Moderna, the company that helped save the world, has unraveled
94 comments
·October 30, 2025pizzathyme
dmschulman
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.
dfsegoat
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...
Eddy_Viscosity2
$180-500M+, doesn't sound that much really. You can barely get a decent ballroom for that.
ahmeneeroe-v2
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...
mycall
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.
lumost
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.
DanHulton
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.
mattmaroon
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.
gdulli
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.
rpdillon
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.
dmschulman
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.
deltarholamda
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.
jleyank
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.
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falcor84
> 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).
teamonkey
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.
jleyank
Hence my statement about hope…
seized
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....
soco
Also, they will help spread the disease around, chances to hit some less fortunate chaps increasing with every new carrier.
Gibbon1
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.
ericmcer
What is this article?
"Why is a company whose entire valuation was based on covid-19 vaccine sales struggling now???"
Mysterious!
christophilus
Yeah. My thoughts exactly. Its valuation is back to pre pandemic levels which seems reasonable.
Projectiboga
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.
SilverElfin
Bad timing. Their stock is up 15% today.
dadjoker
"...the company that helped save the world,..."
This is satire, right?
Wasa_bi
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
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-xmr
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
conception
If by hand waved you mean gone through the same clinical trials and rigor as any approved approach.
monero-xmr
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)
laughing_man
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.
doka_smoka
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cynicalsecurity
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bena
We have roughly 8 billion people on Earth. We have enough that we can probably do more than one thing at a time.
sherburt3
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sherburt3
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camcaine
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null
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