To those who still think Musk is the savior of free speech
Elon Musk’s Love Affair With mRNA
Another
ringing endorsement of mRNA technology by Elon Musk has again left some of his fans dismayed and perplexed.
Synthetic mRNA is basically digital medicine with incredible potential
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
May 8, 2024
But what most people will not know and what raises issues about whether he should not in fact recuse himself from such discussions or at least provide appropriate disclosure, is that Musk is himself part of the mRNA project and has a direct commercial stake in it.
More precisely, Musk is a partner in
Germany’s mRNA project, since Tesla has a partnership with the German mRNA company CureVac to produce so-called ‘RNA printers’: an automated system for manufacturing mRNA and mRNA-based drugs. The patent application for the machines was jointly filed by CureVac and Tesla’s German subsidiary Tesla Grohmann Automation, as can be seen
here.
CureVac is Germany’s ‘other’ mRNA company. Like BioNTech, whose COVID-19 vaccine has been marketed by Pfizer in most of the world, and the two German companies’ American rival Moderna, CureVac was also in the running to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, but its vaccine candidate did not obtain authorisation.
Whereas the German Government has sponsored both of the German companies, it went beyond mere sponsorship of CureVac in mid-June 2020 and
took a direct ownership stake in the company, acquiring nearly a quarter of its shares for €300 million. This means that as CureVac’s partner,
Elon Musk’s Tesla is in fact a direct commercial partner of the German Government, which, as touched upon
here and
here, has made mRNA manufacturing into a cornerstone of its industrial policy.
Just two weeks after the German Government acquired its stake in CureVac,
Musk announced the (preexisting) Tesla-CureVac partnership on Twitter, noting that Tesla would be able to build the ‘RNA printers’, or what he called the “RNA microfactories”, not just for CureVac, but also “possibly for others”.
Tesla, as a side project, is building RNA microfactories for CureVac & possibly others
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
July 2, 2020
In March 2022,
CureVac announced that it was indeed creating a fully-owned subsidiary, CureVac RNA Printer GmbH, to build the machines not just for its own purposes but also potentially for other manufacturers.
Two months after announcing his partnership with CureVac, in early September 2020, Musk then turned up in Berlin in the very midst of the declared COVID-19 pandemic to tout the mRNA machines. The below video shows him struggling to explain how the machines work to a group of somewhat befuddled-looking German parliamentarians from Angela Merkel’s then ruling Christian Democratic party.
CureVac´s Technology in Berlin: Tesla CEO
@elonmusk explaining CureVac´s cooperation with Tesla Grohmann Automation on the development of The RNA Printer® during the
@cducsubt meeting.
https://t.co/APt3zt3EhJ
— CureVac (@CureVacRNA)
September 3, 2020
Two weeks after that, the German Government announced that it was tossing
another €230 million at CureVac: this time not as investment, but as pure subsidies in support of its COVID-19 vaccine programme. BioNTech received €375 million.
So, is it possible to talk about Elon Musk’s involvement in Germany’s mRNA project on his social media platform X? Well, of course. X is, after all, a ‘free speech platform’. Perish the thought that any sort of censorship might take place on it. But, judging by my own previous experience, while we are perfectly free to talk about it, if we have anything critical to say, we are only free to talk about it in a void.
Thus, Elon Musk first
flagged his support for what he enthusiastically styled the mRNA “revolution” in April 2023, admitting that the dose in the Covid vaccines had been too high, but expressing confidence that synthetic mRNA would be “the surest path to curing cancer”.
This will make some people upset, but I need to emphasize that accelerating synthetic mRNA technology was another silver lining. It is a revolution in medicine, like going from analog to digital.
The Covid mRNA vaccine dosage level was too high and having a zillion booster shots…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
April 12, 2023
In response, I noted that his tweet amounted to shilling for BioNTech. After all, the mRNA dose in the BioNTech vaccine was less than one-third of that in the Moderna vaccine and, furthermore, curing cancer had been BioNTech’s ambition from the start. Before Covid, BioNTech was a cancer treatment company. Unlike Moderna, it had had almost no experience in infectious diseases. Curiously, however, none of the trials of its cancer drugs had ever got very far.
In light of research which has uncovered oncogenic properties of synthetic mRNA, I
recently wondered whether this was because its drugs were in fact found to be
promoting cancer rather than ‘curing’ it.
Be that as it may, my critical reply-thread, which also pointed to Musk’s conflict-of-interest in light of the ‘RNA printer’ partnership, was torn apart and rendered invisible by the X algorithm, as can be seen below.
Well, this is interesting. Try clicking on below tweet and see what you get. It is supposed to be a reply
involving 6 tweets.
https://t.co/SfHA2zIOH2
— Robert Kogon (former "Esprit de Voltaire") (@EdV1694)
April 13, 2023
Which just goes to show that “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach”.
