Collins: So you’re saying this is a pretty good virus for a vaccine to work. It has the ability where natural infection does seem to be protective. It doesn't seem to mutate too rapidly compared to some others, is that fair?
Fauci: That is fair. It’s an RNA virus. And, as we know, RNA viruses mutate but the functional consequence of that mutation so far doesn't look to be impressive.
Excerpts from NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins' conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
The bill has finally come due for the pandemic miracles. Bayer, through its Monsanto subsidiary, has sued Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson in federal court, alleging that the foundational mRNA stabilization technology used in every COVID-19 shot was patented by Monsanto scientists in the 1980s—for crops. The lawsuits contend that these pharmaceutical giants trampled upon US Patent 7,741,118, a pre-GATT treasure claiming priority to 1989, which won't expire until June 2027.
Bayer wants its pound of flesh—and the irony here is almost Shakespearean. The same corporate entity notorious for saturating American farmland with genetically modified organisms and Roundup Ready seeds now claims pharma companies essentially injected the public with agricultural genetic modification technology, repurposed for hurried human consumption without proper licensing.
This is no isolated shake-down. The mRNA patent wars are bleeding through the pharmaceutical industry like arterial spray. Moderna just agreed to pay up to $2.25 billion to settle a lawsuit with Roivant's Genevant and Arbutus Biopharma over lipid nanoparticle delivery technology—the microscopic shells protecting fragile mRNA molecules. That astronomical sum, one of the largest patent settlements in pharmaceutical history, validates what attorneys suspected: the COVID vaccine giants built empires on intellectual property they didn't invent or properly license.
The cannibalism doesn't stop there. BioNTech countersued Moderna in February, alleging its next-generation COVID shot infringes BioNTech patents. GSK has piled onto Moderna and separately sued Pfizer/BioNTech for infringing its own mRNA patents. Northwestern University joined the fray against Moderna. The industry's titans, who spent three years congratulating themselves for saving humanity, are now trying to sue each other into oblivion.
Collins: People are feeling like this is never going to come to an end.
Fauci: I could say… as a public health person, as a scientist, it will end. We will get through this for absolutely certain. We’ve already suffered through a lot of pain—a lot of economic and personal pain and inconvenience. But it will end. It will end because the public health efforts will succeed ultimately. And science will get us through this. We will get a vaccine. We will get therapies for early disease and for late disease. So the only message that I think we can jointly tell the American public and the global public is that we will get through this. Hang in there. It will end, we promise you.
Excerpts from NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins' conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
If Bayer's allegations hold up—and given that federal courts and the USPTO have already validated this "critical technology was the first of its kind"—the implications are staggering. The agricultural-to-human leap becomes genuinely uncomfortable: this technology was developed to make plants pest-resistant, not to reprogram human cells at scale. Every safety study rushed through in 2020, every clinical trial compressed into months instead of years, was ostensibly testing a human vaccine—not whether agricultural genetic modification techniques were safe for injection into billions of arms.
The pharmaceutical companies played chicken with patent law, calculating that pandemic urgency would grant them immunity or that licensing could be settled later. Moderna alone has seen its legal exposure balloon from zero to billions. The question for Bayer's targets isn't whether they'll pay; it's how much.
For the public, this legal saga exposes uncomfortable truths about what was actually injected during those urgent months—and whether anyone properly questioned whether systems designed for insect-resistant soybeans were appropriate for mass human immunization. The patents don't lie, and neither do the royalty demands now coming due.
The pandemic's most lucrative product may, it turns out, have been built on stolen seed technology.
I took a lot of heat for this online in 2021, and probably why I was locked out of Facebook for years and X for a time, but it bears repeating here...
Here's the distinction between the ‘m’ in mRNA:
Messenger RNA (natural mRNA) is a transient, short-lived molecule transcribed from your DNA that carries instructions to ribosomes to build proteins—then degrades within minutes to hours. It contains standard nucleotides (A, U, G, C) and is recognized by your immune system as a potential pathogenic signal, which triggers inflammation and rapid destruction.
Modified mRNA (vaccine "mRNA") is a synthetic, chemically engineered impostor designed to evade natural biology:
Modified mRNA (vaccine "mRNA") is a synthetic, chemically engineered impostor designed to evade natural biology:
- Pseudouridine substitution: Natural mRNA uses uridine (U). Vaccine mRNA replaces uridine with N1-methylpseudouridine (or similar modified nucleosides)—a chemical trick that makes the molecule invisible to innate immune sensors (like TLRs and RIG-I) that would normally flag and destroy foreign RNA.
- Extended lifespan: Natural mRNA degrades quickly. Modified mRNA is stabilized with proprietary formulations to persist for days or weeks, producing spike protein far longer than any natural mRNA would survive.
- Codon optimization: The "message" is re-engineered with codon sequences optimized for protein production, not fidelity to the original viral sequence.
The bottom line: The "m" in vaccine parlance refers more accurately to modified than to messenger. True messenger RNA is a fleeting biological signal; vaccine mRNA is a durable, immunologically cloaked synthetic construct designed to override your cells' normal defensive responses.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
