US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-cancels-more-700-million-funding-moderna-bird-flu-vaccine-2025-05-28/

by geox • 1 year ago

111 54 1 year ago

reuters.com

matthewdgreen3• 1 year ago

This seems kind of bad.

krapp• 1 year ago

There's a lot of that going around lately.

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

Memetic bird flu preferring self-harm.

leoh2• 1 year ago

Fortunately, Moderna is well capitalized and will likely find ways to continue development of said vaccine if the risks (financial, health-wise, etc.) are outweighed by anticipated benefits; this is one of the advantages of capitalistic systems. That said, certainly, yes, cancelling a contract like this is not ideal.

drannex• 1 year ago

context: worked in network security and automation for intra-government health departments throughout COVID, so I heard everything and felt everything.

The other problem with the cancellation: Budgets are likely already set, personnel hired, and roadmaps planned based on the expectation of secured funding and secured funding _sources_. Funding doesn't just mean cash being deposited, it usually on this level is additionally knowledge funding and sharing between organizations.

Cancelling funding, like this, also reduces input from the funder, the knowledge share, and expectations.

Now, you will have legions of [1]technicians, scientists, researchers, testers, legal, business, marketing, safety, regulation experts, engineers, hiring, and even HR,[/1] that are going to have to rework likely _months_ of planning and expectations.

One side is that now everything is in chaos and there are a lot of people that were part of this without a roadmap forward. Second side is that now you have a authority or expectations vacuum based on uncertainty and now there will be an internal 'war' between ideological camps and ideas on how to move forward, meaning loss of internal communication. The third part? Now, you have legions of *[^1] who are exhausted and feel like their time has been wasted and now are just frustrated.

This isn't even discussing that multi-year budgets and quotas have been set, and now to supplement the funding and knowledge drop, they will have to pull from other areas, causing a cascading effect.

mike_hearn3• 1 year ago

Nope. Moderna's share price and general outlook has flatlined at its pre-2020 levels a long time ago. They have no products, they aren't well capitalized and they might liquidate at some point. This vaccine was a no-hoper like all other Moderna's products. That's why the article says: "Shares of Moderna were flat in after-market trading." The smart money wasn't surprised because this was never going to make it to market.

Although this will be interpreted on the left as a partisan move (with the administration lying under duress or something), it's likely that they're telling the truth about why it was cancelled. Trump after all was a big supporter of the Moderna vaccines. But mRNA tech just doesn't work when normal safety standards are re-imposed. I wrote about the problem here a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44003338

It's easy to forget that the COVID vaccines were an emergency measure. The way they were judged wasn't how pharma products are normally judged.

jleyank• 1 year ago

Most people find it difficult to bend reality to match their worldview. Doesn’t stop people from trying. The hope is that the number of people affected from these efforts is minimized.

conartist6• 1 year ago

Nobody throws you a parade for preventing a disaster from happening.

Let the disaster happen though and you have a chance to look like a hero!

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

You just described working in cyber security. The difference is you're to blame if the disaster happens.

bediger4000• 1 year ago

The ideological revulsion about mRNA vaccines in particular is an interesting phenomenon.

The vaccines were developed during the first Trump administration. Trump himself wanted credit for developing them. He mentioned Operation Warp Speed in some of his 2020 rallies, and got booed for it.

Trump's Base decided mRNA was bad, with influencers making bizarre predictions about the vaccinated bleeding out in the streets, which of course failed. But Trump's Base decided for Trump about this issue. Trump leads from behind on this one.

boroboro46• 1 year ago

Which is so unfortunate given the potential mRNA vaccines and therapies have.

They would have made fighting flu so much easier (for the context current flu vaccines take a lot of time to be made each season and hence not very agile towards dominant strain and sometimes miss it a lot, mRNA potentially improves this).

potato3732842• 1 year ago

Which is so unfortunate given the potential mRNA vaccines and therapies have.

There's what should be a glaringly obvious lesson about ends and means here but nobody will learn it.

amluto• 1 year ago

I would have liked to see some actual studies of whether multiple doses, over the course of years, of mRNA vaccines are a good idea. Take a look at:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adg7327

and related papers. Is the propensity to generate IgG4 antibodies specific to mRNA vaccines? Is it a problem? It seems entirely plausible that an mRNA flu vaccine would look amazing for one season and less amazing years later. Or not.

The COVID vaccine trials were very focused on the efficacy of a 1-3 dose series, in people with no previous immunity, at preventing disease or reducing its severity over a period of weeks to months after the vaccine series. This is not at all the situation with influenza or the situation now with COVID.

Compare to vaccines like MMR or Varicella, which were, and still are, studied over a period of many years.

csense• 1 year ago

The problem I've had with MRNA vaccines is that we decided a lengthy multi-year trial protocol was necessary to ensure vaccines are safe and effective.

Then COVID hit, and suddenly we decided to rush MRNA [1] vaccines into mass production without those protocols. Moreover, at one point they wanted to force [2] them on the population.

The thing that bothered me most is the government passed a law to prevent people from suing for damages if they're hurt by COVID vaccines [3]. If the vaccine really is safe and effective, why was the waiver necessary?

[1] If the made the COVID vaccine the same way they've been making them since polio, I'd be less uneasy -- if you made 25 vaccines with the process and they all worked okay, saying "it should be fine" for the 26th one is backed by some evidence.

But given MRNA vaccines were brand-new with the COVID ones, until then they'd made 0 vaccines with the process; saying "it should be fine" for the 1st one seems to be rather irresponsible.

[2] In my opinion, "you're being forced to do X" is a fair description of the situation if you have to show proof you did X if you want to get a job, get an education, or get on an airplane. Around the time of the first vaccines getting rolled out, these policies were being discussed very seriously.

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...

exceptione2• 1 year ago

  > But Trump's Base decided for Trump about this issue. Trump leads from behind on this one.

1. The base doesn't decide out of thin air, the USA audience have been primed for decades with `government = bad` (anything `social = bad` really). We have evidence of orchestrated anti covid campaigns on Twitter, but the soil was well prepared for it.

2. Trump always leads from behind. He is allowed some personal space and he uses that for personal profiteering. He flip flops on all important issues, policy does not interest him and it is way too difficult for him anyways. He gives public performances when he thinks it buys him respect.

3. If the public stops focusing on Trump's drama, they could regain bandwidth to make a proper analysis. But they need the help of an oligarch owned press, staffed by people who, like the general public, have to unshackle some self-harming beliefs.

ethbr16• 1 year ago

Vaccine skepticism (and the broader medical skepticism) is a weird one though.

Because it's patently counterproductive -- modern medical science saves lives.

So what you really have is a bunch of people getting riled up about something because they don't currently need it, then making dumb choices at critical moments, then denying their actions caused consequences if they have bad luck.

A partner was a critical care nurse during COVID, and said she had people dying in beds who still denied COVID existed. Mind-boggling.

kelipso• 1 year ago

The medical community, the government, and the media in general hid, downplayed, and censored discussions about the negative side effects of mRNA vaccines. Thus creating an aura of suspicion around the mRNA vaccine and loss of trust in the medical community.

Once they publish tons of trustworthy research on the side effects of mRNA vaccines, then people will have confidence in them.

trustworthy

Yes. It will probably take years to decades for the medical community to regain the trust and confidence of the public. But keep doing good work and it will happen probably.

const_cast• 1 year ago

The problem with mRNA vaccines is that we did not downplay and censor charlatans enough. We allowed anti-vax rhetoric to spread like wildfire on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Our scientists and doctors actually humored these people, and that was a huge mistake.

As soon as you tell an anti-vaxxer something like "there are risks, but..." all they hear is "aha!! I knew it was poison!".

Nobody on planet Earth said that the vaccine was 100% safe, nor that it was 100% effective. Because no vaccine, and no medicine, is. But we allowed people to revel in their own fear and anti-establishment mentality, and because of that, a lot of people died that did not need to.

pengaru2• 1 year ago

  > The vaccines were developed during the first Trump administration. Trump himself wanted credit for developing them.

No. They were produced at scale during his administration to combat the pandemic, but were developed well before that, with support from a government actually funding vaccine R&D:

  > Moderna was also awarded a $25,000,000 grant by DARPA through a program
  > Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics: Prophylactic
  > Options to Environmental and Contagious Threats (ADEPT-PROTECT). Its stated goal
  > was to develop an mRNA vaccine with the capability to suppress a global pandemic
  > within 60 days. (2013)

ethbr16• 1 year ago

The history of DARPA funding mRNA vaccine platforms should be more widely known, because it's exactly what the government should be doing.

DARPA identified novel pathogens with pandemic potential as a key threat to the US (and everyone else), identified mRNA vaccine platforms as something that would allow more rapid responses to novel pathogens, and invested in it.

And then when exactly that happened -- there were mRNA vaccine platforms ready.

matthewdgreen3• 1 year ago

My understanding is the mRNA vaccines are (1) the best hope for developing a fast vaccine in the face of a new, really-dangerous virus, and (2) incidentally a great hope against cancer. I'm sure this doesn't mean the end of funding for those other things, but I imagine it means less funding.

g42gregory• 1 year ago

Why do we need to engage in ideological discussions and feelings about the mRNA vaccines?

Can somebody just post a link to the double-blind, placebo-based safety study of mRNA vaccine (e.g. COVID-19), to put this to rest once and for all?

linotype2• 1 year ago

Sounds like an opportunity for Europe to pick up the tab.

kjkjadksj• 1 year ago

Europe has had to pick up a lot of tabs lately on the offchance the Fulda Gap is breached.

linotype2• 1 year ago

Europeans paying for their own defense, what a concept.

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

The critical thing is that part of the funding was for additional clinical studies, which is exactly what is needed to determine efficacy / safety, and answer lingering scientific questions.

I guess mRNA vaccines are "woke" now (or maybe they always were, dunno).

More stupidity.

matty22• 1 year ago

But what about those egg prices?

US cancels funding for Moderna bird flu vaccine

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