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.
context: worked in network security and automation for intra-government health departments throughout COVID, so I heard everything and felt everything.
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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.
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:
On the lipid nanoparticle toxicity, I remember an article from either 2020 or 2021 that claimed they had some sort of breakthrough in 2019 that reduced the toxicity, though didn't solve it completely. Unfortunately I don't remember the details and hadn't been able to find it again when I tried a year or two afterwards.
I looked for such a breakthrough at the time and could find no evidence of such a thing. They also claimed in 2020 that mRNA was some sort of easily programmable bio-software that would let them launch new vaccines within weeks, but that didn't happen either.
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.
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).
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.
But answering this question is exactly why public funding is so important. If you're concerned about mRNA having long-term downsides, then continued government funding is exactly the right mechanism to force manufacturers to conduct the long-term studies you'd need to figure it out. It does not seem like it's necessarily in the manufacturer's interest to do these studies, if they're using their own funds and trying to turn a profit.
It definitely brings questions about repeated mRNA vaccinations (and mRNA therapies I guess then too?).
Good thing repeated boosters for COVID shouldn't affect other diseases if I understood the study correctly (since target protein is different). Can be an issue for flu vaccines for sure (or it's not since protein used slightly different year to year?).
> 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.
Flu vaccine effectiveness has been trending slowly downwards for about a decade. I don't recall any established reasons for it, though.
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.
One factual note here: mRNA vaccines were not brand-new with the COVID ones. The first human clinical trials using an mRNA vaccine were conducted in 2013.
The right's "rushed into production" talking point is especially amusing given their other messaging about cutting through government red tape. It's all just vibes.
We had a disease killing 10000s (if not 100000s) people in the country and you think government shouldn't adjust their regulatory framework to it? I would be very unhappy if they did not, government suppose to be conservative, but not that conservative. Calling this "just vibes" is very hypocritical in my opinion.
Right, my point is that we did appropriately cut through red tape when it became important to do so. Which (1) weakens arguments that complain about red tape and (2) exposes hypocrisy about claiming to oppose government red tape but then taking a bad faith stance about the vaccine being "rushed".
> 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.
I, actually, agree on this. It was hard balancing act of protecting the population (quite successfully I will note) vs lack of perfect certainty about safety. I've read there've been clinical trials of other mRNA vaccines in mid 2010s so there've been some research data available.
Now, on other hand, we have a lot of data to dig into and seemingly to prove safety of the vaccines.
> Moreover, at one point they wanted to force [2] them on the population.
Yeah, I think this wasn't a good idea. Especially after it was clear we're not getting full protection and covid turning to be endemic.
> If the vaccine really is safe and effective, why was the waiver necessary?
Balancing act mentioned above protecting suppliers, won't be surprised if it was part of negotiations between government and vaccine manufacturers.
I think we can see mRNA vaccine are mostly safe (and we'll get even better certainty about it as time passes) which is given how cool the technology is opens up a lot of opportunities.
> The thing I wish was more understood in anti-mRNA vaccine circles was how mRNA vaccines work vs traditional vaccine platforms.
My experience actually looking at these groups is they did understand it better than most. The various studies people are pulling up in this thread today, showing more research is needed? They were sharing and talking about similar studies in 2021 and 2022 during the period everyone else was blindly repeating the "safe and effective" mantra.
Yeah, mRNA vaccines to old style vaccines are similar to hardware + software vs analog machines of the past. Cool and "simple" tech. However there might be unintended consequences we need to study - for example from a comment above: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adg7327
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.
> 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)
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.
> 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.
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.
It is weird, but what we do know is that is surprisingly easy to compel people into self-harm.
> Patently counterproductive
Yes, but that is the gist. What you have got is the problem of the few who fear the numerous. Where you have power and wealth concentration, there will be a push to autocracy. Zero sum. Might makes right.
It is an international phenomenon, where (political) organizations and people copy and sync each others playbooks. Look at the Brexit, look at Orban, look at the tariffs, look at expelling talent and science, look at the killing of the free enterprise.
Fundamentally, parasites don't care about the host. If the host dies, they jump on the next one. That is why the Kremlin focuses on Ukraine and the rest, while the USA starts to talk about Greenland and Canada.
For normal people it is too crazy to believe, so we don't believe it.
> Where you have power and wealth concentration, there will be a push to autocracy.
Agree, though I think the why/how is interesting.
In watching it play out in several countries: (1) wealth concentration builds resentment against a minority (wealthy/elites) by the majority (poor), (2) someone from the wealthy/elite hijacks the majority dissatisfaction by saying they'll "get" the minority, (3) democracy sweeps that someone into power, (4) turns out, anyone wealthy/elite doesn't really give a shit about egalitarianism, and enriches themselves
I mean, when Brits vote in Boris Johnson or Americans Trump, do they really expect either to compromise their own wealth for the good of the nation, when it comes to that?
> Vaccine skepticism (and the broader medical skepticism) is a weird one though.
I don't think we have effective language to talk about this stuff.
You saying "vaccine skepticism" (or the real boogey man, anti-vaxxer) could mean anything from person who thinks the Jews are injecting microchips into us all, all the way to a person who has gotten all sorts of vaccines except for specifically the mRNA ones.
Obviously, these two people are very different cases.
In a discussion about cars, someone could say they wouldn't buy a Ford, and nobody feels the compulsion to call them anti-car. (And they probably actually understand some details about the car beyond eli5 marketing materials. Perhaps that explains it).
What does this mean? People who don't know a lot about biology? That's effectively everyone who isn't a biologist (and probably even some who are), which is effectively everyone.
> who latch onto vaccines as their cause du jour
That sounds like more than skepticism to me.
> But in practice, at least in America, that represents a small portion of the entire vaccine skeptical community.
I have no way of evaluating whether this is true beyond gut feelings. Do you?
>Vaccine skepticism (and the broader medical skepticism) is a weird one though.
We, as people, are much more sensitive to loss because of action over loss because of inaction. Doing nothing at the risk of getting sick sometime later doesn’t feel as risky as choosing to go take a product with risks, even though the risks are a million times lower than if you get sick. Taking a vaccine feels like you are doing something risky. It is distantly related to the trolley problem.
And so has the amount of plastic in our biosystems and brains. And increased PFAS chemicals in various ecosystems. Soon with increased air overall environmental pollution in the US due to regulations being removed from various industries.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Trump is lauded for stopping the libs no matter what destructive & unnecessary actions he foments that hurt his supporters. It's a now daily exercise to see an article about huge Medicaid cuts planned in the stupid big bill that will hurt his supporters. Then there are the requisite quotes from people who voted for him, and are really concerned with lots of fraud in Medicaid AND are set to lose their just admitted crucial medicaid insurance. Their self destructive choices based on years of TV propaganda is frustrating to see over and over again.
I’m still excited about MRNA vaccines (and therapies).
What’s wrong with Covid vaccines apart from particular politicians demonizing them and their respective electorate getting all crazy about non existing issues in their heads?
First they were supposed to prevent COVID. That turned out to not be true, so then they were supposed to lessen the symptoms. Everyone I know who still frequently gets COVID had the shot. Anyone paying attention was lied to.
There were tons of surprise side effects especially relating to women’s periods getting screwed up.
They were administered to children, when children were not in any serious danger.
The official story was that we were trying to make COVID die out before it mutated again, but to do that would have required vaccinating all animals as well.
Despite the above, there was tremendous pressure from left wing institutions to vaccinate everyone, proving that their values were about pharmaceutical profits instead of my body my choice.
Anyone who investigated the origin story became spontaneously racist. But then later morality reversed and it was fine.
Vaccines are designed to reduce likelihood of contracting disease and/or reduce the effects of disease if contracted. The COVID vaccines did both of these things
Vaccines are never perfect barriers. It's better to think in terms of population scales. if enough people are vaccinated against a disease, then most of the people who would have contracted it will not. And that means a large reduction in the amount of that disease floating around, and that effect compounds.
For you to claim otherwise is either naïveté or trolling
> Vaccines are designed to reduce likelihood of contracting disease and/or reduce the effects of disease if contracted.
You previously stated "(Vaccines being supposed to prevent Covid) was never the case." It sounds like you are claiming that vaccines prevented transmission of Covid at acceptable rates but you've provided no supporting arguments.
> Vaccines are never perfect barriers.
This is a straw man. Nobody in the conversation claimed vaccines were supposed to prevent Covid 100% of the time, just they were originally claimed to prevent people from contracting Covid and generally did not do so. I am sure you already aware of this and are projecting regarding your accusations of trolling.
To be clear, your claim is that COVID vaccines did not reduce likelihood of infection? It's not clear exactly what point you're trying to make here. Were they completely ineffective? Not effective enough for your tastes? If the latter, what degree of likelihood reduction is your bar?
It's not hard to find literature demonstrating a reduction in infection rate [1]
The reality is that the process is meant to look like this:
1. Give the vaccine to everyone.
2. The disease goes away.
There's nothing deeper - they're not "meant" to make any individual stop having symptoms or stop spreading or whatever. They were just "meant" to make the disease go away, and before COVID, we'd never really looked at it in more detail than that.
> Everyone I know who still frequently gets COVID had the shot.
Your observation matches what I'm seeing among the many people I know. One middle-aged man in particular, who's quite active and otherwise healthy, got at least 3 of those shots back then so he could travel overseas. There were at least 2 separate international trips he subsequently went on where he got sick on the way home, tested positive once back, and then needed a week or two to recover. He still tends to get quite sick after trips now, but he ran out of those home tests, so he can't confirm the cause.
Could it be because anti-vaxxers are generally anti-medicine and are therefore not getting tested when they probably should?
Obviously, if you don't believe in Covid, you're going to have way less Covid. Because you don't even believe it exists - so when would you ever admit to having it?
It could also be that the people who get boosters happen to be the most likely to contract Covid, and that's why they're getting the booster. Like if they're immune-compromised, or work at an Airport or something.
The vaccine significantly reduced severity of infection, likelihood to become infected at all, and likelihood of transmitting there infection.
The side effects impacting periods were incredibly rare, mild and fully disclosed.
Children's test scores are still substantially lower now than pre-covid, likely some of that is due to brain damage from the covid virus (remember that the "brain fog" was a common symptom for weeks or months, sometimes longer) and many children died or developed serious health issues like diabetes from the virus.
But needles are scary, so some people will claim anything to justify their aversion rather than admit they have a phobia of injections.
> The vaccine significantly reduced severity of infection, likelihood to become infected at all, and likelihood of transmitting there infection.
The first was what the clinical trials tested for, the second and third were hopes that we never had confirmation of. And with how much the waves continued to spike everywhere afterwards, those two seem to have been false - that the mRNA vaccines only suppressed symptoms without reducing infection/transmission.
A female close to me experienced side effects from shedding of the vaccine. She was not initially an “anti-vaxxer.” These symptoms were absolutely not disclosed ahead of time.
I’ve seen with my own eyes people who tried to shame me for not getting the vaccine come down with COVID over and over again.
When you tell someone that their personal experience and that of their trusted friends is misinformation, you lose all credibility.
> A female close to me experienced side effects from shedding of the vaccine
There are always risks with vaccines, given you are trying to introduce an immune response to a contagion and it's no secret that the immune system can get it wrong (e.g. overreacting, attacking own tissue). It's about balancing the benefits of the vaccine with the risks. You can get the same consequences from having the disease itself, as well as the risks the disease will kill you.
The COVID shot was deployed in a little amount of time, so it's understandable that there are more notable cases of side effects, because it was deployed over months, not decades as is the case with other vaccines.
Think of it from this perspective: you made a claim but you don't have data to support it. It's easy for individuals to be prone to false conclusions because we often conflate weak correlations as causation, when often times, randomness is a better explanation, or "not sure if causation".
> First they were supposed to prevent COVID. That turned out to not be true,
In fact, the vaccines did a fantastic job at preventing covid's spread. The problem was that they were developed for (and had clinical trial results for) the variant-free covid-classic. By the time they were widely deployed, the virus in circulation was already one of several more-easily-spread variants.
Had covid not mutated into variants, it seems very likely that widespread vaccination would have given us true 'herd immunity'.
> That turned out to not be true, so then they were supposed to lessen the symptoms.
They were also always supposed to do this, by making infection less severe and more easily fought-off. Many vaccines operate this way, including the seasonal flu vaccine.
Remember that until clinical trial results came in, we weren't sure exactly what the vaccine was going to do. Something that "merely" helped keep elderly people alive would have been good enough, and by that standard what we ended up with was a fantastic success.
> Everyone I know who still frequently gets COVID had the shot.
As phrased, you've walked right into selection bias; perhaps those people you know choose to get the booster vaccines because they recognize they're more likely to be exposed to covid.
> There were tons of surprise side effects especially relating to women’s periods getting screwed up.
Treatments have side effects, but for pandemic covid the right comparison was "vaccine plus none-to-mild covid" versus "no vaccine plus unmitigated component."
Infection with covid has plenty of 'side effects', and women frequently report disrupted menstrual cycles from infections.
> The official story was that we were trying to make COVID die out before it mutated again, but to do that would have required vaccinating all animals as well.
As far as I'm aware, every circulating covid variant that we've traced has likely come from mutations inside humans, not zoonotic intermixing.
> Despite the above, there was tremendous pressure from left wing institutions to vaccinate everyone, proving that their values were about pharmaceutical profits instead of my body my choice.
Now you're just being disingenuous. "Left wing institutions" were at the forefront of vaccine equality among nations, arguing strongly for coordinated buying approaches to ensure access to developing nations. If anything, that contributed to early politicization of the vaccine as the counter-reaction was "if this vaccine is so good, we need to have it for ourselves first."
The values involved were simply that of the common/societal good against individualist freedom, the same ones at play in lockdown/distancing rules.
> Anyone who investigated the origin story became spontaneously racist. But then later morality reversed and it was fine.
Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with vaccines.
> > The official story was that we were trying to make COVID die out before it mutated again, but to do that would have required vaccinating all animals as well.
> As far as I'm aware, every circulating covid variant that we've traced has likely come from mutations inside humans, not zoonotic intermixing.
IIRC the original Omicron has a strange lineage that looks like a second spillover event, from some animal that had been infected with one of the first variants instead of any that were going around at the time.
