In September 2016, Damian Garde, the national biotech reporter for the medical media company STAT, wrote a lengthy exposé of the “ego, ambition, and turmoil” plaguing “one of biotech’s most secretive startups.” The article focused on the company Moderna, which had been founded in 2010 to commercialize the research of Boston Children’s Hospital cell biologist Derrick Rossi.

The effort to turn a profit by creating Moderna, which intimately involved controversial scientist and close Bill Gates associate Bob Langer as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Flagship Ventures (now Flagship Pioneering), began soon after Rossi published a report on the ability of modified RNA to turn skin cells into different types of tissue.

Despite teaming up with pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca and raising record amounts of funding, Moderna still had no product on the market six years after its founding, and, as STAT revealed, the “company’s caustic work environment” had led to a persistent hemorrhaging of top talent, though little of its internal conflicts was publicly known due to “its obsession with secrecy.”

Bancel, prior to joining Moderna, had spent much of his career in sales and operations, not science, making a name for himself at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly before heading a French diagnostics firm called bioMérieux.

Although lacking a background in mRNA and the science behind its use as a therapeutic, Bancel has made up for it by becoming Moderna’s salesman par excellence. Under his leadership, Moderna became “loath to publish its work in Science or Nature, but enthusiastic to herald its potential on CNBC and CNN.”

When two of its vaccine candidates entered phase 1 human trials in 2016 (trials that ultimately went nowhere), the company declined to list them on the public federal registry ClinicalTrials.gov.

According to former Moderna scientists who spoke to STAT, the company was “a case of the emperor’s new clothes.” Former employees further charged that Bancel was actually “running an investment firm” and “then hop[ing] it also develops a drug that’s successful.”

As STAT noted in 2016, the people who were tasked with making “the science work” were those who most frequently resigned, which led to Moderna losing two heads of chemistry within a single year, followed shortly by losing its chief scientific officer and its head of manufacturing.

Whatever the exact cause of the resignation of the head of R & D, it only added to the mystique around Moderna’s inner workings and its ability to deliver on its promise to “revolutionize” medicine. It also reveals more than a few similarities between Moderna and the now-disgraced company Theranos.

Yet, employees of Alexion, the company co-developing the drug with Moderna, blew the whistle on the project in 2017, revealing that it “never proved safe enough to test in humans” and that the failure of this therapy and the technology platform it sought to use had been responsible for prompting Moderna to abandon the class of drug therapies that, for years, had justified its sky-high valuation and attracted hundreds of millions in investor cash.

As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as Jan. 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals.

Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval.

As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine.

That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.

However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last — that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide.

Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna — and its stakeholders — cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.