It's just a coincidence that these companies that have been working for years on this stuff failed every single time in the past, but then within a few weeks in early 2020 they suddenly figured everything out.
Just a very different cost/benefit analysis on "do all the steps we can in parallel to speed things up" during a pandemic.
The benefit went up. The acceptable costs of parallelization similarly went up.
(Some steps got easier, too, for the same "everyone really wants a solution yesterday" reasons, like recruiting trial volunteers. For example: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-coronavirus-vaccin...)
> For instance, it took just under 16 weeks to recruit and enroll more than 43,000 volunteers for the final phases of testing Pfizer’s vaccine. When volunteer recruitment began for clinical trials of the rabies mRNA vaccine in 2013, it took 813 days to get 101 participants enrolled. Based on this comparison, that’s roughly 730 days — nearly two years — saved in recruiting alone.
The same article cites precisely one of those parallelization steps I'm talking about:
> In a final jolt of speed, some pharmaceutical companies, bolstered by big vaccine contracts and research cash from the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed, were also churning out doses during clinical trials in the hopes that the vaccines would work. Once the companies had emergency use authorization in hand, they were ready to ship doses immediately.
All of the previous mRNA drugs failed testing due to safety concerns. But we're expected to believe that those safety concerns were resolved in a matter of weeks.
Sure, and all the planes leading up to the Wright Flyer failed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w has a great timeline graphic of the various advances and breakthroughs required to get to this point, including the first drug using the lipid nanoparticles - key to fixing the safety concerns! - approved in 2018.
If it's any old cave, you might just explore one at a time.
If you're pretty sure the Holy Grail is somewhere in it, you might hire six explorers, at higher initial expense.
Pick one. You can't have both.
Obviously they didn't start from zero. But it wasn't like they had something from, say, 2018 that was looking promising but just hadn't made it all the way through trials yet. They had nothing but failures.
Their 10-K from the end of 2019: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000168285220...
> We have a diverse pipeline of 24 development candidates, 12 of which are currently in clinical trials, and many of which have the potential to be first-in-class or best-in-class medicines.
All of this is a bit academic, anyways. We've plenty of evidence the Moderna vaccine works. You can quibble over the exact rate of rare side effects a little, but it's abundantly clear it's good at reducing deaths and severe disease in the vaccinated population.
The point discussed is not whether it works or not, but what are the actual safety parameters.
That's not a "Pfizer's is slightly safer in 30+ males and should be used preferentially in that population if both are available" safety quibble.
The expected vaccine sales were high enough to justify spending resources initiating developement on lots of candidate mRNA vaccines in parallel, and spending the money testing more of the potentially viable ones at a time than would otherwise have been the case. When you throw a lot more against the wall, you find something that sticks a lot faster.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
> But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
Of course, as the apocryphal Edison quote goes, "I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work."