Last week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a strategic partnership with biotechnology company Moderna to establish a state-of-the-art, mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility in Melbourne.

Unfortunately for the PM, enthusiasm for booster shots, like the immunity they purport to provide, appears to be waning. Covid vaccination commander Lieutenant-General John Frewen explaining the phenomenon this week said, ‘Some people are just a bit over the whole Covid thing’.

That’s bad news not just for Moderna but for Australia taxpayers. Not only has Health Minister Greg Hunt signed up for millions of shots under existing agreements with Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Novavax, but Australia will be locked into buying Moderna product and the company says it plans to produce up to 100 million mRNA vaccine doses annually against Covid-19, seasonal influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and other potential respiratory viruses.

Will Moderna be able to produce these vaccines? Other than the Covid jabs, which only have provisional authorisation, it has never brought anything to market. That hasn’t deterred the government, but a more sceptical assessment is being made by some on Wall Street.

One is Edward Dowd, a Wall Street hedge fund consultant who worked with BlackRock for a decade from 2002 to 2012 and managed a $14 billion equity portfolio. He says the world is on course for a global vaccine crisis as bad as the global financial crisis.

Dowd points to data which shows that in the US the millennial generation, aged 25-44, suffered its worst-ever excess mortality starting last autumn, when vaccine mandates were imposed, and booster shots approved. This cohort are not at risk from Covid, yet after vaccines were rolled out their all-cause mortality peaked at 80 per cent in September and is rising again to almost 60 per cent at present.

Dowd sheets home the blame to vaccines, pointing to the Pfizer clinical trial data which showed higher all-cause mortality in the vaccine group than in the placebo group. He also points to the Food and Drug Administration which fought in a court this year not to reveal the Pfizer clinical trial data for 75 years. What are they hiding, he asks? Meanwhile, insurance companies are reporting skyrocketing death claims and will seek to show that vaccines are the cause which will limit their liability. This would trigger financial collapse in the value of the Covid vaccine manufacturers, says Dowd.

At the heart of the crisis is regulatory capture, says Dowd, just as it was during the GFC, when credit agencies gave triple-A ratings to mortgage-backed securities worthy of junk bond status. This time around, the captured agencies are the FDA in the US and the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia which receive much of their funding from pharmaceutical companies.

While the release of its clinical trial data is putting the spotlight on Pfizer, Moderna is also under scrutiny. In February, scientists published a paper showing that a sequence of the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein which enhances the infectiousness of the virus was patented by Moderna in 2016. The first name listed on the patent is none other than Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna.

When Bancel was asked about the discovery by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business he said, ‘My scientists are looking into those data to see how accurate they are or not’.Really? Does Bancel expect us to believe that his scientists turned the Covid spike protein into a vaccine without noticing that it contained the gene sequence he’d patented three years earlier?

The implications of the discovery are dramatic. To patent a sequence, a scientist must be able to show that it does not occur naturally so how did it turn up in a virus that evolved in a bat cave or a wet market? It appears to be unmistakeable evidence of human intervention. The question is by whom and to achieve what?

The patented sequence is part of a human DNA repair gene called MSH3 but instead of repairing gene damage it causes a mismatch leading to several diseases including cancer and to an increased susceptibility to viral infection. Its appearance in the Covid virus appears to be prima facie evidence that the virus was bioengineered through gain-of-function research.

That’s what Bancel suggests to Bartiromo saying, ‘As I’ve said before, the hypothesis of an escape from a lab by an accident is possible… It is possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China was working on virus enhancement or gene modification and then there’s an accident where somebody was infected in a lab — and then infected family and friends.’

If anyone else suggested this, they would be branded a conspiracy theorist and banned on social media but as we now know, despite Dr Fauci’s repeated denials, gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, which was banned in the US because it was considered too dangerous, was funded at the WIV by the US National Institutes of Health through grants it provided to the New York headquartered EcoHealth Alliance.

As it turns out, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, Dr Peter Daszak, wasn’t too worried about a lab leak. Indeed, in a talk in March 2015 he said, ‘An infectious disease crisis’ could be useful in driving funding for a ‘pan-coronavirus vaccine’ and explained that ‘a key driver is the media… We need to use that hype to our advantage… Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of (the) process.’

Bancel was more than ready when the crisis arrived. Documents published by online investigative media outlet the dailyexpose.uk show that Moderna and Dr Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) agreed to transfer ‘mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna’ to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in December 2019 where virologist Ralph Baric worked, a long-time collaborator with Shi Zhengli of the WIV. Baric and the NIAID technology transfer specialist signed the agreement on 12 December 2019, 19 days before the World Health Organisation even announced, ‘a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause.’ It gave Moderna a handy head start. Two years later, the company, which had never turned a profit in its history, posted $13 billion in pre-tax profits in 2021. If there is a vax crash coming, Bancel will be alright; he earnt $18 million last year and has a golden parachute of $926 million. It’s Australian taxpayers, amongst others, that could be left to clean up the mess.