Toby Rogers
brownstone.org
Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Think back to July 2020. Trump and Fauci were at war with each other. Key leaders within the Trump administration, including Peter Navarro, wanted to fire Fauci. There were protests and sometimes riots in the streets over the murder of George Floyd. And new evidence shows that behind the scenes, Fauci was working to torpedo Trump’s chances for re-election.
We already knew that Fauci, the FDA, CDC, and the pharmaceutical industry went to great lengths to block treatments based on repurposed pharmaceuticals, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin while putting all hope and money into Covid-19 vaccines. But a new book reveals that Fauci also forced Moderna to delay their clinical trial by three weeks — which pushed the release of their preliminary results until after the presidential election.
This key piece of information comes from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon. I will do it for him.
Most people already know the broad brush strokes of the Moderna story — they had never successfully brought a product to market before Operation Warp Speed. They took $25 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2013 to develop mRNA products that never worked and another $125 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2015 for a vaccine for Zika that also failed. But Fauci really liked these grifters and so when the pandemic began in 2020, BARDA directed $483 million to Moderna for Covid-19 vaccine development — and Moderna cut NIH in on the patents. That gave NIH and especially Fauci control over what came next.
The key paragraphs from Loftus’ WSJ essay are here:
Dr. Zaks [Chief Medical Officer for Moderna] had wanted to use a private contract research organization to run the whole trial, but NIAID officials wanted their clinical-trial network involved. Eventually, Dr. Zaks backed off, and both entities participated. “I realized we were at an impasse, and I was the embodiment of the impasse,” Dr. Zaks said.
Next, when Moderna’s 30,000-person study began enrolling volunteers in July 2020, the subjects weren’t racially diverse enough. Moncef Slaoui, who led Warp Speed’s vaccine efforts, and Dr. Fauci began holding Saturday Zoom calls with Mr. Bancel and other Moderna leaders to “help coax and advise Moderna how to get the percentage of minorities up to a reasonable level,” Dr. Fauci recalled.
Drs. Fauci and Slaoui wanted Moderna to slow down overall enrollment, to give time to find more people of color. Moderna executives resisted at first. “That was very tense,” Dr. Slaoui said. “Voices went up, and emotions were very high.” Moderna ultimately agreed, and the effort worked, but it cost the trial about an extra three weeks. Later, Mr. Bancel called the decision to slow enrollment “one of the hardest decisions I made this year.”
The claim that Fauci cared about racial diversity in the clinical trial is a lie. How do we know this? Later “clinical trials” for Pfizer and Moderna in kids looked at antibodies in the blood, not actual health outcomes, in only about 300 study participants. The number of people of colour enrolled in those undersized trials were in the single digits (literally two or three Black participants total) — so those results were not statistically significant. Yet this did not stop authorization. It appears that Fauci’s delay tactics were designed to accomplish a different goal.
Let’s do the math:
Moderna released their preliminary results — claiming 94.5% effectiveness — on November 16, 2020.
The presidential election was less than two weeks earlier — on November 3, 2020.
Trump lost by less than 1% of the vote in 4 key swing states.
Fauci’s demand to slow down enrollment in July 2020 cost Moderna 3 weeks.
If Moderna had released their results 3 weeks earlier – on October 25, 2020 – Trump might have scored a major win in the final week of the campaign and won the election.
It does not matter how one feels about Trump or Biden. A massive political win in the week before the election would have convinced enough voters of Trump’s competence and thus pushed Trump’s vote total over the top.
What about Pfizer? They also could have published their preliminary results prior to the election which might have secured Trump’s re-election. According to Loftus, Pfizer “opted out of Operation Warp Speed for fear it would slow the company down.” Pfizer still took $2 billion off of the Trump administration for advance purchase orders. But Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer clearly preferred Biden and so they held their preliminary results until November 9, 2020 — just 6 days after the election. The Biden administration returned the favour by giving Pfizer a blank check and authorizing shots for additional age groups based on the worst “clinical trial” results anyone has ever seen.
The important thing to understand in all of this is that Fauci, the FDA, NIH, and CDC are political functionaries pretending to be scientists. Pandemics, vaccines, and public health are a way for the machine to direct billions of dollars to their base and reward large donors to the party. These companies and their bureaucratic enablers were happy to take money off of Trump. But they knew that they could get an even better deal from Biden.
As you know, the results of this scheme are grim. The Covid-19 shots authorized right after the 2020 election have made no discernible impact on the course of the pandemic. Far more people have died of Covid-19 since the introduction of the shots under Biden than during the Trump administration when no Covid-19 shots existed. Even quadruple-dosed Biden and quadruple-dosed Fauci have contracted Covid-19, twice.
This essay is adapted from the author’s Substack