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.
Sonya Bernstein (Credit: LinkedIn)
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.”
Julie Ledgerwood (Credit: public domain)
Former Pfizer executive Susan Silbermann (Credit: public domain)
(…) 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. (Read more: Free Beacon, 3/5/2025) (Archive)