During a U.S. Senate roundtable discussion in February, Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., a senior research scientist in epidemiology specializing in chronic diseases at the Yale University School of Public Health, said that the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention of 1975 prohibits the development of offensive bioweapons.
But, a carve-out in the treaty allows “small quantities of offensive bioweapons … to be developed in order to do research on vaccine countermeasures,” Risch said.
In a recent article by German journalist Beate Taufer which Latypova translated on Substack, Taufer wrote, “The idea of creating vaccines with a completely new technology has its origins in the military logic of biological warfare.”
“The US military was already working on protective mechanisms that would make it possible to use viruses and bacteria in a war more than ten years ago,” Taufer wrote. “The US Department of Defense [DOD] funded the research and development of synthetic biology as a means of ‘bio-defense’ with millions of dollars through its DARPA and BARDA” — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — programs.
According to Taufer, “This allowed the mRNA technology … to overcome initial obstacles and reach its current level of development.”
Companies like Moderna benefitted from this, Taufer wrote. “Moderna was immediately among the beneficiaries,” including a 2013 “strategic collaboration” with DARPA and BARDA, toward the development of “antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological threats.”
According to a 2020 report by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Moderna received several awards from DARPA to develop mRNA technology. These awards helped Moderna — previously “a relatively small company” — develop its Chikungunya, Zika and, most notably, COVID-19 vaccine programs.
In January 2020, Moderna started its mRNA-1273 program, a potential COVID-19 vaccine based on the mRNA approach. BARDA, an agency of the U.S. federal government, awarded Moderna nearly $1 billion for the program, according to the KEI report.
Latypova said government funding amounts to $1.5 of the $5 billion Moderna has raised for research and development, or R&D, describing it as “an unheard-of sum for a biotech company that did not have any products even in late human trials until the COVID pandemic was declared.”
According to Latypova, the DOD “has established at least two large consortia of bio-pharmaceutical companies as military contractors to get grants for making products ostensibly for defense purposes.”
COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers belong to the MCDC Consortium, which Latypova said “is a vast collection of companies [over 300 in total] that, by being attached to the consortium, already are fully aligned with the government agenda.”
“As early as 2012 and 2013, the Pentagon had the basic concepts of the technologies implemented today in the mRNA vaccines and commissioned pharmaceutical companies to develop them further,” Latypova wrote on Substack.
In turn, “mass vaccinations in 2021 were about finding out how strong and how long mRNA vaccines can immunize people with the same genetic material despite modified viruses. This led to the booster vaccinations as a result,” Latypova wrote.
“In 2020-2021, DOD spent $50 billion funding COVID products alone. This represents approximately 50% of the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry spending on R&D per year. This means that, for practical purposes, there is no private bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing industry in the U.S. It is all controlled by the government and specifically, by the DOD,” Latypova said.
Latypova told The Defender that “mRNA technology can get around the Bioweapons Convention restrictions because it is a synthetic chemical drug, not a live pathogen.” Live pathogens are banned under the convention.
Latypova also highlighted the role of Col. Matt Hepburn of DARPA, who she said helped mastermind the COVID-19 “pandemic preparedness and response” and DOD linkages with Big Pharma years before the pandemic.
According to the KEI report, none of Moderna’s patents as of August 2020 disclosed the awards it received from DARPA, in violation of the Bayh-Dole Act, which requires government contractors to disclose — including in patent applications — federal funding that contributed to an invention.
Latypova explained why the COVID-19 pandemic was serendipitous for mRNA technology manufacturers. “There is no way to get this technology approved by normal pharmaceutical regulations that govern investigational drugs … because mRNA tech is inherently toxic and deadly” and because it is “not possible to manufacture it with the quality control and purity requirements that exist for normal pharmaceuticals.”
Persecution Live 