ANALYSIS: BioNTech and Moderna Shattered by America’s Anti-Vax Movement — Science Punished for Saving Millions of Lives

From Marseille to Cambridge, via $14 billion

Stéphane Bancel, 53, an engineer from École Centrale and former CEO of bioMérieux, has led Moderna since 2011. He was one of the pandemic’s biggest winners: his personal fortune rose from $75 million to $5.1 billion in November 2021. Today, it has shrunk to $1.3 billion. But it’s not the money that’s eating away at him—it’s the trajectory.

He had a vision: to make messenger RNA the universal platform for 21st-century medicine. Cancer, flu, HIV, rare diseases. More than 40 vaccine candidates in the pipeline. On October 17, 2025, he announced a plan to cut costs by $1.5 billion by 2027. Translation: between 1,100 and 1,300 jobs cut out of the company’s 5,800 total.

I know few CEOs who publicly own up to their mistakes. Bancel did so in August, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He acknowledged that he had overestimated post-pandemic demand. He spoke of arrogance. It was rare enough to be noteworthy. And late enough to no longer make a difference.

The mRNA Bet That Wasn’t Supposed to Die So Young

mRNA is not a pandemic technology. It is a medical revolution comparable to that of antibiotics in 1945. On March 17, 2025, Moderna released the results of the Phase 3 trial of its vaccine against advanced melanoma in combination with pembrolizumab: a 49% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death at three years. The stock price didn’t budge. The market is now focused solely on the political column.

Meanwhile, China filed 3,470 messenger RNA patents in 2024, compared to 890 for the United States. And yet the American culture war continues to disregard what geopolitical rivals covet. When one country punishes its scientists, another recruits them. Cambridge loses. Shanghai wins.

Mainz, Germany, Sunday, November 8, 2020, 10:47 p.m.

That was the exact time when Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, married since 2002, received the preliminary results of their Phase 3 trial. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’s efficacy: 95%. They didn’t go out to celebrate with champagne. They went to sleep, because the next day, they had to prepare for the production of two billion doses.

Sahin was born in Turkey, the son of a worker at the Ford plant in Cologne. Türeci was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish doctor. Together, they founded BioNTech in Mainz in 2008, in a former industrial building, with fourteen employees. Today, BioNTech has 6,800 employees. Its market capitalization fell from $105 billion in August 2021 to $22.4 billion in November 2025—a 78% drop.

When we look at the Sahin-Türeci couple, we see Europe at its best. Two children of Turkish immigrants saving the West. This is a story no novel would have dared to write. And one that no political speech dares to tell anymore—because it makes everyone uncomfortable, on the right as well as on the left.

BioNTech had prepared for the post-COVID era. The post-COVID era never materialized

Sahin had built BioNTech for cancer, not for Covid. The pandemic was a glorious detour. In 2025, the company has 11 candidates in Phase 3 or late Phase 2 trials, including its therapeutic vaccine against melanoma (BNT122) in partnership with Genentech, and its immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer kills 88% of patients within five years. Even a partial success would transform oncology.

But BioNTech is selling a dream to a market that no longer wants to dream. On August 11, 2025, the company announced a quarterly loss of 386 million euros. And yet it has 17.3 billion euros in cash—enough to fund its pipeline through 2031. The biotech company isn’t dying. It’s being punished.

The biotech index lost a third of its value

The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI) fell 34% between January and October 2025. It wasn’t just Moderna and BioNTech: Novavax (-71%), Vir Biotechnology (-58%), and CureVac (-49%) also saw declines. The entire sector is paying the political price. Biotech IPOs have plummeted 73% year-over-year, according to Renaissance Capital. Venture capitalists have pulled $8.4 billion out of the sector since February.

When capital flees, labs close. When labs close, researchers leave. The University of Pennsylvania has lost 23 mRNA researchers in six months—most of them to Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. Drew Weissman, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate and co-discoverer of the RNA modification that made vaccines possible, published an op-ed on September 4, 2025: “We are disarming our own medicine.”

Weissman is not an activist. He is a methodical, calm scientist—the kind who weighs every word before writing it. When he says “disarming,” he chooses that verb carefully. He knows that the country that produces the next generation of RNA vaccines and therapies will have a fifty-year health and economic advantage. And he is watching his country drop out of the race.

Meanwhile, in Basel, in Cambridge, England, and in Shenzhen

Roche has increased its messenger RNA research budget by 1.2 billion Swiss francs for 2026. AstraZeneca has hired 340 RNA oncology researchers this year. China has announced a five-year public investment plan of 14 billion yuan in RNA biotechnology. And yet Washington continues to believe that science can be sidelined without economic consequences. The wake-up call will be brutal—it will take a decade, but it will come.

Europe, for its part, is hesitating. It has the talent, the laboratories, and the public funding, but it lacks American venture capital. Sahin and Bancel are exceptions, not the norm. If America pulls out, Europe must take the lead. Otherwise, the future of medicine will be decided in Beijing.

On February 26, 2025, in Lubbock, Texas, a six-year-old girl

Her name was Kayley Fehr. She was Mennonite, homeschooled, and unvaccinated. She was admitted to Covenant Children’s Hospital with a high fever. Four days later, she died from complications of measles. It was the first measles-related death in the United States since 2015. Her mother told The New York Times that she “did not regret not vaccinating her.” The MMR vaccine costs $21 per dose. Kayley weighed 22 kilos.

On April 6, 2025, in Seminole, Texas, a second girl died. She was eight years old. Unvaccinated. Daisy Hildebrand. The Texas Department of Health confirmed: “measles not complicated by other conditions.” Medical translation: she died of a disease that has been preventable since 1963. And yet no official statement from the HHS has called on parents to vaccinate their children following these deaths. Official silence is becoming official policy.

I would like to write these lines without anger, but I cannot. When a state allows children to die from diseases for which a $21 vaccine exists, it is no longer a matter of policy. It is a moral choice. And that choice has a name, a title, and a signature: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health, confirmed by 52 senators.

What the CDC figures show—and what no one is reading

As of October 24, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control has recorded 1,564 cases of measles in the United States. That’s more than in the past six years combined. MMR vaccination coverage among children under two years of age has fallen to 89.3%—the herd immunity threshold is 95%. Fourteen states are below this critical threshold.

Whooping cough cases have increased by 412% year-over-year. Meningococcal meningitis cases are up 37%. Tetanus, for the first time since 1948, is seeing a decline in vaccination coverage among infants. And yet Kennedy continues to speak of “medical freedom” as if measles respected individual boundaries. An unvaccinated child is a risk to all infants too young to be vaccinated. One person’s freedom creates another’s illness.

It took three months to realize that the Covid advantage is gone

Between 2020 and 2024, the United States invested $43 billion in federal funds in mRNA R&D through Operation Warp Speed and BARDA. As a result, it became the world leader in this technology. Four years later, the Trump-Kennedy administration is methodically undoing this achievement. On July 17, 2025, the HHS announced the termination of 22 BARDA contracts related to mRNA, totaling $1.8 billion.

At the same time, the European Commission launched its EU FAB program, with a budget of 1.1 billion euros, to secure mRNA vaccine production capabilities on European soil. China, for its part, inaugurated the Shenzhen Bay Laboratory in September 2025—with 4,500 researchers focused exclusively on mRNA and cell therapies. America is pulling back at the very moment its competitors are accelerating. This timing is no accident. It is a geopolitical shift.

Empires never collapse all at once. They slowly hollow out, sector by sector, talent by talent, patent by patent. When someone like Drew Weissman writes that he is considering emigrating, it is not just an academic footnote. It is a signal about the state of civilization. Science follows respect. America has just withdrawn that respect.

Stéphane Bancel has already started speaking Swiss and Japanese

On October 8, 2025, Moderna announced an expanded research partnership with Daiichi Sankyo in Japan—$940 million over five years. On October 14, a new production facility opened in Basel, Switzerland, at a cost of 280 million Swiss francs. BioNTech, for its part, expanded its partnership with Fosun Pharmaceutical in China and signed an agreement in Singapore for a regional Asia-Pacific production center.

These are not technical decisions. They are votes with their feet. When U.S. biotech companies relocate their strategic research centers, it is because they have calculated that the political risk in the U.S. now outweighs the advantage of the U.S. market. And yet Wall Street continues to price Moderna as if it were a U.S. biotech company. It isn’t quite that anymore. It has become a transatlantic company in partial exile.

The American Academy of Pediatrics held its own conference

On September 24, 2025—in an unprecedented move since its founding in 1930—the American Academy of Pediatrics published a vaccination schedule independent of the official HHS recommendations. 67,000 American pediatricians endorsed it. The Academy’s president, Dr. Susan Kressly, stated: “We can no longer present our patients with recommendations that we know have been politically manipulated.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did the same for vaccines for pregnant women. The Infectious Diseases Society of America published its own guidelines. Three professional societies have publicly disavowed their own government on public health issues. And yet, prime-time cable news networks did not lead their newscasts with this story. The silent defection of the medical community is a major development that the entertainment press has failed to cover.

67,000 pediatricians disavowing their minister. In any other democratic country, this news would have made headlines for three days. In the United States of 2025, it lasted twelve hours on the Reuters wire, then disappeared. Not because of censorship. Because of inattention. And inattention, in a crumbling democracy, is exactly what those in power need to stay in power.

Texas Pharmacists on the Front Lines

In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the measles outbreak, 47-year-old pharmacist Hector Ortiz, owner of Seminole Drug, has become a controversial local figure. He posted a sign in his storefront: “MMR vaccine available. $21. No appointment needed.” ” He has received three written threats in six weeks. He has nevertheless increased his stock. On August 12, 2025, he vaccinated 47 children in a single day—a record in his 19 years of practice.

Hector doesn’t give political interviews. He simply says: “I saw a child with measles in 2003 in Mexico. I don’t want to see another one in 2025 in Texas.” That sentence should be posted at the entrance to the HHS. It won’t be. But it exists, in a pharmacy window, 480 kilometers from the Capitol, and that’s already a lot.

The next pandemic won’t wait until the end of the term

H5N1 avian influenza has been actively circulating in the United States since March 2024. As of November 1, 2025, there were 892 infected dairy herds and 67 confirmed human cases, including one death in Louisiana on January 6. The pandemic risk is rated “moderate to high” by the WHO. Moderna had an H5N1 mRNA vaccine ready in Phase 2. The $766 million BARDA contract was canceled on June 17. And yet the virus itself doesn’t read HHS press releases. It mutates on its own schedule.

If a new pandemic strikes—which is no longer a question of “if” but of “when”—America will be the first wealthy country to face it without operational mRNA capacity. The lesson of COVID will have been unlearned in less than five years. The country that invented the solution will be the country that no longer has the solution. That is a working definition of decline.

Pandemics have one characteristic that politicians always forget: they do not negotiate. They do not listen to ideological arguments. They do not respect partisan boundaries. When they strike, they strike. And the country that has disarmed itself for cultural reasons pays in human lives what it refused to pay in vaccine doses.

The Scenario Goldman Sachs Analysts Aren’t Writing About

On October 14, 2025, Goldman Sachs published a report for its institutional clients on the biotech sector. A technical, factual, and cautious note. But tucked away on page 23 is a single sentence: “U.S. regulatory risk is now structurally comparable to Chinese regulatory risk.” This sentence is seismic. It implies that, in the eyes of venture capital, investing in a Boston-based biotech company carries the same level of political unpredictability as investing in one in Shanghai.

Biotech investment in the United States will continue to decline. Researchers will continue to leave. Biotech companies will continue to relocate their strategic centers. And U.S. public health indicators—vaccination coverage, infant mortality, life expectancy—will continue to decline. America will age faster than expected—and be sicker than expected. No one will put it in those terms during this administration. Everyone will see it afterward.

Twenty million lives saved and forgotten in four years

Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin aren’t begging for recognition. They don’t need to be celebrated. What they asked for—what the entire scientific community asked for—was to be able to continue their work. Not to be treated like criminals. Not to see their technologies burned at the stake of an ideology that confuses freedom with ignorance.

They didn’t get it. Not in the America of 2025. And yet messenger RNA will continue to advance—elsewhere. In Basel. In Mainz. In Shanghai. In Singapore. In Cambridge, England. Science doesn’t need Washington’s permission to exist. It just needs someone, somewhere, to continue funding and respecting it. That someone is no longer America.

I’m finishing this text on November 4, 2025, at 11:17 p.m., in Montreal. The little girl from Lubbock was named Kayley. The one from Seminole was named Daisy. They were six and eight years old. No official statement mentioned their names. No minister observed a moment of silence. The market saw Moderna’s stock drop 0.8% on the day Daisy died. That’s all there is left to say. That’s what we don’t say often enough.</voilà>

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist