Push to the downside
This story is dragging down sentiment:
"It (Moderna) doesn't publish on its work in scientific journals. What is known has been disclosed through press releases. That's not enough to generate confidence within the scientific community," the report says. "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."
See it here. Notably, the author of the article is Helen Branswell, who is generally optimistic about virus developments and treatments.
I mean, hyping the results of an 8-person trial, sending your CEO onto CNBC (who is selling the stock) and then announcing a $1.3B secondary at the close after a 20% rally is a bit of a red flag and it's given a lot of the move back.
The Stat News report goes into some interesting details on why there might be smoke and mirrors going on here, but the bottom line is that they want to see the data. Given that a big chunk of the huge rally in equities came on this report yesterday, you would think the broader equity market would feel the same way but if you've been following along for the past 6 weeks, you'd know that's not how this machine is operating at the moment.
All that said, someone has to come up with a vaccine, right?
In any case, seeing the market reaction to this I get the feeling that something fishy is going on. It looks like someone was selling Moderna ahead of the headlines and covered on the dip. You'll remember there were many questions about its Gilead cheerleading.
