Why is this "amazing"? My understanding is that DARPA is just one of many investors and customers who approached Moderna to develope medicine for different uses. The company had raised $2B by the time they went IPO in 2018. It doesn't seem like DARPA funding had much to do with their COVID development, in the same way that Trump's Warp Speed didn't necessarily play a groundbreaking role in the vaccine development. In Pfizer's case, they refused any gov't funding, but only agreed to the gov't's guaranteed sales if their vaccined got approved.
> in the same way that Trump's Warp Speed didn't necessarily play a groundbreaking role in the vaccine development
Operation warp speed, despite its Trump affiliation was extremely successful, If it hadn't been in place the US would have been similar to Canada or Europe in terms of Vaccine rollout. Here's an article about OWS:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-operation-warp-speed-worked...
I can't read the full article (paywall), but my understanding is that COVID vaccine developements were well underway by the time it was announced and the OWS had mostly to do with speeding up approval process, production, distribution and guaranting sales. Not saying it's not important, but I think DARPA's Moderna funding in 2012 is overplayed here.
This is entirely untrue. Europe funded vaccine development and made pre-purchases in a similar way to the Trump program with similar results. The reason for the EU's lag in rollout had to do with bureaucratic and political factors unrelated to vaccine development.
For instance: the US banned all vaccine exports, while the EU exported tens of millions of doses.
” Company representatives said in November that "the company is part of Operation Warp Speed as a supplier of a potential coronavirus vaccine,"[60] and that "Pfizer is proud to be one of various vaccine manufacturers participating in Operation Warp Speed as a supplier of a potential COVID-19 vaccine."”
Pfizer sold vaccines to the US government. That money came from Warp Speed. That's basically the full extent of Pfizer's involvement in Warp Speed. I choose to call that non-participation, but it's a subtle argument.
The U.S. government did not fund the companies’ research and development.
Pfizer chose to risk its own money on vaccine research and not take federal funding in order to avoid bureaucracy and politics, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said. He said its investment so far was at least $1.5 billion.
"I wanted to liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy," Bourla told CBS in September. "When you get money from someone that always comes with strings. They want to see how you are going to progress, what type of moves you are going to do. They want reports. I didn't want to have any of that.
"Basically I gave them an open checkbook so that they can worry only about scientific challenges, not anything else," he said. "And also, I wanted to keep Pfizer out of politics, by the way."
But Warp Speed was more than just R&D dollars. In fact, the R&D dollars were the minor part.
A big part was the coordination between multiple government agencies, negotiation with suppliers for guaranteed volumes, throwing money at the problem when needed.
Pfizer doesn’t need money. It makes billions in profit each year. But it does need the FDA, DOD, CDC, etc all aligned and a clearly laid out path from development, to approval, to distribution and eventually administration.
