‘Fact Checkers’ Try To Defang Glenn Beck Report About Moderna
The “fact checking” website Politifact flagged a video going viral on Facebook claiming it was misinformation.
The flagged content was a video of conservative radio host Glenn Beck reporting on a confidential agreement between Moderna and the US Government.
“This is 153 pages of the confidential agreement between Moderna and the U.S. government and it goes back to 2015,” Beck says.
Glenn reported that the agreement shows that the US government “co-owns” the Moderna vaccine.
Below is a clip of Glenn Beck explaining his finding to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Beck tells Carlson that two weeks before the pandemic was announced a deal for mRNA vaccines was struck between the federal government and Moderna.
Politifact label Beck’s original video as misinformation however relented that the NIH believes they had a hand in the development of the Moderna vaccine which has started a battle between the two entities. Matter of fact, way back in June of 2020, the NIH claimed joint ownership in the Moderna vaccine according to a report from Axios. “We do have some particular stake in the intellectual property” behind Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine, NIH Director Francis Collins said during an Economic Club interview in May.
From Politifact:
In 2020, NIH scientists collaborated with Moderna to design and test the COVID-19 vaccine that Moderna manufactures and sells, known as mRNA-1273, Rohrbaugh said. The collaboration evolved from one originally focused on the development and testing of mRNA vaccines to combat the zoonotic virus Nipah and MERS, a coronavirus related to SARS and SARS-CoV-2.
The 2015 agreement that Beck appears to be citing in his video was between the NIAID and Moderna. It was an agreement to exchange confidential information to allow the parties to explore possible interest in collaborating, according to the NIH.
Politifact actually admitted “that material transfer agreement was executed in 2019, according to the NIH, before SARS-CoV-2 had been identified as the cause of COVID-19 and its nucleotide sequence determined. These materials emerged from NIAID’s collaboration with Moderna on the development of a MERS vaccine. ”
Oh there’s more, the NIH still wants credit for developing the vaccine.
NIH Director Francis Collins told Reuters in November of 2021, “I think Moderna has made a serious mistake here in not providing the kind of co-inventorship credit to people who played a major role in the development of the vaccine that they’re now making a fair amount of money off of.”
On November 11, 2021 Moderna released a statement that government scientists did not play a role in:
“Moderna remains the only company to have pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 intellectual property during the pandemic. Moreover, on September 29th, Moderna offered to resolve its dispute with NIAID by making the government co-owners of those patent applications that only listed Moderna scientists as inventors, including the right as co-owners to license the patents as they see fit.”
That is what this is really all about, money. Moderna doesn’t want to give up the patent so they can earn more money, the NIH is claiming they have to because the US government helped. But, neither of the two want it to go public that they entered into an agreement just weeks before the pandemic was announced.
At a minimum it’s time to get Fauci, Moderna, and the others leaders at the NIH under oath.
