Moderna has unraveled

https://www.statnews.com/2025/10/30/moderna-rise-fall-biotech-analysis-from-pandemic-rise-to-mrna-crash/

by toomanyrichies • 9 months ago

86 111 9 months ago

pizzathyme• 9 months ago

I can understand the current global/political environment against mRNA accounting for a 90% fall in revenues and valuation. But if the mRNA tech is still progressing and promising for a variety of ailments like cancer, then the company still has substantial future value coming

dmschulman2• 9 months ago

The business model for pharma and drug discovery is unfortunately one that requires a lot of upfront investment for research and trials that may or may not pay off as revenue one day.

The technology they invented is incredibly promising for new vaccines and they should be attracting enough investment (through contracts or other deals) to continue innovating and saving lives. Maybe they can license it as a last ditch effort to build revenue, but unfortunately the public perceptions about vaccine efficacy is on the wane and government contracts are no longer there to support this vital work both in the present and as a hedge against future pandemics.

lumost3• 9 months ago

It's tough to get people to want a vaccine which knocks you off your feet for 3 days and needs to be repeated every 6-12 months. I'm very bullish on mRNA vaccine technology - but it's potentially a poor fit for rapidly changing viruses.

dfsegoat• 9 months ago

To put some numbers to trying to develop a single therapy (where candidates etc. will fail as you try them)

- Plan to sink $180-500M+ just in R&D

- Factor in failures, regulatory, clinical, recruitment, phase 1/2 trials and you arrive very quickly around $1.3-2.1 BILLION USD per therapy approved.

...there is a 90% chance that you will spend that $1B+ - and it will fail completely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00043-x

https://greenfieldchemical.com/2023/08/10/the-staggering-cos...

deltarholamda• 9 months ago

Quite a lot of the low-hanging fruit from pharma has already been picked. The modern business model for pharma involves coming up with a patentable new drug that does the same thing as an older drug that's now out of patent and available for manufacture as a generic.

Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.

reenorap8• 9 months ago

mRNA vaccines are a fantastic technology that were completely oversold by politicians.

The politicians lied to our faces and twisted our arms through mandates and threatened us to believe what they told us, not what we were seeing with our own eyes. I don't think the reaction against mRNA vaccines would have been so strong if they didn't try to force us to take it or if they didn't wage a religious war against those that didn't want to take it.

But I still believe mRNA has a great future ahead of it. I have recently bought a large position (for me) in Moderna because I think it will be able to fulfill the promises that we were told it would.

voidnap• 9 months ago

Were very many forced to get mRNA? Even those under a vaccine mandate had the option for a non mRNA vaccine from J&J, right?

joshuamcginnis• 9 months ago

J&J vaccine was eventually recalled and halted. By then, at least at the time I lived in Los Angeles, many employers and establishments flat out would not accept J&J vaccination proofs under the premise that because there were multiple boosters available for mRNA, it was no longer effective.

colechristensen• 9 months ago

All they had to do is be a little witholding and say that vaccines were prioritized for the very sick and very important people and maybe leak some important asshole in a private conversation saying it was a "good thing" that most people wouldn't be getting it. Just do what the French did to popularize potatoes... post guards on your potato fields and tell people they can't have them.

Instead they took the line of "we know better than you and we're going to force you to do this".

Democrats have a real problem with the "we know what's good for you" attitude.

sgc• 9 months ago

The next level up from the Democrats objectively horrible attitude is fascism, which we are currently attempting. I believe Americans have a strong cultural preference to be extreme bullies whenever they can get away with it. So often we are just execrable people who care nothing about others, at all.

deeg• 9 months ago

The vaccine was developed under Warp Speed, a Trump program (one of the very few things I liked from Trump). It was first made available while Trump was still president. I have some empathy for people who think it was oversold but that wasn't solely a Democrat problem.

tgv• 9 months ago

What was the horrible lie you were forced to accept, as if O'Brien himself were telling you to?

reenorap8• 9 months ago

That the vaccines worked, that natural immunity against COVID didn't exist, that the vaccines were BETTER than natural immunity, etc.

I'm fully vaccinated along with a booster. I was the first person outside of medical professionals that I know that got the COVID vaccine. I got COVID 3 weeks after my booster which is when I was supposed to be the most protected. That's when I came to the conclusion that we were lied to.

My kid got COVID and then he was still forced to get the vaccine because the school district/state forced it. That's because they refused to believe that natural immunity existed or that somehow the vaccine was magically better than natural immunity. This also made me realize how religious this has become because now even the scientists were anti-science.

It took years for them to relent and those several years of religious and anti-science beliefs from scientists and politicians destroyed the trust that people had in them.

mattmaroon3• 9 months ago

Eh, the political problems are also oversold. The original mRNA vaccines showed great efficacy and there was no way to know the virus would mutate so rapidly, or that in doing so it would dull the effectiveness, or that transmission rates weren’t significantly reduced by vaccination, or that the effects of the vaccine would diminish relatively rapidly, etc.

It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.

fabian2k2• 9 months ago

There certainly were stupid comments by politicians on this topic. But I don't think the vaccines were oversold, they did exactly what was claimed initially.

That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance.

The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains.

Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.

reenorap8• 9 months ago

That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point.

The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated.

The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness.

No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.

Projectiboga• 9 months ago

A type of Karma hitting them. U Pitt Medical Center had a ready to trial covid vaccine based on super sharp glucose spikes coated with some spike protein. Decent results in lab animals, ready for a human trial. Moderna bought it out by paying off UpittMC to sideline that and become a major testing partner for their mRNA product. Even if it is a legitimate advance the bullying of the media to down focus more tradational products and pulling a new tech from reaching testing is limiting our scientiffic discovery. They pushed the mRNA technology as their lawyers must have felt there were more legal and regulatory barriers to competition to give them a longer profit runway.

t1234s• 9 months ago

Moderna looked more like a pump and dump

jleyank2• 9 months ago

Too many people would rather risk suffering the disease than take the vaccine. These might be the same people criticizing pharma for alleviating symptoms rather than providing cures. mRNA is an interesting means of delivering molecules on-site without mucking about with the body’s general systems. But the ‘Net says drugs are bad so they have funding problems.

Hope such people reconsider their stance when the threat level is high enough. Err, threat to them and theirs as the threat to others isn’t high enough by definition.

falcor842• 9 months ago

Too many people would rather risk suffering the disease than take the vaccine.

Apologies for being morbid, but that's what we call a self-fixing problem, isn't it? On a Darwinistic level, people either adopt an effective threat assessment approach or they die.

EDIT: Following up on some of the comments, note that I didn't actually say whether vaccine deniers do or do not have an effective threat assessment approach - I don't know. While I personally do believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, I definitely am not qualified to be making risk decisions for other people, and it's important for me to say this, because I don't want other people to make decisions for me. For example, I don't want others to tell me to not do extreme sports, or not to go out to the wilderness, or not to drink alcohol, etc, regardless of whether society feels that this increases my health risks. I strongly believe that a core part of being free is being able to make these decisions for oneself. I agree that we should have some way of preventing harm to others, but it can't be something that comes at the cost of removing people's bodily autonomy (or even just denigrating people for choosing differently).

jleyank2• 9 months ago

Hence my statement about hope…

seized• 9 months ago

Not really, those people go to a hospital where there is a duty of care. Hospitals don't get to just say "Nah, not gonna help you" and close the door for people showing up in the ED.

So those vaccine deniers get sick, lose their commitment, go to the ED, get some level of treatment/help/etc, and suck up resources and impact help for the guy who got vaccinated then got hit by someone running a red light....

Gibbon1• 9 months ago

I made a comment that got downvoted and flagged and then dang sent me a nasty gram.

"Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be a problem. Not deadly enough to be a solution"

Which is to say it's a real problem. The flu is a real problem, ask any nurse that works in a hospital. With vaccines Covid is 3X worse. But that's not enough carnage to break through most peoples normalcy bias. No ones getting enlightened, instead they'll get angry and lash out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

teamonkey7• 9 months ago

Unfortunately, one of the key purposes of the vaccine - arguably more important than personal immunity - is reducing the chance of it propagating to other people, and reducing the intensity of the viral load if it does.

esalman2• 9 months ago

If you attend a graduate level CS course on network science, you'll come across network model of herd immunity and mathematical proof of why it is effective. People who developed the model didn't take first amendment into consideration. Otherwise the outcome might have been different.

SilverElfin• 9 months ago

Bad timing. Their stock is up 15% today.

Wasa_bi• 9 months ago

Why is there a constant need to justify why vaccines, vaccine research, and anything related to them are inherently a good thing to skeptics but we're also supposed to believe that AI and the major companies proping it up is the future with no scrutiny?

AnimalMuppet• 9 months ago

HN is not one person. It is not even one cohesive "we". Here you find people who are AI believers, and AI skeptics. And you find people who are vaccine believers, and vaccine skeptics.

And if you think that HN believes that AI is the future with no scrutiny, you haven't been paying attention.

monero-xmr3• 9 months ago

I'm not a "vaccine skeptic" per se but the fact a novel mechanism for vaccines was hand-waived through the FDA, and essentially forced on everyone in society, is something that has not been scrutinized enough

conception2• 9 months ago

If by hand waved you mean gone through the same clinical trials and rigor as any approved approach.

laughing_man2• 9 months ago

They knew the vaccines had substantial side effects before they were released to the public. Those results were put under a 75 year gag order, at least in the US. I'm not sure "hand waving" is the right way to describe what happened, but they certainly could have been more honest with us.

A public health authority's only coin is the extent to which the public finds it credible, and the US public health establishment may never recover from covid.

boxerab2• 9 months ago

It certainly did not save the world. Because, as we now know, it did not prevent either infection or spread. All it did was expose people to risk such as elevated incidence of myocarditis, a fact even the manufacturer has acknowledged. For all you down-voters, can you provide an evidence-based rebuttal rather than a cowardly down vote ?

ffsm8• 9 months ago

Fwiw, you didn't provide any evidence based claims anyone could make a rebuttal for.

You just stated your own view as authority.

boxerab2• 9 months ago

That is an interesting point. The statement "the company that helped save the world" that I was responding to was stated without evidence. So, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

IMHO, if someone disagrees with me, they can ask for evidence, and there is plenty. Downvoting makes my post less and less visible, suppressing my opinion, rather than debating it. That's why I think it is cowardly. Of course there is a place for suppression, for example for abusive posts or inciting violence. But here, I politely state my opinion, let people debate.

ericmcer• 9 months ago

What is this article?

"Why is a company whose entire valuation was based on covid-19 vaccine sales struggling now???"

Mysterious!

christophilus• 9 months ago

Yeah. My thoughts exactly. Its valuation is back to pre pandemic levels which seems reasonable.

pronouncedjerry• 9 months ago

can i bypass the paywall and pay just for this one article?

tsoukase• 9 months ago

Moderna's covid vaccine was a state-of-the-art, low side effect one that I was jealous of. I had taken the almost same one of Prizer without problem. They made a miracle in just months while the regular vaccines have a decade long pipeline.

But a drug company has to produce new products if she wants to survive. m-RNA tech, although promising in theory and the beginning, couldn't produce a life saving block buster product and now the parent company might die or be buyed out.

Moderna has unraveled

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