Moderna co-founder, mRNA developer says he's not completely surprised by vaccine hesitancy


Frank Gluck, Fort Myers News-Press
Fri, February 25, 2022

The co-founder of Moderna and a developer of the foundational technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine says he's not completely surprised people are skeptical about the shots, since revolutionary medical advances have always been controversial.

But Robert Langer, one of the scheduled Imagine Solutions Conference speakers on March 7 in Naples, said the science behind the inoculations could lead to breakthrough treatments in HIV, cancer, heart disease, respiratory afflictions and a host of other ailments in the coming years.

Langer, 73, a billionaire who now sits on the pharmaceutical giant's board of directors and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, blames widespread misinformation online for some of the vehement opposition to life-saving vaccinations and the mRNA science underlying them.


"I think there's a lot of social media and other things where people say it's not good but, from a clinical standpoint and a scientific standpoint, that doesn't make sense to me," Langer said. "But, if you look at the safety profiles, from everything I've seen in the top medical journals, the safety has been as good or better than any vaccine. But some people are distrustful today of the government and a lot of other things. And I think that's sad."

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Moderna was founded in 2010 to develop vaccines and medical treatments based on mRNA technology. In addition to developing a COVID-19 vaccine, it has a number of clinical trials underway for other drugs and treatments.

Langer did not comment at length on vaccine mandates and opposition to them, saying that's an issue for policymakers.

"I'm not a politician, so I'm not the best person to answer that," he said. "I just feel that it's sad that everybody's not pulling together to knock out COVID."

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He noted that Americans were also skeptical of the polio vaccine and even the work of Louis Pasteur, the father of modern germ theory and the resulting revolution in disease-preventing hygiene practices.

More than 204.7 million doses of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States as of this month, according to the global research firm, Statista. That makes it the second most used in this country out of the three available vaccines, behind those developed by Pfizer and ahead of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say all the vaccines are safe, despite some reported non-fatal side effects. Medically serious reactions to the shots are rare, the CDC notes.

Traditionally, vaccines have used a weakened or inactivated germ to trick the body to produce an immune response. Unlike those, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines employ lab-created messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to teach cells how to make proteins that trigger an immune response.

Langer's work on mRNA technology began in the 1970s when he published his first paper demonstrating large molecules like RNA or DNA could be put in and delivered by nanoparticles. Langer, in addition to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the prestigious BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine this year for that early work.

"People were skeptical of that. It kind of went against what people thought you could do," Langer said. "They thought these molecules were too big."

That skepticism persisted for years, he said.

"But I thought it worked. And even though a lot of people criticized me — I got all my grants (applications) turned down, nine in a row, and I couldn't get a chemical engineering professor job — I kept at it and tried to understand it."

Today, Langer has 250 major awards in science, including the 2006 U.S. National Medal of Science and the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for engineering.

Langer also served as a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s SCIENCE Board from 1995 to 2002.

Looking to the future, he said mRNA technology could soon deliver a whole host of groundbreaking treatments, including vaccines for HIV, more effective flu vaccines, personalized treatments for certain cancers, and treatments for respiratory diseases and heart disease.

"I mean, there's very few limits to what I think you'll see the technology used for," he said.

Frank Gluck is a watchdog reporter with The News-Press and the Naples Daily News. Connect with him at fgluck@news-press.com or on Twitter: @FrankGluck.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Moderna co-founder Robert Langer not surprised by vaccine doubts