"BREAKING NEWS

A drug maker (Moderna) released promising, early results for a coronavirus vaccine in 8 healthy people, as it advances into accelerated phases of human trials."

It's almost too good to be true. Normally I would be overjoyed, but frankly I am a little circumspect.

The reason I am circumspect about the Moderna announcement is because this is a 10 year old company (which is actually not all that old in RNA therapeutics field) which to date has no drug candidate in an advanced clinical trial stage (i.e. Phase 3), let alone any approved drug.

But that would still not be too unusual. The strange thing about the company is that, despite its lack of any obvious success, the company has always been highly successful in attracting an almost mystical reputation with some high flyers, while remaining a bit too secretive.

All that said, I wish Moderna all the success. They have quite the brain trust and a sterling pedigree in terms of founder scientists. Sometimes such companies have to be super secretive for trade secret reasons and to keep copycats at bay, but it makes it hard to assess them.

But beware of the Moderna (MRNA) stock though, unless you are highly experienced in biotech investing. https://twitter.com/bansisharma/status/1262487071282823168?s=20

Don't say I didn't warn you not to get your hopes up too much about the Moderna vaccine hype.

"Vaccine experts say Moderna didn’t produce data critical to assessing Covid-19 vaccine" https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/19/vaccine-experts-say-moderna-didnt-produce-data-critical-to-assessing-covid-19-vaccine/

The Dog That Didn't Bark

Here's the give-away that maybe Moderna is overselling its Phase 1 readout of the Covid-19 vaccine trial.

@ScottAdamsSays

It would appear my circumspection expressed in the first tweet of this thread above was amply justified, based on what I knew about Moderna prior to their announcement yesterday of their COVID-19 vaccine trial results.