Why are there HIV sequences in Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine?
It started with a scientific paper in Nature—a peer-reviewed journal trusted by researchers worldwide.
The study, led by scientists in Poland, set out to examine how Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine behaves inside immune cells after injection.
It was a technical investigation, using advanced molecular tools and long-read RNA sequencing to track how the vaccine’s mRNA might be altered once inside the body.
But when genomics researcher Kevin McKernan downloaded the raw sequencing data and looked more closely, he spotted something the authors hadn’t reported.
Among millions of RNA reads extracted from vaccinated mice, McKernan found not only the expected spike protein sequences, but also fragments that matched gp145—a gene used in Moderna’s experimental HIV vaccine program.
These were chimeric RNA sequences—part spike, part HIV—fused together in a way that should not occur.
They weren’t part of the approved formulation, weren’t disclosed to regulators, and weren’t expected by anyone receiving the vaccine.
“How on earth did this get into this SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and what is gp145 doing covalently linked to spike?” McKernan wrote on Substack.