Image Credit: Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via Getty Images 
Moderna Therapeutics was well aware of the health risks associated with experimental mRNA vaccine technology years before the COVID pandemic emerged in 2020.
A 2017 report by STAT explains how Moderna began running into problems with the experimental mRNA tech during its development of a vaccine for Crigler-Najjar, a rare genetic disorder.
From STAT:
In order to protect mRNA molecules from the body’s natural defenses, drug developers must wrap them in a protective casing. For Moderna, that meant putting its Crigler-Najjar therapy in nanoparticles made of lipids. And for its chemists, those nanoparticles created a daunting challenge: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.
From the start, Moderna’s scientists knew that using mRNA to spur protein production would be a tough task, so they scoured the medical literature for diseases that might be treated with just small amounts of additional protein.
“And that list of diseases is very, very short,” said the former employee who described Bancel as needing a Hail Mary.
Crigler-Najjar was the lowest-hanging fruit.
Yet Moderna could not make its therapy work, former employees and collaborators said. The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.
Yet despite the uncertainty of the mRNA technology’s promise and looming economic headwinds for the company, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel “projected unbounded confidence” according to STAT.
“I’m sure that five years from now we’ll look at 2017 as the inflection point that Moderna went for a liftoff,” he prophetically said in 2017. “We have a chance to transform medicine, and we won’t quit until we are done and we have impacted patients.”
Moderna went on to make billions of dollars with the distribution of its COVID-19 mRNA injection years later that did not undergo standard clinical trials beforehand thanks to the CDC’s Emergency Use Authorization approval.
Predictably, the injection resulted in many severe adverse reactions, and millions of doses were even halted in Japan and other nations suspended the injections for children.
That partly explains why Moderna was forced to throw out over 30 million doses of its experimental shots last year.
Notably, a tiny chunk of DNA patented by Moderna was found in the COVID-19 sequence, an anomaly Bancel struggled to explain.
A study published in Frontiers in Virology in 2022 by an international team of researchers found the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (FCS) contains a tiny bit of genetic code identical to a part of a gene patented by Moderna in 2016.