Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority

And, um, there, there's someone else very interested, and that's, um, the US government.

And, you know, I've, um, had the opportunity to host the, you know, the BARDA and the ASPR folks on the show in the past and talk about the national stockpile and, and the, uh, the Defense Production Act.

Um, I, I, me- wherever that's press release, obviously this, uh, initially is TBain focused, but you know, when one reads the, you know, essential medicines, medical countermeasures, and critical inputs, I, I assume, you know, especially when we talk about tropane alkaloids and all that, maybe you're doing some chemical countermeasure stuff as well.

Um, to the extent you can talk about this and what you're working on, um, that's public, please, I'd love to hear about it, 'cause obviously, um, you know, whether we're talking about important critical medicines or countermeasures or everything else they work on [chuckles] down there, very important that we have a reliable source.

It's not even limited to a class of, of medicines.

It is very broadly applicable and so can be a very broad solution.

Um, so to this point, you know, we have very strong relationships, um, and established partnerships with HHS through ASPR, um, and BARDA, and that's through the BioMaP consortium that was set up, um, you know, a couple of years ago.

Um, uh, and we continue to build on those partnerships and relationships.

So I'm gonna go into some of the history here and it starts with really this clip with a gentleman named Rick Bright.

Rick Bright from 2016 to 2020 was the head of BARDA.

BARDA is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority within the United States.

What they do is they have the big pocket book and they write the big checks.

government checks to pharmaceutical companies so they can develop countermeasures during an emergency, a vaccine.

So BARDA spent billions of dollars to basically hoist up and erect this mRNA vaccine paradigm that looks like it's starting to accelerate now into the flu vaccine.

This is Rick Bright and Tony Fauci at the Milken Institute in 2019.

Note, this was before the world ever heard about Wuhan, the coronavirus.

looking at our experience, looking at how quickly people had innovated in different ways and independently to accelerate vaccine development, we said, is it possible that to drastically compress vaccine development timelines? And what would it take? What would we need to be able to engineer the ability to produce safe and effective vaccines within 100 days of identifying a new pathogen? That was the genesis of the 100 Days mission, and it became a central pillar, but it was really a transformation of the organization and our sense of its mission and what its ambitions should be.

You served as the acting director of U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, BARDA.

You talked a few moments ago about your past role with Ebola Response.

What lessons from your past do you feel like are relevant today?

And they were able to get U.S. government funding.

BARDA is part of the U.S. government.

It's some of the things that the Defense Department invests in because they're really interested in vaccines to protect our soldiers and other people against chemical warfare and biological warfare, right? So they fund research on these specific things.

And there's a lot of concerns, for example, that maybe somebody has a stockpile of smallpox.

And in battle, they're going to release that and get everybody sick.

And again, as I mentioned, During the day when people didn't have immunity, a third of people exposed to smallpox would die.

So BARDA funds these kind of things.

And the purpose of this particular study was to compare Vaxart oral COVID-19 vaccine against one of the mRNAs.

Are we prepared should there be another pandemic? Should we listen to health, you know, our, our, our health betters in the government at this point?

You know, the units that are supposed to protect us are BARDA, DARPA, and what's called the Biological Threat Reduction Program for the, uh, military.

I don't think any of these agencies are doing anything to protect us.

In fact, they are actively involved in creating the next pandemic, working with dangerous pathogens.

We've got the National Security Council involved.

We've got BARDA involved.

We've got clearly the military at some level involved in this pandemic response.

So I'm not saying that this is all Fauci.

So we saw, you know, the government pull away from, um, a contract on H5N1, uh, that was mRNA, a six hundred million dollar contract to, to produce that.

Um, and then we saw them shut down the research at BARDA, um, about a half a billion dollars' worth of research.

And there is some noise in the, in the, in the conspiracy sphere to say that we should make these vaccines illegal in the United States.

And again, you're taking away one of your most powerful potential tools.

Could it work for better tuberculosis vaccine, for malaria vaccine? I mean, I think we'll find out.

But unfortunately, we have a Secretary of Health and Human Services that just took $500 million out of BARDA, which is the Research Development Authority, Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority.

Because he doesn't like mRNA vaccines.

And I think that's why this flu mRNA vaccine is hanging up.