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The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is funding the laboratory creation of deadly, genetically engineered bird-flu viruses—even as its director, Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, is named as an inventor on a U.S. government patent for a vaccine platform designed to counter those very pathogens.
In other words, the same federal agency making new bird-flu viruses is led by the man who helped invent—and could profit from—the vaccine meant to fight them.
Mainstream reports and federal documents confirm that Dr. Taubenberger could receive royalty payments if the vaccine platform proves successful.
Federal rules allow government inventors like Taubenberger to personally earn up to $150,000 a year in royalties from their patents.
This overlap between virus creation and vaccine ownership raises profound questions about conflicts of interest within America’s pandemic-preparedness system.
The same official overseeing the creation of potentially pandemic-causing bird-flu viruses also stands to earn personal income from the patented vaccine technology designed to combat them—a built-in conflict of interest at the very heart of U.S. pandemic research.
How secure is a nation whose top infectious-disease officials are simultaneously funding the creation of potential pandemic pathogens and positioned to profit from the vaccines meant to stop them?
Who Is Jeffery Taubenberger?
NIAID Director Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger gained fame for leading the team that sequenced and reconstructed the 1918 “Spanish flu” genome—the deadliest pandemic in modern history.
Dr. Taubenberger’s work on the Spanish flu virus involved the reconstruction and sequencing of one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
That project effectively resurrected an extinct virus under federal sponsorship, establishing Taubenberger as a pioneer of gain-of-function influenza research.
Bird flu belongs to the influenza family, meaning the very expertise Taubenberger developed by resurrecting the 1918 virus now underpins his agency’s funding of new, lab-engineered avian-influenza strains with similarly pandemic-capable properties.
Taubenberger replaced Anthony Fauci as acting NIAID director on April 25, 2025, following Fauci’s retirement in December 2022 and Jeanne Marrazzo’s tenure as director from 2023 until 2025.
Like Fauci before him, Taubenberger now presides over an agency channeling taxpayer dollars into the same kind of high-risk pathogen manipulation that helped set the stage for the COVID-19 disaster—continuing the very pattern of federally backed experimentation that muddles public health preparedness and pandemic provocation.
Bird Flu Takes Center Stage in Trump’s $500 Million ‘Generation Gold Standard’ Project
Under President Donald J. Trump, HHS and the NIH in May 2025 launched ‘Generation Gold Standard,’ a $500 million “next-generation, universal vaccine platform” centered on avian-influenza (“bird flu”) jab creation.
“These vaccines aim to provide broad-spectrum protection against multiple strains of pandemic-prone viruses like H5N1 avian influenza and coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, and MERS-CoV,” an HHS press release states.
The lead candidates—BPL-1357 and BPL-24910—use beta-propiolactone (BPL)-inactivated, whole-virus platforms.
Clinical trials are scheduled for 2026, with FDA review targeted for 2029.
The Patent & Potential Financial Stakes
Dr. Taubenberger is a named inventor on the BPL-inactivated bird-flu vaccine patent developed within NIH laboratories.
That means he holds a patent for the bird-flu vaccines at the center of Trump’s Generation Gold Standard program.
A May 2025 report in Science confirms that NIH “has two patents for the BPL-inactivated, universal flu vaccine,” that Taubenberger “is named as one of the inventors,” and that the NIAID director “stands to financially benefit from this project.”
The patent is confirmed in a Federal Register notice from December 2019.
The relevant patent application is titled “Broadly Protective Influenza Vaccine Comprising a Cocktail of Inactivated Avian Influenza Viruses.”
Put plainly, the federal official directing America’s bird-flu virus research is also positioned to earn personal royalties from the very vaccine platform his own agency is funding—tying Taubenberger’s financial interests directly to the emergence of a bird flu pandemic.
The Dual-Track Pattern Echoes of COVID-19
This dual track—create the pathogen, then sell the cure—echoes the pattern seen before COVID-19, when EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE project proposed engineering chimeric coronavirus spikes and aerosolized self-spreading vaccines years before the 2019 outbreak.
A Frontiers in Virology study confirmed that Moderna’s 2016 patented spike-protein sequence—developed in partnership with DARPA years before the COVID-19 outbreak—matched the pandemic virus’s spike sequence with a one-in-three-trillion probability of occurring naturally.
Later, congressional investigators discovered that DARPA, the Department of Defense, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had classified and concealed EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal.
The plan outlined how to engineer SARS-like viruses with furin cleavage sites.
It prompted Senator Roger Marshall to warn that the cover-up may “rise to the level of misconduct, false statements, obstruction of federal proceedings, conspiracy, conflicts of interest, or infractions of administrative or civil laws.”
The parallels are striking: classified projects, overlapping incentives, and opaque oversight.
The New Bird Flu Playbook
The COVID-19 pandemic was likely the result of lab-engineered pathogen manipulation, according to Congress, the White House, the Department of Energy, the FBI, and the CIA.
Today, U.S. and international laboratories—funded by NIAID—are constructing new bird flu strains using reverse genetics and chimeric-virus methods.
- One recent NIAID-funded project produced a live hybrid H5N1 “Frankenstein” virus that infects human lung cells, resists flu medication, and mutates to evade vaccines.
- In another NIAID-backed project, researchers built entirely new bird-flu viruses with enhanced growth and replication traits.
- At the University of Pittsburgh, NIAID bankrolled experiments that created a never-before-seen chimeric bird-flu virus by fusing H5N1 genes onto a live vesicular stomatitis virus backbone.
- At Georgia State University, U.S. and South Korean researchers—backed by NIAID funding—recently created chimeric H5N1 bird-flu viruses by splicing genes from Asian outbreak strains onto a lab H1N1 backbone, producing synthetic hybrids that triggered severe inflammatory reactions in animal tests.
- At the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin, NIAID-funded researchers led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka rebuilt a pandemic-capable H5N1 virus from synthetic gene clones, deliberately driving mammalian adaptation and drug resistance.
- In another recent NIAID-backed collaboration spanning the U.S., Japan, Egypt, and Austria, scientists used reverse genetics to stitch together wild H5N1 genes with a 1934 lab flu strain—creating a chimeric hybrid virus that proved 100% lethal in mammals.
- At the University of Missouri, NIAID-funded researchers engineered bat–human hybrid influenza viruses through reverse genetics that replicate efficiently in mammalian cells and resist common antivirals.
- In yet another recent NIAID-funded experiment, scientists engineered a multi-strain bird-flu virus in German labs using synthetic plasmids before shipping it to Alabama, where live ferret infection tests with H5N1 were performed under U.S. government direction.
The same tools central to the COVID-19 gain-of-function controversy are again in play.
The outcome is a closed loop: government-funded pathogen creation feeding government-funded vaccine development, overseen by officials with patent ties to the product side.
Bottom Line
Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger—the scientist who resurrected the 1918 flu—now directs NIAID, funds gain-of-function-style bird-flu research, and is a named inventor on the federally patented BPL vaccine platform at the heart of Trump’s $500 million Generation Gold Standard program.
According to Science and federal records, Taubenberger could personally earn royalties—up to $150,000 a year—from the same vaccine platform his own agency is financing, meaning the official funding bird-flu virus creation is also positioned to profit from the “solution.”
That built-in financial stake transforms what should be a public-health mission into a structural conflict of interest—one that blurs the line between national bio-defense and bio-commerce.
Once again, the U.S. government’s pandemic apparatus merges research, regulation, and remuneration—raising the question not of whether the next outbreak is being planned for, but whether it’s being prepared for profit.
