Biden Awarded $28 Million to Mysterious 'Vaccine Company' Run by His COVID Adviser and Based out of a Maryland PO Box
Biden admin's grant has ‘alarm bells going off’ for Joni Ernst
Andrew Kerr
March 5, 2025
During the final months of the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health awarded $28 million to a mysterious venture-backed company called Vaccine Company Inc., a biomedical firm founded in 2022 whose chief financial officer happens to be one of former president Joe Biden’s top COVID advisers.
To Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), the September 2024 grant from the NIH’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health doesn’t pass the smell test. Vaccine Company has left virtually no public footprint showing what it has done with the taxpayer funds, which the Biden administration doled out to a seemingly random post office box in Bethesda, Maryland. Ernst urged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a letter late Tuesday to investigate why the Biden administration awarded millions of taxpayer dollars to the mysterious firm and to consider clawing back any portion of the reward that remains unspent.
A Washington Free Beacon review of the taxpayer-funded company, which is supposed to use its $28 million HHS grant to develop vaccines to combat West Nile, dengue, and Zika viruses, indicates it has gone to great lengths to keep itself out of the public eye. The generically named firm has no website, and none of its top officers, including its chief financial officer, former Biden COVID adviser Sonya Bernstein, have disclosed their association to the company on their public résumés. Even the principal office of the taxpayer-funded business is a mystery, with Vaccine Company listing a different home base in each of its respective business registration filings in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts.
"From listing its mailing address as a P.O. box to being run by former Biden staffers, there are alarm bells going off as to how and why Vaccine Company, Inc. was awarded a lucrative government contract," Ernst told the Free Beacon. "Unfortunately, there are more questions than answers, because everything this company does is shrouded in mystery. It should not be this hard to figure out where $28 million in tax dollars are going. The American people deserve to know."
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https://freebeacon.com/biden-harris-administration/biden-awarded-28-million-to-mysterious-vaccine-company-run-by-his-covid-adviser-and-based-out-of-a-maryland-po-box/
