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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest $40 million in a Belgian company’s technology designed to ramp up mRNA vaccine production in Africa and other low-income countries to tackle a variety of infectious diseases and “be available on standby in case of a future pandemic.”
Quantoom Biosciences, based in Nivelles, Belgium, will get $20 million to advance its work on its mRNA manufacturing platform that makes “cheap” vaccines of “incredible quality” at unprecedented speed and scale, according to Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation.
Two African vaccine manufacturers, the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal and Biovac in South Africa, will each get $5 million to purchase the Belgian technology.
Both companies will seek to make mRNA vaccines available for diseases endemic to the continent, including Lassa fever, Rift valley fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, malaria and tuberculosis, the foundation said.
The remaining $10 million will go to vaccine manufacturers, not yet named by the foundation, in low- and middle-income countries.
Gates, the ninth-richest man in the world and the foundation’s largest private philanthropic donor, hailed the “exciting” mRNA investment as the crowning announcement in his keynote speech at his 20th annual Grand Challenges meeting attended by scientists and researchers from around the world.
Grand Challenges was held this year in Dakar, the capital of the West African republic of Senegal.
The philanthropist designed the annual meeting to stimulate research on global health and development problems that he would finance if they focused “on the hardest problems with the most innovative solutions,” Gates said in his keynote.
Quantoom Biosciences developed its innovative mRNA manufacturing platform with an early-research Grand Challenges grant made in 2016 to its parent company, Univercells.
Gates said that while the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives in the pandemic thanks to historically fast regulatory approvals like the Emergency Use Authorizations granted to Pfizer and Moderna by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), what is now required to meet the world’s needs is faster regulatory approval and a less expensive way to quickly scale up to produce billions of mRNA vaccinations worldwide to stop more diseases.
The latter goal of greater mRNA vaccine production efficiency is one that Quantoom addressed with its new platform, Gates said.
“Historically, vaccine factories have to be gigantic and there were huge-scale economics involved,” Gates said. “We took advantage of that in order to get very cheap vaccines.”
“But, with the work Quantoom has done, the idea now is that with the right design you can still get cheap vaccines even with factories having a much smaller footprint,” he said.
Quantoom CEO Jose Castillo said his company’s platform allows a vaccine manufacturing plant with only 3,800 square feet of space, the size of a large house, to make tens of millions of doses and could enable low- and middle-income countries “to become autonomous in terms of research and development.”
African public health leaders, media laud Gates’ investment
Gates’ announcement was greeted with cheers by African public health leaders.
“Putting innovative mRNA technology in the hands of researchers and manufacturers in Africa and around the world will help ensure more people benefit from next-generation vaccines,” Nigeria’s coordinating minister of health and social welfare and a global expert on vaccines Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate said in a statement.
“What we want is next time there is a pandemic — we hope it won’t happen soon — Africa would be able to make its own vaccine, to contribute to the development, and make sure that we protect the population,” said Amadou Sall, Ph.D., CEO at Institut Pasteur.
Mainstream media outlets, including The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC News, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News and The Hill, also took a positive stance on Gates’ plan.
The Gates Foundation has given more than $300 million in grants in recent years to media outlets, including ABC News, CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS, The Atlantic magazine and The Guardian, to expand their coverage on public health, vaccines and other issues important to Gates.
Those media outlets and others have routinely favored Gates with positive coverage for years, according to investigative reporting by the Columbia Journalism Review and others.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, The Washington Post, BBC News, the AP, Reuters and other giant media outlets including Google/YouTube and Facebook joined forces as the Trusted News Initiative and illegally censored pandemic news including criticism of mRNA vaccines and doctors’ concerns over mRNA safety, according to a lawsuit filed in May by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
Critics: Africa should ‘refuse the gift’
Critics of Gates’ latest announcement cited the mRNA vaccines’ safety and efficacy failures.
“The toxicity and lethality of the mRNA vaccine platform is unparalleled and has wrought a humanitarian catastrophe across the advanced health economies of the world,” said Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
“To make the destruction and suffering resulting from this medical intervention more equitable is a historic act of depravity, and one which I hope history records accurately,” Kory added.
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician and member of CHD’s scientific advisory board, told The Defender, “The Gates donation to developing nations of the mRNA vaccine platform is a Trojan horse — much more harmful than helpful,” and Africa should “refuse the gift.”
The FDA, “when it was still a regulatory agency and not a propaganda arm of pharma,” Nass said, required three things in order to license a medical product: proof of safety, potency and purity.
But the mRNA vaccine platform is not safe, potent or pure, Nass said.
“So far, the only mRNA vaccines licensed in the U.S. are for COVID,” Nass said.
“Vaccinated people seem to have more blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, myocarditis and cancers than the unvaccinated.”
“And the vaccines do not even work to prevent COVID,” Nass said. “After a few weeks they confer negative efficacy, and you become more likely to get the disease than the unvaccinated.”
Dr. Michael Palmer, a Canadian microbiologist and one of the founding signers of Doctors for COVID Ethics, agreed.
“These side effects will have to be expected even if the vaccines are manufactured to perfection,” Palmer said. “In fact, these effects might well become even more common with higher quality standards, because to the best of my understanding they result from the vaccines working as expected.”
The mRNA vaccines can “never have uniform potency,” Nass said, adding:
“The mRNA vials had greatly varying percentages of intact mRNA according to the European Medicines Agency because humans made widely varying amounts of protein from the same injection of mRNA and the duration of effect varied widely, with some people apparently producing proteins even six months after an injection.
“Presumably this is due to the presence of a novel pseudouridine component, which makes vaccine mRNA considerably different than human-produced mRNA.”
Palmer concurred on the mRNA vaccine platform’s unreliability.
“Even if the manufacture were perfected,” he said, “we would still have to expect that the efficiency of cellular uptake and expression would differ. Conventional protein-based vaccines (toxoids such as tetanus and diphtheria, inactivated virus vaccines such as Salk polio, subunit vaccines such as Hepatitis B) can at least be reliably dosed.”
Nass also argued that the purity of the mRNA vaccine “can never be established.”
“Inspection of the vials reveals gross contamination with undisclosed components,” she explained. “This is especially true for the presence of large quantities of DNA plasmids, which in some vials made up 30% of the nucleotides in the vaccine vial, and for SV40 mRNA.”
“Together they make translocation of DNA into the nucleus a common occurrence and increase the risks of mutations and cancers,” Nass continued. “Because mRNA breaks down quickly, smaller bits of mRNA that code for peptides or proteins different than the advertised product can easily be hidden while deliberately included in the vials.”
Since purity can never be established, Nass said, “the mRNA platform should not be used in anyone.”
Despite the foundation’s purported good intentions, Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that worldwide clinical and research evidence shows the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was no humanitarian advance but a disastrous technology that was inherently flawed.
No matter which diseases the mRNA vaccine platform is manufactured to address, McCullough said, “mRNA vaccines are destined to be biological safety disasters since they install the genetic code to foreign proteins in the human body with no way of stopping production or getting the products out of the human body.”
McCullough pointed to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which has recorded more than a million injuries and tens of thousands of deaths reportedly associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, many times more than any vaccine administered in U.S. history.
A growing scientific literature has attempted to document and analyze the historic harms caused by mRNA, with many clinicians and researchers pointing to the toxic spike protein artificially produced by mRNA in the body that causes damaging or even deadly inflammation and immune system decline, McCullough said.
“Fatal side effects with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should be a strong warning to any mRNA company” to engage in “considerable preclinical research including pharmacodynamic studies and investigations into human autoimmunity triggered by the genetic technology,” McCullough said.
Critics also noted that Africa appeared to handle the COVID-19 pandemic better than the U.S. because it avoided toxic mass mRNA vaccination now advocated by Gates.
Gates ‘optimistic we will eradicate polio’
Gates’ announcement on mRNA vaccine global expansion comes amid a surge in grants by the philanthropist to fund vaccines and other public health issues in Africa and developing nations.
On Oct. 11, the Gates Foundation, the European Commission and the European Investment Bank jointly announced a $1.16 billion financing partnership to eradicate polio, support other childhood vaccines and “strengthen health systems so they are better able to respond to emerging health threats.”
“Thanks to medical innovations, the world eradicated one human disease — smallpox,” Gates said. “Today we’re on the verge of ending another — wild poliovirus. I am committed to ensuring that no child, anywhere in the world, faces this awful disease.
I am also optimistic that we will eradicate polio once and for all and make health innovations more accessible for everyone, particularly those in the poorest countries.”
The financing partnership includes $526 million for polio eradication, $526 million to “strengthen health systems and prepare for future pandemics,” and $84 million for “technical assistance,” half of that to be funded in a matching grant by Gates.
The investment builds on the Gates Foundation’s 2022 pledge, working jointly with African development agencies, the European Union (EU) and EU member states Belgium, France and Germany, to “mobilize more than 100 million euros over the next five years to support the recently established African Medicines Agency” and other African health initiatives, including efforts to expand access to “affordable medicines, vaccines, and other health tools.”
The widely differing reaction to Gates’ mRNA grant announcement showed the sharp divide on vaccines and other public health issues in the U.S. and globally that developed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Kory and others said.
At the close of his keynote address in Senegal, Gates called for dramatic increases in global research and development to stop childhood diseases.
He also urged the attendees and his grantees to spread the word to governments, politicians and any policy stakeholders of the remarkable promise of more efficient mRNA vaccine technology.
Using much the same language that Gates did in different content, engineer Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation that has extensively documented harms linked to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, said of Gates’ new African mRNA investment, “The goal should be to save lives. This is an investment in doing the opposite. It’s shameful.”
