The underlying mRNA technology belongs to BioNTech and – supposing this has been happening at all – if any company has been modifying mRNA to encode for a homebrewed variant of the virus, it would have to be BioNTech.

Be that as it may, as discussed in my last article, although BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin claims in the book The Vaccine that BioNTech launched its Covid-19 vaccine project on January 27, 2020, we know this is not true: a BioNTech study report released in response to an FOIA request shows that the company had already in fact begun preclinical (animal) testing on January 14.