Bill Gates has a long history of investing in mRNA technology and firms active in this sphere. But would these investments have been possible without U.S. government — or taxpayer — support of mRNA research?
According to Sasha Latypova, a former pharmaceutical industry executive with 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development, Gates’ investments in the mRNA field — and the profits he has reaped — were made possible by U.S. government and military funding of bioweapons research.
Latypova told The Defender that “mRNA is entirely funded and pushed on the market under military contracts and funding. It is represented as ‘defensive’ activity in order to skirt the Bioweapons Convention, which prohibits making offensive bioweapons.”
According to Latypova, “The Pentagon came up with the cover story of ‘pandemic preparedness’ in order to fund on a large scale the making of biological poisons and related systems, including making them at scale.”
As a result of this research, Gates has invested in companies actively pursuing mRNA technology — and continues to invest in those companies today.
One mRNA company Gates has an interest in — Aldevron — has operations in Nebraska, North Dakota and Wisconsin, where research universities have long conducted mRNA research.
Gates also has amassed significant holdings of farmland in these states.
Experts who spoke with The Defender said that Gates may be looking to wield significant influence in those states through his investments and land ownership.
Immunologist and biochemist Jessica Rose, Ph.D., said, “The farmland … could be a part of an ongoing plan for a global control/power grab” by Gates.
She added:
“With regard to modified mRNA injection of plants, animals and humans, it is possible that there could be genetic tags therein. It is also possible that these injections are designed for other purposes, such as population reduction under the guise of ‘vaccination.’
“When small numbers of corporate giants are making billions from products that are ineffective at their promoted task, something is amiss.”
“I think Gates wants to privately lord over a large territory with productive land,” Latypova said.
Gates: mRNA vaccines can ‘change the world’
In a recent interview and a 2022 “TED Talk,” Gates laid out his five-year vision for global health, saying there will soon be “factories worldwide that can make $2 vaccines with even less lead time than we’ve had to here during this pandemic.”
The factories will produce vaccines for all diseases, Gates said.
Heralding the future of vaccines, Gates said more and better mRNA vaccines would make COVID-19 “the last pandemic.”
Gates backed up these statements with recent investments promoting mRNA vaccines, including $40 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued in October 2023 to help develop mRNA vaccines in Africa.
But Gates began investing in mRNA vaccine technology long before the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2018, TIME reported that Gates counted mRNA vaccines — along with gene editing, better vaccine storage and artificial intelligence — among the six technologies that could change the world.
In 2017 and again in 2019, he invested $155 million in BioNTech, the German biotech firm that collaborated with Pfizer to develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and boosters.
Gates later sold his BioNTech stock at a significant profit.
In 2015, Gates invested $162 million into CureVac, described by the Gates Foundation as “a leading clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company specializing in mRNA-based vaccine technologies” and which, in 2021, was attempting to develop its own mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
CureVac, which features a photograph of Gates on its website, maintains a partnership with the Gates Foundation “to develop mRNA-based vaccines against various infectious diseases.”
These investments likely would not have been possible — or profitable — had the U.S. government and military not funded mRNA research.
Government, military funded development of mRNA vaccines
During a U.S. Senate roundtable discussion in February, Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., a senior research scientist in epidemiology specializing in chronic diseases at the Yale University School of Public Health, said that the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention of 1975 prohibits the development of offensive bioweapons.
But, a carve-out in the treaty allows “small quantities of offensive bioweapons … to be developed in order to do research on vaccine countermeasures,” Risch said.
In a recent article by German journalist Beate Taufer which Latypova translated on Substack, Taufer wrote, “The idea of creating vaccines with a completely new technology has its origins in the military logic of biological warfare.”
“The US military was already working on protective mechanisms that would make it possible to use viruses and bacteria in a war more than ten years ago,” Taufer wrote. “The US Department of Defense [DOD] funded the research and development of synthetic biology as a means of ‘bio-defense’ with millions of dollars through its DARPA and BARDA” — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — programs.
According to Taufer, “This allowed the mRNA technology … to overcome initial obstacles and reach its current level of development.”
Companies like Moderna benefitted from this, Taufer wrote. “Moderna was immediately among the beneficiaries,” including a 2013 “strategic collaboration” with DARPA and BARDA, toward the development of “antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological threats.”
According to a 2020 report by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Moderna received several awards from DARPA to develop mRNA technology. These awards helped Moderna — previously “a relatively small company” — develop its Chikungunya, Zika and, most notably, COVID-19 vaccine programs.
In January 2020, Moderna started its mRNA-1273 program, a potential COVID-19 vaccine based on the mRNA approach. BARDA, an agency of the U.S. federal government, awarded Moderna nearly $1 billion for the program, according to the KEI report.
Latypova said government funding amounts to $1.5 of the $5 billion Moderna has raised for research and development, or R&D, describing it as “an unheard-of sum for a biotech company that did not have any products even in late human trials until the COVID pandemic was declared.”
According to Latypova, the DOD “has established at least two large consortia of bio-pharmaceutical companies as military contractors to get grants for making products ostensibly for defense purposes.”
COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers belong to the MCDC Consortium, which Latypova said “is a vast collection of companies [over 300 in total] that, by being attached to the consortium, already are fully aligned with the government agenda.”
“As early as 2012 and 2013, the Pentagon had the basic concepts of the technologies implemented today in the mRNA vaccines and commissioned pharmaceutical companies to develop them further,” Latypova wrote on Substack.
In turn, “mass vaccinations in 2021 were about finding out how strong and how long mRNA vaccines can immunize people with the same genetic material despite modified viruses. This led to the booster vaccinations as a result,” Latypova wrote.
“In 2020-2021, DOD spent $50 billion funding COVID products alone. This represents approximately 50% of the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry spending on R&D per year. This means that, for practical purposes, there is no private bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing industry in the U.S. It is all controlled by the government and specifically, by the DOD,” Latypova said.
Latypova told The Defender that “mRNA technology can get around the Bioweapons Convention restrictions because it is a synthetic chemical drug, not a live pathogen.” Live pathogens are banned under the convention.
Latypova also highlighted the role of Col. Matt Hepburn of DARPA, who she said helped mastermind the COVID-19 “pandemic preparedness and response” and DOD linkages with Big Pharma years before the pandemic.
According to the KEI report, none of Moderna’s patents as of August 2020 disclosed the awards it received from DARPA, in violation of the Bayh-Dole Act, which requires government contractors to disclose — including in patent applications — federal funding that contributed to an invention.
Latypova explained why the COVID-19 pandemic was serendipitous for mRNA technology manufacturers. “There is no way to get this technology approved by normal pharmaceutical regulations that govern investigational drugs … because mRNA tech is inherently toxic and deadly” and because it is “not possible to manufacture it with the quality control and purity requirements that exist for normal pharmaceuticals.”
Enter Gates
Moderna is also connected to mRNA firms that Gates has invested in. Latypova said these investments appeared “strange” — until the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think in general Gates has been obsessed with the idea of vaccination, which, for a long time, was not a good business investment … So it’s at a minimum strange that he pursued vaccinations, especially in the Third World, so zealously. It didn’t make financial sense until COVID,” Latypova said.
For instance, Gates maintains significant holdings in Danaher Corporation, a life sciences healthcare company. The Gates Foundation first invested in Danaher in 2022 and, as of the third quarter of 2023, these investments totaled $92.54 million.
In 2021, Danaher purchased Aldevron, a company that manufactures “high-quality plasmid DNA, mRNA, and proteins” — and that produced the DNA used in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines.
Last year, Aldevron announced the expansion of its “mRNA production capabilities to include lipid nanoparticle (LNP) encapsulation.”
This is not the only connection between Aldevron — which touts the benefits of mRNA on its blog — and Moderna. In 2021, the two companies announced an “expanded partnership for mRNA vaccine and therapeutic pipeline,” while Kenneth Chien, Ph.D., co-founder of Moderna, was an Aldevron board member.
The Gates Foundation may have been linked to Aldevron as early as 2017 when the foundation and Aldevron both supported research on modified viruses published in the Journal of Virology.
Gates a donor to North Dakota’s governor, a former Microsoft executive
Aldevron is headquartered in North Dakota and maintains facilities in Nebraska and Wisconsin — states that are home to academic institutions that have performed key mRNA research — and also states where Gates has significant investments.
North Dakota State University (NDSU) is actively engaged with mRNA research, including research funded by the National Science Foundation.
According to the NDSU Foundation, Aldevron was founded at NDSU in the late ’90s and all of its founders are NDSU alumni. NDSU is also home to Aldevron Tower, an R&D facility.
Gates is connected to North Dakota governor and former Republican presidential candidate Doug Burgum. A tech billionaire, Burgum founded Great Plains Software in the 1980s, which Microsoft bought for $1.1 billion in 2001. He served as senior vice president of the Microsoft Business Solutions Group until 2007.
Gates donated $107,000 to Burgum’s 2016 gubernatorial campaign — the largest single contributor. Burgum and Gates were pictured together during the latter’s 2017 visit to North Dakota and during 1998 congressional testimony, while both attended a dinner party thrown by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at Washington, D.C.’s Alfalfa Club — founded by Robert E. Lee — in January 2020.
Burgum has repeatedly defended Gates in interviews.
In a 2017 interview, Burgum said “[Bill] and Melinda [Gates] are doing so many amazing things on education in the United States, on global health.”
In a November 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Burgum said the Gates’ have saved more lives than anyone “probably in the history of the planet” and that Gates is “one of the most misunderstood people that we have in America right now.”
According to Fox Business, in 2022, Gates expanded his footprint in North Dakota through the controversial purchase of 2,100 acres of farmland — spanning two counties. The deal was completed “despite backlash from the community.”
According to North Dakota attorney Sarah Vogel, the purchase was completed via the Red River Trust — described as a “corporate shell” connected to Gates — despite the state’s anti-corporate farming law, which protects family farmers by largely prohibiting corporate farm buyouts.
Vogel noted that North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley — a Burgum appointee — approved the purchase.
Gates bought farmland in mRNA research hubs Nebraska, Wisconsin
Along with North Dakota, Nebraska and Wisconsin are home to Aldevron facilities, to universities conducting significant mRNA research and to Gates-owned farmland.
For instance, University of Nebraska researchers have conducted multiple research studies involving mRNA — including hosting two Moderna clinical trials, and other mRNA research dating back to the 1990s.
Gates completed controversial farmland purchases in Nebraska, using 20 shell companies to buy over 20,000 acres of farmland in the state at over $113 million. According to state Sen. Tom Brewer, If the land was given to a nonprofit — possibly exempting it from property taxes — it would “decimate” the counties involved.
Wisconsin is also home to significant mRNA research, with the University of Wisconsin known as one of the pioneers in the field. According to Biocompare, researchers at the university launched mRNA research in 1990. The university continues to actively pursue mRNA research, including hosting mRNA clinical trials.
While Wisconsin is one of the states where Gates is known to own farmland, little public information is available about Gates’ holdings in the state. However, in 2023, Microsoft completed a $76 million purchase of 420 acres of farmland in the state.
Aldevron maintains research sites on the campuses of the University of Nebraska and the University of Wisconsin.
Gates: Farmland purchases will help fund more vaccines
“The decision to buy this land was made by people who help manage my money so that we get a good return so that the Foundation can buy more vaccines,” Gates said on Trevor Noah’s podcast in November 2023. “And they saw that if we could invest in land and (improve) the productivity of that land, that it would have a good return.”
But according to Latypova and Rose, the purchases are about control.
“I see this as his move to own the highly productive land where he can also control the state government via major investments into the ‘biotech’ sector — which is always considered attractive by the government due to being considered a high value-added, ‘clean’ generator of jobs, tax revenue and attracting positive PR for the politicians,” Latypova said.
“He wants to own the land and control the government of that state,” Latypova added, saying this is part of a process to “capture and control all major levers to establish private control over a territory.”
She said this includes exerting influence over universities, which “will do whatever ‘science’ you order for money.”
Along similar lines, Rose said that “the necessary ingredient to ensure control of society … is the control of the food and water supply.”
Achieving such control over humans is difficult, Rose said, due to free will, but a possible way to overcome this “‘imposition’ … would be to tag us and trace us, and impose punishment for ‘choosing to go out of step.’”
“Those punishments might include withholding of food and water. There are some among us who believe that humans should be tagged, as some animals are.”