The specter of RFK Jr. has investors fretting about a onetime vaccine wunderkind

In the chaotic early days of the pandemic, Wall Street scrambled to place bets on the companies that looked the most likely to thrive the uncharted waters that were rising all around us. The early winners won big — the WFH plays like Zoom and Peloton and Home Depot, and, of course, the vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna.

In the chaotic early days of the pandemic, Wall Street scrambled to place bets on the companies that looked the likeliest to thrive in the uncharted waters that were rising all around us. The early winners won big — especially the WFH plays like Zoom and Peloton, and, of course, vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna. All of these stocks have all had a rocky path back to “normal.” (Heck, who hasn’t?) But perhaps none more so than Moderna. Here’s the deal: The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company began as a tiny startup in 2010 and later became the biggest US biotech IPO in history in 2018. Wall Street was all in on Moderna’s mRNA research, even though Moderna didn’t have a single product on the market at the time and in fact didn’t plan to have one until 2025 at the earliest. The pandemic upended that timeline. In the spring of 2020, the US government tapped Moderna to work on Operation Warp Speed (honestly, great name), and in just nine short months Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech had begun shipping hundreds of millions of vaccines. When Moderna’s stock price peaked in August of 2021, it was up 2,000% from its IPO. But the stock has since fallen 90% from its peak, and Bank of America analysts this week said they think it has farther to fall. While noting it’s “a tough time to be a vaccines company” (more on that in a moment), Moderna is burning cash on research and development and, by its own guidance, won’t be cashflow positive until 2028, the researchers wrote.