When An Entire Brand of Science Gets "Terminated"
Thank You For Your Service
Moderna’s strategic collapse continues, its brand and its business model getting destroyed by the ideas upon which it has built its storyline of value. Its stock fell more than 5 percent yesterday, following this reporting from The Daily Beast:
The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.
Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.
He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.
Moderna, which was worth over $180 billion at its pandemic peak, is down more than 90 percent since then (now valued around $15 billion); it is laying off roughly 10 percent of its global workforce by the end of the year, all part of the brand’s previous plan to cut operating expenses by about $1.5 billion by 2027. Peers BioNTech and Novavax aren’t doing much better: BioNTech is down 75 percent from its pandemic peak; Novavax isdown around 80 percent.
Pfizer also dipped yesterday, dropping around 3 percent. But because it’s more diversified, it’s weathering things better.
Every pharma business, if not every business in the world, has its own version of a a “magic quadrant” — this is the space for ambition and vision, for edge leadership, the blank page to start unique plots and storylines around which to construct different economic systems.
Part of that process includes getting beyond the Main Character Syndrome, changing the center-of-gravity around which an entire system of belief is organized and operates and draws its power. [To dig deeper, see Whatever Happened to Eisai’s “Dementia Ecosystem”?) This means identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are. It means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form.
The process isn’t easy.
It’s painful and disturbing. We fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change (the whole “transformation” thing). That’s why we call those who manage to do it ‘heroes’.
The Hero of the Day
Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task to actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being ‘in denial’ and, of course, we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws, but as virtues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a common plot moment in which protagonists ‘refuse the call’ of the story.
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he describes the narrative pattern as follows:
Often when the call is given, the future hero first refuses to heed it.
This may be from a sense of duty or obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to hold the person in his current circumstances.
Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or "culture," the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones — even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a labyrinth. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.
The pandemic stress-tested institutions everywhere, writes Thomas Chatterton Williams in Summer of Our Discontent, his new book that explores the collapse of discourse and how the left and the right stopped listening to each other altogether, coming to regard the other side as morally beyond the pale.
Some, such as vaccine-makers and the supply chains that filled supermarket shelves, covered themselves with glory. Others, not so much.
Public-health authorities were far too confident in their pronouncements about a new disease, the understanding of which was, inevitably, evolving. As Francis Collins later put it: “We failed to say every time there was a recommendation, guys, this is the best we can do right now. It’s a good chance this is wrong…That was a profound mistake, and we lost a lot of credibility.”
Governments enacted the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history, and suppressed speech that opposed it. “Every state in the United States confronted the same problem in different ways, should have been the laboratories of democracy, learning from each other. But they were not. Instead, red and blue politicians and voters retreated into cocoons of self-righteous certainty.”
Which brings us to where we are now.
Ex Uno Plures — Out of One, Many
Ashish K. Jha is dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a contributing Boston Globe opinion writer. From his piece yesterday (Abandoning the mRNA vaccine platform is a failure of leadership):
Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it will wind down funding for mRNA vaccine development, including new vaccines against COVID-19, seasonal flu, bird flu, and HIV. The move amounts to 22 projects being eliminated that total nearly $500 million, according to HHS.
This retreat from one of the most powerful, proven scientific weapons the nation has to fight pandemics, biological weapons, and common infectious diseases is a stunningly bad idea. It also represents a dangerous weakness if the nation’s leaders will let political winds and misinformation drive the country away from the technology best positioned to defend its people against future biological threats. Remember, it was an mRNA vaccine, administered to almost 80 percent of Americans, that helped stop the COVID-19 pandemic.
The retreat signals that the federal government is capricious and weak and easily persuaded by misinformation.
Things naturally become worse when our fact-checking senses become damaged.
But all of this points to something even spookier: If our senses are so limited, if our brains simply can’t process most of what’s going on in the great oceans of electromagnetic radiation that surrounds us, how do we know what’s really going on?
The answer is we don’t.
The only thing we’ll ever really know are the electrical pulses that are sent up to our senses from the fractured world around. And from these signals, our storytelling brain creates the colorful sets in which to play out our lives, the plots and the personalities to follow.
As we interact with the world in our own characteristic way, so the world pushes back in ways which reflect it, setting us off in our own particular cause-and-effect journey, a plot specific to us.
A question for the strategically pivoting everywhere, particularly the “Fueled by Scientific Discovery” pharmaceutical industry, including Moderna, still selling its brand as “Pioneering mRNA technology”, is this: who do you choose to be, right now, at this moment in history, when the foundation supporting who you are is being strip-mined away?
Change matters. It forces us to act. This is the time for the heroes to answer the call.
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry narratives.