Moderna, the company that helped save the world, has unraveled

When Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel addressed the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2021 — virtually, along with the rest of the participants who tuned in at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic — he was armed with two things he’d lacked the year before: a vaccine that was 95% effective against a virus that had shut down the world, and a slogan. “This,” he declared, “is just the beginning.”

The phrase, repeated and reprinted dozens of times thereafter, tidily summed up the company’s monumental ambitions: to plow the profits and know-how from its Covid coup into a new crop of mRNA vaccines and therapies that would change medicine and turn Moderna into one of the largest drugmakers on the planet.

It has not worked out that way. 

Today Moderna faces a crisis unlike any other in its 15-year-history. Wall Street has pushed executives to slash spending, as Covid vaccine sales have slumped and no new blockbusters have emerged. The federal government, which had all but midwifed the company, has turned on it. In May, the Health and Human Services Department — led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has touted falsehoods about mRNA vaccines — canceled $766 million in contracts to prepare shots for a potential bird flu pandemic.

Moderna’s market value has fallen by more than 90% — $185 billion, or a full Sony — from its 2021 peak to around $10 billion this month. Layoffs and restructurings, often undisclosed, have roiled the company. Further cuts have not been ruled out. 

“We’ve shown discipline on cost,” President Stephen Hoge said in an August interview with STAT. “If we need to be more disciplined, we will.”

The story of Moderna’s great unraveling — told here in detail, with new disclosures about the pressures the company has faced and the missteps it has made — is neither simple nor finished. At the end of this year, the company will still have $6 billion in the bank, a Covid shot with more than $1 billion in sales annually, and a cancer vaccine that has tantalized oncologists and analysts alike with its potential to revive that moribund field. “They’re not going anywhere,” said Melissa Moore, Moderna’s former chief scientist of mRNA research.

That does not mean it will survive in its present shape.