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."
Ernst, in her letter Wednesday, urged Kennedy to find out how the Biden administration vetted Vaccine Company and to report back to her basic information about the publicly funded firm, such as where it’s physically located. Ernst’s scrutiny of the mysterious firm comes amid Elon Musk’s ongoing government-wide audit through the Department of Government Efficiency to cut wasteful spending. Ernst, in her letter to Kennedy on Tuesday, suggested Biden’s $28 million grant to Vaccine Company could be easy fodder for DOGE.
"Current records indicate $2 million of its $28.2 million ARPA-H award has been spent," Ernst wrote to Kennedy. "I would encourage you to look into clawing back the remaining funds, and seeking reimbursement for the spent funds if in fact this ARPA-H payment to a newly established biotech start-up, run by a recent Biden political appointee, was improperly awarded."
The primary clues pointing to who’s behind Vaccine Company are found in its business registration filings in various states across the country, the most detailed of which was a filing it submitted in California last June. There, the company disclosed Bernstein, described by Politico in 2021 as Biden’s COVID "wunderkind," as its chief financial officer. But Bernstein’s LinkedIn page contains no mention of her work heading the finances for Vaccine Company, though she advertises her service as Biden’s senior COVID aide in 2021 and 2022 and, before that, her work on the Biden-Harris transition team in 2020.
Bernstein isn’t the only former Biden administration official associated with the taxpayer-funded company. Vaccine Company’s chief medical officer, according to its California business filing, is Julie Ledgerwood, a former HHS official who worked on Operation Warp Speed until her departure from federal service in May 2022. From there, she went to work for an unnamed "venture backed new company," according to her LinkedIn page.
Attempts to reach Bernstein and Ledgerwood for comment were unsuccessful.
The venture capital firm referenced in Ledgerwood’s résumé appears to be Arch Venture Partners, an Illinois-based biotechnology investment firm that originated out of the University of Chicago in 1986 with $9 billion total assets under management. Arch identified Vaccine Company as one of the many companies in its investment portfolio in a July 2024 disclosure.
Arch Venture Partners did not return a request for comment.
Vaccine Company's chief executive officer, according to its California business registration, is former Pfizer executive Susan Silbermann. Before joining Vaccine Company, Silbermann created and led Pfizer’s global COVID-19 task force, according to her LinkedIn page, which contains no mention of her affiliation with the taxpayer-funded firm she now supposedly leads.
Public records indicate Vaccine Company has been active in the realm of vaccine research. The firm was involved in at least two clinical trials of a COVID mRNA vaccine in 2023, according to Synapse, a global drug intelligence database.
But as for Vaccine Company’s primary place of business, that’s a matter of debate—at least when going by its various business filings across the country.
To the federal government, Vaccine Company’s primary place of business is a post office box in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s that address the Biden administration had on file for the $28 million taxpayer grant it awarded the boutique biotech shop last year, according to federal records on USA Spending, and it's the same address the firm lists as its primary place of business in its Maryland business registration, according to a document Bernstein signed in July 2024.
But Vaccine Company’s business registration in California states its primary office is nearly 3,000 miles away from that Maryland post office box. That document, dated June 2024, states the company operates out of an office space in South San Francisco.
A public job posting reviewed by the Free Beacon suggests that location in California is Vaccine Company’s true headquarters. In the undated posting for a viral immune assays scientist in South San Francisco, Vaccine Company described itself as an "early-stage biotechnology company with the mission of discovering, developing, and delivering exceptional vaccines to people everywhere."
"We're backed by leading investors and world-class innovators on the cutting-edge of vaccine science," Vaccine Company stated in the job posting, which made no mention that it is also backed by the American taxpayer.
However, Vaccine Company’s business registration in Massachusetts tells yet another story. According to that filing, which Bernstein signed and dated in October 2024, Vaccine Company’s principal office is in Chicago, in the same office suite shared by its private sector backer, Arch Venture Partners.
Ernst demanded Kennedy return to her with the results of his probe into Vaccine Company by March 17.
Vaccine Company couldn’t be reached for comment.