Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen
, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from small startup to biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter loss last year of $3.6 billion, as
most Americans refused to get another COVID booster shot.
In a September call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s then
-chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna's numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. "Despite some misinformation,"
Garay said, COVID-19 still drove significant hospitalizations. "It really is a vaccine that's relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.
To get past the “misinformation” and convince the public to take continual booster shots
, Garay briefly noted that Moderna was “delving down” on ways to partner “across the ecosystem to make sure consumers are educated on the need for the vaccine.”
What Garay hinted at during the call, but didn’t disclose, was that Moderna already had a sprawling media operation in place aimed at identifying and responding to critics of vaccine policy and the drug industry. A series of internal company reports and communications reviewed by RealClearInvestigations show that Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials and a drug industry-funded non-governmental organization called The Public Good Projects (PGP) to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation.”
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