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The Trump administration has canceled a contract with Moderna (MRNA) worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The contract was supposed to help Moderna develop a vaccine for humans to defend against bird flu. Yahoo Finance Senior Health Care Reporter Anjalee Khemlani reports the details in the video above.
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Trump administration canceling more than $700 million awarded to drug maker Moderna to develop the vaccine against potential pandemic viruses. For more we're bringing in here Yahoo Finance Senior Health Reporter, Angeli Kamani. Ange.
Yeah, like you mentioned, the NIH canceled more than $750, a million dollars, rather, in funding for Moderna. And this is something that the company found out just based on a notification to themselves, even though they were really expecting that to get into late stage development. They said in a statement, Moderna received notice that the Health and Human Services Department, remember led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy will terminate the award for the late stage development and rights to purchase the pre-pandemic influenza vaccines. Now, we went out to HHS to understand what their rationale was behind this. And among other things they mentioned that the MRNA technology remains quote, "under tested" and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public. And in that they're referring to the myocarditis that was evident in some males and some younger individuals. So, this is really just the latest setback for the company. We know it's been pummeled, the stock is down more than 30% on the year. This is one of the latest. So, we know that they pulled their filing of a combination flu and COVID vaccine earlier last week. Then we've got the NIH funding that's cutting the pandemic and bird flu. And then we've also got missing the Q1 estimates earlier this year. So, just really telling a really hard story for this company. We know it's been under pressure because of the waning COVID revenues, and these are just some of those areas that were supposed to sort of plug that hole. And now, without those in the way, it's a question on what Moderna's viability is. Now, on the flip side, you do have some good news, right? The company's still working on a number of clinical trials with Merck on cancer vaccine. It also has a partnership with Vertex on cystic fibrosis. So, they do have a few other things going for them, but this is really a longer play for the company rather than any near term that they would have otherwise been able to take advantage of.
All right. Thanks, Angeli. Appreciate it.
