STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Microbiologist Kevin McKernan and his team recently discovered simian virus 40 (SV40) promoters in Pfizer’s and Moderna’s bivalent mRNA COVID shots
- SV40 have long been suspected of causing cancer in humans
- DNA contaminants may have the ability to alter the human genome. One of Pfizer’s vials also had an SV40 promoter with a nuclear localization sequence (NLS), a 72 base pair insertion that makes the promoter “much more aggressive and also drives the sequence into the nucleus” of the cell
- DNA contamination is a warning sign that endotoxin, which causes anaphylaxis when injected, may be present
- A cinnamycin-resistant gene is also included in the sequencing vector, and it’s unclear if or how this might impact human health. In a worst case scenario, it could make your microbiome resistant to antibiotics
In the video above, Jessica Rose, Ph.D., interviews microbiologist Kevin McKernan on “Good Morning CHD.” McKernan’s team recently discovered1,2,3,4 simian virus 40 (SV40) promoters in Pfizer’s and Moderna’s bivalent mRNA COVID shots, which, for decades, have been suspected of causing cancer in humans.5 As explained in the abstract, posted on OSF Preprints in April 2023:6
“Several methods were deployed to assess the nucleic acid composition of four expired vials of the Moderna and Pfizer bivalent mRNA vaccines. Two vials from each vendor were evaluated … Multiple assays support DNA contamination that exceeds the European Medicines Agency (EMA) 330ng/mg requirement and the FDAs 10ng/dose requirements …”
Equally, if not more, troubling, these DNA contaminants also can alter the human genome. As explained by McKernan, genomic sequencing involves reading the letters of the genome, A, T, C and G, which make up the DNA code. Both DNA and RNA can be sequenced in this manner.
DNA can be likened to a copy of the hard drive of your cell, while RNA is like your task manager, dictating the software program being run in a given moment. When you sequence RNA, you get a sense of what the cell is being instructed to do, while sequencing DNA tells you everything the cell could possibly do if the proper instructions are present.
COVID Shots Contain Both RNA and DNA
It’s been assumed that the COVID shots contained only RNA, but using genomic sequencing, McKernan discovered they contain DNA fragments as well, and there really should not be any. The RNA is basically copied, or “Xeroxed” off the DNA, and only the RNA should be in the final product.
As noted by McKernan, the DNA used is proprietary. “They don’t want people to know all the tricks they put in the DNA to drive maximum amount of Xeroxing, if you will.” But what popped out during sequencing was the entire sequencing vector, “which shows us everything they’re doing to drive the expression of this RNA,” McKernan says.
So, we now know they’re using a T7 promoter, an SV40 promoter, an antibiotic-resistance gene, that the replication is bacterial in origin and more. As explained by McKernan, to get the amount of RNA required for these shots, you need very large amounts of DNA. To get the DNA required, a piece of DNA that codes for RNA in a circle, called a plasmid, was created and then reproduced inside E. coli in a huge vat.
Plasmids are unique in that they have an origin of replication that allows the DNA to copy itself several hundred times inside every cell of the E. coli, and, since bacteria double every 20 minutes, you get exponential amplification of the DNA overnight.
The DNA must then be extracted from the E. coli and purified. Once that’s done, a T7 in vitro transcription reaction is run on the purified DNA, which copies the RNA off that DNA.
The plasmid that is put in with the E. coli — the sequencing vector — is the blueprint for how the RNA is made, and this is what McKernan found, in its entirety, in the vials. It really should not be there. Only the purified RNA should be present.
Regulatory agencies have an acceptable upper limit for double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) in medical products, but the DNA McKernan found was orders of magnitude higher than those thresholds.
The arbitrary limit for dsDNA set by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is 330 nanograms per milligram (ng/mg), but McKernan suspects that limit isn’t stringent enough, because they probably didn’t consider that it might include replicable DNA. In all likelihood, this limit was primarily based on concerns about E. coli DNA, which might get mixed in.
In a May 20, 2023, Substack article,7 McKernan also pointed out that Pfizer itself submitted evidence to the EMA showing sampled lots contained anywhere from 1 ng/mg to 815 ng/mg of DNA, so regulators knew they had quality control problems from the start. In McKernan’s testing, the highest level of DNA contamination found was 30%, which is rather astounding.
Endotoxin Concerns
McKernan also explains that one of the primary concerns when pulling plasmids out of E. coli is the fact that endotoxins frequently tag along. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), an endotoxin, sits on the outside of gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli. When endotoxin is injected, it can cause anaphylaxis, and life-threatening anaphylaxis just so happens to be among the most commonly reported side effects of these shots. According to McKernan:8
“Whenever we see DNA contamination, like from plasmids, ending up in any injectable, the first thing people think about is whether there’s any E. coli endotoxin present because that creates anaphylaxis for the injected … You can see people get injected with this and drop. That could be the background from this E. coli process of manufacturing the DNA …”
What Is the SV40 Promoter For?
As mentioned earlier, the sequencing vector found also included an SV40 promoter. To be clear, this is not the whole virus. It’s only the promoter, meaning a specific portion of the viral DNA that is essential for gene expression. The problem is that this particular promoter is known to be problematic.
SV40 promoters have been studied for years and are known to trigger cancer when encountering an oncogene (a gene that has the potential to cause cancer). What’s more, McKernan found that one of the Pfizer vials had not just one but two SV40 promoters.
One of them had a nuclear localization sequence (NLS) that the other didn’t have — a 72 base pair insertion for a nuclear localization sequence (NLS) that makes the promoter “much more aggressive and also drives the sequence into the nucleus” of the cell. NLS is basically a sequence that tags a given protein for import into the cell nucleus, and this further heightens the risk of genome integration.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.

