(The Epoch Times)—Moderna halted a clinical trial for a new vaccine because one of the participants suffered an adverse event, The Epoch Times has confirmed.
Workers at two of the trial sites said the trial for the Epstein-Barr virus vaccine, which launched in early 2022, was paused. One of the workers said the trial was halted due to an issue with one of the participants.
“We received an update about an adverse event that initiated the pause for dosing, but I, myself did not receive details on what the event was,” Maurice Beck, recruitment manager for Tekton Research, told The Epoch Times via email.
The confirmation comes after independent reporter Alex Berenson reported on an email he obtained that announced the halt.
The message, titled “all dosing must pause immediately!” informed people that the adverse event was suspected to be myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation.
“We have been informed today of an adolescent subject … that has met a pause rule of ‘possible case of myocarditis,'” the email stated. “In line with protocol guidance, this necessitates an immediate suspension of all dosing for ALL adolescent subjects.”
A Moderna investigator was said to have sent the email on Nov. 16. The Lynn Health Science Institute also confirmed to The Epoch Times that the trial was paused.
Mr. Beck said on Nov. 17 that there was no projected timeline for resuming the trial but added on Nov. 21 that the dosing pause “was lifted within a week.”
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UMass Chan Medical School, a third site, declined to comment, referring The Epoch Times to Moderna. The school, at the University of Massachusetts, was among the sites announcing the trial start in a press release.
“The goal is to raise robust immune responses to a broader range of proteins used by the virus for cell entry, in order to protect against infection and mononucleosis disease,” Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, the principal investigator of the trial at UMass Chan, said at the time.
Multiple requests for comment to Moderna returned a one-away message from a spokeswoman while two other spokespeople did not respond.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates vaccines, declined to provide a comment by press deadline. Moderna has not publicly disclosed the halt of the phase 1 trial, which is known as Eclipse.
Companies are required to disclose to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission “on a rapid and current basis” information “concerning material changes in the financial condition or operations” under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and subsequent commission rules.
The disclosures are made through form 8-K. Moderna has filed two form 8-Ks in November but did not mention the trial in either.
Dr. Andrew Bostom, a retired professor of medicine who has run clinical trials, said that Moderna is required to let study coordinators and participants know about the development.
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine causes myocarditis, though there’s no consensus on the mechanism by which the inflammation is caused.
Dr. Bostom told The Epoch Times in an email that the apparent case of myocarditis following Epstein-Barr vaccination raises concerns about the messenger RNA platform that Moderna uses for both the Epstein-Barr and COVID-19 vaccines.
The case “suggests the platform itself is causing inflammation, such as myocarditis, and the platform itself needs to be re-evaluated,” Dr. Bostom said. “A moratorium should be put in place until the mechanism of this potentially fatal inflammatory is better understood and eliminated.”
Epstein-Barr Vaccine Trial
Moderna announced in January 2022 that the first participant in the trial for the experimental Epstein-Barr vaccine had been dosed.
“The start of this Phase 1 study is a significant milestone as we continue to advance mRNA vaccines against latent viruses, which remain in the body for life after infection and can lead to chronic medical conditions. Moderna is committed to developing a portfolio of first-in-class vaccines against latent viruses for which there are no approved vaccines today,” Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said at the time.
Moderna currently has no cleared products besides its COVID-19 vaccine.
The Epstein-Barr virus, named after scientists Anthony Epstein and Yvonne Barr, who discovered it, is a herpesvirus that typically spreads through saliva and other bodily fluids. It can cause illnesses such as infectious mononucleosis, which is commonly known as mono.
The virus infects many people, including about 95 percent of adults, according to the Cleveland Clinic. A number of people contract the virus during childhood. Latent viruses remain in the body after infection and can later contribute to other conditions.
The randomized, controlled trial was launched in about 15 sites in the United States. The first part was aimed at examining the safety and tolerability of the vaccine in adults aged 18 to 30 and enrolled about 270 adults.
Part B of the trial enrolled adolescents aged 12 to 17. Participants had to be in good general health, according to Moderna’s website. Participants with a history of myocarditis and/or pericarditis, a related condition, were barred from enrolling.
About 150 adolescents have been enrolled, according to the website. Participants were said to spend 18 months in the trial, with up to 15 site visits and 10 safety calls.
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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.