How Moderna Came Up With a Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent

A COVID-19 vaccine sits in the medical department of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) before being administered aboard the ship in Souda Bay, Greece, on Feb. 20, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo/Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Damon Grosvenor)

News Analysis

Finances at vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID-19 booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from a small startup to a biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter loss in 2023 of $3.6 billion, as most Americans refused to get another COVID-19 booster shot.

In a September 2023 call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s then-chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna’s numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. “Despite some misinformation,” Ms. Garay said, COVID-19 still drove significant hospitalizations.

“It really is a vaccine that’s relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.

To get past the “misinformation” and convince the public to take continual booster shots, Ms. Garay briefly noted that Moderna was “delving down” on ways to partner “across the ecosystem to make sure consumers are educated on the need for the vaccine.”

What she hinted at during the call but didn’t disclose was that Moderna already had a sprawling media operation in place aimed at identifying and responding to critics of vaccine policy and the drug industry. A series of internal company reports and communications reviewed by RealClearInvestigations (RCI) show that Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials and a drug industry-funded nongovernmental organization called The Public Good Projects (PGP) to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation.”

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Part of this effort includes providing talking points to some 45,000 health care professionals “on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream.” PGP and Moderna have created a new partnership, called the “Infodemic Training Program,” to prepare health care workers to respond to alleged vaccine-related misinformation.

The company has also used artificial intelligence to monitor millions of global online conversations to shape the contours of vaccine-related discussion. The internal files—shorthanded here as the Moderna Reports—show that high-profile vaccine critics were closely monitored, particularly skeptics in independent media including Michael Shellenberger, Russell Brand, and Alex Berenson. PGP, which was funded by a $1.275 million donation from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a lobbying group representing Pfizer and Moderna, has identified alleged vaccine misinformation and helped facilitate the removal of content from Twitter, among other social media platforms, throughout 2021 and 2022.

Emails from that period show that PGP routinely sent Excel lists of accounts to amplify on Twitter and others to deplatform, including populist voices such as ZeroHedge.

The messages also suggested emerging narratives to remove from the platform.

“People opposed to vaccines are capitalizing on the NYT [New York Times] article about the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] withholding vaccine information. The articles do not contain misinformation themselves but are using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy,” Savannah Knell, PGP’s senior director of partnerships, wrote in an email to a Twitter lobbyist in September 2022.

In another email the following month, Kaitlyn Krizanic, PGP’s senior program manager, told Twitter to be on the lookout for “reports that Sweden is no longer recommending the vaccine for children.” In some cases, conservative accounts expressing outrage at restrictive pandemic policies, such as vaccination passports, were deemed by PGP as “misinformation” that warranted removal.

The Moderna Reports consistently show the company raising red flags about those reporting documented side effects of the vaccine the biotech company was selling. Such concerns, which may be typical of corporate public relations efforts that want their product shown in the best light, take on a darker cast when it involves medicine injected into people’s bodies.

Like the Twitter Files, the Moderna Reports highlight the push by powerful entities—especially government, big tech, and big pharma—to identify and brand dissenting opinions about establishment narratives as risky forms of speech. The growing network these efforts rely on shows the growth of what has been called the censorship industrial complex. Moderna’s faltering financials also suggest, at least for now, the limits of that project.

The Public Good Projects and Moderna didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

In an internal email sent last July, Moderna notified its team of its latest efforts to shape the vaccine debate.

“We have partnered with PGP (The Public Good Projects) and Moderna’s Global Intelligence, Corporate Security, Medical Affairs, Corporate Communications, Clinical Safety and Pharmacovigilance teams to provide media monitoring for misinformation at scale,” wrote Marcy Rudowitz, the company’s customer program lead. “If and when a response is needed, our team will notify the appropriate stakeholders with recommendations.”

The extent to which the company may intervene to shape content decisions isn’t clear. PGP continues to boast close relations with establishment institutions, including major medical associations.

The rise of censorship is inextricably connected to the pandemic, which emerged in the United States in early 2020. As federal, state, and local governments imposed unprecedented regulations on Americans in the name of public health, efforts arose to discredit counter-narratives that could be spread easily on social media. Early in the pandemic, criticism of policies such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates came almost entirely from independent media, which faced shadowbans and outright censorship on various platforms.

When they introduced their vaccines in 2021, manufacturers such as Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson also had a powerful financial interest in bolstering such censorship.

Moderna, perhaps more than other drug firm, is overwhelmingly reliant on the continued success of its vaccine. The company announced a price hike of up to $130 per dose this month, far higher than the $15 to $26 for U.S. government contracts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“We’re expecting a 90 percent reduction in demand,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said when he was asked to defend the decision. “As you can see, we’re losing economies of scale.”

Far from acting as a neutral arbiter, the Moderna Reports show that the company blurred the lines between public relations and public health. In many cases, Moderna’s intelligence and communications team targeted accurate information that had “the potential to fuel vaccine hesitancy” as menacing forms of misinformation in its reports. Given the size and scope and the censorship industrial complex, it can be difficult to draw a clear straight line between Moderna’s surveillance and actions taken against specific articles, posts, and writers. Instead, as Ms. Garay suggested, the company is one stream in an evolving ecosystem aimed at undermining dissent.

Alex Berenson

Independent journalist Alex Berenson has been a repeated subject of the company’s surveillance efforts. A former reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Berenson quickly emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of vaccine-related policies. He was among the earliest to cast doubt on the Biden administration’s false claim that the vaccinated people couldn’t transmit the COVID-19 virus to others. After government pressure on Twitter, Mr. Berenson was banned from the platform in 2021, only to return after successfully litigating against the company.

He appears to still be in the crosshairs. In September 2023, Moderna flagged a tweet from Mr. Berenson that highlighted the CDC’s data showing that among 1 million mRNA-vaccinated teenagers, there were from zero to a single COVID-19 death and as many as 200,000 side effects.

The company cited Mr. Berenson’s tweet under a report headline “Attacks on pediatric COVID-19 vaccines escalate” and claimed that he had “cherry-picked data.” However, the company didn’t directly rebut any of Mr. Berenson’s claims in its report. Rather, Moderna noted the “high-risk” danger of Mr. Berenson’s viral tweet related to the potential for low child COVID-19 vaccination rates.

“Fears about side effects and long-term dangers are major reasons parents report not vaccinating their children,” the report states.

It further concluded that “resistance to COVID-19 vaccines for children can be a gateway to broader anti-vaccine beliefs.”

Other Moderna reports flag Mr. Berenson’s tweets for “misinformation about mRNA safety” and claim that he’s a “conspiracy theorist” for suggesting that health authorities haven’t properly taken into account the documented risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) for young men receiving the vaccine. Such questions have been posed by an increasing number of health professionals, but the misinformation reports dismiss any of his criticism as inherently false.

“It’s nice to know Moderna is watching me,” Mr. Berenson said when asked about his response to the revelations. “I’m watching them, too. mRNA shots carry unacceptably high heart risks for teenagers and young adults. Nearly the entire rest of the world accepts this reality and now discourages or bans people under 50 from taking mRNA Covid boosters. It is unconscionable that Moderna and Pfizer continue to market them to non-elderly adults.

“They can call me whatever they like, but they can’t stop my reporting.”

Russell Brand

Russell Brand, the British commentator and comedian, is also a repeated name in the Moderna misinformation files. The left-leaning populist routinely pillories the pharmaceutical industry for exploiting the pandemic to generate unprecedented profits.

Moderna has closely monitored Mr. Brand’s criticism of the drug industry.

In various “low-risk” reports produced in August 2023, Moderna flagged videos produced by Mr. Brand twice. In one, Moderna noted that he had broadcast a monologue about Jonathan Van-Tam, a former senior health official who helped formulate COVID-19 policies in Britain. Mr. Van-Tam had just taken a position with Moderna, a move that raised eyebrows with many in the media. In the video, Mr. Brand noted that the company had just “made a fortune during the pandemic selling vaccines to the government” and that the “government worker that bought all those vaccines” was now moving through the revolving door.

In another report, Moderna alleged that Mr. Brand “claimed that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were based on a lie in a recent podcast episode.” The video was broadly accurate. The monologue highlights CDC documents that had come to light showing that officials were aware that the virus would “break through” and still infect vaccinated patients. In an ironic twist, Mr. Brand finished the segment with a discussion of efforts to censor debate around the vaccine.

Moderna noted that they weren’t yet taking action on this broadcast, but “we are monitoring with our partner, the Public Good Projects.”

The following month, several media outlets reported that several women who insisted on anonymity were claiming that Mr. Brand had abused them nearly 20 years ago. The ensuing media firestorm, which led to YouTube demonetizing his account, became fodder for other Moderna misinformation reports. The company warned that the cancellation of Mr. Brand was sparking a backlash among social media users, who believed that he may have been targeted by government and corporate censors for his outspoken opposition to pandemic narratives.

In a Moderna high-risk report, the company noted that speculation was swirling that “allegations are part of a conspiracy to silence the comedian, who has been a vocal opponent of COVID-19 vaccines.” The report linked an X video of Mr. Brand sharply criticizing Moderna and Pfizer for generating “$1,000 of profit every second” in 2021. The specific claim of profiteering was a mainstream claim, a statistic that was produced by Oxfam.

Nowhere in its reports on Mr. Brand did Moderna highlight any incorrect information. But the reports noted that they monitored him because he “has a large platform with over 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and over 21 million followers across multiple social media platforms.” Moreover, his “videos are widely circulated in anti-vaccine spaces where he is viewed as a truth-teller and threat to authority,” and Mr. Brand maintained support from Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.

Michael Shellenberger

The Moderna misinformation reporting system reveals that the pharmaceutical firm maintained an interest in pandemic-related issues that go beyond vaccine policy, overlapping with general issues surrounding the unexplained questions that still swirl around the source of the pandemic.

The company, for instance, flagged discussions about news in 2023 of a congressional whistleblower who came forward with allegations that the CIA suppressed an assessment from analysts that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The story has garnered widespread coverage in NBC, Science, and ABC News, among other outlets.

But Moderna’s misinformation alerts flagged Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and journalist Michael Shellenberger for distributing information about the CIA allegation. Mr. Shellenberger—with whom this reporter has worked on the Twitter Files—had exclusively reported earlier in 2023 that U.S. government sources believed that the “patient zeros” of COVID-19 were a group of Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab—a major revelation later confirmed by The Wall Street Journal.

Despite his work on the issue, Moderna dismissed Mr. Shellenberger in its reports as among its known “misinformation authors.”

“Moderna has spent years spreading disinformation about their vaccines, and so it makes sense that they would smear the scientists and journalists who expose them as conspiracy theorists and sources of misinformation,” Mr. Shellenberger told RCI.

“The question is why is Moderna spreading disinformation on the high probability that Covid escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab?

“A company that makes its money selling a coronavirus vaccine shouldn’t care where Covid came from.”

Others

Moderna closely monitored other independent voices. The company flagged left-wing comedian Jimmy Dore for simply tweeting at a New York Times call for triple-vaccination with the two-word response, “Hard pass,” as an example of misinformation. The company also warned about the appearance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Joe Rogan podcast, as well as Lex Fridman, a popular independent podcaster.

Other reports flag skeptics of vaccine efficiency and potential side effects. In September 2023, Moderna’s system cited Megyn Kelly, podcaster and former Fox News host, for a viral clip in which she said she regrets the COVID-19 booster after she developed an autoimmune condition that she believes was caused by the shot.

Moderna warned that such comments could “discourage people who are on the fence about getting vaccinated.” In its alert about Ms. Kelly, the company noted that her comments added to growing concern around autoimmune disorders and COVID-19 vaccinations. The Moderna misinformation email proceeded to offer data that appeared to reaffirm, rather than debunk, Ms. Kelly’s assertions. The alert concluded with a message about a meta-analysis reported on the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) PubMed database that highlights a link between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and inflammatory and autoimmune skin diseases. Moderna didn’t dispute the findings of the study but noted that it “is in rotation in anti-vaccine spaces online.”

The merging of public health and corporate influence peddling has concerned many academics. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who says the government violated his free speech rights by trying to silence his questioning of federal policies regarding COVID-19, told RCI, “We have a problem that social media companies and the government have allied with pharma to treat information flows around the COVID vaccine as a propaganda problem, rather than a medical issue that is best resolved by patients talking with their doctor about what’s best for them.”

Mr. Bhattacharya was one of the most prominent academics who was shadowbanned under the previous owners of Twitter because of his criticism of the lockdowns and masking policy. He’s now one of the plaintiffs litigating against the U.S. government’s role in shaping content decisions on social media platforms in the Missouri v. Biden case, which is now before the Supreme Court.

His outspoken advocacy has attracted attention from Moderna as well. In October 2023, shortly after I spoke to him for an interview, Moderna flagged one of the Stanford professor’s tweets that shared a link to a new Food and Drug Administration preprint study that documented “elevated risk of seizures in toddlers and myocarditis in teenagers associated with covid mRNA vaccination.” Moderna didn’t directly dispute the study findings other than to note that its authors wrote that it “should be interpreted cautiously.”

In the attached report, Moderna noted that it had highlighted the tweet and others like it because “concerns about safety and side effects are among the main reasons parents are hesitant about or oppose COVID-19 vaccines for their children.”

In other words, anything that might discourage children from vaccinations, despite any risks or lack of benefits, is dangerous information. That suggests a motive far from bringing truth to the vaccine debate and far more about dominating it for financial gain.

Near the end of the Moderna call in September 2023, as the biotech firm worked to highlight its stepped-up outreach to consumers, James Mock, chief financial officer, spoke briefly to assure investors of the company’s ability to continue to make money.

“COVID is a very valuable product line of business and will continue to be,” Mr. Mock said, “and we’ll make it more profitable.”

From RealClearInvestigations

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.