Now is the time for marketers to prioritize equity and inclusion, while also committing to a new open marketplace built on trust, radical transparency, and meaningful collaboration. Just imagine how opening up training, technology, and insights across the marketing industry could simultaneously accelerate lasting transformation and real economic recovery.
REMEMBER THIS ABOMINATION OF AN AD BELOW? YACCARINO’S AGENCY DID IT.
As 2021-2022 Ad Council Chair, Yaccarino partnered with the business community, the White House, and government agencies to create a COVID-19 vaccination campaign, featuring Pope Francis and reaching over 200 million Americans.
“Committed to improving the state of the world.” It’s the tagline for the World Economic Forum, one of the most influential gatherings on the planet. While it seems like a lofty goal, after a week in Davos, it’s hard not to feel inspired to improve our respective corners of the world. And the truth is, we need to. With each new talk or conversation last week, it became increasingly clear: Transformation is happening—whether we like it or not.
So, as I trade in Swiss mountains for New York streets, here are five reflections I’m bringing home:
1. Trust Matters.
It’s the foundation of all human connection, and, unsurprisingly, was a central focus in Davos. Around the world, various institutions are experiencing a trust crisis. But here’s the good news: employees have a higher degree of trust in their own companies. Meanwhile, traditional media is increasingly seen as a more trusted source of information than social media. We can’t take this trust for granted. We need to listen to each other and be more transparent in everything we do to maintain the confidence of our consumers, partners, and employees.
2. The future of work is now our present.
Expectations of today’s workforce and the legacy mindsets in some workplaces are at odds.Advances in technologies like automation and AI are changing what companies ask of talent, and what people require from their work. Given the trust people place in their employers, all businesses have a responsibility to prepare its workforce—and reinvent the workplace—to meet these realities. We need to institute new training, reimagine hiring practices, embrace flexible schedules, and create programs that allow people to return to the workforce after child rearing and elder care. Let’s find every possible way to help every person succeed.
3. Be prepared to move fast.
In a 5G world, consumers win big. With faster speeds, people will be able to easily consume more of the information and premium content they love on their mobile devices, wherever and whenever they want. Meanwhile, 5G and other technologies will enable our industry to evolve by opening up new opportunities to connect with audiences, distribute content, and monetize this content in new ways. Business models and legacy systems must change and be part of that reinvention.
4. Diversity is the right thing to do, and it’s good for business.
The Forum brings together diverse leaders who represent countries and industries from all around the world.And this year, more women attended Davos than ever before—which is fantastic news. However, we only made up only 22 percent of the total delegates, so while there’s been real progress, there’s still room to grow. The same goes for business, where a wider range of perspectives will foster new thinking and innovation. Fortunately, there’s already an awareness of the need for greater diversity. Now it’s time to transform that awareness into action.
5. We’re in this together—and need to work together.
The WEF reveals that no matter where we live or what industry we focus on, we all face similar challenges—from rebuilding trust to navigating new technologies, to preparing our workforce. At the same time, many are investing in solutions, and building a new global architecture for shared prosperity and progress. We can accomplish so much more if we collaborate within and across our industries—not just in Switzerland, but every day.
Linda Yaccarino Chairman, Advertising & Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal
So she’s been on a woke crusade for a while, but it only got worse since the Great Reset has been officially kickstarted:
Meet Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter. In 2020 interview, Yaccarino praised Jeff Shell and Brian Roberts, her bosses for taking the right steps to “fight social justice and equality”. Also, Yaccarino commended her company’s progress of hiring “50% of women and 50% people… pic.twitter.com/u73vrpnEmA
— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) May 12, 2023
Yaccarino Calls for ‘Radical Transformation’ of Marketing
NBCUniversal exec opens training to industry, plans summits
Linda Yaccarino (Image credit: NBCU)
Linda Yaccarino, the chairman for advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, is calling for “radical transformation” of the marketing business in the face of cultural change around racism and the impact of COVID-19 on the economy.
“This is the moment to question not just when we do business, but how we do business, at every level—because transformation is more than the private sector’s response to this moment, it’s our long-term responsibility,” she said in a note sent to NBCU’s partners Monday morning.
By Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising and Partnerships, NBCUniversal
We’re living through a moment of massive cultural and structural change. We’ve seen an enormous awakening to long-standing issues of racism and inequality. Meanwhile, COVID-19 still has the economy reeling: double-digit drops in sales as stores consider reopening; millions of jobs lost, with only a few signs of gains; GDP projected to shrink substantially this quarter.
While some companies are stepping up, there’s still more to do. This moment demands radical transformation, and as companies are changing messaging or shifting trading calendars, we can go even further. This is the moment to question not just when we do business, but how we do business, at every level—because transformation is more than the private sector’s response to this moment, it’s our long-term responsibility.
Last year, 181 CEOs committed to a new model of corporate responsibility and affirmed their obligation to all stakeholders. And over the past few months, seismic shifts have rippled across the corporate playing field and pushed us even further. Competitors now stand shoulder-to-shoulder, staring down the same systemic issues, ready to take action and change for the better.
Our fates are intertwined. We all now have a shared responsibility to transform our companies, our industry, and our economy—because when everything is at stake, we are all stakeholders. And there’s no industry better suited to lead this than the marketing community.
Marketing has always been a platform to inform public opinion, change hearts and minds, amplify cultural moments and movements, and spur economic growth. No other industry cuts across every sector or reaches millions around the world every single day. Great advertising educates audiences, elevates stories and ideas, mobilizes people to act, and lifts bottom lines—which in turn engages and advances conversation, creates jobs, and keeps families afloat.
But it’s not just about marketing; we need to do more as a marketing community to address our most deep-seated legacy problems, especially within our industry.
Now is the time for marketers to prioritize equity and inclusion, while also committing to a new open marketplace built on trust, radical transparency, and meaningful collaboration. Just imagine how opening up training, technology, and insights across the marketing industry could simultaneously accelerate lasting transformation and real economic recovery.
No doubt, it’s an ambitious call-to-action. But the stakes are too high to let legacy thinking, competitive agendas, closed marketplaces, or closed mindsets stand in our way. We need courage, conviction, and imagination, and we can start by asking ourselves some questions:
This is what responsible leadership will look like: if you know something is right, you do it. If you know something is wrong, don’t. If there’s infrastructure everyone needs, build and scale it. That’s what it will take for this industry to truly transform.
Inevitably, this open marketplace will require new alliances, partnerships, business models, and maybe even some strange bedfellows. And none of that should scare us; it should liberate us to do whatever this moment requires.
We know these investments in each other, our marketplace, and the economy will pay off. That’s why NBCUniversal is creating more marketing training and development resources while mapping out a new open-source technology structure—one that will streamline all advertising processes, bring measurement into the 21st century, and completely transform the way marketers transact with us. But we’re only one company; we need others to join us.
Together, we can make sure transformation and responsibility are not just buzzwords, but a shared playbook. Real transformation is possible, and recovery is on the horizon—so let’s give each other the permission to be courageous, open up, and share the responsibility.
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We’ve all heard of existing cancer cures, whether you believe in them or not, you can’t rationally hope they will be made available to plebs for as long a Pharmafia exists.
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”
“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”
Richter cited Gilead Sciences’ treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company’s U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. Goldman estimates the U.S. sales for these treatments will be less than $4 billion this year, according to a table in the report.
“Gilead is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients,” the analyst wrote. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”
The analyst didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The report suggested three potential solutions for biotech firms:
“Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually.”
“Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe.”
“Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) … Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets.”
So you don’t see anyone pushing for any cures.
CONSUMER AFFAIRS
Biden’s moonshot examined: Researchers say cancer cure is a long ways off
The White House is pressing ahead, saying a combination of research on cures and prevention efforts will end the scourge.
Congress has appropriated $1.8 billion for the “cancer moonshot” President Joe Biden began in 2016, and the positive reaction to Biden’s request for more suggests it’s eager to maintain the momentum. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden’s pledge to “end cancer as we know it” is a rare sliver of common ground between Democrats and Republicans.
Congress has appropriated $1.8 billion for the “cancer moonshot” Biden began in 2016, and the positive reaction to Biden’s request for more during Tuesday’s State of the Union suggests it’s eager to maintain the momentum.
But cancer researchers are less unified about the moonshot than Washington policymakers. A contrarian cadre question whether the money appropriated is being well spent. Cancer research is funded well enough, they said, and investing more in high-tech individualized treatments is more likely to help the wealthy live longer than it is to save those most likely to die of the disease: the poor and people of color.
“It’s a lot harder than getting a man to the moon,” Gilbert Welch, an internist and senior investigator at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said of curing cancer. “It’s a very complex set of diseases. You need to think of it as a family of diseases. The moon is just one thing. Just gotta get there. This is hundreds of different things.”
Biden wants to press ahead on a bipartisan initiative. He has called on Congress to maintain funding for the 2016 law that launched the moonshot, the 21st Century Cures Act. He pledged to cut cancer death rates by 50 percent in the next 25 years and to turn fatal cancers into treatable diseases.
Biden also has asked Congress to reauthorize the National Cancer Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Reauthorization would help the National Cancer Institute support researchers around the country by building clinical trial networks and more robust data systems, according to Danielle Carnival, the White House’s moonshot coordinator.
But some experts, such as Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former White House adviser, said there’s plenty of money devoted to cancer research. The National Cancer Institute had a nearly $6.4 billion budget for cancer research in 2021 and its annual spend has been growing since 2015. Cancer non-profits like the American Cancer Institute also raise hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
President Joe Biden has asked Congress to reauthorize the National Cancer Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971. | AP Photo
Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry is incentivized to put money behind increasingly lucrative cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Research shows that from 2010 to 2019 revenue generated from cancer medicines increased 70 percent among the top 10 pharmaceutical companies to reach $95 billion.
And not everyone thinks more funding is a good thing. “There’s so much money sloshing around,” Welch said of the cancer industry, adding, “Both academic and biotech or industry are excessively enthusiastic and just trying to put out as many products as they can.”
We’ve overinvested in cancer, according to Welch, especially in expensive cancer drugs with modest or unproven benefit for patients and in screenings — Welch’s research area. He’s particularly opposed to the Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Act, sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), which would require Medicare to cover cancer blood tests if they’re approved by the FDA. From Welch’s vantage point, benefits from screenings have been exaggerated, while its harms have been minimized.
Other critics, such as Keith Humphreys, a public health professor at Stanford University who has published academic articles on the link between alcohol use and cancer, see cancer prevention as a more immediate way to save lives.
Managing disease and curing it
The president’s agenda goes beyond money, Carnival told POLITICO, emphasizing prevention efforts, such as improving nutrition for kids, discouraging smoking, and decreasing environmental risks.
“We’re going to have to reach more people with the tools we already have and those we develop along the way,” Carnival said. “The purview is much broader than research. I don’t think anyone would say we have all of the research advancements and knowledge and treatments that we need today to end cancer as we know it.”
Those closely involved in developing cutting-edge cancer therapeutics said the field has shifted dramatically in recent years. It’s gone from treating cancer as a chronic disease, to trying to cure patients.
During his medical fellowship in the early 2000s, improving patient survival by months or years was the goal, explained Marco Davila, a physician-scientist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y., who helped pioneer some of the first CAR-T cell therapies for patients with blood cancer.
Since then, treatment breakthroughs for some previously incurable cancer have upended the cancer-as-chronic-disease philosophy. Now, doctors and researchers believe cancer-curing therapies are within reach. “It’s changed the nature of how we manage patients. There’s that option there. It’s on the table,” Davila said.
For Davila, moonshot funds earmarked for cancer research and therapies created a new pool of money for his work. It doesn’t fix the problem of underfunded science as a whole, he said, but it makes his work as a cancer researcher a priority.
“It’s great for us, because that’s our field. It’s also great for patients, because cancer is still going to be one of the most common causes of people’s death in the United States,” Davila said. (In the U.S., it’s second behind heart disease, taking more than 600,000 lives in 2020, the most recent year for which there are statistics.)
Indeed, since the late 1980s, scientists have developed effective treatments for lung cancer, breast cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There are caveats, of course. They don’t work for all patients.
“It’s maybe 20 percent, 30 percent,” Davila said. The goal now is to keep improving those cure rates over time — to 50 percent or 60 percent, for example.
“Will it get to 100 percent in your lifetime? I don’t know,” he said.
What Davila does know is that each 10 percent cure-rate increase means saving tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of lives.
‘Prevention takes action’
But some cancer experts said there’s a downside to the shift toward precision medicine and individualized treatments. Attempting to test everyone or characterize every tumor more precisely is a bit of magical thinking, according to Welch.
“The more you subset people, the more difficult it is to know whether your treatments help. It’s too small of a group,” Welch said. “It used to be just lung cancer. Now we’ve got eight genetic variants we’re testing in adenocarcinomas of the lung,” he added.
“Ironically, the more precise we get, the more types of cancer there are, as we genetically signature each cancer, all of a sudden we don’t really know what to do with any one of them.”
Others think there needs to be a fundamental shift away from screening and treatment and toward preventing cancer in the first place.
“It’s terrific when we develop new treatments for cancer, but it certainly is always better to prevent something than to treat it,” said Humphreys, who served as a drug policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“Very high-end, complicated treatments are never going to be accessible to the whole population,” he added. “Congress could definitely do more.”
“We have very good evidence that when we raise the federal alcohol tax that fewer people die.”
Keith Humphreys, public health professor at Stanford University
Tobacco taxation is widely considered one of the most effective practices in preventing people from starting to smoke in the first place, leading existing smokers to quit, and reducing deaths from tobacco-related cancers. Humphreys said Congress could take the same taxation approach to the alcohol industry. “We have very good evidence that when we raise the federal alcohol tax that fewer people die,” he said.
While broad blood-based cancer screening may not be a cost-effective strategy for stopping cancer early, targeted cancer screening for colorectal, breast, cervical, prostate, and lung cancers could be. Rules could stoke participation or ensure that patients on Medicaid, who are more likely to be at risk of cancer, are getting regular screenings.
“It’s important to acknowledge that our biggest success in cancer really reflects prevention,” Welch said. “It’s nothing fancy. It’s discouraging cigarette smoking.”
There’s a lot of money already in the moonshot cancer system. It just needs to be redirected and allocated differently, said Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and former White House adviser.
The White House touts prevention in its moonshot agenda. In 2022, the first year of the reignited moonshot, the FDA proposed rules to prohibit menthol cigarettes. Among other agenda items, the moonshot program plans to increase cancer screenings in at-risk communities and facilitate donations of sunscreen to schools and youth organizations.
But prevention is a trickier cancer-prevention mechanism than treatment. It could mean cleaning up Superfund sites or removing lead pipes to reduce environmental cancer risk. It often requires people to change their behavior — to drink less alcohol and exercise more or stop smoking — a more challenging mission at the population level than directing patients to take a pill or offering them a diagnostic test.
“It’s not necessarily clear how one spends money on prevention,” Welch acknowledged. “It’s much easier to sell a test or a drug. It’s a concrete thing. Prevention takes action on the part of individuals,” he said. “You gotta say, that’s harder.”
More funding wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem, according to Emanuel.
There’s a lot of money already in the system. It just needs to be redirected and allocated differently, Emanuel explained.
Who is spending that money also matters. The government sponsors roughly one-third of clinical cancer research, according to Emanuel. Industry accounts for the remaining two-thirds of funding. “It’s good that they’ve got a lot of drugs that they’re testing. What’s bad is having industry shape the clinical research agenda, because industry has a bias.”
Emanuel’s solution: stronger government leadership and more non-industry sponsors.
“The NCI [National Cancer Institute] is the biggest NIH institute,” Emanuel said. “It’s not exactly like they’re starving.”
You also have to be a monster to sell halving the cases long after your death as a “cure”
Biden keeps rambling about curing cancer because he and Obama set up and funded the delusional mRNA industry, which was initially aimed at cancer. The Moderna guys promised him this and he ran with it. He still does, poor dumb fv<k…
And if you have a MAGA hat, don’t flash it before reading this:
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No, you cannot associate Kanye West with Trump any longer, they are divorced forever.
In the wake of the Pittsburgh ‘Tree of Life’ synagogue mass shooting, in October 2018, President Donald Trump demanded that the death penalty be “brought back” for anti-Semites. Only Bolshevik Russia had such a law.
This evil antisemitic attack is an assault on all of us, it’s an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of antisemitism from our world. This was an antisemitic attack at its worst. The scourge of antisemitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, and it cannot be allowed to continue. We cannot allow it to continue. It must be confronted and condemned everywhere it rears its very ugly head. We must stand with our jewish brothers and sisters to defeat antisemitism and vanquish the forces of hate. That’s what it is. And those seeking their [the Jews’] destruction, we will seek their destruction. Now when you have crimes like this, whether it’s this one or another one, or another group, we have to bring back the death penalty. They have to pay the ultimate price. They have to pay the ultimate price. They cannot do this. They can’t do this to our country. We must draw a line in the sand and say very strongly, ‘Never again’.
“Of course, there has never been a death penalty in the U.S. for antisemitism, so it doesn’t seem to make sense when Trump stated that he wanted to “bring it back”, that is, unless you understand what he’s really talking about.
When the Jews invaded and usurped power in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the first laws they passed was making antisemitism punishable by death. This law was necessary because the ethnic Christian Russians began noticing that all the bolshevik revolutionaries were jewish and they spoke Yiddish, not Russian.
Nothing has changed in the last 100 years. The Bolshevik Revolution continues today under a different brand called “globalism”, but the perpetrators are the same. And this “alarming” rise in antisemitism that the jewish press rants about literally every day now is a direct result of more and more people waking up to the jewish hand in the nation-wrecking agenda of the Left.
The Jews want the legal option of putting to death anyone who opposes them or even criticizes them. They don’t just want to silence their critics — they want them dead, and if that means bringing back the gallows of the Nuremberg kangaroo court, then so be it.”
Read more about the shooting and Trump’s rally on Daily Mail.
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’RE PROBABLY TARGETED BY A GOVERNMENT OR TWO. SO I MADE SOMETHING FOR YOU. SEE DETAILS / ORDER
His silence is a disservice to his people and a service to himself and Israel.
This is the kind of stuff that doesn’t really need more wordy intros or outros. The dots have been joined, you either can handle the truth or you can’t, no 3rd option.
I cited copiously from following fellow independent truthers, thanks for their efforts:
Know More News SMH Productions
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This week, diplomats from around the world are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of an annual gathering of state parties for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The BWC has an important mandate: It prohibits the 182 countries that have signed on and ratified the convention from developing, producing, and stockpiling biological weapons.
The BWC, and the biosecurity community broadly, has historically been more focused on existing pathogens with clear potential to be used as biological weapons, such as anthrax and the agents causing botulism and Q fever. In addition, health security experts are worried about the “next big one” — the next global pandemic. Pandemic diseases are often zoonotic, meaning they jump from animals to humans. Zoonotic diseases like Ebola, Zika, SARS, and HIV are created when, say, the wrong pig meets up with the wrong bat — and then meets the wrong human.
The emergence of such diseases depends a great deal on spontaneous genetic mutations and circumstantial factors. So here’s a scary thought: Possible future pandemics may not depend on the chance meeting of different animal species and chance mutations, but may be deliberately designed instead. New tools from the field of synthetic biologycould endow scientists with the frightening ability to design and manufacture maximally dangerous pathogens, leapfrogging natural selection.
The threat is very much on the minds of security officials. This past May, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) led an exercise involving former US senators and executive branch officials on how the country would respond to an international outbreak of an engineered pathogen. In this fictional scenario, a terrorist group constructed a virus that was both deadly and highly contagious. More than a year into the made-up pandemic, the worldwide death toll was soaring past 150 million, the Dow Jones had fallen by 90 percent, and there was a mass exodus from cities amid famine and unrest.
In biotech, the story of the past several decades has been one of exponential progress. Just 75 years ago, we were not even confident that DNA was the primary material governing genetic heredity. Today, we are able to read, write, and edit genomes with increasing ease.
But biotechnologies are dual-use — they can be used for both good and ill. We fear that with even just current capabilities, an engineered pandemic could join the growing list of seismic changes made possible by biotechnological advances. Sufficiently capable actors could work to resurrect the deadliest pathogens of the past, like smallpox or Spanish flu, or modify existing pathogenssuch as bird flu to be more contagious and lethal. As genome engineering technologies become more powerful and ubiquitous, the tools necessary for making these modifications will become increasingly accessible.
This leads to the terrifying specter of independent actors intentionally (or unintentionally) engineering pathogens with the potential to inflict worse harm than history’s deadliest pandemics. No obvious physical or biological constraints preclude the construction of such potent biological weapons. According to biosecurity expert Piers Millett, “If you’re deliberately trying to create a pathogen that is deadly, spreads easily, and that we don’t have appropriate public health measures to mitigate, then that thing you create is amongst the most dangerous things on the planet.”
Mitigating this risk is shaping up to be one of the major challenges of the 21st century — not only because the stakes are high, but also because of the myriad obstacles standing between us and a solution.
The technologies that help us might also hurt us
Natural pandemics can be horrific and catch us completely off guard. For example, three years elapsed between the first officially documented US AIDS cases in 1981 and the identification of HIV as its cause. It took another three years to develop and approve the first drug treating HIV. While antiretroviral treatments now allow those living with HIV to manage the disease effectively (that is, if they can afford the treatment), we still lack a promising HIV vaccine.
Yet as ill-equipped as we may be to fight newly emergent natural pathogens, we are even less prepared to cope with engineered pathogens. In the coming decades,it may become possible to create pathogens that fall well outside the range of infectious agents modern medicine has learned to detect, treat, and contain.
Worse yet, malicious actors might build disease-causing microbes with features strategically tailored to thwart existing health security measures. So while advances in the field of synthetic biology will make it easier for us to invent therapeutics and other technologies that can defend us from pandemics, those very same advances may allow state and nonstate actors to design increasingly harmful pathogens.
For example, new gene-synthesis technologies loom large on the horizon, allowing for the automated production of longer DNA sequences from scratch. This will be a boon for basic and applied biomedical research — but it also will simplify the assembly of designer pathogens.
A technician at the Smartman Laboratory facility at the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground on August 15, 2017, in Dugway, Utah. Workers at this facility handle some of the deadliest biological and chemical agents on earth.
Compared to other weapons of mass destruction, engineered pathogens are less resource-intensive. Although malicious actors would currently need university-grade laboratories and resources to create them, a bigger obstacle tends to be access to information. The limits of our knowledge of biology constrain the potential of any bioengineering effort. Some information, like how to work proficiently with a specific machine or cell type, can be acquired only through months or years of supervised training. Other information, like annotated pathogen genome sequences, may be easy to access through public databases, such as those maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
If information such as pathogen genome sequences or synthetic biology protocols is available online, this could make it much easier for malicious actors to build their own pathogens. But even if they’re not online, hackers can also steal sensitive information from the databases of biotechnology companies, universities, and government laboratories.
Preventing damage from engineered pathogens is complicated by the fact that it takes only one lapse, one resourceful terrorist group, or one rogue nation-state to wreak large-scale havoc. Even if the majority of scientists and countries follow proper protocols, a single unilateral actor could imperil human civilization.
And some wounds can be self-inflicted. Between 2004 and 2010, there were more than 700 incidents of loss or release of “select agents and toxins” (i.e., scary stuff) from US labs.In 11 instances, lab workers acquired bacterial or fungal infections. In one instance, a shipment of a harmful fungus was lost — and, according to the FBI, destroyed — in transit. In a world in which well-meaning but sometimes careless biologists are creating dangerous organisms in the lab, such accidental release events could prove even more frightening.
A global problem
Like naturally occurring pandemics, engineered pandemics will not respect national borders. A contagious pathogen released in one country will emigrate. Actions that protect against engineered pathogens are an example of a global public good: Since a deadly engineered pathogen would adversely affect countries around the world, doing something to prevent them is a service that benefits the whole world.
A fundamental challenge of global public goods is that they tend to be underprovided. With global public goods, individual countries prefer to free ride over unilaterally providing global public goods if they can get away with it.
This doesn’t mean that countries won’t do anything to provide global public goods; they just won’t do as much as they should. For example, a country such as the United States will consider the potential damage an engineered pathogen could wreak on its 325 million people, and it will take actions to prevent this from happening. However, the actions it takes won’t be as extensive as they would be if it were to consider the toll an engineered pathogen could take on the planet’s 7.6 billion people.
To address this dilemma, world leaders created the Biological Weapons Convention in the 1970s. The BWC has the important goal of constraining bioweapons development; in practice, it has been ineffective at verifying and enforcing compliance.
And bioweapons have specific characteristics that make verification and enforcement difficult compared to chemical and nuclear weapons.
Consider nuclear technology. Nuclear power plants require low levels of uranium enrichment (typically around 5 percent), whereas nuclear weapons require highly enriched uranium (typically above 90 percent). Highly enriched uranium requires large industrial facilities with precise centrifuges. When granted access, it is comparatively easy for inspectors to determine when a facility is being used for the production of highly enriched uranium.
Partly for these reasons, no country has ever developed nuclear weapons while being a party to the NPT. Of the nine nuclear weapons nations, the US, USSR (whose weapons are now exclusively owned by Russia), UK, France, China, and likely Israel had nuclear weapons before the treaty was enforced. India (first test in 1974) and Pakistan (first test in 1998) never signed the NPT. North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003, three years before its first nuclear test in 2006.
In contrast, bioengineered organisms require fewer resources and smaller facilities to make, and it is harder to readily distinguish between organisms that are being developed for scientific purposes from those that are being developed with malicious intent.
Historically, the BWC does not have a good track record of preventing the possession of bioweapons. The Soviet Union maintained a large bioweapons program after it signed on to the BWC in 1975. The South African apartheid regime held bioweapons in the 1980s and ’90s while being a party to the BWC.
Fearing that invasive verification by the BWC could compromise sensitive intellectual property and hurt the competitiveness of its cutting-edge biotechnology sector, the US chose to withdraw from negotiations at the BWC’s Fifth Review Conference in 2001. The US later rejoined those negotiations, but serious measures to improve the BWC’s verification and enforcement mechanisms have not been implemented, and the agreement remains largely ineffective.
Despite this concern about the invasiveness of verification, there is a growing consensus that the BWC must become more effective. The 2015 Bipartisan Report of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, chaired by Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate, and Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush, called for the vice president and the secretary of state to chair a series of meetings with relevant Cabinet members and experts to come to an agreement on verification protocols that would satisfy US concerns while adequately enforcing compliance with the treaty. The study led to the introduction of the National Biodefense Strategy Act of 2016, which is still awaiting a vote.
In September 2018, the Trump administration released a National Biodefense Strategy, though this document contained little specific information on how the US would strengthen the BWC and didn’t mention Cabinet-level meetings chaired by the vice president, as was recommended by the blue ribbon panel.
Emergency personnel walk down the aisle of an Amtrak train during a biological preparedness drill being led by members of the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF), a unit in the United States Marine Corps, at Penn Station during the early morning hours on September 22, 2012, in New York City.
Some have questioned the seriousness of the threat posed by bioweapons. For example, in his recent book, Harvard University professor Steven Pinker suggests that “Bioterrorism may be [a] phantom menace.” He claims that terrorists wouldn’t weaponize pandemic pathogens, since their goal is typically “not damage but theater.” Others have suggested that even if terrorists wanted to engineer a pathogen as a weapon, they’d lack the requisite biological knowledge and practical know-how to get the job done.
While it is true (and quite fortunate) that these factors reduce at least the present risk of a biological attack, it is cold comfort. In the coming decades, it will only become easier for nonstate actors to acquire and deploy powerful biotechnologies for ill. And beyond terrorists, state actors also pose serious risks.
For example, Japan launched devastating bioattacks against China during World War II. Japanese Unit 731 dropped bombs filled with swarms of plague-infested fleas on Chinese cities, likely killing hundreds of thousandsof civilians. The unit’s commander, Shiro Ishii, found plague to be a potent weapon because it could present itself as a natural epidemic and kill large numbers of people through person-to-person transmission.
In addition, the US had a bioweapons program from 1943 to 1969 that, among other things, made propaganda videos bragging about testing biological weapons on human subjects. The Soviet Union’s covert bioweapons program that it maintained after signing on to the BWC had more employees at its peak in the 1980s than Facebook currently has.
We don’t know what we don’t know — but here’s what we can do
Many questions remain unanswered when it comes to the potentially catastrophic risks posed by engineered pathogens. For example, what is the full spectrum of microbes that cause human disease? And which types of microbes would most likely be used as bioweapons? Research centers such as the Center for Health Security at Hopkins, the Future of Humanity Institute, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative are working hard to answer such questions.
But just because we don’t have answers to all the questions — and don’t even know all the questions to begin with — doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do to mitigate our risks.
Thinking and acting globally
For starters, we should develop a process to address advancements in biotechnology in the BWC.Currently, the BWC lacks a dedicated forum where the treaty implications of new developments in biotechnology can be discussed. Other international agreements like the CWC have dedicated scientific advisory boards to track and respond to new science and technological changes. The BWC has no such board.
There’s some movement on this issue — the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted an event in Geneva earlier this week to discuss how the BWC can evolve to address rapid advances in biotechnology. Still, it is crucial to establish a permanent institutional capacity within the BWC to address biotechnological change.
This all connects to another priority: give the BWC’s Implementation Support Unit more resources.The four-person implementation support unit, the convention’s sole administrative body, has immense responsibilities that far exceed its current resources. These responsibilities include supporting and assisting nations as they implement the treaty, administering a database of assistance requests, facilitating communication between the parties, and much more.
But the resources remain minuscule, especially compared to other international treaties. The annual cost allocated to BWC meetings and its implementation support unit is less than 4.5 percent of the cost allocated to the CWC. This inadequate budget sends a grim signal about how seriously the world is currently taking the growing risks from bioweapons.
Another global priority should be finding ways to regulate dual-use gene synthesis technologies. To facilitate their research, biologists regularly order short, custom pieces of DNA from companies that specialize in their manufacture. In 2009, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium proposed guidelines for how gene synthesis companies should screen customers’ orders for potentially dangerous chunks of DNA, such as those found in harmful viruses or toxin genes. Most companies voluntarily follow these guidelines, and they represent 80 percent of the global market.
However, even companies currently applying recommended screening procedures only test whether ordered sequences match those of known pathogens. An engineered pathogen with a novel genome could potentially slip past this filter.
Presently, the gene synthesis market is expanding internationally and synthesis costs are falling. It is urgent that governments both independently and multilaterally act to mandate proper screening of sequences and customers. As Kevin Esvelt of MIT writes, “adequately screening all synthesized DNA could eliminate the most serious foreseeable hazards of biotech misuse by nonstate actors.”
Dealing with biorisk on the ground and in the lab
Beyond developing new global standards and practices, we need to adopt more flexible countermeasures to face off the threat of bioengineered pathogens. As noted in a recent CHS report, “One of the biggest challenges in outbreak response, particularly for emerging infectious diseases, is the availability of reliable diagnostic assays that can quickly and accurately determine infection status.”
Diagnostics based on cutting-edge genome sequencing methods could provide detailed information about all the viruses and bacteria present in a blood sample, including even completely novel pathogens. Meanwhile, as genome sequencing technology becomes less expensive, it could be more widely applied in clinics to provide unprecedented real-time insights into genetic diseases and cancer progression.
We also need to invest more in developing antivirals that hit a wider range of targets. Such broad-spectrum drugs may stand a better chance of slowing the proliferation of an engineered bug than treatments specific to single known pathogens.
And we should also develop “platform” technologies that allow rapid vaccine development.Currently, the process of designing, testing, and manufacturing a vaccine to prevent the spread of a new pathogen takes years. Ideally, we could immunize all at-risk individuals within months of identifying the pathogen. Accelerating vaccine development will require us to innovate new and likely unconventional technologies, such as vectored immunoprophylaxis or nucleic acid vaccines.
Even as we pursue and accelerate such research, we should also be mindful of the possibility of self-inflicted wounds. To avert a terrible accident, the international biomedical community should establish firmer cultural guardrails on the research into pathogens.
Currently, career advancement, financial gain, and raw curiosity motivate biologists at all levels to push the envelope, and we all stand to gain from their efforts. However, these same incentives can sometimes lead researchers to take substantial and perhaps unjustified risks, such as evolving dangerous strains of influenza to be more contagious or publishing instructions for cultivating a close cousin of the smallpox virus. It’s important for biologists to do their part to promote a culture in which this adventurous intellectual spirit is tempered by caution and humility.
Encouragingly, synthetic biology luminaries like Esvelt and George Church of Harvard University are doing just that, pioneering technologicalsafeguards to mitigate accidental release risks and advocatingpolicies and norms that would make 21st-century biology a less perilous pursuit. As the tools of synthetic biology spread to other disciplines, their example is one that others should follow.
Underlying the prescriptions above is the need to approach the problem with the sense of urgency it warrants. As our biotechnological capabilities grow, so too will the threat of engineered pathogens. An engineered pandemic won’t announce itself with a towering mushroom cloud, but the suffering of the individuals it touches will be no less real.
R. Daniel Bressler is a PhD candidate in the sustainable development program at Columbia University. His research is at the intersection of dual-use technologies, environmental change, and the capacity for collective action in the international system to deal with these issues. Find him on Twitter @DannyBressler1.
Chris Bakerlee is a PhD candidate in molecules, cells, and orgamisms at Harvard University, where he uses genetic engineering to study how evolution works. Find him on Twitter @cwbakerlee.
Some of the stealth edits that Vox made to its article debunking "conspiracy theories" that Covid-19 originated in a lab leak between its original publication in March 2020 and now. pic.twitter.com/RYxZ2B81mc
“Vox was founded in April 2014 by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell. Prior to founding Vox, Ezra Klein was a former Washington Post columnist where he worked as the head of Wonkblog, a public policy blog. Vox is run by Vox Media, a digital publishing network founded by Jerome Armstrong, Tyler Bleszinski, and Markos Moulitsas.
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“Think outside the Vox”
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
The Internets got agitated recently at the news that Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, dumped $400Million in Moderna stocks and nuked his Twitter account. Here’s why this shouldn’t surprise you and you should expect the worst any moment now.
Have you watched the former Blackrock director that went on Bannon’s War Room and prophesied that the Covid vaccines are a bubble that’s about to pop? Everything I’ve learned lately stands to support his claim.
If the dumping were a sudden and unusual move, this would indicate a recent event that shook the system, possibly rats leaving a sinking ship, a near threat for the business, as in:
That’s the case only partly, due to the stock crash overlapped with the incoming financial report, but a constant behavior over the span of months and years rather indicate a strategy and it’s associated with insider trading more often than not.
Surprisingly, it’s NPR of all the fakestream media who came in support of my suspicions, with a pretty merciless analysis of Moderna’s leadership financial behavior. And you know what’s funny? The piece dates all the way back to September 2020. I recommend reading the whole piece, I added the bolding and highlights :
Whether the coronavirus vaccine developed by Moderna succeeds or not, executives at the small biotech company have already made tens of millions of dollars by cashing in their stock. An NPR examination of official company disclosures has revealed additional irregularities and potential warning signs.
“On a scale of one to 10, one being less concerned and 10 being the most concerned,” said Daniel Taylor, an associate professor of accounting at the Wharton School, “this is an 11.”
Taylor said Moderna’s stock-selling practices appear well outside the norm, and raise questions about the company’s internal controls to prevent insider trading.
Since January, CEO Stéphane Bancel has sold roughly $40 million worth of Moderna stock held by himself or associated investment funds; Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks has sold around $60 million; and President Stephen Hoge has sold more than $10 million.
Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, has sold roughly $40 million worth of stock in the company since the beginning of this year.
The stock sales first came to widespread notice after Moderna announced positive early data from a vaccine trial in May [2020 – S.m.]. At that point, the company’s share price jumped and official disclosures showed executives cashing in their shares for millions of dollars.
“As long as stocks are sold after public announcements – and not before – one might conclude that for an executive with significant net worth tied up in the company, it’s a prudent thing to do,” said Marc Fagel, a former longtime enforcement official with the Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC). “But the optics aren’t great.”
The Moderna vaccine was quick to reach a phase 3 trial, and is seen as a promising contender. But, in some ways, the executives’ stock sales have overshadowed the company’s progress.
Advocates have questioned whether it’s appropriate for executives to privately profit before bringing the vaccine to market, especially when American taxpayers have committed roughly $2.5 billion to the company’s vaccine development and manufacture.
Here’s what NPR’s examination found:
Stock Sales Worth Tens Of Millions: Since June 1, NPR has found, company executives have sold roughly $90 million worth of Moderna stock. Rather than put a hold on the trades after facing intense criticism in May, company executives continued to sell.
Questionable Modifications To Stock Sale Plans: Moderna says its executives pre-scheduled their stock sales long in advance. Those schedules – known as 10b5-1 plans – can act as a defense to charges of insider trading. But the plans have to be put in place when executives do not have confidential inside information. NPR has found multiple executives adopted or modified their plans just before key announcements about the company’s vaccine. That has raised questions about whether they were aware of nonpublic information when they planned their stock trades.
Selling To Zero: Generally, corporate best practices suggest that a company’s leadership should hold on to at least some stock in their company to have “skin in the game.” That way, the thinking goes, an executive has an incentive to improve the company’s performance. As Moderna has been developing its coronavirus vaccine, two executives, including the Chief Medical Officer, have sold all their stock holdings in the company. The General Counsel has sold nearly all of her holdings.
In an interview with NPR, Ray Jordan, Moderna’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, said the company has strict internal policies in place to prevent illegal insider trading. For example, Jordan said, the company only allows employees to make changes to their stock sale schedules when they don’t have confidential inside information that could affect the company’s share price.
NPR asked Jordan why Moderna executives modified their 10b5-1 plans just before major announcements. Initially, Jordan said by email, “I believe you must have your dates wrong.”
NPR then provided documentation of those dates from the company’s official disclosures to the government, which Jordan did not dispute.
Jordan then said that even though multiple Moderna executives changed their 10b5-1 plans within one business day of announcements, the company had determined that those executives did not have “material nonpublic information” – a key term for insider trading – when they made those changes.
A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment for this story.
From a relative unknown, to a key player in the vaccine race
Moderna launched in 2010 with a headquarters based in Cambridge, Mass., focused on using a technology called messenger RNA (or mRNA) to develop vaccines and therapeutics. The mRNA technology has been widely considered innovative, but remains largely unproven. The company has never brought a product to market. In early January, Moderna was trading for under $20 per share, and was valued at around six billion dollars.
Then Moderna announced that it had started collaborating on a coronavirus vaccine with scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is led by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
By April, the government had committed half a billion dollars to the Moderna vaccine project as part of Operation Warp Speed.
Since then, the company’s stock price has exploded. Press releases suggesting positive news from the scientific trials, or announcing additional commitments of taxpayer funding sent the share price to a peak of around $95, before dropping to between $60-$70 in recent months. The company is now valued at around $25 billion.
As a result, shares owned by Moderna executives suddenly became much more valuable. And those executives have cashed in tens of millions of dollars worth of stock, according to filings with the SEC.
The bad press and critical comments did not deter continued sales. Since June 1, NPR found, executives sold around $90 million worth of stock.
Public money, private gain
The U.S. government is making massive financial bets on several vaccine candidates. In all likelihood, only some of those vaccine candidates will prove sufficiently safe and effective.
“If the vaccine doesn’t work, you lost a lot of money,” Fauci has said. “But we feel this is serious enough that it’s worth the financial risk.”
But even if taxpayers lose money betting on Moderna, the company’s executives have already made millions.
“The insiders are making plenty of profit and they’re mostly doing it with our money,” said Margarida Jorge, a campaign director with the group Lower Drug Prices Now. “I’m absolutely for deploying public money in the interests of public health and the public good. But we don’t have any commitment from the administration that any of this investment is ultimately going to benefit real people.”
Moderna has argued that the company was only in a position to work with the government on a coronavirus vaccine, because it had spent a decade developing its mRNA technology with the support of private investors.
“The company has been funded over the years by billions of dollars of private investment,” Zaks told the Freakonomics podcast in August. “Those billions created the opportunity for the U.S. government to come in earlier this year and say, ‘I’m going to add some money to the pot to make sure that you get the development for this vaccine right.'”
[But they locked in the Government and its funding for mRNA technology years before SARS-COV2, as shown below, so this was a deliberate lie – S.m]
Trying to resuscitate the company with some archive work?
“Set it and forget it” stock plans
Moderna has offered another defense of those stock sales: the sales, representatives and executives say, were scheduled well in advance, and were unrelated to the market-moving announcements about the coronavirus vaccine. An NPR examination of the company’s financial filings tells a more complicated story.
The schedules are known as 10b5-1 plans. If your stock trades are on autopilot, the idea goes, then you can’t be accused of insider trading. But these “set it and forget it” plans have to be adopted when executives do not have “material nonpublic information,” to use the legal term.
In an interview with CNBC in July, CEO Bancel said he and other executives set up their 10b5-1 plans “a long time ago” – in December 2018 – and “obviously, when we set up those plans, none of us had any idea what was going to happen in 2020.”
In fact, NPR has found, Moderna executives, including Bancel himself, implemented new plans or modified older plans at multiple points in 2020, and right around key announcements related to the company’s vaccine.
On Jan. 21, 2020, for example, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tal Zaks amended his 10b5-1 plan. (It’s unclear what changes he made.)
Then, on Jan. 22, Moderna first widely confirmed that it was working with the government on a coronavirus vaccine. The following day, Jan. 23, the company announced it had received additional funding to support its coronavirus vaccine development.
NPR asked Moderna whether Zaks might have been aware of the collaboration with the government when he changed his stock trading plan.
“What was known on that particular day or not known, I couldn’t specifically talk to,” Moderna’s Jordan told NPR. But he said that the Moderna legal team only allows employees to change their 10b5-1 plans if they do not possess inside information that could affect the company’s share price.
Later, on Friday, March 13, three Moderna executives adopted new 10b5-1 plans, according to records reviewed by NPR: Zaks, Chief Technical Operations and Quality Officer Juan Andres, and then-Chief Financial Officer Lorence H. Kim. (Kim left the company in August 2020.)
On Monday, March 16 – one business day later – the company announced that it had given a participant the first dose of their vaccine as part of its phase 1 trial. The stock ended that day up 24% compared to the previous day’s close. Moderna was “bucking the trend” of the broader market, which was panicking over coronavirus fears, one CNBC host said at the time.
Timing Of Changes To Pre-Scheduled Stock Sales Raises Questions
Jan. 21 – Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tal Zaks amends his schedule of stock sales, known as a 10b5-1 plan.
Jan. 22 – Moderna widely confirms that it is working on a coronavirus vaccine with the National Institutes of Health. The company’s share price rises nearly 5% over the previous day’s close.
Jan. 23 – Moderna announces new funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
Mar. 13 – Chief Technical Operations Officer Juan Andres, Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim, and Zaks adopt new 10b5-1 trading plans.
Mar. 16 – Moderna announces that it provided the first dose of its coronavirus vaccine to a participant in a phase 1 trial. Moderna stock climbs 24% over the previous day’s close.
May 18 – Moderna reports early positive data from its phase 1 trial. The company’s stock ends the day up 20% over the previous day’s close.
May 21 – CEO Stéphane Bancel adopts and amends multiple 10b5-1 trading plans.
May 29 – Moderna announces another milestone in its phase 2 coronavirus vaccine trial.
June 1 – President Stephen Hoge amends his 10b5-1 plan.
Despite the close timing, Jordan told NPR, “by the judgment of the legal team, there would not have been material, nonpublic information known” when executives entered into the new plans.
“Every company and individual is entitled to the presumption of innocence. That said, from the public’s perspective, this trading behavior looks very problematic,” said Taylor of the Wharton School, who first pointed out the timing of these changes to NPR.
“If I put on my SEC enforcement hat, I would certainly be asking, ‘What caused you to change the plan on a Friday?'” said Kurt Wolfe, who works as a defense attorney in securities cases for the firm Troutman Pepper. “I don’t think it’s a good fact pattern.”
On May 21 – in between announcements of major vaccine trial milestones on May 18 and May 29 – CEO Bancel amended and adopted 10b5-1 plans. And on June 1, President Hoge amended his trading plan.
“Amending a trading plan after a positive announcement, like trading after a positive announcement, is only problematic if the executive possesses material, nonpublic information at the time,” said Fagel. “Though repeated or questionably-timed changes to a trading plan will reduce its value as a defense to insider trading.”
Selling to zero
Using these 10b5-1 plans, two Moderna executives – Zaks and Andres – have sold all of their shares in the company. General Counsel Lori Henderson has sold nearly all of her shares.
In fact, roughly every week since June, Zaks has exercised stock options (meaning, he bought stock at a price set by the company as part of his compensation), and then immediately sold all of his shares for a significant profit.
[Isn’t this a great explanation for Bancel’s sales too?! – S.m]
On Aug. 24, for example, Zaks exercised stock options and bought 25,000 shares at bargain prices of between $12 to $21. He then immediately sold all of those shares for around $65 per share. Zaks ended up with a profit of nearly $1.2 million.
SEC filings indicate these trades are made under the 10b5-1 plan he adopted in March.
Selling so much stock can also raise concerns for investors – and the public – about why company leaders would sell now if they expected their vaccine to succeed later. After all, a safe and effective vaccine could send Moderna’s stock to even greater heights.
“It perhaps draws questions about how much they believe in it,” said Wolfe.
If the company does develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, and its stock keeps rising, then “these trades will be water under the bridge,” said Fagel, the former SEC enforcement official.
But, Fagel warns, if the vaccine fails, then SEC regulators and angry investors may come looking for answers. In that case, he said, “both class action litigation and an SEC investigation would seem inevitable.”
NPR revelations end here, we’re actually just starting
So what we’ve learned is that Moderna looks like a stock market operation more than a medical one. The chiefs create momentums and then trade. And they use public money to bet and make billions, but more about that shortly.
This news is actually pretext to get you to know the real history of Moderna, a crux point in modern history in the widest sense. The stock dumping is not really news, it’s been happening for quite a while, indicating a long term strategy and business model, rather than a sudden or impulse move.
The next two older reports from Pharma’s own media – STAT, will cement the certainty that Moderna turned into a stock market bubble long ago, under the helms of Stephan Bancel. They don’t mind having some science to show, but that’s just the bait.
Ego, ambition, and turmoil: Inside one of biotech’s most secretive startups
At first glance, Moderna Therapeutics looks like the most enviable biotech startup in the world. It has smashed fundraising records and teamed up with pharmaceutical giants as it pursues a radical plan to revolutionize medicine by transforming human cells into drug factories.
But the reality is more complicated.
A STAT investigation found that the company’s caustic work environment has for years driven away top talent and that behind its obsession with secrecy, there are signs Moderna has run into roadblocks with its most ambitious projects.
At the center of it all is Stéphane Bancel, a first-time biotech CEO with an unwavering belief that Moderna’s science will work — and that employees who don’t “live the mission” have no place in the company. Confident and intense, Bancel told STAT that Moderna’s science is on track and, when it is finally made public, that it will meet the brash goal he himself has set: The new drugs will change the world.
But interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and associates suggest Bancel has hampered progress at Moderna because of his ego, his need to assert control and his impatience with the setbacks that are an inevitable part of science. Moderna is worth more than any other private biotech in the US, and former employees said they felt that Bancel prized the company’s ever-increasing valuation, now approaching $5 billion, over its science.
As he pursued a complex and risky strategy for drug development, Bancel built a culture of recrimination at Moderna, former employees said. Failed experiments have been met with reprimands and even on-the-spot firings. They recalled abusive emails, dressings down at company meetings, exceedingly long hours, and unexplained terminations.
At least a dozen highly placed executives have quit in the past four years, including heads of finance, technology, manufacturing, and science. In just the past 12 months, respected leaders of Moderna’s cancer and rare disease programs both resigned, even though the company’s remarkable fundraising had put ample resources at their disposal. Each had been at the company less than 18 months, and the positions have yet to be filled.
Lower-ranking employees, meanwhile, said they’ve been disappointed and confused by Moderna’s pivot to less ambitious — and less transformative — treatments. Moderna has pushed off projects meant to upend the drug industry to focus first on the less daunting (and most likely, far less lucrative) field of vaccines — though it is years behind competitors in that arena.
The company has published no data supporting its vaunted technology, and it’s so secretive that some job candidates have to sign nondisclosure agreements before they come in to interview. Outside venture capitalists said Moderna has so many investors clamoring to get in that it can afford to turn away any who ask too many questions. Some small players have been given only a peek at Moderna’s data before committing millions to the company, according to people familiar with the matter.
“It’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes,” said a former Moderna scientist. “They’re running an investment firm, and then hopefully it also develops a drug that’s successful.”
Like many employees and former employees, the scientist requested anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. Others would not permit their names to be published out of fear that speaking candidly about big players in the industry would hurt their job prospects down the road.
Moderna just moved its first two potential treatments — both vaccines — into human trials. In keeping with the culture of secrecy, though, executives won’t say which diseases the vaccines target, and they have not listed the studies on the public federal registry, ClinicalTrials.gov. Listing is optional for Phase 1 trials, which are meant to determine if a drug is safe, but most companies voluntarily disclose their work.
Investors say it’ll be worth the wait when the company finally lifts the veil.
“We think that when the world does get to see Moderna, they’re going to see something far larger in its scope than anybody’s seen before,” said Peter Kolchinsky, whose RA Capital Management owns a stake in the company.
The Moderna offices in Cambridge, Mass.ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR STAT
Bancel, meanwhile, said he is aware of the criticism of him and has taken some steps to address it. After scathing anonymous comments about Moderna’s management began showing up online, Bancel went to Silicon Valley to get tips on employee retention from the human resources departments of Facebook, Google, and Netflix. But he makes no apologies for tumult past or present, pointing to the thousands of patients who might be saved by Moderna’s technology.
“You want to be the guy who’s going to fail them? I don’t,” he said in an interview from his glassy third-floor office. “So was it an intense place? It was. And do I feel sorry about it? No.”
An ambitious CEO dreams big
Bancel, 44, had no experience running a drug development operation when one of biotech’s most successful venture capitalists tapped him to lead Moderna. He’d spent most of his career in sales and operations, not science.
But he had made no secret of his ambition.
A native of France, Bancel earned a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Harvard in 2000. As Harvard Business School classmates rushed to cash in on the dot-com boom, Bancel laid out a plan to play “chess, not checkers.”
“I was always thinking, one day, somebody will have to make a decision about me getting a CEO job,” he told an audience at his alma mater in April. “… How do I make sure I’m not the bridesmaid? How do I make sure that I’m not always the person who’s almost selected but doesn’t get the role?”
He went into sales and rose through the operational ranks at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, eventually leading the company’s Belgian operation. And in 2007, at just 34, he achieved his goal, stepping in as CEO of the French diagnostics firm bioMérieux, which employs roughly 6,000 people.
The company improved its margins under Bancel’s tenure, and he developed a reputation as a stern manager who got results, according to an equities analyst who covered bioMérieux at the time.
“He doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity to comply with company policy. “I think if you’re underperforming, you’ll probably find yourself looking for another job.”
Bancel’s rise caught the eye of the biotech investment firm Flagship Ventures, based here in Cambridge. Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan repeatedly tried to entice him to take over one of the firm’s many startups, Bancel said. But he rejected one prospect after another because the startups seemed too narrow in scope.
Moderna was different.
The company’s core idea was seductively simple: cut out the middleman in biotech.
For decades, companies have endeavored to craft better and better protein therapies, leading to new treatments for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare diseases. Such therapies are costly to produce and have many limitations, but they’ve given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry. The anti-inflammatory Humira, the world’s top drug at $14 billion in sales a year, is a shining example of protein therapy.
Moderna’s technology promised to subvert the whole field, creating therapeutic proteins inside the body instead of in manufacturing plants. The key: harnessing messenger RNA, or mRNA.
In nature, mRNA molecules function like recipe books, directing cellular machinery to make specific proteins. Moderna believes it can play that system to its advantage by using synthetic mRNA to compel cells to produce whichever proteins it chooses. In effect, the mRNA would turn cells into tiny drug factories.
It’s highly risky. Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects. But if Moderna can get it to work, the process could be used to treat scores of diseases, including cancers and rare diseases that can be death sentences for children.
Bancel was intrigued. He knew it was a gamble, he told STAT, “but if I don’t do it, and it works, I’m just going to kick myself every morning.”
And so he became the company’s CEO — and soon developed an almost messianic reverence for the mRNA technology.
Despite having never worked with RNA before, Bancel said he sat around the table with his core team in the early days of the company, dreaming up experiments. As a result, he is listed as a co-inventor on more than 100 of Moderna’s early patent applications, unusual for a CEO who is not a PhD scientist.
Lavishly funded Moderna hits safety problems in bold bid to revolutionize medicine
SAN FRANCISCO — Moderna Therapeutics, the most highly valued private company in biotech, has run into troubling safety problems with its most ambitious therapy, STAT has learned — and is now banking on a mysterious new technology to keep afloat its brash promise of reinventing modern medicine.
Exactly one year ago, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel talked up his company’s “unbelievable” future before a standing-room-only crowd at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference here. He promised that Moderna’s treatment for a rare and debilitating disease known as Crigler-Najjar syndrome, developed alongside biotech giant Alexion Pharmaceuticals, would enter human trials in 2016.
It was to be the first therapy using audacious new technology that Bancel promised would yield dozens of drugs in the coming decade.
But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
“It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,” said one former Moderna manager. “Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”
Bancel made no mention of the Crigler-Najjar drug when he spoke Monday before a similarly packed room at this year’s J.P. Morgan conference.
His presentation instead focused on four vaccines that the company is moving through the first phase of clinical trials: two target strains of influenza, a third is for Zika virus, and the fourth remains a secret. Bancel clicked through graphs of data from animal studies before hurrying on to tout Moderna’s balance sheet and discuss the company’s cancer vaccines, slated for clinical testing later this year.
When STAT asked Bancel after the presentation about Crigler-Najjar, he deferred to Alexion.
In need of a Hail Mary
Founded in 2012, Moderna reached unicorn status — a $1 billion valuation — in just two years, faster than Uber, Dropbox, and Lyft, according to CB Insights. The company’s premise: Using custom-built strands of messenger RNA, known as mRNA, it aims to turn the body’s cells into ad hoc drug factories, compelling them to produce the proteins needed to treat a wide variety of diseases.
But mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.
Bancel has repeatedly promised that Moderna’s new therapies will change the world, but the company has refused to publish any data on its mRNA vehicles, sparking skepticism from some scientists and a chiding from the editors of Nature.
The indefinite delay on the Crigler-Najjar project signals persistent and troubling safety concerns for any mRNA treatment that needs to be delivered in multiple doses, covering almost everything that isn’t a vaccine, former employees and collaborators said.
The company did disclose a new technology on Monday that it says will more safely deliver mRNA. It’s called V1GL. Last month, Bancel told Forbes about another new technology, N1GL.
But in neither case has the company provided any details. And that lack of specificity has inevitably raised questions.
Three former employees and collaborators close to the process said Moderna was always toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had. (Even Bancel has acknowledged, in an interview with Forbes, that the delivery method used in Moderna’s first vaccines “was not very good.”)
Are N1GL and V1GL better? The company has produced no data to answer that question. When STAT asked about new technologies, Bancel referred questions to the company’s patent filings.
The three former employees and collaborators said they believe N1GL and V1GL are either very recent discoveries, just in the earliest stages of testing — or else new names slapped on technologies Moderna has owned for years.
“[The technology] would have to be a miraculous, Hail Mary sort of save for them to get to where they need to be on their timelines,” one former employee said. “Either [Bancel] is extremely confident that it’s going to work, or he’s getting kind of jittery that with a lack of progress he needs to put something out there.”
Former employees and collaborators who spoke with STAT requested anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements — which the highly secretive Moderna requires even some job candidates to sign.
A STAT investigation last year found that Bancel had driven away top talent from Moderna with a culture of recrimination and a caustic work environment, including on-the-spot firings for failed experiments.
The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., seems to have repaired its reputation among many rank-and-file employees, winning workplace accolades from Science Magazine and the Boston Globe, but Moderna has lost more than a dozen top scientists and managers in the past four years, despite its vast financial resources.
A bug in the software
Bancel, a first-time biotech CEO, has dismissed questions about Moderna’s potential. He describes mRNA as a simple way to develop treatments for scores of ailments. As he told STAT over the summer, “mRNA is like software: You can just turn the crank and get a lot of products going into development.”
It seems clear, however, that the software has run into bugs.
Patients with Crigler-Najjar are missing a key liver enzyme needed to break down bilirubin, a yellowish substance that crops up in the body as old red blood cells break down. Without that enzyme, bilirubin proliferates in the blood, leading to jaundice, muscle degeneration, and even brain damage.
In Moderna’s eyes, the one-in-million disease looked like an ideal candidate for mRNA therapy. The company crafted a string of mRNA that would encode for the missing enzyme, believing it had hit upon an excellent starting point to prove technology could be used to treat rare diseases.
But things gradually came apart last year.
Every drug has what’s called a therapeutic window, the scientific sweet spot where a treatment is powerful enough to have an effect on a disease but not so strong as to put patients at too much risk. For mRNA, that has proved elusive.
Before COVID-19, the company’s secretive nature, and its failure to deliver a functional product, was drawing comparisons to the infamous biotech startup Theranos. Similar to Moderna, Theranos rarely published any peer-reviewed material. Like Moderna, Theranos mastered the networking game, and recruited high profile individuals to its board in order to vouch for the company’s “revolutionary technologies.” Once valued at well over $10 Billion, Theranos collapsed after it was revealed that the company was running a massive fraud scheme, in addition to its failure to implement its promised blood testing technology.
“Now an obscure lawsuit filed in British Columbia in October sheds light on one of Moderna’s key partners, and through it FORBES can reveal details on Moderna’s amazing but still untested technology.
It appears that the first two products Moderna has entered into clinical trials rely on technology from a small outfit in Vancouver, British Columbia, called Acuitas Therapeutics. (Acuitas is so small, in fact, that its worldwide headquarters are in its CEO’s single-family home.)
Almost all medicines either block proteins–the building blocks of life–or, in the case of expensive biotech drugs, are proteins themselves. But Moderna has been promising to hack an entirely different part of life’s cookbook. In order to turn genetic information encoded in DNA into the cellular machines that actually are proteins, living things use a messenger chemical called mRNA.
Creating these mRNA drugs is a big challenge on many levels. For them to work, Moderna needs to deliver mRNA to the body’s cells. By itself mRNA breaks down in the bloodstream. Tiny Acuitas specializes in one method: lipid-nanoparticle delivery systems. Its technology essentially wraps the mRNA into balls of fat that disguise the drug so that the target cells will readily ingest it.
“Although we are small,” says Thomas Madden, chief executive of Acuitas, “I believe the technology we have developed is highly effective.”
The problem for Madden and Moderna is that Acuitas doesn’t actually own the technology it has licensed to Moderna. The tech belongs to a third company, publicly traded Arbutus, which recently decided to terminate the license for the tech that it had granted to Acuitas. That’s why Acuitas filed the lawsuit in British Columbia, to protect the deal it had. Arbutus immediately countersued, claiming its deal with Acuitas didn’t cover Moderna’s medicines.
The legal mess has its roots in Moderna’s 2011 start, when Robert Langer, an MIT professor, Moderna board member and founder of dozens of biotech companies, told Bancel that Moderna was too underfunded and small to create its own delivery system. So Moderna vetted over a dozen external delivery methods for mRNA and settled on at least three. One belonged to Arbutus, but Moderna turned to tiny Acuitas to get access to it.
Acuitas was formed in 2009 by Madden after a merger eliminated his position at Arbutus’ predecessor, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals. After a contentious lawsuit Madden was able to license from his former employer the novel tech he had helped develop, and Bancel claims Moderna chose to work with Acuitas because it had “the people and the capabilities.”
But that doesn’t explain why Moderna–flush with capital–didn’t make sure that sublicensing through Acuitas would be okay with Arbutus before advancing its new drugs into human studies.
Bancel met with FORBES at a Brooklyn coffee shop on a recent Saturday to dispel the implications of the lawsuit. He is dismissive of Acuitas’ technology. “We knew it was not very good,” he says. “It was just okay.”
He further explains that Moderna is in the process of producing its own nanoparticle lipids. One such lipid, N1GEL (called “Nigel” internally), appears to cause less inflammation than Acuitas’ version. Another is being licensed from Merck. Bancel says Moderna has stopped using the Acuitas tech for new drugs.
That still leaves a somewhat messy situation for any Moderna vaccines that are being developed using Acuitas’ tech.
Data from one vaccine is expected early next year. If results are good, it could lead to a sizzling-hot initial public offering, even if the Canadian lawsuit ultimately affords Arbutus bigger royalty payments from Moderna.”
Well, the two tiny Canadian companies mentioned above bring royalties to the Canada’s treasury (should I say The British Crown?), so don’t expect Trudeau to backpedal too soon
AND IF ONLY THEY HUSSLED WITH PRIVATE FUNDS, AS THEY CLAIMED…
Moderna chief keep claiming that they started to use public funds only as a patch on infrastructure, science and funding they’ve built for years.
Wrong!
It’s known that NIH + NIAID have long been one of their main sources for the “lavish funding” mentioned earlier and when they locked in the government support, they actually started to leverage it and attract even more private funds, in an self-feeding loop that created today’s monster-bubble.
Very few people know they even got money from BARDA and DARPA. As in “military funds”.
Remember this lie from earlier? “The company has been funded over the years by billions of dollars of private investment,” Zaks told the Freakonomics podcast in August. “Those billions created the opportunity for the U.S. government to come in earlier this year and say, ‘I’m going to add some money to the pot to make sure that you get the development for this vaccine right.'” Watch this claim getting nuked:
This grid above looks familiar to you? It does to me, but it’s not blood from people who underwent Covid genetic therapies, just something similar. Taken from:
KEI asks DOD to investigate failure to disclose DARPA funding in Moderna patents
by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
Luis Gil Abinader has taken a deep dive into Moderna’s surprising practice of never declaring government funding in its 126 patents and 154 patent applications, despite having had funding from multiple federal agencies.
One outcome of his research is a 25 page report (RN-2020-3) on Moderna’s failure to report funding from DARPA, and a request by KEI to DOD and DARPA to remedy this, including by taking title to patents where disclosures should have been made. (Text of letter below, and PDF version here).
KEI will also send a letter to BARDA. The letter below was addressed to DOD and DARPA, and focuses on their funding.
Context
The obligation to disclose federal funding in patent applications has been subject to presidential executive orders, statutes, regulations and contracts, including those cited and quoted in Abinader’s report. The disclosure clarifies the public’s rights in the inventions and the obligations on the entity getting the money, on everything from the government’s worldwide royalty free license to the public’s march-in rights, obligations to make inventions available to the public on reasonable terms, and additional safeguards that can be exercised by a government inclined to do so.
Secondly, the disclosure changes the narrative about who has financed the inventive activity, often the most risky part of development.
One of the earlier norms on this was Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9424, on the Establishment of a Register of Government interests in patents.
In 2018, the regulations on disclosure were modified by NIST (see 83 FR 15954), where, among other things, the government gave itself unlimited time to remedy a failure to disclose federal funding, to eliminate one loophole that created an incentive ignore the disclosure requirement.
In the past, the US Department of Defense has taken title to patents where federal funding was not disclosed. See: Campbell Plastics v. Brownlee, 389 F.3d 1243 (Fed. Cir. 2004).
The research on the Moderna/DARPA funding is outlined in a 25 page August 27, 2020 report by Luis Gil Abinader, titled: “Moderna failures to disclose DARPA funding in patented inventions.” RN-2020-3
Below is the text of the KEI letter to Dr. Mark T. Esper, Secretary of Defense, and Dr. Amy Jenkins, of the Pandemic Prevention Platform for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), regarding the apparent failure by Moderna to disclose DARPA funding in patent applications. PDF copy here:
2020. September 18. DARPA letter to KEI confirming investigation of Moderna for failure to report government funding in patent applications. https://www.keionline.org/33970
2020. September 4. BARDA is investigating Moderna’s failures to disclose BARDA funding in patent applications. https://www.keionline.org/33907
2020. September 2. KEI request to BARDA concerning Moderna obligations to disclose federal funding in patent applications. https://www.keionline.org/33892
2020. August 30. DARPA announces investigation into Moderna’s apparent failures to disclose mRNA vaccine patents. https://www.keionline.org/33832
2020. August 28. KEI asks DOD to investigate failure to disclose DARPA funding in Moderna patents. https://www.keionline.org/33763
2020. August 27. 2020:3 KEI Research Note: Moderna failures to disclose DARPA funding in patented inventions. https://www.keionline.org/rn-2020-3
2020. August 5. BARDA Responds to KEI, Public Citizen Letter Asking BARDA to Enforce Moderna Contract. https://www.keionline.org/33633
2020. August 4. KEI and Public Citizen request BARDA to address Moderna’s noncompliance with COVID-19 vaccine contract term. https://www.keionline.org/33618
2020. July 1. KEI receives seven new contracts for COVID 19 research from BARDA and DOD, including five using “Other Transactions Authority” that weaken or eliminate Bayh-Dole and FAR Safeguards. https://www.keionline.org/covid19-ota-contracts
Washington Post 2020. August 28. “Moderna failed to disclose federal support in vaccine patents, researchers say: The company with a leading coronavirus vaccine candidate did not adhere to a law designed to protect public investment.” Washington Post. Christopher Rowland. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/28/moderna-vaccine-patents-darpa-funding/
Financial Times 2020. August 29. “US government’s Darpa probes Moderna’s vaccine patents: Researchers accuse biotech company of failing to disclose federal grants in patents which also cover Covid-19 candidate.” Financial Times. Donato Paolo Mancini. https://www.ft.com/content/2be1f87e-9e96-4e23-9cc5-33ba35e50586
Moderna’s vaccine was developed with support from the NIAID, and, as covered in a past fact check, analysis from Axios found that the National Institutes of Health, of which the NIAID is part, may own intellectual property used in producing Moderna’s vaccine. Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH, has also said that NIH has a stake in intellectual property used in the vaccine, though what exactly this means in practical terms is unclear.
“Valera’s efforts (Moderna subsidiary) have resulted in the demonstration of preclinical efficacy of Moderna’s mRNA-based vaccines in multiple viral disease models, Moderna said.
In the partnership with the Gates Foundation, Valera will apply its mRNA vaccine platform as well as Moderna’s drug platform Messenger RNA Therapeutics™. Designed to produces human proteins, antibodies, and entirely novel protein constructs inside patient cells, the therapeutics are secreted or active intracellularly.” – Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
To avoid a conflict of interest, Slaoui resigned from the board of the Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna, which had been developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. He stepped down but he didn’t give up his stakes in Moderna, as the Daily Beast reports:
“Slaoui’s ownership of 156,000 Moderna stock options, disclosed in required federal financial filings, sparked concerns about a conflict of interest. Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren called Slaoui out over the matter on Twitter: “It is a huge conflict of interest for the White House’s new vaccine czar to own $10 million of stock in a company receiving government funding to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Slaoui should divest immediately.” The company’s shares skyrocketed last month after news broke of the $483 million in federal funding to work on a coronavirus vaccine. Slaoui could not immediately be reached for comment on the matter.”
Slaoui also sits on the boards of SutroVax, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the PhRMA Foundation
So this has never been about health, just a global scale racketeering operation that’s coming to light about about to go bust. You can speed up this process simply by spreading this expose far and wide!
UPDATE MARCH 21, 2022: VOILA!
Via our ex-BlackRock friend Edward Dowd. I rest my case, but I bet they will “unrest” it soon.
Both Pfizer+Moderna have issued huge 2022 revenue guidance to Wall Street for C-19 vaccines: combined nearly 3 billion doses & ~$50b in revenue.
But mRNA demand has waned.
If they don't sell 4th doses, they may need to break their promises to Wall St. and lower their guidance. pic.twitter.com/K0HMdfFBPu
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Ivanka Trump being a Young Global Leader at Davos 2020
Dr. Oz aka Dr. Why
WAIT, IT GETS EVEN DEEPER, BELIEVE IT OR NOT!
Trumpies stuck forks in their own eyes to avoid seeing this and I don’t speak to leftoids, so it went largely overlooked in 2020, but I think it aged smoothly. Don’t perpetuate that grave error, see:
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Jeff Zucker’s resignation from CNN comes packaged in a Santa Claus-level official narrative. Here are a few interesting details to consider when guessing the real scenario.
Everyone knew of Zucker’s ‘secret relationship’ even before the divorce, there’s reports of their fights in 2017 media, that’s a non-disclosure, that’s a weak pretext, especially by CNN’s moral standards.
However, as a fallout from that relationship and the Cuomo events, some of his greatest enemies must be his former wife, Caryn, the Cuomo clan and Trump.. And they all have more interesting things in common that can be leveraged against a former partner.
While former President Donald Trump and former CNN President Jeff Zucker may be at odds today when it comes to “fake news,” the pair have benefited from each other for years.
Trump applauded Zucker’s Wednesday decision to resign over having an undisclosed relationship with a fellow executive, declaring it a chance to “put Fake News in the backseat.”
“Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers and everybody else,” Trump said in a statement on Wednesday. However, Trump ignores how Zucker gave him his big shot at television stardom and the integral role Zucker had in making him the president.
Zucker served as the president of NBC Entertainment, which oversaw NBC and its media divisions, beginning in 2000. This included signing Trump for his reality show, The Apprentice, which premiered in 2004. While Trump had made national headlines before, The Apprentice offered Trump name recognition nationwide.
While the CNN executive initially dismissed Trump as a “sideshow” in 2015, Zucker later changed his message and gave Trump significant coverage during the 2016 election. The network would often give considerable face time to Trump rallies, even livestreaming footage of an empty stage while Hillary Clinton spoke elsewhere. Zucker was even accused of giving Trump an excessive amount of face time on CNN, a decision that drew ire from other candidates’ aides, reported the New York Times.
When asked about his approach to covering politicians like Trump, Zucker compared the coverage to ESPN’s sports coverage. “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way,” Zucker told the New York Times. That idea, mixed with the ratings gold rush of the Trump administration for CNN, meant that Trump was a source of significant profit for the news network, with record-high numbers reported during election week 2020 and on Jan. 7.
So life’s much more complicated than Zucker’s non-disclosure. That’s for Omicron customers.
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IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’RE PROBABLY TARGETED BY A GOVERNMENT OR TWO. SO I MADE SOMETHING FOR YOU. SEE DETAILS / ORDER
Life’s complicated. But it’s more complicated when you’re some elite pederast setting up orgies in the White House.
Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush ‘Call boys’ took midnight tour of White House
Washington Times, June 29, 1989
A homosexual prostitution ring is under investigation by federal and District authorities and includes among its clients key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, military officers, congressional aides and US and foreign businessmen with close social ties to Washington’s political elite, documents obtained by The Washington Times reveal.
One of the ring’s high-profile clients was so well-connected, in fact, that he could arrange a middle-of-the-night tour of the White House for his friends on Sunday, July 3, of last year. Among the six persons on the extraordinary 1 a.m. tour were two male prostitutes.
Federal authorities, including the Secret Service, are investigating criminal aspects of the ring and have told male prostitutes and their homosexual clients that a grand jury will deliberate over the evidence throughout the summer, The Times learned.
Reporters for this newspaper examined hundreds of credit-card vouchers, drawn on both corporate and personal cards and made payable to the escort service operated by the homosexual ring. Many of the vouchers were run through a so-called “sub-merchant” account of the Chambers Funeral Home by a son of the owner, without the company’s knowledge.
Among the client names contained in the vouchers – and identified by prostitutes and escort operators – are government officials, locally based US military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides and other professionals.
Editors of The Times said the newspaper would print only the names of those found to be in sensitive government posts or positions of influence. “There is no intention of publishing names or facts about the operation merely for titillation,” said Wesley Pruden, managing editor of The Times.
The office of US Attorney General Jay B. Stephens, former deputy White House counsel to President Reagan, is coordinating federal aspects of the inquiry but refused to discuss the investigation or grand jury actions.
Several former White House colleagues of Mr. Stephen are listed among clients of the homosexual prostitution ring, according to the credit card records, and those persons have confirmed that the charges were theirs.
Mr. Stephen’s office, after first saying it would cooperate with The Times’ inquiry, withdrew the offer late yesterday and also declined to say whether Mr. Stephens would recuse himself from the case because of possible conflict of interest.
At least one highly placed Bush administration official and a wealthy businessman who procured homosexual prostitutes from the escort services operated by the ring are cooperating with the investigation, several sources said.
Among clients who charged homosexual prostitutes services on major credit cards over the past 18 months are Charles K. Dutcher, former associate director of presidential personnel in the Reagan administration, and Paul R. Balach, Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole’s political personnel liaison to the White House.
In the 1970s, Mr. Dutcher was a congressional aide to former Rep. Robert Bauman, Maryland Republican, who resigned from the House after admitted having engaged in sexual liaisons with teen-age male prostitutes. Mr. Dutcher also worked on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle when he represented an Indiana district in the House.
A charge also was discovered against the credit card of a former White House staffer who prepared the president’s daily news summary in the Reagan administration. Todd A Blodgett said he had not made the charge.
One of the ring’s big spending clients is Craig J. Spence, Washington socialite and international trade consultant, according to documents and interviews with operators and prostitutes who say they engaged in sexual activities with Mr. Spence.
Mr. Spence spent upwards of $20,000 a month for male prostitutes who provided sex to him and his friends, said to include military personnel who also acted as his “bodyguards.” It was Mr. Spence who arranged the nocturnal tour of the Reagan White House. Repeated attempts to reach Mr. Spence by telephone, fax machine and personal visits to his home, were unsuccessful.
Credit card vouchers confirm that Mr. Spence charged thousands of dollars on American Express and Visa cards, sometimes making $600 charges against his cards several times a day, drawn in behalf of an escort service called Professional Services Inc.
Members of major news organizations also procured escort services from the ring, credit card documents show. These include Stanley Mark Tapscott, who was an assistant managing editor of The Washington Times.
Mr. Tapscott, whose resignation on June 20 was accepted, said he had not procured homosexual escorts or sexual services of any kind. He said in an interview that he had talked to two women he arranged to meet through the escort service as part of an investigation of a dial-a-porn services he had initiated a year earlier when he was editor of the newspaper’s Money section. The charges were made against his company American Express card. His editors knew of no such investigation.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Tapscott worked for the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration.
Managers of the escort ring said that “a few women” were used for clients who called with specific requests but that the regular stable was altogether male.
The documents show that a number of clients – lawyers, doctors and business executives – used corporate credit cards to procure escort services and that a number of military officers from the United States and allied countries – including one foreign officer using a “Department of Defence” credit card – charged male escort services.
One former top-level Pentagon officer said that for the past eight years, military and civilian intelligence authorities have been concerned that “a nest of homosexuals” at top levels of the Reagan administration may have been penetrated by Soviet-backed espionage agents posing as male prostitutes, said one former top-level Pentagon official.
A major concern, said the former official with longtime ties to top-ranking military intelligence officers, was that hostile foreign intelligence services were using young male prostitutes to compromise top administration homosexuals, thus making them subject to blackmail.
“We have known for many, many years that there is a department of the KGB [Soviet intelligence] whose job it is to prey on sexual deviants,” said retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Because “closet” homosexuals in government service can be easily “turned” through blackmail for espionage purposes, Gen. Graham said, “we have always in intelligence tried very hard not to be giving classified information to known homosexuals.”
Those interviewed by The Times confirmed that there were blackmail attempts by male prostitutes who wanted money and other favors to protect clients’ sexual lives.
The clients interviewed say a Feb. 28 police raid on a house at 6004 34th Place NW was set off by reports of blackmail and possible credit-card fraud complaints and by District hotel operators about prostitution activities.
In the raid, spearheaded by the Washington Field Office of the U.S. Secret Service, authorities found a telephone switchboard operation serving a half-dozen homosexual escort services.
Secret Service agents and District police vice investigators confiscated financial records, as well as ledgers, photos, diaries, telephone records, Rolodexes and client lists of the prostitution network, during the raid and with subsequent subpoenas issued by D.C. Superior Court.
Although the confiscated material was turned over to District police on the scene, witnesses and law enforcement agents say the Secret Service kept one box containing names and other information about high-level government officials who were clients of the male escort business.
District police officials say that, to their knowledge, this is the first time the Secret Service has ever become involved in such a raid in this area.
Initially, the Secret Service denied it was involved in the raid, but after a second raid of the 34th Place house on May 18, the agency acknowledged its involvement in the investigation.
Secret Service spokesman Bob Snow said the agency participated in the search and seizure operation because of its jurisdiction over credit card fraud. “We come into such operations usually at the request of a U.S. attorney … if the fraud involves $10,000 or more … We are not involved in any local prostitution investigation,” said Mr. Snow.
Witnesses to the February raid said 12 Secret Service agents in blue parkas entered the house and spent several hours collecting and removing boxes of files.
Federal and District investigators have since interrogated several prostitutes working for the ring, as well as clients of homosexual escort services operating under such names as Jovan, Man-to-Man, Metrodate, Ultimate Models and Ultimate First Class.
In addition to credit-card fraud, the investigation is said to be focused on illegal interstate prostitution, abduction and use of minors for sexual perversion, extortion, larceny and related illicit drug trafficking and use by prostitutes and their clients.
One of the chief operators of Professional Services Inc. and a regular client of the service speculated in separate interviews that the investigation would be restricted because “big names” were involved.
“Henry Vinson [the operator] said a high level official is going to try to block the investigation and may succeed,” said Mr. Balach, the labor secretary’s liaison to the White House. Mr. Vinson said he believes a highly placed federal official, whom he would not name, is working to derail the investigation, but he would not elaborate.
Authorities have been investigation possible credit card fraud by the ring operators since last fall.
[…]
Operators of the ring told The Times that videotapes, audio tapes and still photographs were made of sex acts performed by clients and the call boys, including perverted acts.
Documents show that customers were charged for “videotapes” from the operation
“He described Mr. Spence as “strange,” saying that he often boasted that he was working for the CIA and on one occasion said he was going to disappear for awhile “because he had an important CIA assignment.” According to the businessman, Mr. Spence told him that the CIA might “doublecross him,” however, and kill him instead “and then to make it look like a suicide.” The businessman also said he attended a birthday bash for Roy Cohn at Mr. Spence’s house. He said Mr. Casey was at the party. “One time he stormed into another party with a big, white hat and an entourage of security guards,” the businessman said. “It was all rather bizarre.” (…) “He was quite secretive, but from what I could see these things had little or no substance,” Mr. Harbin said. “Usually a grain of truth, but he’d build a pile of lies on top of it. Usually he’d start with a photograph of himself with some guy and build a lie around it that he was his top adviser. Nakasone was one.” Mr. Spence also bragged about social companions, telling friends that he had hosted Mr. Cohn, Rock Hudson and others at his Wyoming Avenue home. The former Reagan administration aide said he decided to sever a friendship with Mr. Spence when he witnessed him trying to force his off-duty military bodyguards into homosexual acts.”
I bolded Cohn references in the quotes above because he’s the original Epstein, the Pedo Pimp OG. Except he made his own money, wasn’t bankrolled by his mistresses. And he was a coveted gay pedo. And…
“Cohn’s job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.”
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
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IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’RE PROBABLY TARGETED BY A GOVERNMENT OR TWO. SO I MADE SOMETHING FOR YOU. SEE DETAILS / ORDER
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