... Or, a striking rise in investing in whatever the mob thinks will make money, even when it is not, from tesla to bitcoin. If they were investing in the future they 'd be investing in ModeRNA / Biontech
These days? It's always been thus.
The Roman Poet Juvenal who said:
"It is all too easy to fall from power – like Sejanus. The mob follows Fortuna and cares for nothing but bread and circuses." (Circuses can also be games, or in modern times TV, Games, Netflix, Reddit, etc...).
You ever see Gladiator?
Lucilla: "The gods have spared you. Today I saw a slave become more powerful than the Emperor of Rome."
Maximus: "The gods have spared me? I am at their mercy, with the power only to amuse a mob!"
Lucilla: "That is power. The mob is Rome. And while Commodus controls them he controls everything."
We have a literal cult controlling at least 40% of the minds of the USA (QAnon). A literal mob almost led a successful insurrection. (If they were more organized, they would've had a higher body count).
A literal mob, possibly manipulated by finance majors orchestrated a pump-and-dump under the guise of "stick it to the man", just disrupted wallstreet in a pretty spectacular way. Sure, they did stick it to the man, for a bit - but I'm sure a lot of people also lost their ass on this.
In a mob there's a bunch of people who basically just are following a fluid current in history, most are unaware as to why and the best answer is probably: "I wasn't doing anything else, so why not?", or "So and so told me, and I trust them" and often that trust is mis-placed, like believing a highschool dropout's opinion on climate change instead of the consensus by 90%+ of the leading scientists across the globe.
But for now, it's 40% that's a mix of cultists and people who act like cultists for the time being.
Self-driving is a pipe-dream and a marketing vehicle, not gonna happen anytime soon.
BioNTech/Moderna are poised to income streams of billions of $ through guaranteed sales, with the very real possibility of more to come if either revaccination is necessary or there are more applications for the mRNA technology.
With that in mind, they are quite conservatively valued by the market right now.
Since the results of the regulatory tests and safety and efficacy validations can mostly be transferred for slight vaccine modifications (at least that's my state of knowledge), a variation should not have to go through the entire chain of test phases again before it can be cleared for use.
If anything, the prospect of mutations can only be seen as a significant moat for mRNA vaccine manufacturers, because their technology is the fastest when it comes to such adaptions.
Is that kinda like saying the 737-MAX wasn't really a new type of plane?