THE MESSENGER

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.