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(Fucking two-bit hustlers.)
NY Times, May 23, 2020
How Upbeat Vaccine News Fueled a Stock Surge, and an Uproar
By Katie Thomas and Denise Grady
When the biotech company Moderna announced early on Monday morning
positive results from a small, preliminary trial of its coronavirus
vaccine, the company’s chief medical officer described the news as a
“triumphant day for us.”
Moderna’s stock price jumped as much as 30 percent. Its announcement
helped lift the stock market and was widely reported by news
organizations, including The New York Times.
Nine hours after its initial news release — and after the markets closed
— the company announced a stock offering with the aim of raising more
than $1 billion to help bankroll vaccine development. That offering had
not been mentioned in Moderna’s briefings of investors and journalists
that morning, and the company chairman later said it was decided on only
that afternoon.
By Tuesday, a backlash was underway. The company had not released any
more data, so scientists could not evaluate its claim. The government
agency leading the trial, the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, had made no comment on the results. And the stock
sale stirred concerns about whether the company had sought to jack up
the price of its stock offering with the news.
The Moderna episode is a case study in how the coronavirus pandemic and
the desperate hunt for treatments and vaccines are shaking up the
financial markets and the way that researchers, regulators, drug
companies, biotech investors and journalists do their jobs.
Drug companies accustomed to releasing early data to attract investors
and satisfy regulators suddenly find themselves accused of revealing too
much, or not enough, by a new, broader audience. Journalists may be
scolded for hyping early findings, while those who ignore sketchy data
may be blamed for missing the news.
Scientists who take the traditional time to gather and analyze their
data for publication in mainstream journals are criticized for sitting
on lifesaving information. Upstart websites beat the journals and break
the usual rules by publishing unvetted studies, some of dubious quality.
And President Trump uses his bully pulpit to promote unproven treatments.
“You have these wild swings, based on incomplete information,” said
David Maris, managing director of Phalanx Investment Partners, and a
longtime analyst covering the pharmaceutical industry. “It’s a crazy,
speculative environment, because the pandemic has caused people to want
to believe that there’s going to be a miracle cure in a miracle time frame.”
Moderna’s chairman, Noubar Afeyan, defended the decision to open a stock
sale hours after releasing limited data. He said the company’s board had
been considering an offering before Monday’s announcement, but finalized
the decision only late in the day.
“It was based on our looking at the data and concluding that we needed
to have our own resources going into develop this vaccine and not simply
wait for government grants,” he said. Moderna has a deal to receive up
to $483 million from the U.S. government to pursue a vaccine.
While corporations and scientists are under incredible pressure to
develop a vaccine and raise money for research and manufacturing,
vaccine companies are also vying for attention from investors amid a
crowded field and are seeking to lift their stock prices in a global
recession.
Nearly all are trying to compress the timetable for developing vaccines
that normally takes years, sometimes decades, into a year or so — and
still ensure that the vaccines will be safe and effective.
At the same time, a torrent of information is blasting from medical
journals as well as company and university news releases. Articles are
posted on so-called preprint websites of studies that have not been
peer-reviewed by experts, unlike articles in mainstream medical and
science journals. Clinicaltrials.gov, which lists medical studies,
showed that 1,673 were underway for Covid-19, the disease caused by the
coronavirus, as of May 23.
News outlets are rushing to stay on top of new findings, and to feed a
public hungry for any advances in potential treatments or vaccine
candidates that hold promise against the highly infectious virus. Some
news organizations would prefer to maintain traditional practice and
ignore early results of medical studies, waiting for peer-reviewed data
but they are also competing to report on the latest studies.
Still, concerns arise routinely about the quality of rapidly posted data
and the motivations behind announcements.
“Why does any company release early data?” Mr. Maris asked. “Clearly
there is an appetite for it. People want to know that we are making
progress. Having a vaccine is the clearest way to a full reopening and
putting this behind us.”
Moderna’s preliminary results were promising. Its vaccine, the first to
be tested in humans, appeared safe and stimulated antibody production in
the first 45 study participants. And of eight who have undergone further
testing so far, all produced so-called neutralizing antibodies, which
can stop the virus from invading cells, and should prevent illness.
But there were no details — no charts, no graphs, no numbers, nothing
published in a journal.
Releasing sparse data is not unusual in the biotech world, where
companies often present early trial results months before they are
published in journals. Publicly traded companies are required to
disclose material information that might lead an investor to buy or sell
shares. The company said federal researchers who are conducting the
trial would be responsible for submitting the data to be reviewed and
published.
Mr. Maris said that he would leave it to regulators to decide if the
company had acted inappropriately in not announcing the stock sale
sooner, and said that investors should have been told earlier that the
company was considering a stock offering. “There’s something wrong with
that,” he said.
Moderna, based in Cambridge, Mass., went public in 2018 and has been a
favorite of biotech investors, given its focus on the hot area of
immuno-oncology and its partnerships with companies like Merck and
AstraZeneca, and with the Vaccine Research Center at the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Its technology, based on genetic material called messenger RNA or mRNA,
is considered highly promising.
“Messenger RNA is one of the hot new platforms,” Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the infectious disease institute, said in an interview on
Thursday, adding that it can be adapted quickly to produce new vaccines
and scaled up easily.
Although Moderna has other vaccines in its pipeline, none have come to
market, and the viability of its mRNA vaccine-making platform — the
basis of the company — is on the line. It is a front-runner in the
coronavirus vaccine race, and its stock has risen more than 250 percent
since the beginning of the year. It closed at $69 a share on Friday
afternoon, down 26 percent from a high Monday of $87.
Dr. Afeyan acknowledged that companies were now subject to far more
intense scrutiny with so much riding on the outcome of drug development.
“People are basically saying, you know, one shouldn’t do this,” Dr.
Afeyan said. “And if you don’t put out data, people will say, why are
you withholding the data? People are trading without knowing the data.
So it’s a tough situation to be doing science in, and we have no choice
because we’re trying to develop a vaccine.”
With so many different interests demanding the latest information —
including governments around the world — the company couldn’t withhold
it from the public, he said. “As a public company, if we have it, we
cannot give this to them and hide it from other people.”
Dr. Fauci said that while companies often release partial data, “My own
preference, and what my group will do, will be to wait until we get the
data solid and then publish it in a paper saying, ‘In the first phase
this is what we saw.’”
Still, he considers Moderna’s preliminary results encouraging. The
levels of neutralizing antibodies in the eight people tested for them
appeared high enough to be protective, Dr. Fauci said. But he emphasized
that eight is a small number.
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