‘People inside Moderna are afraid’: As the antivaccine climate intensifies, a big local firm has much to lose

Since then, the veteran pharmaceutical executive has applied for about 40 biopharma jobs in Massachusetts. He has gotten only half a dozen interviews and no job offers.

“Am I worried? Yes,” said the 64-year-old Somerville resident. “I think it’s entirely possible that I might not land another job.”

Morrow’s concerns are hardly unfounded. The recent downturn in biotech has battered Massachusetts’ world-renowned sector, and the political climate has only made it worse. Billions of dollars in federal cuts to scientific research by the Trump administration have cast a pall on the sector’s innovation pipeline.

Moderna vaulted to the forefront of biotech during the pandemic, becoming a major pillar of the region’s economy, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s skepticism of vaccines, and mRNA in particular, has cost the company dearly.

Late last month, the administration canceled a $766 million contract with the firm to develop an mRNA vaccine to protect people against bird flu and other viruses that could cause pandemics. The cancellation came despite Moderna’s announcement of positive results from an early-stage trial of the vaccine that targeted bird flu.

Last Monday, Kennedy fired all members of a vaccine advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying he did it to restore public confidence in vaccine science. The move marked a reversal of what he had promised a key Republican senator during his confirmation hearings, when Kennedy had pledged to maintain the panel. He has since announced eight new members, including four who have spoken out against vaccination in some way.

Morrow, who has worked in the pharma industry for about 30 years, including 17 years at GlaxoSmithKline, said antivaccine activists have been “remarkably effective” at distorting the truth about cutting-edge science, including how safe and effective mRNA shots are.

“It makes it harder for anyone who wants to do science to get a job,” he said.

Morrow said he was let go in a third round of layoffs in 2024 and estimated that at least 100 Moderna employees lost jobs in Massachusetts last year. Those layoffs were never publicly disclosed, he said.

Moderna acknowledged laying off about 50 digital employees in February this year, but has not disclosed layoffs in other departments. A Moderna spokesperson, Christopher Ridley, said the company had no comment about layoffs.

Even before President Trump took office, Massachusetts’ biopharma hub had been in a prolonged slump because of high interest rates, investors pulling back from risky biotech stocks, and a steep decline in private financing.

For the first time in more than a decade, total employment in the state’s life sciences sector stayed flat in 2024, according to a report by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation.

The workforce had 143,142 employees last year, an increase of only 0.02 percent over 2023, the report said. From 2013 to 2023, industry jobs grew at an average annual rate of 6.7 percent.

Sunny Schwartz, chief executive of the foundation, said massive hiring during the pandemic made a “correction” almost inevitable. The uncertainty created by the presidential election likely contributed to the stagnant growth.

“The life sciences industry, like any industry, is conservative in their hiring and probably wanted to see what would happen,” she said.

At least 60 drug companies in Massachusetts made layoffs or closed in the past 12 months, according to Dan Gold, president of Fairway Consulting Group, a life sciences recruiting firm. He estimated that at least 1,000 employees lost their jobs.

Biogen, the homegrown biotech that has been a mainstay of Kendall Square, has made several rounds of layoffs since 2022. The company, which had 1,654 employees in Massachusetts in March, has been undergoing a restructuring to help save $1 billion by the end of this year. (The slimmed-down firm said it will consolidate its headquarters in a 580,000-square-foot lab and office building in Kendall in 2028.)

“I’ve been a biotech entrepreneur for 20 years, and I haven’t seen a worse downturn,” said David Lucchino, the former chief executive of Frequency Therapeutics, now defunct, and a former chair of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, an industry trade group.

Robert Langer, the prolific inventor and biomedical engineering professor at MIT who helped cofound Frequency and Moderna, agreed. He said the slump is the longest-lasting he has seen in his half-century as an entrepreneur.

The impact on the real estate market has been devastating. The biotech cluster based in Greater Boston is grappling with a record 16.3 million square feet of unleased lab space, according to the real estate firm Colliers. Nearly one-third of lab space across the region is available for lease.

Despite some noteworthy successes this year — including FDA approval of a non-opioid painkiller by Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Sanofi’s $9.1 billion buyout of Blueprint Medicines in Cambridge — investors are wary of biotech stocks. The NASDAQ Biotechnology Index is down 1.5 percent since the start of the year. There has been only one biotech initial public offering in Massachusetts this year after six in 2024, according to MassBio.

Nothing has been whipsawed more than Moderna, which grew to become the second-biggest biopharma employer in Massachusetts, behind Takeda.

Before the pandemic, the company had no approved products. Then, in 2020, it won billions of dollars in federal contracts to rapidly develop a COVID vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed during Trump’s first administration.

Moderna’s mRNA vaccine was cleared by the FDA in December 2020. The massive success of the shot made several of the company’s founders and top executives billionaires. In 2022, Moderna’s vaccine generated peak annual sales of $18.4 billion. But in 2023, that total plunged by about two-thirds.

“It’s been a long fall from grace,” said Tyler Van Buren, an analyst at TD Cowen, a financial research and advisory firm. To a large extent, he said, Moderna was “a victim of circumstance.”

The company was built “to save the world, and the world stopped wanting or needing the COVID vaccine,” Van Buren added. He also faults Moderna for failing to diversify its pipeline by developing other scientific platforms besides mRNA, in contrast to the German biotech BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer on its COVID vaccine.

Although the first Trump administration touted Moderna’s COVID shot as a remarkable achievement, Kennedy has said certain vaccines for respiratory diseases, including mRNA shots, have “never worked.”

Reached for comment, Moderna said that “mRNA vaccines funded by Operation Warp Speed were essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide, including more than 1 million in the United States. The efficacy and safety profile has been confirmed in over a billion people worldwide.”

Moderna’s share price, which peaked at $484 in 2021, is now trading at about $26, roughly what it was before the pandemic. Its workforce at the end of last year, however, was roughly seven times what it was before the pandemic, with 5,800 employees.

Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, said in January that the company will reduce its costs by $1 billion this year. Van Buren said there is “zero doubt in my mind” that the company will make hundreds of layoffs in the next two years, in part because the political climate toward mRNA vaccines has become so hostile.

Another scientist at Moderna who was laid off in December said “multiple hundreds of workers” were let go in Massachusetts since the third quarter of 2023, and that the company has never made it public.

“It’s been really opaque,” said the former employee, who insisted on anonymity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his severance package. “I think what [Moderna’s leaders] owe to Massachusetts is to be transparent about what they are doing."

A third employee, Nathan Devaud, 24, said he was laid off from a job in technical development at Moderna’s Norwood facility in late February along with about 80 other people.

He had worked at the company for six months while a co-op at Northeastern University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and biochemistry a year ago, and then for nine months as a full-time employee.

He said he has applied for about 25 jobs but hasn’t been able to get an interview.

“It’s hard to find a job on LinkedIn that doesn’t have over a hundred applicants,” he said.

Morrow, for his part, said he talks to his former Moderna colleagues, and they’re worried.

“People inside Moderna are afraid right now,” he said. “They’re afraid of what’s going to come next. To be laid off in this environment makes it that much more stressful.”

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.saltzman@globe.com.