A conspiracy theory has been going around social media linking Moderna, a prominent coronavirus vaccine developer to several high-profile figures including Fauci, Gates, Soros, and Epstein.
Moderna's ties to high-profile figures?
According to Snopes, viral text outlined how the biotechnology company has been associated with the prominent names.
Moderna has received international attention after it became one of the top developers of a safe and effective vaccine for the COVID-19 virus.
At the same time, several social media users have begun sharing bits of text that link the biotechnology company with the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Financier George Soros, and convicted sex offender and now deceased Jeffrey Epstein.
All the connected figures have previously been the subject of baseless conspiracy theories with no evidence. The text tying Moderna to these names seemed to have been groundless claims, but some users wondered if the content had any factual basis.
The text claims that Fauci was the first CEO of Moderna and states that he was roommates with Gates, who designed and patented radio-frequency identification chips.
It continued to say that the company was first known as IG Farben and operated in Germany and was responsible for producing Zyklon-B, which was used in the Holocaust to kill millions of people.
The theory suggests that after Germany was defeated, IG Farben was forced to sell off its assets by George Soros, who it says was a former Nazi who then renamed the company to Moderna. Lastly, the post states Epstein was the primary stockholder of the company until he died in prison and claimed it was where he made his fortune and vast connections.
Debunking the conspiracy theory
Breaking each claim down, the director of NIAID Fauci was never CEO of Moderna as he has been holding his position in the medical agency since 1984, and the biotechnology company was not founded until 2010.
Secondly, Fauci graduated from Cornell University Medical College in 1966 and could not have been roommates with tech giant Gates, who was studying at Harvard in the mid-1970s, as reported by The USA Express.
Next, Gates had never attended Cornell University and was not the one who designed or patented radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips but rather by Mario Cardullo in 1973.
Soros did not disband IG Farben, the notorious chemical and pharmaceutical company after World War II. He was neither a Nazi nor a German and would have only been 14 years old in 1945 when Germany surrendered. Allied powers distributed the company's surviving assets into smaller companies.
Lastly, Epstein, convicted in 2008 for sexual crimes and was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 after hanging himself, made his vast fortune by being a trader in 1976 at Bear Stearns and later started Financial Trust Company, his own money-management consulting firm.
