An image that is spreading widely online claims that Moderna had created its COVID-19 vaccine two years before the pandemic began—proof that health authorities had planned the pandemic in advance. “Moderna CEO confessed to creating the Covid-19 vaccine 2 years before the virus was released to the world,” the image reads. “This means that they knew Covid was coming, that it was pre-planned, pre-meditated, and launched on the world for profit and power. God we pray for exposure and justice for Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and the pharmaceutical industry in Jesus’ name. Amen!”
The claim is false. While the novel technology used by Moderna in its COVID-19 vaccine was being researched and developed years before COVID-19 emerged, the COVID-19 vaccine itself was created after the outbreak was first identified in China.
When COVID-19 was first identified in China in December 2019, health officials immediately began laying the groundwork for development of an effective vaccine against it. At the time, a decades-long effort to create a vaccine platform that leveraged messenger RNA (mRNA) to trigger the body’s immune response was just coming to fruition.
“It was an extraordinary piece of good fortune, but chance favors the prepared mind,” Dr. Chris Beyrer, epidemiologist and director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told The Dispatch Fact Check. And prepared vaccine researchers were.
Public health authorities and private medical companies had been exploring the application of mRNA technology to novel and existing coronaviruses long before COVID-19 emerged. Deadly outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012—both respiratory illnesses caused by coronaviruses believed to originate in bats—prompted focused research into mitigation and prevention of future coronaviruses. “There had been a lot of concern about this family of bat coronaviruses for some years,” Beyrer said. Specifically, public health authorities were worried that SARS or MERS might reemerge with epidemic potential.
The prospect of using mRNA as a tool for vaccination was identified as early as the 1990s, but a breakthrough in 2005 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman—the pair would go on to win the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research—demonstrated that mRNA could be delivered in a way that activated the body’s immune system and induced the production of antibodies to fight a specific disease. “Many people would credit that as the beginning of the idea that, okay, maybe we could use this as a vaccine delivery system,” Beyrer said.
Eventually, the National Institutes of Health’s Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory (VPL) under the leadership of Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett, began specifically developing mRNA vaccine platforms for bat coronaviruses, and by the end of 2019, the VPL and Moderna had prepared a vaccine candidate for the coronavirus that caused MERS. With the foundational research toward mRNA vaccines laid, when SARS-CoV-2—the coronavirus that causes COVID-19—was identified in China in December 2019, the VPL and Moderna were ready to pivot quickly toward a vaccine.
In January 2020, SARS-CoV-2’s genetic sequence was made publicly available, and within two weeks a candidate vaccine was ready for testing. “On January 6, a brave Chinese scientist put the full genetic sequence of the virus online for all the scientists in the world to access,” Beyrer explained. “And 13 days later, we had the spike protein in an mRNA and a candidate vaccine ready.” In March 2020, Beyrer, who had performed vaccine research for years prior, was enlisted to help run trials for Moderna and the NIH’s COVID-19 vaccine. “It was made clear that, based on the results of a phase two trial that was underway—which was looking at safety and immune responses—that an efficacy trial with this product could start soon, and it was going to have to be very large.”
The efficacy trials began several months later, and positive results were in by November 23. On December 18, 2020—less than a year after the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence was first made available—the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for Moderna’s vaccine candidate, allowing it to be distributed and used widely in the U.S. for the first time.
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