‘Disease X Is Coming’: Bill Gates Unleashes mRNA Vaccine ‘Wafer’ Technology

The film can be placed inside the cheek or under the tongue to deliver the vaccine. It can also be rehydrated with an aqueous solution and taken nasally or through other means that don’t require passage through the digestive tract.

Jurata and CEPI tout the technology as key to getting vaccines to poor people across the world. “If shown to be successful,” CEPI said in its press release, the technology will “help expand access to mRNA vaccines in underserved regions and advance the global response to future emerging infectious disease outbreaks.”

However, scientists who spoke to The Defender said that “success” seemed unlikely anytime soon. They also said the technology could pose problems even beyond the serious known risks with existing mRNA transfection technology.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., senior director of science and research at Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said:

“Vaccines require cold storage (mostly refrigeration) and mRNA vaccines are especially susceptible to heat damage during shipping and storage. A thermostable platform completely eliminates the need for refrigeration and would be a huge breakthrough in getting rid of ‘cold chain requirements’ in delivering vaccines to the developing world and would also constitute a big cost savings in deployment overall.

“But outside of the other obvious issues with mRNA vaccines, I would be worried that the mRNA wouldn’t be as thermostable as purported and this would induce sequence mutations and other damage to the genetic code.”

Jurata is a small biotech firm developing the films for vaccine delivery and other therapeutics. Its founders also founded Bamboo Therapeutics, a gene therapy biotech company acquired in 2016 by Pfizer in a deal valued at $827 million.

Thermostable, needle-free vaccines are a ‘red herring’ 

Jurata is the fifth partner announced as part of CEPI’s January 2022 call for proposals for thermostable vaccine manufacturing innovations. The company said more announcements are on the horizon.

Recently, organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, have touted the potential benefits of non-needle vaccine delivery technologies including microarray patches, pens and now microfilms as “groundbreaking,” “game changers” and “the future of vaccination.”

They claim these technologies have the potential to make vaccines accessible to remote areas, particularly in the Global South, where infrastructure for the cold storage necessary for vaccines is lacking, especially for mRNA vaccines which require ultra-cold temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius to -80 C.

They also say these technologies can “help promote vaccine uptake in areas of vaccine hesitancy” and reduce the need for providers by making it possible for people to self-administer vaccines.

Under the terms of the agreement with CEPI, Jurata committed to ensuring vaccine supply for the Global South by producing a volume of vaccines “required to meet public health needs,” setting affordable prices for Global South countries and potentially transferring the technology to Global South manufacturers.

Thermostable needle-free technologies are being widely promoted even though few clinical trials on any of these technologies have been completed and no such vaccine has yet been approved by regulators.

CHD Staff Scientist J. Jay Couey, Ph.D., told The Defender he thought the hype around such technologies is a “red herring” meant to make the public think any problems with these vaccines are technical questions of storage or delivery method — rather than the much more serious threat posed by mRNA transfection technologies themselves.