Did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that people vaccinated against COVID-19 are no longer legally humans, but rather "products" that belong to the vaccine's patent holder? No, that's not true: The claim stems from a misinterpretation of a Supreme Court ruling that discusses neither vaccines nor the legal definition of "human." Rather, it affirms a company's right to patent DNA created in labs - and COVID-19 shots do nothing to alter a person's genetic makeup.
The claim appeared in a Hungarian-language video on TikTok on June 20, 2023, under a caption translated by Lead Stories as:
"🔥🔥THE SUPREME COURT OF THE USA APPROVED THAT PEOPLE VACCINATED WITH MRNA SHOULD BE THE PROPERTY OF THE PATENT!!!" The video shows an interview with Todd Callender, a U.S. attorney known for making sensationalist claims about the COVID-19 vaccine. He says:
There is existing U.S. Supreme Court authority on the subject. It's called Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics. The holding in the case is that the use of mRNA to effect gene modification results in 'the product' -- in this case, the vaccinated people, belonging to the patent holders...All these manufacturers of the COVID shots are using lipid nanoparticles. These lipid nanoparticles slip right into a cell, they dump their payload, and then you have gene modification... Vaccinated people have already been turned into a new species that our government [calls] "SynBio," or simply "Borg"... Do we owe any rights to these new species of people? And the answer is, probably not. When you look at all the various documents, what you find is, they refer to them as property, not as people, not as humans with rights.
Here is a screenshot from the video taken at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue July 11 04:51:48 2023 UTC)
The 2013 Supreme Court case in question, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., held that a biotech company was free to patent "complementary DNA," which is engineered in a lab, but barred it from patenting naturally occurring DNA. The ruling said nothing about human beings becoming the property of a complementary-DNA patent holder, did not discuss the legal definition of "human," and was handed down more than seven years before COVID-19 vaccines appeared on the market.
Moreover, no COVID-19 shot modifies a person's DNA, as Callender claims. The jabs manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna use a genetic material known as messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), but do not change DNA structure, as the British National Health System explains:
Gene therapies involve making deliberate changes to a patient's DNA in order to cure or alleviate a genetic condition... mRNA from the vaccines does not enter the cell nucleus or interact with the DNA at all, so it does not constitute gene therapy. Gene therapies can have long-lasting effects because they permanently change the cell's DNA, with these changes being inherited by any daughter cells that result if the cell divides. In contrast, mRNAs are always transitory and are not inherited by daughter cells, making them ideal for use in vaccines.
Lead Stories has debunked Callender's other claims about COVID-19 vaccines on several occasions.
