Moderna, the company that helped save the world, has unraveled
statnews.com69 points by toomanyrichies 5 hours ago
69 points by toomanyrichies 5 hours 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
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.
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...
$180-500M+, doesn't sound that much really. You can barely get a decent ballroom for that.
Are you trying to say that Pharma R&D is ~ $10-20B to yield 1 approved therapy? 10 * $1-2B "at bats" = 1 run?
Honestly it doesn't sound that bad considering these pharma revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_com...
According to your numbers, Moderna got lucky at a 10% chance of producing the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in 48 hours of computation? I don't know, but there seems to be more factors at play.
Moderna got lucky in that we know enough about that virus that the chance of a COVID-19 vaccine was a lot more than 10%. The more general case of a drug is a lot more than specific one
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.
That sucks if that's your experience, but it's not the universal, or even the common, experience.
For reference, I get a sore-ish shoulder the next day, and that's it. Also for reference, when I got Actual Covid, I was knocked on my ass for almost two weeks. So for me, at least, the choice is easy.
That was my experience. A bit of tenderness at the injection site, the same thing I get from a flu shot.
It's my unfortunate experience, when I've had covid its a 6-12 hour affair that happens once every 12-24 months. My 3rd vaccine shot had me in bed for 3 days. Leading to continued vaccination being unsustainable. My wife has a similar experience to yours, and gets moderate to severe covid. She gets the vaccine every year to help avoid it - but still gets moderate COVID roughly once per 6 months.
It's unfortunate that the vaccine has such radically different outcomes within a single household, if it was a flu shot like experience I'd happily get it once per year.
COVID is a nasty virus. I need my brain way to much to FAFO.
COVID-19 may Enduringly Impact Cognitive Performance and Brain Haemodynamics in Undergraduate Students - ScienceDirect https://share.google/49ER4VjJUwipGotZO
> it was a flu shot like experience
Flu shot experience varies too. The last several have been very low response, but the first few were a miserable couple days and I stopped getting them because certain misery was worse than a chance of misery that I'd never know if it was flu or not, because testing was inaccessible.
Last year I skipped the flu vac (I had a zillion for tropical diseases so I though come one not another one) and lo, I got a flu about every 4 weeks, so like over 6 the whole season. I'm on a way to get it this year.
Wait, you're saying that when you got COVID, it lasted six hours?
At least testably/symptomatically, I'm asthmatic as well - so it's surprising that the impact is so small. My wife gets it for 1-2 weeks whenever she comes down with it.
As a data point, my experience with the shot was a sore arm and chills for a couple days.
When I got Covid later, it was slightly worse chills for 3 days. By the 4th time I got Covid, it was just chills for a day.
If I knew that would be the experience, I'd probably have skipped it. That said, it's completely possible it was having the vaccine that made getting real Covid not so bad.
By the time it was my turn to get Covid I’d been twice vaccinated. It’s the most exhausted I can remember ever feeling. Let me tell you, the whole time I kept thinking: How much more miserable would this have been without the vaccine to blunt the impact? Felt grateful and humbled
Wait, you got the Covid vaccine, it reduced your symptoms, and your conclusion was "I should have skipped it?"
That's not how I intended to frame it. I don't regret the vaccine or anything. And my last sentence admitted that was probably the case.
you're also ignoring the long term damage that COVID appears to do
In what way? I made no claims about that, curious what you're alluding to.
You said: "When I got Covid later, it was slightly worse chills for 3 days. By the 4th time I got Covid, it was just chills for a day. If I knew that would be the experience, I'd probably have skipped it."
I'm saying that's not an apples to apples comparison due to the growing evidence of how much long term damage a COVID infection can cause.
Ah I see, thanks. Yep, it's definitely not apples to apples in either event. As in, not having the vaccine could have made getting it, at least the first time, way way worse to deal with.
If you mean covid, most people aren’t knocked off their feet at all. If you mean cancer, that’s a dream compared to chemo.
Is this a serious comment? Covid killed over a million people in the United States alone.
Reread it until you understand that we were talking about the vaccine not the disease
That was the initial shock, we're all better now, with or without the vaccine.
It has affected me for at most 16 hours. I have never heard 3 days, though I'm sure there are some rare outliers. And, not being at high risk, I don't "need" it more than once a year. This kind of exaggeration is one of the things that doesn't help public opinion. Especially when there are people actively looking for ways to subvert it.
Reactions vary. I got a COVID shot on Friday. I had to massage my arm a little bit Saturday, but nothing more incovenient than that.
People have varying immune responses to getting vaccines, but feeling crummy after getting a flu shot has nothing to do with whether the vaccine used mRNA technology or not.
I would say people who end up bedridden for 3 days are in the minority for most vaccines immune responses, but people also need to make peace with the idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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....
Also, they will help spread the disease around, chances to hit some less fortunate chaps increasing with every new carrier.
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.
What is this article?
"Why is a company whose entire valuation was based on covid-19 vaccine sales struggling now???"
Mysterious!
Yeah. My thoughts exactly. Its valuation is back to pre pandemic levels which seems reasonable.
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.
Bad timing. Their stock is up 15% today.
"...the company that helped save the world,..."
This is satire, right?
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?
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.
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
If by hand waved you mean gone through the same clinical trials and rigor as any approved approach.
Except for years of follow-up studies to determine longer term effects, which certainly would have been applied for a novel vaccine, before forcing all of society to use it. Of course you could be fired from your job and be banned from public spaces (except in Florida) instead of taking it, but essentially you had to if you wanted to function in society.
I will keep my laminated "Proof of Vaccination" card for life so we don't forget, wasn't allowed anywhere without it (except Black Lives Matter riots)
Oh well, in the meantime a few years have gone by and the studies are here. Do we really need to repeat the same arguments of 5 years ago?
It was a major reason for the collapse in trust of institutions, and then the election of Trump 2.0. But why rehash the past emirite?
So you’re saying that something done on Trump’s watch led to such distrust that people elected Trump again?
Given that the plan to accelerate covid vaccine development, "Operation Warp Speed", was a Trump administration program, this seems quite ironic.
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
We have roughly 8 billion people on Earth. We have enough that we can probably do more than one thing at a time.
[flagged]
[flagged]
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
What was the horrible lie you were forced to accept, as if O'Brien himself were telling you to?
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.
Vaccine-induced immunity is better because it comes with drastically lower chances of serious illness or death than the actual infection.
There were plenty of studies comparing immunity through infection and vaccination pretty early on. One interesting aspect initially was that it looked like the combination of vaccination and infection was particularly effective. The infection acted like a booster.
I'm not familiar with the exact handling of this in the US, but in general it is difficult to count infection as a replacment for vaccination. There is likely much more variability there, there was less data about this available and the simple tests for COVID are not that reliable. Not impossible, but far more complex than requiring vaccination.
The point is that mandates forcing people, like my son, who already had COVID to take the vaccine were absolutely wrong. And it also exposed him to the possibility of getting myocarditis from the vaccine, which is openly a risk talked about by the CDC now but was denied before.
Natural immunity has been proven time and time again to be much more longer lasting and more effective than vaccination. Once you had COVID, there is no reason whatsoever to force people to get vaccinated. That is simply anti-science.
The vaccine never stopped you from getting COVID, it just gave you a better response when you got it.
I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.
This was one of my (as a layperson) irritations with this process. Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune. Myself included.
I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.
> Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune.
If you're going to be upset about word choice, the thing to be upset about is that it has no connection to cows at all.
No vaccine grants 100% immunity. Some are more effective than others. It's hard to predict efficacy for a novel type of vaccination for a novel virus and there's no vaccines for other viruses in the same family.
Certainly, this could have been communicated better, but it's not like flu vaccines have 100% efficacy either and they've been around for decades.
If we're going to go by this, literally every vaccine should stop being called a vaccine. That's not the right answer. The right answer is to not have a population of ignorant people.
That can be a noble goal, but I wouldn't be so hand-wavy about how people understand words and their meanings. I'm firmly in the camp that the mRNA covid vaccine was a wonder of modern science, and on the whole it had net positives for society. Don't misunderstand, it was not rolled out, or messaged perfectly and wasn't without risk that we're likely to wrap our arms around some day in the future.
But we can learn from the experience. And in my view, telling a captive, emotional, and concerned audience "we have a vaccine!" and then not absolutely being a broken record about what that means was a miss.
It is/was a vaccine, I think the terminology is correct. It just didn't work effectively because the variants mutated too quickly because you're not supposed to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic. This cause an explosion of variants and they couldn't make vaccines that tracked the new variants fast enough.
So instead they decided to change the goalposts and said "This vaccine that worked on the variant 2 years ago will still protect from severe symptoms" when in fact it did nothing and people kept getting infected.
It wasn't the vaccine itself it was how it was sold to us by Pfizer, Moderna and the politicians.
This is false and has never been proven. This was the propaganda that was spread after the vaccine was openly no longer working.
What stopped the pandemic was omicron that was so explosively contagious that 98+% of the world got it at the time. After that everyone had natural immunity that caused decreasing symptoms every subsequent time you got infected with a new variant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Americans have nothing on fascism compared to Europeans, especially what is going on in Britain right now.
Moderna looked more like a pump and dump
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 ?
Fwiw, you didn't provide any evidence based claims anyone could make a rebuttal for.
You just stated your own view as authority.
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.