Vaccine hesitancy and mRNA safety concerns cast shadow over multi-billion dollar Moderna factory opening, Victoria
Moderna’s ‘too big to fail’ mRNA facility opened in Victoria this week with the promise of pumping out up to 100 million doses of mRNA vaccines per year, amid rising vaccine hesitancy and unresolved safety concerns.
Based at Monash University’s Technology Precinct in southeast Melbourne, the new factory is the result of a 10-year strategic partnership between the Australian Government, the Victorian Government, and U.S. pharma company Moderna, positioning Australia as the only country in the Southern Hemisphere with the capacity for commercial-scale end-to-end manufacturing of mRNA vaccines.
Subject to regulatory approval, the new site will produce its first mRNA vaccines in 2025 for respiratory diseases including influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and Covid, and is expected to create 140 highly-skilled direct jobs, and up to 500 additional jobs in the broader workforce.
The facility is the crown jewel of Moderna’s Australian growing portfolio, alongside its Regional Research Centre for Respiratory Medicines and Tropical Disease and regional headquarters, both of which opened in Victoria last year.
The former Morrison Government reportedly spent AUD $2 billion to secure the deal with Moderna, and the new factory is just one of a spate of government-funded mRNA research and manufacturing facilities popping up around the country, signalling Australia’s reputational and financial stakes in the mRNA industry.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan refused to share how many taxpayer dollars were spent on the partnership, stating that the information is commercial in confidence. However, the Victorian Labor Government has invested $1.3 billion in medical research since 2014, with $12.3 million from the 2023/24 budget dedicated to the development of mRNA technology. This presumably includes the Victorian Government’s partnership with BioNTech, Pfizer, and La Trobe University on another facility to create more mRNA vaccines, with a focus on treating cancer.
While the Moderna factory opening heralds the ramping up of the commercial mRNA vaccine industry in Australasia, there are signs that stakeholders may not enjoy the smooth upward trajectory that they are hoping for.
Australia has seen a “concerning decline” in childhood vaccination rates of one or two percentage points since 2021, when Covid vaccines were mandated at large. The proportion of ‘up-to-date’ infants (12 months old) dropped from 94.3% in 2020, to 92.8% in 2023, the last available year of data, while only 93.3% of five-year-olds were up to date in 2023, compared to 94.2% in 2020.
The role of mandates in driving this decline was acknowledged in the recent federal Covid inquiry, during which the panel heard that “mandating restrictions and actions, especially vaccination, had the biggest negative impact on trust and increased rejection of these measures.”
Australia has had coercive No Jab No Pay/Play vaccination policies in place since 2016, where family tax benefits and childcare rebates are withheld from families whose children are not up-to-date with the schedule, and under-vaccinated children are not allowed enrolment in childcare centres and kindy (conscientious objection exemptions are not allowed). Australians have mostly accepted this, but Covid vaccine mandates seem to have been a bridge too far for many.
Furthermore, 6 in 10 Australian parents reported feeling distressed when thinking about vaccinating their child, according to preliminary insights from new research into childhood vaccination barriers conducted by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS).
This suggests that while a majority of parents are still willing to vaccinate their children according to the National Immunisation Program Schedule (NIPS), which requires that Australian kids have 45 doses of vaccines by the age of five (up to 52 doses for Indigenous children), parents are sitting with a level of discomfort about it.
Politicians and health officials have made a huge deal of this dip in childhood vaccination rates, spending millions of taxpayer dollars to advertise taxpayer-funded vaccines back to the taxpayers, and staging semi-regular media blitzes on the importance of vaccinating newborns and “pregnant people” - most recently with a focus on whooping cough, for which Australia is reportedly experiencing the worst year on record.
Underlying the rise in vaccine hesitancy are unresolved safety concerns unique to the novel mRNA platform, the mass-scale rollout of which, during Covid, was enabled by two key scientific breakthroughs.
One, the stabilisation of the mRNA used to prompt recipients’ cells to create the antigen, by swapping out natural uridine for synthetic pseudouridine, for which scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2023. Hence, the mRNA in the Covid injections is synthetically modified-RNA, not natural mRNA.
Second, the delivery mechanism of lipid nanoparticles (LNPS) to ensure that the fragile mRNA could be safely delivered to cells. Without being sealed in the fatty LNP packets, the mRNA would be destroyed too quickly to stimulate production of the antigen.
While both inventions solved one problem (how to get the mRNA into cells without it being destroyed en route), they gave rise to new problems. As example, in a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature, scientists shared findings that the modifications made to the mRNA in Covid vaccines are causing “frameshifting,” resulting in the production of “off-target” (i.e.: unintended) proteins, the consequences of which are unknown.
Scientists have explored the pro-inflammatory potential of LNPs, calling for further research to investigate a possible link to adverse events following immunisation (AEFIs) such as anaphylaxis and autoimmune responses.
And more recently, with the discovery last year that the mRNA vaccines contained excessive levels of residual synthetic DNA left over from the vaccine production process, including a gene therapy sequence called the SV40 enhancer/promoter in the Pfizer vaccine, LNPs have come under the microscope for their potential to dump this foreign DNA into cells, raising concerns of long-term health risks, including genomic integration and cancer.
While much of the public is likely unaware of the scientific ins and outs of these safety concerns, the contamination issue has caught some public attention since the local government of West Australian mining town Port Hedland initiated a call at the grassroots level to stop the shots in October, after which several other councils have followed suit. Federal MP Russell Broadbent has also taken up the matter with the Prime Minister and the Health Minister, reporting regularly to constituents on his progress.
But also, people don’t need to know science to observe that friends and family aren’t doing too well after getting the shots. In Western Australia during the vaccine rollout in 2021, AEFIs reported in relation to Covid vaccines were a staggering 24 times higher than the rate of reporting for all other vaccines combined.
There were 141,074 adverse events AEFIs and 1,038 deaths reported to Australia’s safety surveillance database in association with the Covid vaccines as at 23 November. The majority of these (91,315 AEFIs and 518 deaths) are related to the mRNA Moderna and Pfizer products.
Anecdotally, people who believe they have witnessed family or friends get injured after a shot are less inclined to take another one themselves, and there is research to confirm that this is the case at population level.
Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the Health Department insist that the above-listed concerns are immaterial, and that the mRNA vaccines are safe and effective.
The Federal Government has two billion reasons not to look too closely, and the state governments, which are invested to the hilt in the mRNA industry, have a few million reasons of their own to double down on the safe and effective messaging.
It appears that our governments believe they can afford to ignore safety concerns, and they may even be right. During a recent court hearing for Australia’s first Covid vaccine injury class action against the government, lawyers for senior health officials including the Health Minister, Chief Medical Officer, and head of the TGA, argued that the case should be dismissed because these officials did not owe a duty of care to Australian citizens who were injured by the medical products they approved and promoted.
The judge is now reviewing the move to dismiss the case, while nearly two thousand injured Australians enrolled in the class action wait with bated breath to find out if they’ll get their day in court. Read more about the progress of the case via the Substack of Whitsundays GP Dr Melissa McCann, who initiated the action and is still seeking further funding.
So, it would seem that what Australians can expect is more mRNA products, more ‘virus hunting’ research, more media blitzes, more ad and educational campaigns, more ‘behavioural insight’ research to drive government messaging, and possibly even tougher coercive measures to ensure demand for such abundant supply.
If Australians aren’t on board with this, the time to say no is now.
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Yes, and they've tied up all the universities with research grants, joint manufacturing plants, translational hubs, pilot plants - they're all on board. No academic is going to say bad things about mRNA now, which means no media report is going to bother finding any contrary expert to challenge the narrative, since the yes-men will all be on the press release, with the highest credentials, an easy photograph and even video for a quick story.
Every nation has its part, economically to play. Ours is the base centre of the great poisoning, isnt that sooo nice to know, makes you feel sick!
Brilliant reporting here Rebekah , you tied it all together neatly in one package! I am in awe of your writing. Many thanks🙏🙏🙏🙏