Fast-paced account of Moderna’s race to be first to market with a Covid-19 vaccine.
Wall Street Journal reporter Loftus opens his narrative, an able blend of science reporting and business history, at a telling moment: Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, on vacation in France in January 2020, reads about a mysterious virus in China and, on a dime, pivots the company to use that virus as a proof of concept for a new kind of vaccine. Moderna aimed to use messenger RNA to introduce drugs developed on a constantly adaptable platform into the human body. Though the original “stopwatch drill” that Bancel had been examining centered on a rare disease caused by the Nipah virus, he and some of his board members and executives “thought Moderna should try for a coronavirus vaccine because they suspected the outbreak would get much bigger.” They were right. Coordinating the race for a vaccine that was spreading far faster than SARS, MERS, Zika, and other concerning viruses, Bancel had to take his small company to new levels of production in the face of the Trump administration’s patchwork medical and financial responses. It’s no small irony that a leader of the industry’s rapid-response team was a Moderna board member who was both a Moroccan immigrant and a one-time Marxist who worried that chasing the vaccine could ultimately harm Moderna since other projects would have to halt. Still, as Loftus writes, “Moderna agreed to cooperate with Operation Warp Speed in part because…it needed the money.” In the end, racing past regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles, it secured funding and produced a safe vaccine in record time. It also rose markedly in value, at one time surpassing Starbucks, UPS, and Citigroup. As Loftus writes in closing, Moderna has since been able to return to other quests, including genetically keyed cancer drugs that kick the immune system’s neoepitopes into high gear.
A satisfying look at how a smart business can both identify opportunity and do well by doing good.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64782-319-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Did you like this book?
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Everyone’s favorite avuncular socialist sends up a rousing call to remake the American way of doing business.
“In the twenty-first century we can end the vicious dog-eat-dog economy in which the vast majority struggle to survive,” writes Sanders, “while a handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.” With that statement, the author updates an argument as old as Marx and Proudhon. In a nice play on words, he condemns “the uber-capitalist system under which we live,” showing how it benefits only the slimmest slice of the few while imposing undue burdens on everyone else. Along the way, Sanders notes that resentment over this inequality was powerful fuel for the disastrous Trump administration, since the Democratic Party thoughtlessly largely abandoned underprivileged voters in favor of “wealthy campaign contributors and the ‘beautiful people.’ ” The author looks squarely at Jeff Bezos, whose company “paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018.” Indeed, writes Sanders, “Bezos is the embodiment of the extreme corporate greed that shapes our times.” Aside from a few passages putting a face to avarice, Sanders lays forth a well-reasoned platform of programs to retool the American economy for greater equity, including investment in education and taking seriously a progressive (in all senses) corporate and personal taxation system to make the rich pay their fair share. In the end, he urges, “We must stop being afraid to call out capitalism and demand fundamental change to a corrupt and rigged system.” One wonders if this firebrand of a manifesto is the opening gambit in still another Sanders run for the presidency. If it is, well, the plutocrats might want to take cover for the duration.
Even if they're pie-in-the-sky exercises, Sanders’ pitched arguments bear consideration by nonbillionaires.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593238714
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
