Senator Paul Should Ask Fauci about NIAID's December 2019 mRNA Coronavirus Vaccine Candidate

Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement with NIAID on Dec. 12, 2019 for challenge experiments. What was the genetic code of the mRNA vaccine, and what pathogen did Baric use to challenge it?

A conspicuous feature of the development timeline of the Moderna-NIAID mRNA-1273 Coronavirus vaccine is a MATERIAL TRANSFER AGREEMENT (see pages 105-107) from NIAID/Moderna (“Provider”) to Ralph Baric (“Research Recipient”). The Agreement specifies the transfer of “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna” to Dr. Baric “to perform challenge studies with the mRNA vaccine.”

The Agreement is signed by Ralph Baric on December 12, 2019—19 days before the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission informed the WHO China Country Office of “cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China on December 31, 2019, and 55 days before the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published on February 5, 2020.

Why did NIAID and Moderna believe that Dr. Baric was equipped to challenge their “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates”? Did they provide Dr. Baric with the coronaviruses to be used for his challenge studies, or did he already possess them in his laboratory?

This collaboration, which was consummated on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, proved to be very profitable for NIAID and Moderna.

The reader may recall that Ralph Baric had long worked with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to develop chimeric coronaviruses transmissible to humans, and published papers in 2015 and 2016 in which he declared that he had successfully developed such chimeras. That he was asked to perform the challenge experiments on the NIAID-Moderna vaccine is consistent with Moderna’s 2016 patented gene sequence that was subsequently found in SARS-CoV-2.

It would be perfectly reasonable for Senator Paul to ask Dr. Fauci to elucidate the genetic code of the December 2019 “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna,” as well as the genome of the viral pathogen that Dr. Baric used to challenge the vaccine.