Stocks Tumble After Publication Slams Moderna Vaccine Trial Data

Yesterday, when digging a little deeper in the Moderna “coronavirus vaccine” press release and media frenzy, we asked if the company’s market moving “news” of a coronavirus vaccine wasn’t just one giant “bait and switch“, especially with the company – whose insiders are best known for consistently dumping their own stock…

… immediately capitalizing on the massive move higher to sell over $1BN in MRNA shares.

It appears that may indeed have been the case because moments ago StatNews (best known for peddling pro-Remdesivir articles every now and then, and also pushing the market higher using before someone refutes their “data”), said that Moderna did not produce enough critical data to assess its success.

Vaccine experts say $MRNA didn’t produce data critical to assessing #Covid19 vaccine https://t.co/s5EtLzkL7Z @helenbranswell reports on the claims made by Moderna about its #coronavirus vaccine

— Adam Feuerstein (@adamfeuerstein) May 19, 2020

Commenting on the stock’s surge, StatNews’ author Helen Branswell wrote asked “was there good reason for so much enthusiasm” and said that “several vaccine experts asked by STAT concluded that, based on the information made available by the Cambridge, Mass.-based company, there’s really no way to know how impressive — or not — the vaccine may be.”

Echoing our own skepticism, the report then said that while “Moderna blitzed the media, it revealed very little information — and most of what it did disclose were words, not data. That’s important: If you ask scientists to read a journal article, they will scour data tables, not corporate statements. With science, numbers speak much louder than words.”

Even the figures the company did release don’t mean much on their own, because critical information — effectively the key to interpreting them — was withheld.

Experts suggest we ought to take the early readout with a big grain of salt. Here are a few reasons why.

There is more in the critical report which can be found here, and which largely recaps our own skeptical observations that this was just one bait and switch, but for what it’s worth, the article sent Moderna stock sliding to session lows and well below its offering price of $76/share…

… while slamming stocks which also briefly plunged to session lows, after soaring yesterday on the belief that Moderna’s “vaccine” is a gamechanger because a trial that involved 8 (eight) people showed some favorable results.

Statnews is quite familiar with such reports itself, of course, and as a reminder here is what happened to stocks following its own cheerleading of Gilead’s remdesivir several weeks ago.

And now we wait for Statnews to fully turn the tables on Moderna, and publish its own “report” praising remdesivir, even as it becomes clear that such reports of “successful” covid vaccines or drugs are nothing more than hot air, and won’t amount to anything tangible for months, if not years, until there is an actual drug ready for administration… some time in early/mid 2021.