17 ms·

Moderna's Financials

74 points by currio 5y ago

axg11 5y ago
As mentioned in the article, pharma is high-risk high-reward long term investment. Many companies tried and failed to produce an effective COVID vaccine (CureVac, Merck). Those companies invested R&D dollars well before the pandemic and further invested in recent trials. When a pharma company finds a winner, of course the margin will be great, the raw materials for most medicines are cheap relative to the value they bring. But the margin doesn't account for the 10+ years of R&D spend that put Moderna into the position it is in today.
- ackbar03 5y ago
  Is there any good/better way to derisk this process? It's always seemed quite inefficient to me
  - giarc 5y ago
    Read up on Andrew Lo. He used his background in finance to develop better biotech financing models. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-05/out-of-grief-mit-s-andrew-lo-invented-a-better-way-to-finance-biomedical-innovation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-05/out-of-gr...
  - cshimmin 5y ago
    It seems that at some level, that is exactly the purpose of (publicly-funded) basic research on the academic side. For example, the idea of messenger RNA therapy has been around for decades in the academic literature, and of course this idea was only possible with preceding advancements in general biology.
  - osigurdson 5y ago
    https://www.schrodinger.com/ https://www.schrodinger.com/
    - theonething 5y ago
      totally off topic, but can't resist. on their careers page, under Software Engineers there is this listing: > Developer, Force Fields haha, yes, the scifi nerd dream job. :)
      - Ajef 5y ago
        I assume it's referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_field_(chemistry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_field_(chemistry) And developing software similar to: https://openforcefield.org/software/ https://openforcefield.org/software/
  - csours 5y ago
    Protein folding helps some. Genomics help some. Computer models help with pharmacokinetics. But all these things help you get to the expensive part more easily: testing safety and efficacy. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/big-problems https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/big-problems https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-drug-discovery-attacking-right-problems https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-drug-discov... https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/another-ai-generated-drug https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/another-ai-generat...
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Or to put it in other terms, "better" ways mean billions of dollars of avoided loss / additional profit to pharma companies doing drug development. Suffice to say, there are a lot of people always looking at this, and a lot of money being spent on it. It's just hard.
  - cehrlich 5y ago
    Currently, no. Bringing a new drug to market takes several years and a billion dollars. And I haven't seen any compelling evidence that anyone is working on a "solution". A large part of the cost and complexity is the clinical trials, of which several stages of increasing complexity are required to get FDA approval. While it might seem inefficient, it's also the reason why vaccines work so well and have such small side effects - about half of Phase 3 candidates either fail the clinical trial or are rejected by the government for some other reason. Each round of clinical trials requires significantly more money than the one before it, but it's also arguably easier to get investors on board in the later rounds as risk is lower. Smaller pharma companies often aim to get bought outright before their product is brought to market because it makes more sense for everyone involved. Maybe someone will come up with an algorithm that lets us simulate clinical trials with sufficient precision, but that seems like a far-off sci fi fantasy to me.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  > But the margin doesn't account for the 10+ years of R&D spend that put Moderna into the position it is in today. This and the associated economics seem like the central problem with biotechnology funding. The timescales and likelihood of success preclude anything under the size of government investment. Even Gates can only nibble around the edges.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Private investment in biotech dwarfs what the US puts in right now. US gov't (NIH) = $41.6B (not all is for biotech) Biggest pharma (PhRMA members) R&D = $83B VC biotech funding + follow-on rounds = $62B So private funding is ~3.5x what the gov't spends today.
    - dataking 5y ago
      The Gov't is often the earliest and most risk tolerant investor. I'm mainly thinking of DARPA (who funded Moderna to the tune of $25M if my memory serves) here, I have much less knowledge of how risk tolerant NIH is.
      - mrjangles 5y ago
        As the article points out, Modern was spending 500M a year on research before becoming profitable. Do you think a one time payment of 25M from DARPA was in any way relevant to their success?
        20after4 5y ago
        If it happened at the very beginning when they had exactly $0 then yes it would be highly relevant. (I am not at all familiar with how Moderna got started)
refurb 5y ago
"A company that made a massive, risky investment that was successful has very high margins" Is this really earth shattering?
- yunohn 5y ago
  You must be new here. I think you’ll be quite disappointed by the rest of HN posts - rarely are they earth shattering.
  - ghego1 5y ago
    And this, for me, is one of the reasons why I keep coming back to HN. In a word were sensational news are the norm, and clickbait titles are everywhere, HN stands out as one of the most reliable and accurate places to find information
    - kevin_young 5y ago
      faggot
  - refurb 5y ago
    Actually plenty of HN posts are pretty interesting and offer perspectives that you don’t come across everyday. Not earth shattering, but more than maybe an obvious observation.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      I’m quite tired of reading comments on HN that boil down to “nothing new to see here, why was this posted,…” It’s reductive, boring, and not the goal of a discussion forum. There’s always interesting points to be made, as can be seen from the other comments that tried harder.
      - refurb 5y ago
        I never said it shouldn't be posted, I provided direct criticisms of the blog post content itself. The topic is still interesting, the author's conclusions not so much.
mehrdada 5y ago
An interesting economics exercise would be to evaluate the perverse incentives that could be created when the existence of a company is tied to turning one-time vaccine purchases into subscription revenue, and how to prevent/control them.
- 015a 5y ago
  For sure. Its rather convenient for Moderna that the vaccines will probably need to be re-administered every year. Which isn't to say that it could be better, just that it isn't, and that's very convenient for them; I bet the creators of the once-and-done MMR vaccine are shooting themselves in the foot, think of how much money they're missing out on. Or, jeeze, even one dose every year isn't enough! That's very convenient for Moderna. You need two, maybe even three of them. Why not four? Well, hold on there, the science says its two. Until you start digging in to why, precisely, its "two" at "Xmcg dosage" spaced "Y weeks" apart and you realize that the "science" was really only a byproduct of their phase 3 trials, which were rushed, encountered different variants of COVID, and all sorts of other variables. The paperwork was justified with science; science does not justify the paperwork. Incredibly convenient for Moderna's shareholders how the Federal government is now mandating that everyone in the United States who, I don't know, wants to, you know, work, now has to get vaccinated. Well, Moderna and Pfizer. You get two choices, really, and that means there's competition. Apple or Google. AT&T or Verizon. Moderna or Pfizer. Take your pick. Its normal to look at this situation and feel an existential dread about our society's future. How its looking more and more likely that we're spiraling toward some dystopian cyberpunk blade-runner judge dredd-esque corporatocracy. Democracy is dying, if not already dead. But, those fears are absolutely unfounded, because they would require that human society be able to survive the next killer virus, global warming, decreasing male fertility, critical supply-chain shortages due to an increasingly global trade network, global nuclear or non-nuclear war, hyper-inflation in an IMF reserve currency, democratic political polarization... Really looking forward to the new Dune movie though. That should be good.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    > But, those fears are absolutely unfounded, because they would require that human society be able to survive the next killer virus, global warming, decreasing male fertility, critical supply-chain shortages due to an increasingly global trade network, global nuclear or non-nuclear war, hyper-inflation in an IMF reserve currency, democratic political polarization... Growth is a constant and we are not putting the genie back into the bottle. All of these are addressed in some capacity by embracing and enhancing globalism and multilateralism. Working together towards empathic, transnational societies is the only real sustainable way forward. Regression into isolationist fiefdoms with autocratic or monarchic leadership is simply unworkable and not going to happen. I am continually saddened when I see outright or implied support of this kind of thing on HN of all places. The "intellectual dark web" has really done a number.
zetazzed 5y ago
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest made $1.07bln global revenue. So Moderna made roughly 4 Dad Man's Chest's of revenue this quarter for their incredibly innovative mRNA vaccine, given to tens of millions of people, saving tens of thousands of lives. A truly sweet deal for society at large. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  or to look at it another way, how low the reward is for genuinely world changing things vs fluff
  - RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
    So I'll take it you didn't like 'At Worlds End'
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I preferred Contagion from 2011.
  - moksly 5y ago
    It’s not really fluff, it’s circus maximus because when you paralyse the masses with entertainment they won’t have time to realise how terrible their lives are compared to the elite.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    fluff has a known good ROI changing the world is very risky, might not be as much of an upside as you expect
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    The rule is "Cost < Price < Value"
- TheRealSteel 5y ago
cshimmin 5y ago
This seems like a very short-sighted take at best. Moderna has been around for over a decade. Their goal from the start was to commercialize mRNA therapy, targeting a variety of therapeutic applications such as heart disease and cancer. I don't know if viral immunization was ever even on their radar before Covid happened. The point is, they have been working for a long time to bring mRNA tech to fruition, and now they have successfully demonstrated they can do it. Their business model going forward isn't going to be just collecting rent on Covid vaccines.
- andreygrehov 5y ago
  > I don't know if viral immunization was ever even on their radar before Covid happened. Here is a quote straight out from Moderna's patent: Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in China in 2002 and spread to other countries before brought under control. Because of a concern for reemergence or a deliberate release of the SARS coronavirus, vaccine development was initiated.
  - cshimmin 5y ago
    Cool, I did not know that! What/when is this patent?
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Vaccines are among the simpler things they could use the delivery technology for. However, their key advantage over competitors is development speed. Until COVID-19 though, that wasn't something we needed. If vaccines took an extra 2, or 4, or 10 years to develop, it was usually okay.
- Moto7451 5y ago
  This is spot on. My brother is a candidate for one of their cancer treatments once it makes it to a wider testing phase. They didn’t just come up with that in their spare time this year. That’s a long time in the works.
  - kylehotchkiss 5y ago
vnorilo 5y ago
Seems like a fairly modest return for creating one of the first top performing vaccines for a global pandemic. Even if you disregard all the other mRNA R&D they do.
buildbot 5y ago
I'm very long Moderna - MRNA treatment platforms seem like such a powerful tool to have. They created one of the best COVID vaccines so far using their existing platform, and have dozens of others in the pipeline for things like cancer and HIV. While sure there is a risk that these MRNA treatments don't work as well as the MRNA COVID vaccine, but I think the smart money is on many of them performing well.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The "smart money"? Interesting turn of phrase, when we're talking about screwing with one of the most complex, dynamic systems in the world (us, and specifically immune response). The smart money is probably insider information. Anyone else is guessing about how dice came up for a few million years worth of rolls. (Edit: Enjoying the knee-jerk reaction that I'm anti-vax(?))
  - fny 5y ago
    Smart money is a well known phrase used to refer to institutional investors. It's not a turn of phrase.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Buildbot definitely wasn't using it in the common sense.
      - fny 5y ago
        I respectfully disagree. Buildbot is saying they think institutional investors are betting on many of them performing well.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    If you are not anti-vax I have no idea what you are talking about. There is no pro-vax position I can derive from this
    - 5y ago
dazag 5y ago
To say deserved for a group of vaccines (they are prophilactics if you have to take one every few months to get benefits) that don't work, is astonishing by this dates, but nobody mentioning it's crazy. Pharma is a company that makes money from sick people, if that isn't enough for you, is one of many examples of why we are nnot going to make it as a species.
cryptica 5y ago
A vaccine so effective, it needs to be taken again every few months. For treating COVID, it's almost as effective as horse worm medicine.
- esalman 5y ago
  Another way of saying a virus so effective, the best humanity came up with is an antidote that wears off every few months.
- selcuka 5y ago
  It's a weakness of the human immune system, not that of the vaccine. Even when you are infected with the actual Coronavirus the immunity only lasts for months.
  - yobbo 5y ago
    [citation needed] I'm guessing you have seen reports of antibody levels falling, but that is not an indication of immunity. So far I have seen no reports of natural immunity (as measured in confirmed reinfections) falling.
    - selcuka 5y ago
      There are many reports of natural immunity waning [1][2] and they are not only about antibody levels but the actual probability of a reinfection. I never said natural immunity is worse (or better) than vaccines, but it definitely gets weaker over time. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-protection.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr... [2] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-2019-nCoV-Sci-Brief-Natural-immunity-2021.1-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-...
- bigodbiel 5y ago
  Wouldn’t that just raise valuation?
jstummbillig 5y ago
> Today I learned that Moderna (and maybe Pharma industry?) has better margins than Facebook. Imagine if a spiked blogging platform that literally makes money by relative demotion of unpromoted content produced better margins than the creation of a life saving vaccine for all humanity. How insane that would be.
- beebmam 5y ago
  Sometimes the business world really feels that way. Glad to see probably one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mankind is highly profitable. Maybe modern capitalism isn't completely toxic!
duckah 5y ago
No liability. Scientism is the worst religion. How much do y'all get paid?
negsd 5y ago
Amazing business. 0 liability and paid for through extortion (taxes.)

74 points by currio 5y ago

As mentioned in the article, pharma is high-risk high-reward long term investment. Many companies tried and failed to produce an effective COVID vaccine (CureVac, Merck). Those companies invested R&D dollars well before the pandemic and further invested in recent trials. When a pharma company finds a winner, of course the margin will be great, the raw materials for most medicines are cheap relative to the value they bring. But the margin doesn't account for the 10+ years of R&D spend that put Moderna into the position it is in today.

ackbar03 5y ago
Is there any good/better way to derisk this process? It's always seemed quite inefficient to me
- giarc 5y ago
  Read up on Andrew Lo. He used his background in finance to develop better biotech financing models. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-05/out-of-grief-mit-s-andrew-lo-invented-a-better-way-to-finance-biomedical-innovation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-05/out-of-gr...
- cshimmin 5y ago
  It seems that at some level, that is exactly the purpose of (publicly-funded) basic research on the academic side. For example, the idea of messenger RNA therapy has been around for decades in the academic literature, and of course this idea was only possible with preceding advancements in general biology.
- osigurdson 5y ago
  https://www.schrodinger.com/ https://www.schrodinger.com/
  - theonething 5y ago
    totally off topic, but can't resist. on their careers page, under Software Engineers there is this listing: > Developer, Force Fields haha, yes, the scifi nerd dream job. :)
    - Ajef 5y ago
      I assume it's referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_field_(chemistry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_field_(chemistry) And developing software similar to: https://openforcefield.org/software/ https://openforcefield.org/software/
- csours 5y ago
  Protein folding helps some. Genomics help some. Computer models help with pharmacokinetics. But all these things help you get to the expensive part more easily: testing safety and efficacy. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/big-problems https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/big-problems https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-drug-discovery-attacking-right-problems https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-drug-discov... https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/another-ai-generated-drug https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/another-ai-generat...
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Or to put it in other terms, "better" ways mean billions of dollars of avoided loss / additional profit to pharma companies doing drug development. Suffice to say, there are a lot of people always looking at this, and a lot of money being spent on it. It's just hard.
- cehrlich 5y ago
  Currently, no. Bringing a new drug to market takes several years and a billion dollars. And I haven't seen any compelling evidence that anyone is working on a "solution". A large part of the cost and complexity is the clinical trials, of which several stages of increasing complexity are required to get FDA approval. While it might seem inefficient, it's also the reason why vaccines work so well and have such small side effects - about half of Phase 3 candidates either fail the clinical trial or are rejected by the government for some other reason. Each round of clinical trials requires significantly more money than the one before it, but it's also arguably easier to get investors on board in the later rounds as risk is lower. Smaller pharma companies often aim to get bought outright before their product is brought to market because it makes more sense for everyone involved. Maybe someone will come up with an algorithm that lets us simulate clinical trials with sufficient precision, but that seems like a far-off sci fi fantasy to me.
ethbr0 5y ago
> But the margin doesn't account for the 10+ years of R&D spend that put Moderna into the position it is in today. This and the associated economics seem like the central problem with biotechnology funding. The timescales and likelihood of success preclude anything under the size of government investment. Even Gates can only nibble around the edges.
- refurb 5y ago
  Private investment in biotech dwarfs what the US puts in right now. US gov't (NIH) = $41.6B (not all is for biotech) Biggest pharma (PhRMA members) R&D = $83B VC biotech funding + follow-on rounds = $62B So private funding is ~3.5x what the gov't spends today.
  - dataking 5y ago
    The Gov't is often the earliest and most risk tolerant investor. I'm mainly thinking of DARPA (who funded Moderna to the tune of $25M if my memory serves) here, I have much less knowledge of how risk tolerant NIH is.
    - mrjangles 5y ago
      As the article points out, Modern was spending 500M a year on research before becoming profitable. Do you think a one time payment of 25M from DARPA was in any way relevant to their success?
      - 20after4 5y ago
        If it happened at the very beginning when they had exactly $0 then yes it would be highly relevant. (I am not at all familiar with how Moderna got started)

refurb 5y ago

"A company that made a massive, risky investment that was successful has very high margins" Is this really earth shattering?

yunohn 5y ago
You must be new here. I think you’ll be quite disappointed by the rest of HN posts - rarely are they earth shattering.
- ghego1 5y ago
  And this, for me, is one of the reasons why I keep coming back to HN. In a word were sensational news are the norm, and clickbait titles are everywhere, HN stands out as one of the most reliable and accurate places to find information
  - kevin_young 5y ago
    faggot
- refurb 5y ago
  Actually plenty of HN posts are pretty interesting and offer perspectives that you don’t come across everyday. Not earth shattering, but more than maybe an obvious observation.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    I’m quite tired of reading comments on HN that boil down to “nothing new to see here, why was this posted,…” It’s reductive, boring, and not the goal of a discussion forum. There’s always interesting points to be made, as can be seen from the other comments that tried harder.
    - refurb 5y ago
      I never said it shouldn't be posted, I provided direct criticisms of the blog post content itself. The topic is still interesting, the author's conclusions not so much.

mehrdada 5y ago

An interesting economics exercise would be to evaluate the perverse incentives that could be created when the existence of a company is tied to turning one-time vaccine purchases into subscription revenue, and how to prevent/control them.

015a 5y ago
For sure. Its rather convenient for Moderna that the vaccines will probably need to be re-administered every year. Which isn't to say that it could be better, just that it isn't, and that's very convenient for them; I bet the creators of the once-and-done MMR vaccine are shooting themselves in the foot, think of how much money they're missing out on. Or, jeeze, even one dose every year isn't enough! That's very convenient for Moderna. You need two, maybe even three of them. Why not four? Well, hold on there, the science says its two. Until you start digging in to why, precisely, its "two" at "Xmcg dosage" spaced "Y weeks" apart and you realize that the "science" was really only a byproduct of their phase 3 trials, which were rushed, encountered different variants of COVID, and all sorts of other variables. The paperwork was justified with science; science does not justify the paperwork. Incredibly convenient for Moderna's shareholders how the Federal government is now mandating that everyone in the United States who, I don't know, wants to, you know, work, now has to get vaccinated. Well, Moderna and Pfizer. You get two choices, really, and that means there's competition. Apple or Google. AT&T or Verizon. Moderna or Pfizer. Take your pick. Its normal to look at this situation and feel an existential dread about our society's future. How its looking more and more likely that we're spiraling toward some dystopian cyberpunk blade-runner judge dredd-esque corporatocracy. Democracy is dying, if not already dead. But, those fears are absolutely unfounded, because they would require that human society be able to survive the next killer virus, global warming, decreasing male fertility, critical supply-chain shortages due to an increasingly global trade network, global nuclear or non-nuclear war, hyper-inflation in an IMF reserve currency, democratic political polarization... Really looking forward to the new Dune movie though. That should be good.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  > But, those fears are absolutely unfounded, because they would require that human society be able to survive the next killer virus, global warming, decreasing male fertility, critical supply-chain shortages due to an increasingly global trade network, global nuclear or non-nuclear war, hyper-inflation in an IMF reserve currency, democratic political polarization... Growth is a constant and we are not putting the genie back into the bottle. All of these are addressed in some capacity by embracing and enhancing globalism and multilateralism. Working together towards empathic, transnational societies is the only real sustainable way forward. Regression into isolationist fiefdoms with autocratic or monarchic leadership is simply unworkable and not going to happen. I am continually saddened when I see outright or implied support of this kind of thing on HN of all places. The "intellectual dark web" has really done a number.

zetazzed 5y ago

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest made $1.07bln global revenue. So Moderna made roughly 4 Dad Man's Chest's of revenue this quarter for their incredibly innovative mRNA vaccine, given to tens of millions of people, saving tens of thousands of lives. A truly sweet deal for society at large. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

throwaway2048 5y ago
or to look at it another way, how low the reward is for genuinely world changing things vs fluff
- RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
  So I'll take it you didn't like 'At Worlds End'
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I preferred Contagion from 2011.
- moksly 5y ago
  It’s not really fluff, it’s circus maximus because when you paralyse the masses with entertainment they won’t have time to realise how terrible their lives are compared to the elite.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  fluff has a known good ROI changing the world is very risky, might not be as much of an upside as you expect
- HPsquared 5y ago
  The rule is "Cost < Price < Value"
TheRealSteel 5y ago

cshimmin 5y ago

This seems like a very short-sighted take at best. Moderna has been around for over a decade. Their goal from the start was to commercialize mRNA therapy, targeting a variety of therapeutic applications such as heart disease and cancer. I don't know if viral immunization was ever even on their radar before Covid happened. The point is, they have been working for a long time to bring mRNA tech to fruition, and now they have successfully demonstrated they can do it. Their business model going forward isn't going to be just collecting rent on Covid vaccines.

andreygrehov 5y ago
> I don't know if viral immunization was ever even on their radar before Covid happened. Here is a quote straight out from Moderna's patent: Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in China in 2002 and spread to other countries before brought under control. Because of a concern for reemergence or a deliberate release of the SARS coronavirus, vaccine development was initiated.
- cshimmin 5y ago
  Cool, I did not know that! What/when is this patent?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Vaccines are among the simpler things they could use the delivery technology for. However, their key advantage over competitors is development speed. Until COVID-19 though, that wasn't something we needed. If vaccines took an extra 2, or 4, or 10 years to develop, it was usually okay.
Moto7451 5y ago
This is spot on. My brother is a candidate for one of their cancer treatments once it makes it to a wider testing phase. They didn’t just come up with that in their spare time this year. That’s a long time in the works.
- kylehotchkiss 5y ago

vnorilo 5y ago

Seems like a fairly modest return for creating one of the first top performing vaccines for a global pandemic. Even if you disregard all the other mRNA R&D they do.

buildbot 5y ago

I'm very long Moderna - MRNA treatment platforms seem like such a powerful tool to have. They created one of the best COVID vaccines so far using their existing platform, and have dozens of others in the pipeline for things like cancer and HIV. While sure there is a risk that these MRNA treatments don't work as well as the MRNA COVID vaccine, but I think the smart money is on many of them performing well.

ethbr0 5y ago
The "smart money"? Interesting turn of phrase, when we're talking about screwing with one of the most complex, dynamic systems in the world (us, and specifically immune response). The smart money is probably insider information. Anyone else is guessing about how dice came up for a few million years worth of rolls. (Edit: Enjoying the knee-jerk reaction that I'm anti-vax(?))
- fny 5y ago
  Smart money is a well known phrase used to refer to institutional investors. It's not a turn of phrase.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Buildbot definitely wasn't using it in the common sense.
    - fny 5y ago
      I respectfully disagree. Buildbot is saying they think institutional investors are betting on many of them performing well.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  If you are not anti-vax I have no idea what you are talking about. There is no pro-vax position I can derive from this
  - 5y ago

dazag 5y ago

To say deserved for a group of vaccines (they are prophilactics if you have to take one every few months to get benefits) that don't work, is astonishing by this dates, but nobody mentioning it's crazy. Pharma is a company that makes money from sick people, if that isn't enough for you, is one of many examples of why we are nnot going to make it as a species.

cryptica 5y ago

A vaccine so effective, it needs to be taken again every few months. For treating COVID, it's almost as effective as horse worm medicine.

esalman 5y ago
Another way of saying a virus so effective, the best humanity came up with is an antidote that wears off every few months.
selcuka 5y ago
It's a weakness of the human immune system, not that of the vaccine. Even when you are infected with the actual Coronavirus the immunity only lasts for months.
- yobbo 5y ago
  [citation needed] I'm guessing you have seen reports of antibody levels falling, but that is not an indication of immunity. So far I have seen no reports of natural immunity (as measured in confirmed reinfections) falling.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    There are many reports of natural immunity waning [1][2] and they are not only about antibody levels but the actual probability of a reinfection. I never said natural immunity is worse (or better) than vaccines, but it definitely gets weaker over time. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-protection.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr... [2] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-2019-nCoV-Sci-Brief-Natural-immunity-2021.1-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-...
bigodbiel 5y ago
Wouldn’t that just raise valuation?

jstummbillig 5y ago

> Today I learned that Moderna (and maybe Pharma industry?) has better margins than Facebook. Imagine if a spiked blogging platform that literally makes money by relative demotion of unpromoted content produced better margins than the creation of a life saving vaccine for all humanity. How insane that would be.

beebmam 5y ago
Sometimes the business world really feels that way. Glad to see probably one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mankind is highly profitable. Maybe modern capitalism isn't completely toxic!

duckah 5y ago

No liability. Scientism is the worst religion. How much do y'all get paid?

negsd 5y ago

Amazing business. 0 liability and paid for through extortion (taxes.)