How Did Moderna's 2016 Patented Gene Sequence Turn Up in SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 Virus)?

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, the Wuhan Lab, a critical gene patent, and the U.S. government's curious lack of interest in what appears to be a smoking gun.

In recent conversations with Senator Rand Paul and former CDC Director, Robert Redfield, I asked them if they are aware of the gene sequence that Moderna patented in 2016 that was subsequently found in SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. Both men stated that they’d heard of this extraordinary finding, but neither expressed much interest in it. I followed up by sending one of Senator Paul’s staff a link to the paper in which this critical finding was presented, but I never heard back from her.

To review the paper: on February 21, 2022, Frontiers in Virology published a report titled MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site. The Furin Cleavage Site is the component of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that enables the virus to dock onto human lung epithelial cells, thereby initiating the viral replication process. It is the key feature of SARS-CoV-2 that made it infectious to humans. Examining the genetic code of this part of the spike protein, the authors noted that part of the sequence was a perfect match to a genetic sequence patented in 2016 by Bancel S. et al. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Among numerous point mutation differences between the SARS-CoV-2 and the bat RaTG13 coronavirus, only the 12-nucleotide furin cleavage site (FCS) exceeds 3 nucleotides. A BLAST search revealed that a 19 nucleotide portion of the SARS-CoV-2 genome encompassing the furin cleavage site is a 100% complementary match to a codon-optimized proprietary sequence that is the reverse complement of the human mutS homolog (MSH3). (. . .)

SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein and MSH3

A peculiar feature of the nucleotide sequence encoding the PRRA furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein is its two consecutive CGG codons. This arginine codon is rare in coronaviruses: relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) of CGG in pangolin CoV is 0, in bat CoV 0.08, in SARS-CoV 0.19, in MERS-CoV 0.25, and in SARS-CoV-2 0.299 (8).

A BLAST search for the 12-nucleotide insertion led us to a 100% reverse match in a proprietary sequence (SEQ ID11652, nt 2751-2733) found in the US patent 9,587,003 filed on Feb. 4, 2016 (9)

On the question of whether this perfect match could be merely coincidental, the authors noted:

Conventional biostatistical analysis indicates that the probability of this sequence randomly being present in a 30,000-nucleotide viral genome is 3.21×10^-11 [or 1 in 3.21 trillion].

A friend who assisted the authors of the homology paper in their analysis emailed me the following explication:

This sequence makes the gene disfunctional, and when this gene is included in culture material with coronaviruses, they replicate faster allowing them to mutate and become accustomed to the host cell system, like human lung cells. This variant sequence is 19 nucleotides long and by its patenting, is a novel sequence that does not exist in nature (otherwise Moderna could not patent it). Not quite. The only organism in which it is found, is SARS-CoV-2. And in fact, it codes for the furin cleavage site and for an adjacent “landing site.” The furin cleavage site is exactly what was needed to make SARS-CoV-2 human infectious. The landing site is a DNA sequence that enhances the ability of the original coronavirus grown in a medium with the patented MSH3 to cross over its genetic sequence and incorporate the furin cleavage site from the MSH3.

So it is clear that WIV cultured the original coronavirus with the Moderna patented MSH3, and that made the virus human virulent. The only question is how did WIV find out about the Moderna patented MSH3. That could have happened because Moderna’s president Bancel knew the WIV people because he was involved with Merieux in building the BSL-4 lab there. Whether this was done by intention or incompetence is unknown, but there is no other possible understanding of how a Moderna patent genetic sequence of length 19, which makes it essentially unique, could be found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and be the reason that the vorus is virulent for humans. If Moderna did this on purpose in order to design a vaccine, it would be a huge crime against humanity.

My friend’s exposition made me wonder if someone at WIV (or connected with WIV) simply did a search of Moderna’s patented gene sequences and figured out that this particular sequence would be useful for making a chimeric coronavirus infectious to the human respiratory tract.

The episode reminds me of Ralph Baric’s April 2002 patent application for Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus[i]. As we note in our recent book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality:

The contents of the patent application revealed that he had come a long way in discovering how to manipulate coronaviruses in his lab. The purpose of his work, he claimed, was to create recombinant coronaviruses in order to develop vaccines against them.

About seven months after Baric et al. filed their patent application, the first apparent cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were reported in Foshan, Guangdong China. In February 2003, several people, including an American businessman, staying in a Hong Kong hotel came down with the syndrome.[ii] The businessman then traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was hospitalized. Dr Carlo Urbani, a WHO scientist in Hanoi, visited the patient and suspected he was suffering from a novel disease. Urbani himself contracted the disease and died on March 29, 2003, in Bangkok. On April 1, 2003, the WHO announced:

A new pathogen—a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The speed at which this virus was identified is the result of the close international collaboration of 13 laboratories from 10 countries.[iii]

The Daily Mail reported the Frontiers in Virology report, which prompted Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo to question Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel about his 2016 gene patent. His cool brushoff was suggestive of a man unconcerned about media queries. Why should he be? When it comes to the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, the US mainstream media rarely asks tough questions, and never pursues serious inquiry.

Inquisitive viewers might have wondered: Who is Stéphane Bancel, and why is a French national heading a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that was originally funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant?

Prior to become CEO of Moderna, Bancel was CEO of the French in vitro diagnostics company, bioMérieux, from 2007-2011. The large company, operating in over 160 countries, originated in the Institut Mérieux in Lyon, France, founded by biologist Marcel Mérieux (a colleague of Louis Pasteur).

Marcel’s grandson, Alain Mérieux, is the company’s chief proprietor and (according to Bloomberg) worth approximately$8.80 billion. A personal acquaintance of Jacques Chirac (French President from 1995-2007), in 2003 (following the outbreak of the first SARS) Mérieux was instrumental in forming a cooperative agreement between France and China to build a BSL-4 lab annex to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Bancel was CEO of bioMérieux during the planning and early construction of the lab and the training of its Chinese staff at bioMérieux’s lab in Lyon. In the year 2007, Bancel oversaw the company’s opening of a new division in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As noted in its annual report:

The opening in 2007 of a dedicated theranostics division in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), a city with an especially high concentration of biotechnology firms and research centers, puts bioMérieux in a hub for personalized medicine, in direct contact with the most influential players in the field.

Four years later, in 2011, Bancel left his plum position at bioMérieux to become CEO of the Cambridge startup Moderna. Back then it seemed like a Quixotic decision. After all, the new company had just one employee and was exclusively focused on developing mRNA therapeutics. As Bancel stated in a December 2020 interview,“When I resigned from my last company, bioMerieux, to start on this journey at Moderna, I told my wife there was only a 5% chance it would work out.”

Two years after its founding, Moderna—short for “Modified RNA”—drew interest from DARPA, which awarded it a $25 million grant to develop messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics. Sometime around 2015, Moderna began collaborating with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to develop mRNA vaccines against the SARS and MERS coronaviruses.

In the year 2016, Bancel et al. filed for their patent of the genetic sequence for part of the coronavirus spike protein furin cleavage site—the same genetic sequence that was, four years later, found in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 that apparently leaked from the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. This was the same lab whose construction Bancel oversaw and whose personnel his company trained.

Bancel’s decision to leave bioMerieux to lead Moderna worked out well. On March 16, 2020—just five days after the WHO declared SARS-CoV-2 to be the causative agent of a worldwide pandemic, NIAID issued a press release stating it had commenced human trials of its mRNA-1273 vaccine.

mRNA-1273 was developed by NIAID scientists and their collaborators at the biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) supported the manufacturing of the vaccine candidate for the Phase 1 clinical trial.

Less than a year later—with the United States government relentlessly pushing Moderna’s mRNA and Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines as the ONLY solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, Stephane Bancel became a billionaire.

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[i] Kristopher M. Curtis, Boyd Yount, Ralph S. Baric. Methods for producing recombinant coronavirus. 2002-04-19, Application US10/474,962 filed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en

[ii] Cherry JD, Krogstad P. SARS: the first pandemic of the 21st century. Pediatr Res. 2004 Jul;56(1):1-5. doi: 10.1203/01.PDR.0000129184.87042.FC. Epub 2004 May 19. PMID: 15152053; PMCID: PMC7086556. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7086556/

[iii]WHO announces discovery of virus that causes SARS, UN NEWS, 16 April 2003. https://news.un.org/en/story/2003/04/64992

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