Moderna's Financials

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.

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.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man&#x27;s Chest made $1.07bln global revenue. So Moderna made roughly 4 Dad Man&#x27;s Chest&#x27;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.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_highest-grossing_films" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_highest-grossing_films</a>

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&amp;D they do.

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&#x2F;control them.

&gt; Today I learned that Moderna (and maybe Pharma industry?) has better margins than Facebook.<p>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.

I&#x27;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&#x27;t work as well as the MRNA COVID vaccine, but I think the smart money is on many of them performing well.

A vaccine so effective, it needs to be taken again every few months.<p>For treating COVID, it&#x27;s almost as effective as horse worm medicine.

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&#x27;t work, is astonishing by this dates, but nobody mentioning it&#x27;s crazy. Pharma is a company that makes money from sick people, if that isn&#x27;t enough for you, is one of many examples of why we are nnot going to make it as a species.

<i>&quot;A company that made a massive, risky investment that was successful has very high margins&quot;</i><p>Is this really earth shattering?