RNA for Moderna's Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3TlehY2)
Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines,
including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been
exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant
ties to US intelligence.
Earlier this week, the United Kingdom became the first country to
approve Moderna's reformulated version of its COVID-19 vaccine,
which claims to provide protection against both the original form of
the virus and the significantly less lethal but more transmissible
Omicron variant. The product was approved by the UK's Medicines
and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) with the
support of the UK government's Commission on Human Medicines.
Described by UK officials as a "sharpened tool" in the nation's
continued vaccination campaign, the reformulated vaccine combines
the previously approved COVID-19 vaccine with a "vaccine candidate"
targeting the Omicron variant BA.1. That vaccine candidate has
never been previously approved and has not been the subject of
independent study. The MHRA approved the vaccine based on
a single, incomplete human trial currently being conducted by
Moderna. The company promoted incomplete data from that trial
in company press releases in June and July. The study has yet to be
published in a medical journal or peer reviewed. No concerns have
been raised by any regulatory agency, including the MHRA, regarding
Moderna's past history of engaging in suspect and likely illegal
activity in past product trials, including for its original COVID-19
vaccine.
The approval comes shortly before several Western countries,
including the UK, plan to conduct a massive COVID-19 booster
vaccination campaign this fall. Moderna has also noted that approval
for its Omicron booster vaccine are pending in the US, EU, Australia
and Canada - all of which are also planning fall vaccination
campaigns focused on COVID-19. The company's CEO, Stephane
Bancel, has called the reformulated vaccine "our lead candidate
for a Fall 2022 booster."
However, unlike the company's original COVID-19 vaccine, the
genetic material, or messenger RNA (mRNA), for this new vaccine,
including the newly formulated genetic material meant to provide
protection against the Omicron variant, is being manufactured, not
by Moderna, but by a relatively new company that has received
hardly any media attention, despite its overt links to US
intelligence. Last September, it was quietly announced that
a company called National Resilience (often referred to simply
as Resilience) would begin manufacturing the mRNA for Moderna
COVID-19 vaccine products. Under the terms of the multi-year
agreement, "Resilience will produce mRNA for the Moderna COVID-19
vaccine at its facility in Mississauga, Ontario, for distribution
worldwide."
National Resilience was founded relatively recently, in November
2020, and describes itself as "a manufacturing and technology
company dedicated to broadening access to complex medicines and
protecting biopharmaceutical supply chains against disruption."
It has since been building "a sustainable network of high-tech,
end-to-end manufacturing solutions with the aim to ensure the
medicines of today and tomorrow can be made quickly, safely, and
at scale." It furtherplans to "reinvent biomanufacturing" and
"democratize access to medicines," namely gene therapies,
experimental vaccines and other "medicines of tomorrow."
In pursuit of those goals, the company announced it would "actively
invest in developing powerful new technologies to manufacture
complex medicines that are defining the future of therapeutics,
including cell and gene therapies, viral vectors, vaccines, and
proteins." It was founded with the reported intention "to build
a better system for manufacturing complex medicines to fight
deadly diseases" as a way to improve post-COVID "pandemic
preparedness."
The company initially marketed its manufacturing capabilities
as "the Resilience platform", and offers principally "RNA
Modalities", including RNA development for vaccines, gene editing
and therapeutics; and "Virus Production", including viral vectors,
oncolytic viruses (i.e. a virus engineered to preferentially attack
cancer cells), viruses for use in vaccine development and
gene-edited viruses for unspecified purposes. It is worth noting
that, to date, many controversial "gain-of-function" experiments
have justified modifying viruses for the same purposes as
described by National Resilience's Virus Production capabilities.
In addition, National Resilience offers product formulations and
other modalities, such as biologics and cell therapies, to its
clientele and the "Virus Production" of its website has since been
removed.
National Resilience, being such a young company, has very few
clients and there is little publicly available information on its
manufacturing capabilities aside from the company's website. The
firm only acquired its first commercial manufacturing plant in
March 2021, located in Boston, MA and purchased from Sanofi,
followed shortly thereafter by the acquisition of another separate
plant located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Makeovers were
announced for the plants, but little is publicly known about their
progress. Prior to the acquisitions, the company had been subleasing
a Bay area facility in Fremont, California. Reporters were puzzled
at the time as to why a company with roughly 700 employees at the
time had acquired a total of 599,00 square feet of manufacturing
space after having only emerged from stealth less than 6 months
prior.
In April 2021, National Resilience acquired Ology Bioservices Inc.,
which had received a $37 million contract from the US military the
previous November to develop an advanced anti-COVID-19
monoclonal antibody treatment. This acquisition also provided
National Resilience with its first Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3)
laboratory and the ability to manufacture cell and gene therapies,
live viral vaccines and vectors and oncolytic viruses.
Despite being in the earliest stages of developing its
"revolutionary" manufacturing capabilities, National Resilience
entered into a partnership with the Government of Canada in July
of last year. Per that agreement, the Canadian government plans
to invest CAD 199.2 million (about $154.9 million) into National
Resilience's Ontario-based subsidiary, Resilience Biotechnologies
Inc. Most of those funds are destined for use in expanding the
Ontario facility that Resilience acquired last March and which
is now manufacturing the mRNA for Moderna's COVID-19 products.
Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry,
Francois-Philippe Champagne, asserted at the time that the investment
would "build future pandemic preparedness" and help "to grow
Canada's life science ecosystem as an engine for our economic
recovery." More recently, in 2022, the company has announced
a few new clients - Takeda, Opus Genetics and the US Department
of Defense.
According to National Resilience's executives, the company's
ambitions apparently go far beyond manufacturing RNA and viruses.
For instance, Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi has claimed that the
company is seeking to build "the world's most advanced
biopharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem." Yet, Singhvi has
declined to offer much in the way of specifics when it comes to
exactly how the company plans to become the planet's most elite
biomanufacturing company.
In an interview with The San Francisco Business Times, Singhvi
states that Resilience is looking to fill its massive manufacturing
plants with "technologies and people that can set and apply new
standards for manufacturing cell therapies and gene therapies as
well as RNA-based treatments." Prior to Resilience, Singhvi was
CEO of NovaVax and an operating partner at Flagship Pioneering,
which played a major role in the creation and rise of Moderna.
Singhvi has further insisted that National Resilience is "not
a therapeutics company, not a contractor and not a tools company"
and instead aims "to boost production using the new therapeutic
modalities" such as RNA-based treatments, which have become
normalized in the COVID-19 era. Whereas contract manufacturers
"are like kitchens, with pots and pans ready for any recipe," "what
we're trying to do is fix the recipes," Singhvi has explained. One
member of Resilience's board of directors, former FDA Commissioner
and Pfizer Board member Scott Gottlieb, has described the company
as seeking to act as the equivalent of Amazon Web Services for the
biotechnology industry.
Essentially, Resilience bills itself as offering solutions that will
allow "futuristic" medicines, including mRNA vaccines, to be
produced more quickly and more efficiently, with the apparent
goal of monopolizing certain parts of the biomanufacturing process.
It also appears poised to become the manufacturer of choice for mRNA
vaccines and experimental therapeutics in the event of a future
pandemic, which some public health "philanthropists" like Bill Gates
have said is imminent.
Perhaps the company's most noteworthy ambition relates to their
claims that they support clients through the government regulatory
process. Given the company's emphasis on speedy mass production
of experimental gene therapies, its stated intention of getting the
"futuristic" medical products it manufactures to market as quickly
as possible seems at odds with the slower, traditional regulatory
processes. Indeed, one could easily argue that the approvals of
mRNA vaccines for the first time in human history during the
COVID-19 crisis were only possible because of the major relaxing
of regulatory procedurse and safety testing due to the perceived
urgency of the situation.
Resilience seems intent on seeing that phenomenon repeat itself. As
previously mentioned, the company claims to allow for the setting
and application of "new standards for manufacturing cell therapies
and gene therapies" and also says it plans to become
a "technology-aggregating standards bearer that helps therapies come
to market more efficiently." It previously offered on its website
"regulatory support" and "strategy consulting" to clients, suggesting
that it would seek to mediate between clients and government
regulators in order to fulfill its goal of having the products it
manufactures taken to market more quickly. In addition, upon
launch, the company claimed it planned to obtain unspecified
"regulatory capabilities." If so, it is certainly notable that former
top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials are either
on the company's board or, as will be noted shortly, played a major
role in the company's creation.
Resilience was co-founded by Biotech venture capitalist Robert
Nelsen, who is known for listening "to science's earliest whispers,
even when data are too early for just about anyone else." Nelsen
was one of the earliest investors in Illumina, a California-based
gene-sequencing hardware and software giant that is believed to
currently dominate the field of genomics. As mentioned in a
previous Unlimited Hangout investigation, Illumina is closely tied
to the DARPA-equivalent of the Wellcome Trust known as Wellcome
Leap, which is also focused on "futuristic" and transhumanist
"medicines." Nelsen is now chairman of National Resilience's board,
which is a "Who's Who" of big players from the US National Security
State, Big Pharma and Pharma-related "philanthropy."
However, while Nelsen has been given much of the credit for creating
Resilience, he revealed in one interview that the idea for the
company had actually come from someone else - Luciana Borio.
In July of last year, Nelsen revealed that it was while talking to
Borio about "her work running pandemic preparedness on the
NSC [National Security Council]" that had "helped lead to the
launch of Nelsen's $800 million biologics manufacturing startup
Resilience."
At the time of their conversation, Borio was the vice president of
In-Q-tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA that has been used since
its creation in the early 2000s to found a number of companies, many
of which act as Agency fronts. Prior to In-Q-Tel, she served as
director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National
Security Council during the Trump administration and had previously
been the acting chief scientist at the FDA from 2015 to 2017.
Borio is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council
on Foreign Relations, a consultant to Goldman Sachs, a member
of the Bill Gates-funded vaccine alliance CEPI, and a partner at
Nelsen's venture capital firm ARCH Venture Partners, which funds
Resilience. Nelsen's ARCH previously funded Nanosys, the company
of the controversial scientist Charles Lieber. Around the time of her
conversation with Nelsen that led to Resilience's creation, Borio
was co-writing a policy paper for the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security that recommended linking COVID-19 vaccination
status with food stamp programs and rent assistance as a possible
means of coercing certain populations to take the experimenta
vaccine.
Borio is hardly Resilience's only In-Q-Tel connection, as the CEO
of In-Q-Tel, Chris Darby, sits on the company's board of directors.
Darby is also on the board of directors of the CIA Officers Memorial
Foundation. Darby was also recently a member of the National
Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), where
members of the military, intelligence community and Silicon Valley's
top firms argued for the need to reduce the use of "legacy systems"
in favor of AI-focused alternatives as a national security
imperative. Among those "legacy systems" identified by the NSCAI
were in-person doctor visits and even receiving medical care from
a human doctor, as opposed to an AI "doctor." The NSCAI also
argued for the removal of "regulatory barriers" that prevent these
new technologies from replacing "legacy systems."
Another notable board member, in discussing Resilience's intelligence
ties, is Drew Oetting. Oetting works for Cerberus Capital Management,
the firm headed by Steve Feinberg who previously led the President's
Intelligence Advisory Board under the Trump administration. Cerberus
is notably the parent company of DynCorp, a controversial US national
security contractor tied to numerous scandals, including scandals
related to sex trafficking in conflict zones. Oetting is also part of the
CIA-linked Thorn NGO ostensibly focused on tackling child trafficking
that was the subject of a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation.
Oetting is also the co-founder of 8VC, a venture capital firm that
is one of the main investors in Resilience. 8VC's other co-founder
is Joe Lonsdale and Oetting "started his career" as Lonsdale's chief
of staff. Lonsdale is the co-founder, alongside Peter Thiel and Alex
Karp, of Palantir, a CIA front company and intelligence contractor
that is the successor to DARPA's controversial Total Information
Awareness (TIA) mass surveillance and data-mining program. In
addition, Oetting previously worked for Bill Gates' investment fund.
Also worth noting is the presence of Joseph Robert Kerrey, former
US Senator for Nebraska and a former member of the
conflict-of-interest-ridden 9/11 Commission, on Resilience's board.
Kerrey is currently managing director of Allen & Co., a New York
investment banking firm which has hosted an annual "summer camp
for billionaires" since 1983. Allen & Co. has long been a major
player in networks where organized crime and intelligence intersect,
and is mentioned repeatedly throughout my upcoming book One
Nation Under Blackmail. For instance, Charles and Herbert Allen,
who ran the firm for decades, had considerable business dealings
with organized crime kingpins and frontmen for notorious gangsters
like Meyer Lansky, particularly in the Bahamas. They were also
business partners of Leslie Wexner's mentors A. Alfred Taubman
and Max Fisher as well as associates of Earl Brian, one of the
architects of the PROMIS software scandal - which saw organized
crime and intelligence networks cooperate to steal and then
compromise the PROMIS software for blackmail and clandestine
intelligence-gathering purposes. Allen & Co. was a major investor
in Brian's business interests in the technology industry that Brian
used in attempts to bankrupt the developers of PROMIS, Inslaw
Inc. and to market versions of PROMIS that had been compromised
first by Israeli intelligence and, later, the CIA.
In addition to these intelligence-linked individuals, the rest of
Resilience's board includes the former CEO of the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, Susan Desmond-Hellmann; former FDA
Commissioner and Pfizer board member, Scott Gottlieb; two former
executives at Johnson & Johnson; former president and CEO of Teva
Pharmaceuticals North American branch, George Barrett; CalTech
professor and board member of Alphabet (i.e. Google) and Illumina,
Frances Arnold; former executive at Genentech and Merck, Patrick
Yang; and Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi.
It is certainly telling that the normally publicity hungry Moderna
has said so little about its partnership with Resilience and that
Resilience, despite its ambitious plans, has also avoided the media
limelight. Considering Moderna's history and Resilience's
connections, there may be more to this partnership that meets the
eye and concerned members of the public would do well to keep
a very close eye on Resilience, its partnerships, and the products
it is manufacturing.
Given that we now live in a world where government regulatory
decisions on the approval of medicines are increasingly influenced
by corporate press releases and normal regulatory procedures have
fallen by the wayside for being too "slow," there is likely to be
little scrutiny of the genetic material that Resilience produces for
the "medicines of tomorrow." This seems to be already true for
Moderna's recently retooled COVID-19 vaccine, as there has been
no independent examination of the new genetic sequence of mRNA
used in the Omicron-specific vaccine candidate or its effects on the
human body in the short, medium or long term. For those who are
skeptical of the outsized role that intelligence-linked companies
are playing in the attempted technological "revolution" in the
medical field, it is best to consider Resilience's role in the
upcoming fall vaccination campaign and in future pandemic and
public health scenarios before trying its "futuristic" products.
