Manufacturing the Next Threat: Can Pharma Profit From Hantavirus?

One has to only look at the intellectual property (IP) (meaning patents) of vaccine companies to see where the focus lies, and most IP focuses around the Andes virus strain (ANDV); the only hantavirus with documented human-to-human transmission. However, many health authorities still say that human-to-human spread of ANDV is still very rare. By the way, this is the strain found on the Dutch cruise ship. Of course it is.

Old World hantaviruses had much less mortality and tended to affect the kidneys more than anything else. New World Hantaviruses are different. First, they are only found in the Americas. Second, they affect the lungs and heart (just like COVID did), and are far deadlier, causing severe pulmonary edema, rapid respiratory failure, and abrupt cardiopulmonary collapse within hours. They have high inflammatory cytokine signatures. So did COVID-19. But they expect us to believe it when they say this far deadlier virus “co-evolved as the mice that carry it evolved.” Right. No bioengineering at all. Nothing to see here.

Who Are The Targets?

Who are the companies’ customers? Because hantavirus outbreaks are relatively rare, most experts do not currently envision universal vaccination. Not yet anyway. But this thought paired with “outbreaks are imminent” means that forced vaccination could be right around the corner at any moment.

The number one target is military personnel, followed by laboratory workers. This seems strange…how many laboratory workers are actually working with hantavirus in a lab? For dangerous hantaviruses like Andes virus and Sin Nombre virus, live-virus work is generally performed at BSL-3 containment labs. How many workers can that be? There are 3,500 BSL-3 labs worldwide, and half are in the US. 

Agricultural and forestry workers are also a target. The first thing I thought about was, “ah, kill the agricultural workers so we have problems harvesting crops.” That’s where my brain is going after six years of this nonsense.

A larger customer base would come from endemic outbreaks in certain regions. Both the US and South Korea have endemic “outbreaks” so maybe this explains why Moderna has been working with a South Korean university since 2023 to develop a hantavirus vaccine, using the same mRNA technology they used in the COVID-19 jabs. When the cruise ship outbreak occurred, Moderna stock rose from $49 to $55 per share. That’s another way to make money!

All of these above are plausible but they don’t make enough money. Only an outbreak makes money. Companies like Moderna dream of outbreak ring vaccination, a containment strategy in which health authorities vaccinate the people most likely to be exposed around a confirmed infection case, instead of vaccinating the whole population. The idea is to create an “immune ring” that blocks transmission chains. Smallpox made ring vaccination famous, and the technique has also been used in Ebola outbreaks in Africa.

Fine, but it still doesn’t make that much money. The whole premise of ring vaccination is that vaccines are limited. Total cases per year of hantavirus are only 50,000 cases. Maybe Moderna has a market, but with 7 vaccines in development (discounting the 6 the military is developing), they’re all competing for an extremely limited market. No investor would touch it.  There’s no business case here. There’s not enough return on investment for the research dollars that go into development and the manufacturing cost required to produce these jabs.

An Ulterior Motive

There’s no business case, and that leads me to wonder what the true motive is. The military is developing DNA vaccines while Moderna and cohorts are developing mRNA (like COVID) and viral vector vaccines (like J&J’s COVID jab.)

And that brings me back to the intellectual property. Just look at all the patents.  There are patents for mRNA tech, antigenic compositions, nucleoproteins, monoclonal antibodies and more: vaccine constructs, detection methods, manufacturing methods, and engineered sequences. What’s interesting is that there are so many new hantavirus patents at the application stage. Why? Because of one cruise ship?

We are reminded that someone cannot patent a naturally-occurring virus, so what the heck is ALL THIS for? It’s not for hantavirus, at least not the natural virus. But what if they release a highly engineered form of hantavirus? Where have we heard all that before?

There’s a particular patent from The University of Texas that caught my eye. They’re working on vaccines that target hantavirus glycoproteins. Once you target one glycoprotein, can’t you target them all? Can that then be used for nefarious bioweapons against a population? Yes. Maybe it’s just hantavirus research and maybe it is something else entirely.