I actually think mRNA technology has great potential - especially in cancer and rare diseases. Even early ideas from Moderna around mRNA and stem cell rejuvenation were interesting. However, using it as a vaccine platform is fundamentally different from using it as a cancer drug. The safety tolerance for something given to a large population should be extremely high - closer to aviation than oncology. These were rushed to market, and agencies like FDA and NIH projected a level of certainty about safety and efficacy that wasn’t actually established. When you’re systemically delivering a genetic construct, there should be no tolerance for things like prolonged B cell germinal center activity months later, or peripheral tissues expressing inflammatory or proliferative programs with potentially devastating consequences. Those risks are acceptable in late stage cancer. They’re not for population-wide use. The messaging became politicized and serious efforts to understand what these technologies actually do in the human body was put aside.