Moderna Is A Very Murky Company, In Case You Didn’t Know: Part 1

Now, let’s look at this sentence: “…with recent estimates putting it at roughly 22–40% of sequenced U.S. infections.” Many will read that as 40% of Americans have COVID. That’s not what it says. The figure indicates a percentage of those infections that CDC sequences. So if CDC sequences 1,000 infections, about 400 are the XFG variant. And remember, CDC doesn’t sequence every person who gets COVID. Instead, it takes a sample of positive tests and genetically analyzes the virus in those samples to estimate which variants are circulating. If you’re thinking its just as inaccurate as the way they determine flu variants every year, you’re on the right track.

And then, like clockwork, comes the caveat from the CDC. “It is much harder for us to measure Covid now than during the pandemic.”

OK, but you just said that the determination of the new vaccines is based on your sequencing of XFG and now you’re whining that it’s too hard to do.

The CDC says it no longer has a reliable nationwide count of infections. And the leading reason the CDC gives is that it is all our fault! They’re saying that people don’t report home test results to public health authorities anymore. We’re so bad to withhold evidence…or maybe it is because NO SANE PERSON is doing these home tests anymore because there is no reason to. Oh, here it is…CDC says “testing has fallen dramatically.” Umm hmmm, it sure has.

Actually, if you stop and think, when was the last time you heard about anyone getting a swab jabbed up the nose? I guess they’re not doing PCR testing anymore either.

Because we are so negligent and not reporting, we make the CDC’s job harder, according to them. Now they must rely on wastewater testing, emergency-department visits, hospitalizations, and a sample of genomic sequencing. Isn’t this their job though? Keep in mind, CDC has ~9,000 employees, but, yeah, we’re making it harder for them.

The latest CDC wastewater data classify national SARS-CoV-2 activity as very low. But they have to scare us and say it is increasing. Then, Stanford says its WastewaterSCAN is showing unusually high concentrations in August as compared to July. This sentence is misleading too, and a look at the actual 2026 article has a picture of a hospitalized girl front and center, except that when you read the caption, the pic is from 2022. Suggestive programming of your mind.

Why Is Moderna Still Here?

And how is Moderna even afloat? The business has fallen by about 90% from its 2022 COVID-sales peak. The company has been using its cash-rich position to fund a broader mRNA pipeline.

A vaccine company must have a product pipeline to stay afloat. They could build safe superior products OR they could be involved in a mafia-style enterprise of quid pro quo deals, kickbacks and God only knows what else–getting help from the corrupt government agencies (FDA and CDC) to pass just about anything through to be injected into our arms.

People are often mistaken in thinking that COVID appeared and Moderna invented an mRNA vaccine to combat it. This is not the case.

I would contend that a company that had the stock ticker of MRNA already picked out from day ONE had a pretty sure bet they’d not only be successful, but be publicly traded as well. Most startups do not have this experience.

In fact, Moderna was already developing mRNA vaccines for influenza and coronaviruses before COVID-19 appeared. Way before. Moderna had actually been working on corona viruses since 2015, and between 2015 and 2020 had developed substantial mRNA manufacturing and clinical infrastructure.

It’s amazing how much business acumen, or maybe sheer luck, they had getting that clinical infrastructure in place RIGHT BEFORE Covid hit. What are the odds?

The Moderna evolution is actually quite extraordinary for a young biotech startup. Most companies do not have their very first commercial product becomes a multimillion-dollar blockbuster, but Moderna’s became a multibillion-dollar blockbuster.

Most biotech startups spend years developing multiple candidates.  Drug development has a very high failure rate. They spend years suffering many clinical failures with nearly all drug candidates. One or more usually survive after a decade or more of trial and error, then you’re lucky if you can get it through FDA approval and commercial launch. And just because you have FDA approval does not mean you will have commercial success. But Moderna had both.

Why? Because Moderna is no typical startup. Not even close.

Moderna was founded in 2010, had its first human mRNA vaccine by 2015, a COVID vaccine in early 2020, FDA authorization by December 2020, and billions in sales less than two years after approval. This is an extraordinary trajectory.

Who Funded Moderna?

Even with its extraordinarily tight timeline of product development from 2015 to 2020, Moderna was still able to squeeze in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2018 to take the company public (using that MRNA stock ticker mentioned earlier.)

The company went public with no approved products which is completely legal, and not necessarily unusual in the biotech world. Many companies do an IPO to raise money for their extraordinarily expensive clinical trials. In other words, they need the money before FDA approval, but still, why would investors buy a company with no product? Certainly, investors are buying an ownership stake based on expectations about the company’s technology, pipeline, and future products.

Moderna was valued at $7.5 billion at the IPO price and the company raised $604 million with the IPO. But I still wondered who funded Moderna before the IPO.

And no, I’m not talking about Dolly Parton. Dolly did donate $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), creating the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund in March 2020. Lead researcher Mark Denison used some of that money to support Vanderbilt research that became part of the Phase 1 clinical work on Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine.

I’m talking about much bigger players than Dolly Parton. Moderna uses the term “strategic collaborators”, so who are they?

• Flagship Pioneering — Moderna’s founding venture-creation firm and a major early investor.

• AstraZeneca — entered a major strategic collaboration with Moderna in 2013, including a $240 million upfront payment.

• Merck —In 2016, Merck actually paid Moderna $200 million to develop personalized cancer vaccines in combination with Keytruda. This should raise eyebrows.

• Sequoia Capital-the firm that took a significant hit from its investment in the FTX cryptocurrency debacle (think Sam Bankman-Fried).

• Temasek, Alexandria Venture Investments, Baillie Gifford, and T. Rowe Price and Fidelity (if your retirement savings is in one of these, you are a Moderna investor)

So private investors, and OTHER pharma companies, provided the capital–$2.4 billion before the IPO. But so did we, the taxpayer, because of the government-funded (NIH and NIAID) science underlying the technology, mRNA, lipid delivery, coronavirus spike proteins, etc. There was general academic research, but the government also had research collaborations with Moderna.

Moderna didn’t directly receive government money, but it was well positioned to take advantage of the enormous government financial commitment that came after COVID began.

This was not a coincidence.

In April 2020, BARDA awarded Moderna $483 million to support development of mRNA-1273. BARDA later increased that to $955 million to cover development and manufacturing. This is indicated on Moderna’s own SEC filings. Then, the government agreed to purchase 100 million doses for $1.225 billion, with another potential $300 million payment tied to regulatory milestones. The SEC filing shows the government’s total commitment at a whopping $2.48 billion.

All in, a peer-reviewed analysis estimates that at least $2.3 billion in U.S. public funding went directly toward development of the mRNA COVID vaccines through March 2022, with the majority of that money going to support Moderna’s clinical trials and tech buildout.

The figure is actually closer to $5 billion when you factor in everything the government did—advance purchases of the vaccine, manufacturing commitments, etc. One analysis puts the public investment in the entire vaccine portfolio (Moderna and other companies) at more than $18 billion because they are factoring in government investment and purchase across Moderna’s entire vaccine portfolio.

So, if you took the Moderna vaccine, you literally funded your own demise. And if you were a startup company and got even a sliver of $18 billion in government money, wouldn’t you be successful, too?

The government funding removed Moderna’s financial risk associated with clinical trials and manufacturing. It was the government picking the winners, basically.

The IPO Wasn’t The Weird Part

Going public without a product is not unusual, but subsequently producing ~$18 billion in annual revenue from your very first commercial product is extremely unusual.

Many pharma companies – Amgen, Gilead, Genentech—did IPOs before they had approved products. Moderna did too, but they weren’t selling a drug (a single vaccine), they were selling an entire mRNA platform. Their sales pitch said they had 21 mRNA vaccines in development, covering infectious diseases, rare diseases and cancer. It was one mRNA technology platform that could generate dozens of treatments for whatever ails you. This is a technology platform launch, not a conventional pharmaceutical IPO.

It’s easy to think that investors liked Moderna for its new mRNA class of “medicines”, but it’s also perfectly within our rights to wonder whether these investors knew also that COVID-19 was coming. Because when you pull that string…

In 2020, Moderna experienced perhaps the most extraordinarily fortunate convergence EVER. A pandemic came along at the right time to turn their speculative mRNA platform into one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical businesses in history.

In 2018, the company had no revenue, and was valued at ~$7.5 billion. Only three years later, they were generating ~$18 billion in product sales. This just doesn’t happen.

In three years, Moderna raked in roughly $43 billion. From its first commercial product. By comparison, most newly approved drugs don’t come anywhere close to that level of sales.

Lucky for Moderna that the COVID pandemic created an extraordinary situation—a market with essentially instantaneous global demand. A decade-old platform company with no approved products suddenly had a product addressing an unprecedented global emergency, with governments providing enormous financial support and guaranteeing purchases.

I Want To See Fauci Texts About Moderna

Remember when Fauci told incoming President Trump that he would definitely experience a pandemic? Fauci made those remarks on January 10, 2017, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated. He was delivering the keynote address at a conference titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration“ at Georgetown University Medical Center, organized in partnership with the Harvard Global Health Institute. Fauci: “There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases.”

Fauci knew. Did Moderna know too? Did they know their business would have a guaranteed outcome? Just sayin’.

The SARS-CoV-2 sequence was released and two months later (March 2020), Moderna was testing. And not only testing but HUMAN testing. That’s what you call warp speed. By December, the jab had received EUA authorization and the rest is history.

Here’s what had to happen, and even in a near-perfect world, this would be next to impossible to cover in the timeframe Moderna covered it in. The company had to bring together mRNA, modified nucleosides, and lipid nanoparticles, then perfect delivery of all of that into human cells in order to produce the desired viral protein. Then it had to trigger the appropriate immune response.

Maybe you believe the narrative of decades of academic research and thankless hours in a lab led to Moderna being able to gift the world with their mRNA death jabs.

Or maybe Moderna was a spinoff of our own government. Let’s not forget that NIH itself describes the mRNA-1273 as co-developed between Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID. And Moderna is connected to some nebulous companies, like Flagship Pioneering.

One thing is for certain: Moderna certainly did not go through a standard regulatory process for pharmaceutical development, that’s for sure. FDA reviewers knew about serious issues with the COVID product but they looked the other way. 

We’ll explore the FDA role in Part 2.