Vaccine makers curtail research and cut jobs
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
By REBECCA ROBBINS
In Massachusetts, Moderna is pulling back on vaccine studies. In Texas, a small company canceled plans to build a factory that would have created new jobs manufacturing a technology used in vaccines. In San Diego, another manufacturing company laid off workers.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried that the longtime vaccine skeptic would wreak havoc on the fragile business of vaccine development.
Those fears are beginning to come true, according to executives and investors involved with companies that develop and sell vaccines and the technology that is best known for the COVID vaccines.
At conferences and in interviews, they described the emerging consequences of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the long-standing federal support for vaccines.
“There will be less invention, investment and innovation in vaccines generally, across all the companies,” Dr. Stephen Hoge, the president of Moderna, said in an interview.
The Trump administration said it was not discouraging innovation.
But investors have grown hesitant to bet on a field that has fallen out of favor in Washington. Major manufacturers are reporting declining sales of their shots. Smaller companies are taking the brunt of the impact, with some stocks whipsawing in response to the changes.
Perhaps no vaccine maker has been hit harder by the federal policy changes than Moderna. Kennedy has repeatedly questioned the safety and effectiveness of the technology around which the company has built its business. The technology, known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, instructs the body to produce a fragment of a virus that then sets off an immune response. It can be more quickly tailored and manufactured compared to traditional approaches.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, saying its research design was flawed.
The health officials’ decisions are a striking departure from President Donald Trump’s first term, when the federal government funded and shepherded Moderna’s COVID vaccine. The company’s stock price has plummeted more than 90% since its peak in August 2021, erasing about $180 billion in market value.
Pharmaceutical companies have dodged several of Trump’s threats, reaching favorable deals with the administration to avoid tariffs and keep prices high for most of the drugs they currently sell. But they have been unable to find common ground on vaccines.
“It’s a different world when you start discussing vaccines,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, said last month. “There is almost like a religion there.” Asked what needs to change, Bourla said, “the health secretary.” Bourla also characterized Kennedy’s rhetoric as “anti-science.”
Bourla talks about the president with a different tone. He once said Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for championing the COVID vaccines.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said, “We reject the claim that our approach to vaccines is anti-science or hostile to innovation.”
Kennedy has argued that COVID shots using mRNA are not effective because they do not prevent infection. He also once called them “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Like all shots, mRNA vaccines sometimes cause side effects, but extensive research has found that the shots are safe overall and that serious reactions occur rarely.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, the department has canceled contracts for mRNA technology, limited the use of COVID shots and remade a crucial committee that recommends which vaccines Americans should take and when.
Last month, federal health officials overhauled the childhood vaccination schedule, reducing the number of recommended immunizations to 11 from 17, deciding that the six vaccines that were dropped should now be given only in consultation with a clinician.
The changes “sent a chill through the entire industry,” said Jeff Coller, a scientist who works on mRNA at Johns Hopkins University. Coller advises several small mRNA companies and is on the executive committee of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines, a trade group.
Nixon defended the administration’s changes. “Vaccine policy at HHS is guided by evidence-based science, public health outcomes and transparency, not by the business models or public statements of pharmaceutical executives,” he said.
So far, vaccine manufacturers say that they have no plans to exit the market and that their businesses are resilient enough to withstand the new pressures. Insurers have promised to continue to cover the vaccines that are no longer federally recommended, at least until the end of this year, promising to soften the financial blow for companies.
And despite increasing vaccine hesitancy, industry officials say they hope that Americans will be swayed by a vast body of research showing that vaccines save lives.
“Not everybody looks to the top of HHS to get all of their guidance on how to live their lives,” Paul Hudson, the outgoing CEO of Sanofi, told reporters last month. Still, he predicted a continued slowdown in vaccine sales because of “the misinformation that is going around.”
Lost jobs for American workers
The federal vaccine policies coupled with declining demand for COVID shots have translated into hard times for Moderna.
Last year, the company laid off more than 800 workers, a tenth of its workforce. It also lost more than $700 million in contracts to develop a shot to protect humans against bird flu after the Trump administration canceled the agreements. And the company shelved vaccines to protect against herpes, chickenpox and shingles.
Moderna plans to continue late-stage studies of mRNA products for cancer. But citing the Trump administration’s stance, the company is pausing late-stage development of shots to prevent infectious diseases and infections that lurk in the body.
For example, Moderna has halted preparatory work for large late-stage clinical trials of vaccines to prevent and treat Epstein-Barr, a common virus that may be linked to multiple sclerosis. The vaccines had shown promise in early studies.
Some smaller companies test shots in hopes of eventually being bought by a big company that will bring them to market. Other small firms provide services like manufacturing to vaccine developers.
Plano, Texas, lost out on more than 170 new jobs when NTx Bio, which manufactures a device about the size of a microwave for producing mRNA, retreated from plans to build a plant there. The small company attributed its decision to a considerable slowdown in sales last year amid a challenging business climate.
The company’s CEO, Joan Haab, pointed to “headwinds around vaccine hesitancy and initiatives with the administration.”
A few small companies recently notified regulators of their plans to lay off dozens of workers. They include Inventprise, a vaccine developer near Seattle, and TriLink BioTechnologies of San Diego, which promises to help “bring your mRNA vaccine or therapeutic to market faster.”
Big companies face new pressures
The biggest players in the U.S. vaccine market — Merck, Sanofi, GSK and Pfizer — have largely been buffered from recent vaccine policy shifts because most of their sales come from medicines.
Some new vaccines, like the ones to prevent shingles or pneumococcal disease, turn into lucrative blockbusters. Old, routine childhood shots like the one that protects against measles, mumps and rubella generate more modest profit.
A major concern for the big companies is whether the Trump administration will do away with the special liability protections afforded to vaccine makers that have helped them stay in the market.
Allies of Kennedy who have sought to undermine vaccines — including Aaron Siri, a plaintiff’s lawyer representing vaccine injury claims, and Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist — have said they believe the decision to rescind recommendations for certain immunizations provides an opening to strip manufacturers of existing liability shields. That could expose the companies to big-dollar lawsuits.
Nixon said the administration did not comment on “speculative policy decisions.” He said that the vaccines with changed recommendations “continue to be covered” under a program affording those liability protections.
Declining sales
Steady declines in the number of Americans getting vaccinated are dampening sales for the big vaccine manufacturers, a trend dating back to well before Kennedy’s tenure.
Vaccination rates among kindergartners have been falling for years, and efforts to weaken immunization requirements in a handful of states, including Idaho, could further erode those rates.