to specifically respond.

Microbiologist Kevin McKernan made the initial discovery. While conducting an experiment in his Boston laboratory using vials of Moderna's vaccine as controls, he unexpectedly found what appeared to be fragments of plasmid DNA in the samples.

McKernan repeated the experiment and found that the vials contained between 18 and 70 times more DNA contamination than the legal limits set by both the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Other scientists soon replicated his findings, though the levels of contamination varied, indicating potential inconsistencies across different vaccine batches.

Just two weeks ago, further independent testing confirmed synthetic plasmid DNA in two vials of Pfizer’s and one vial of Moderna’s Covid vaccines.

Fluorometry testing showed that all vials exceeded the allowable DNA contamination limits, with Moderna’s samples showing the highest levels—145 times above the legal threshold.

There is growing concern in the scientific community about the potential risks of synthetic DNA entering the human genome. Some evidence suggests that synthetic plasmid DNA can infiltrate the cell nucleus and potentially integrate with human DNA.

In March, German molecular biologist Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer teamed up with McKernan to conduct an experiment on ovarian cancer cell lines. The results showed that contaminant DNA from mRNA Covid vaccines not only entered the cells but also survived multiple rounds of cell division.

In simple terms, they found the contaminant DNA can transfect the cell nucleus and integrate with human DNA.

The findings are cause for worldwide concern. Yet, Moderna refuses to publicly address the issue. The only documentation that provides some acknowledgement is a 2014 patent that outlines their DNA testing process had limitations.

This is an analysis of the total amount of DNA measured using a special light-based test (fluorometry). The "RNase=" values show how much time has passed since the enzyme RNase A was added to the sample, which is why the Moderna vial appears largest in total horizontally, not by bar vertically.

Then, there’s the misleading statements Moderna made about the lipid nanoparticles contained within their vaccine. I wrote about this in July, following the release of a pre-print study, which you can find here alongside some other facts about the company’s history with mRNA technology.

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