Dr. Robert Malone: 'I came up with the idea of using RNA as a gene therapy medicine'

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Ezra Levant asked Dr. Malone to explain his point of view when he helped develop the mRNA technology in the past. Dr. Malone responded, saying that this goes back to his graduate school days in the late 1980s.

"The work was done to try to enable me to ask some fundamental questions about retroviruses and at the time, I was very passionately pursuing a career in gene therapy."

Malone continued:

So I wanted to be a pediatric gene therapist and I was working on trying to improve the use of the utility of the leading gene therapy technology at the time, which was retroviruses. To do it, I had to develop methods for working with RNA because retroviruses are packaged as RNA ribonucleic acid.

That's their genome and they're retroviruses because they're able to change the RNA into DNA - most viruses, RNA viruses can't, like coronaviruses can't do that.

And so I needed to develop methods to allow me to manufacture large quantities of pure RNA and include and learn about what were the appropriate genetic elements in that RNA and chemical elements necessary to make it so that it could produce protein when it was delivered into a cell.

And then I tested all the different methods of delivery that were available at the time. None of them worked and was fortunate to be the first to test a new tech that had been developed in the Bay Area involving positively charged fats.

And so that's what gave rise to that suite of technologies. And then having established that I could do all these things, make large quantities of RNA that at the proper structure and cause it to be slipped into virtually any cell type and then testing it in embryos and showing that it worked in embryos.

"The question was, what was it good for? And so I came up with the idea of using RNA as a gene therapy medicine, which is was considered to be radical and bizarre at the time, not at all feasible," Malone added. "And of all the potential genetic medicines that could be developed using this technology, I proposed that the leading one would be for vaccines because the tech didn't work very good."

Levant asked Dr. Malone, "What did the pharmaceutical companies say or do when you started pumping the brakes? A bit on the cheerleading of this? I mean, you're someone who was obviously very open to this technology, but you had criticisms of its application. How did they respond to you?"