Moderna (MRNA) Stock on 8 December 2025: Institutional Tug‑of‑War, FDA Shockwaves and 2026

Published: 8 December 2025 – all data and news current to this date. This article is informational only and not investment advice.

Key takeaways

Share price and size: Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) is trading around $27.70 per share, implying a market capitalisation of roughly $10.8 billion and a one‑year price drop of about 35–40%. ^[1]
Heavy short interest: Around 64 million shares are sold short – roughly 18–20% of the public float – with around 5–7 days to cover, keeping short‑squeeze chatter alive. ^[2]
Big funds are repositioning: Invesco and Federated Hermes have added large stakes, while Lido Advisors and the New York State Common Retirement Fund have cut positions. Overall institutional ownership sits around 75%. ^[3]
Earnings picture: Q3 2025 revenue came in at about $1.0–1.02 billion, down ~45% year‑over‑year, but well ahead of Wall Street estimates. EPS of ‑$0.51 beat forecasts of around ‑$2.05, and Moderna still holds about $6.6 billion in cash and investments. ^[4]
Pipeline and strategy: Management is pivoting from pandemic windfall to a seasonal vaccine franchise plus oncology and rare‑disease drugs, targeting up to 10 product approvals over three years and cash breakeven by 2028. ^[5]
Major setback: In October, Moderna scrapped its congenital CMV vaccine program after a large Phase 3 trial showed only 6–23% efficacy, a key blow to one of its most-hyped post‑Covid assets. ^[6]
Regulatory overhang: An internal FDA memo linking Covid‑19 vaccines to 10 child deaths and proposing stricter vaccine approval rules triggered a sharp selloff in vaccine makers, with Moderna dropping about 6–7% on the day. ^[7]
Wall Street vs algorithms: Analysts’ consensus rating is “Reduce” with an average 12‑month price target around $29.46 (modest upside), while several quantitative models expect mild downside from current levels over the next year. ^[8]

Where Moderna stock stands today

As of 8 December 2025, Moderna shares trade around $27.70, roughly flat after a powerful rebound that saw the stock jump 8–9% on 5 December on heavy volume. ^[9]

Over the last year the stock has:

Fallen ~35–39% on a total‑return basis
Traded between a 52‑week low near $22 and a high just under $49 ^[10]

The result is a mid‑cap biotech with:

Market cap: ≈$10.8 billion
Price‑to‑sales: about 4.8× trailing revenue
Price‑to‑book: roughly 1.1× ^[11]

On pure price action, MRNA is still in a long, downward trend from its pandemic peak, but the last few weeks have featured:

A 23%+ rise over the past two weeks
Multiple sessions with >6% daily moves, both up and down ^[12]

This volatility is being driven by a mix of institutional repositioning, regulatory headlines, and pipeline news, not just Covid booster demand.

Big money is moving: who’s buying and who’s selling?

Fresh 13F filings and December 8 news show an unusually active tape in Moderna among large funds:

Invesco Ltd. increased its position by 20.7% in Q2, buying over 1.2 million shares to reach 7.1 million shares, worth about $196 million – roughly 1.8% of the company. ^[13]
Federated Hermes boosted its stake by 364.5%, adding 2.25 million shares to hold 2.87 million shares, valued around $79 million or 0.74% of Moderna. ^[14]
Norges Bank, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, appears as a new holder with a position near $95 million. ^[15]

On the other side of the ledger:

New York State Common Retirement Fund cut its Moderna stake by about 50% in Q2, selling roughly 182,000 shares and ending the quarter with 182,600 shares (~$5.0 million). ^[16]
Lido Advisors slashed its position by over 90%, selling about 140,800 shares and retaining just 13,574 shares (≈$375,000). ^[17]

MarketBeat’s aggregation of filings suggests that, despite some high‑profile sellers, around three‑quarters of Moderna’s stock – about 75% – is held by institutions, a high figure for a volatile biotech. ^[18]

Taken together, the flows point to a rotation within the institutional base rather than a wholesale abandonment: some value‑ and event‑driven funds are buying the dip, while more conservative or benchmark‑driven investors are cutting exposure.

A crowded short: why MRNA keeps showing up in “short squeeze” lists

Short sellers have not gone anywhere.

As of 14 November 2025, about 64.36 million shares of Moderna were sold short, roughly 18.5–20% of the public float, with a short interest ratio of around 5.5–5.7 days to cover. ^[19]
Fintel and other data providers show short float in the high‑teens (%) and confirm Moderna remains one of the most‑shorted stocks in the S&P 500 healthcare cohort. ^[20]

Back in May 2025, a widely circulated analysis argued that Moderna looked “ripe for a short squeeze” because more than 60 million shares were short, requiring nearly six days of trading volume to cover. ^[21] That basic setup still exists today, even if sentiment has soured further.

The recent 8–9% spike on 5 December, accompanied by a big jump in volume, fits the pattern of short‑covering rallies that can happen in heavily shorted names when any piece of good news hits the tape. ^[22]

For long‑term investors, high short interest cuts both ways:

It signals deep skepticism about Moderna’s earnings power beyond Covid.
It also means good news can be amplified as shorts rush to cover.

Earnings check‑in: Q3 2025 shows progress but not profits

Moderna’s third‑quarter 2025 results, released on 6 November, gave bulls and bears plenty to work with:

Revenue: about $1.0–1.02 billion, compared with roughly $1.9 billion in Q3 2024 – a ~45% year‑over‑year decline as Covid booster demand normalises. ^[23]
Earnings per share:‑$0.51, beating consensus forecasts around ‑$2.05 by more than $1.50 per share, thanks to cost controls and product mix. ^[24]
Net loss: about $200 million for the quarter. ^[25]
Cash and investments: approximately $6.6 billion, giving Moderna ample runway to fund R&D and commercialization. ^[26]

Management highlighted that, even with a roughly 30% drop in U.S. Covid vaccination rates, Moderna still maintained about 42% market share in its Covid vaccine segment, underscoring the resilience of Spikevax and next‑generation formulations. ^[27]

The quarter also tied into the company’s broader financial roadmap laid out at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January:

2025 revenue guidance:$1.5–2.5 billion, heavily weighted to the second half of the year and driven mainly by Covid and RSV vaccines.
Cost cuts: targeted $1.0 billion in 2025 cash cost reductions and another $0.5 billion in 2026.
Cash breakeven target:2028, contingent on multiple product launches. ^[28]

In other words: revenue is shrinking versus the pandemic era, but the business is shrinking more slowly than feared, and the company remains cash‑rich but loss‑making.

A tale of two headlines: CMV failure vs. pipeline expansion

CMV vaccine program scrapped

One of Moderna’s most painful 2025 headlines came in October, when the company halted development of its congenital CMV vaccine mRNA‑1647:

A large Phase 3 trial in about 7,500 women aged 16–40 failed to meet its primary endpoint, with efficacy in preventing infection of only 6–23%, far below what would support approval. ^[29]
Shares dropped more than 5% in after‑hours trading on the news, and patient groups and researchers expressed disappointment given the lack of any approved congenital CMV vaccine. ^[30]

Moderna has said it will continue evaluating mRNA‑1647 in a separate mid‑stage trial in bone‑marrow transplant patients, where CMV reactivation is a serious risk, but congenital CMV as a mass‑market indication is off the table for now. ^[31]

Importantly for investors, management reiterated that the setback does not alter 2025 revenue guidance or the 2028 cash‑breakeven goal, but it clearly weakens one of the company’s most anticipated non‑respiratory vaccine opportunities. ^[32]

Analyst Day: building a seasonal franchise and an oncology engine

The CMV news contrasts with a more upbeat message from Moderna’s Analyst Day on 20 November 2025, which fleshed out a three‑year growth plan: ^[33]

2026 revenue growth: targeting up to 10% growth year‑over‑year.
Seasonal vaccine franchise: plan to expand from three marketed respiratory products to up to six approved seasonal vaccines by 2028, including:
- Spikevax (original Covid-19) – approved in ~40 countries.
- mNEXSPIKE (mRNA‑1283) – a next‑gen Covid vaccine approved in the US and Canada, with filings in other major markets.
- mRESVIA (mRNA‑1345) – RSV vaccine approved for older adults in many countries.
- mRNA‑1010 – pure flu vaccine with global submissions expected to be complete by early 2026.
- mRNA‑1083 – flu/Covid combo, under EMA review and filed in Canada.
- mRNA‑1403 – Norovirus vaccine in Phase 3, with an interim readout anticipated in 2026. ^[34]

Beyond vaccines, Moderna is planting long‑term seeds in oncology and rare diseases:

Intismeran (mRNA‑4157), an individualized neoantigen therapy developed with Merck, now in multiple Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials across melanoma, lung, bladder and kidney cancers.
mRNA‑4359, a cancer immunotherapy targeting tumour and immunosuppressive cells, in an ongoing Phase 1/2 study.
mRNA‑3927 (propionic acidemia) and mRNA‑3705 (methylmalonic acidemia) in registrational or near‑registrational studies, including support from the FDA’s START rare‑disease program. ^[35]

To support these ambitions, the company has built a global manufacturing network with new mRNA facilities in Canada, the UK and Australia, alongside expanded US capacity in Massachusetts, with a focus on automation, robotics and cost efficiency. ^[36]

The investment thesis here is simple: if Moderna can turn its pipeline into a portfolio of approved vaccines and oncology drugs, today’s valuation could look modest. But every failure like CMV is a reminder that drug development is brutally binary.

FDA memo shock: stricter vaccine rules and a bruised share price

Moderna and other vaccine makers were hit hard in early December by news of an internal FDA memo:

The memo, attributed to Vinay Prasad, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, cited an analysis linking 10 child deaths from 2021–2024 to myocarditis after Covid vaccination, drawn from post‑marketing surveillance data. ^[37]
It floated tighter approval standards for vaccines, including moving away from approvals largely based on immune‑response (“immunogenicity‑only”) data for label expansions and new formulations. ^[38]

Markets reacted quickly:

Moderna shares fell roughly 6–7% on the day of the report, with similar declines in Novavax and BioNTech. ^[39]

The story did not end there. Within days, a dozen former FDA commissioners published a strongly worded critique warning that sweeping changes to vaccine review could damage public health, slow innovation and raise costs if handled badly. ^[40]

For Moderna, the memo matters because the company’s strategy assumes:

Regular annual Covid and flu boosters
A pipeline of updated formulations and combinations
Faster approvals based on established platforms

Stricter rules could make each new formulation slower and more expensive to bring to market, albeit with the potential long‑term benefit of greater public trust if safety debates calm down.

At this point, the memo is not formal policy, but it has become a new overhang on the whole vaccine complex, and Moderna is right in the crosshairs.

How Wall Street and models see Moderna from here

Street view: cautious, with limited upside

According to MarketBeat’s aggregation of analyst research:

Overall rating: “Reduce”
Coverage breakdown: 2 Buys, 12 Holds, 5 Sells
12‑month consensus price target: $29.46
Target range: $17 (bear case) to $63 (bull case), implying anything from deep downside to a potential double, but only ~6% upside on average from current levels around $27–28. ^[41]

Recent moves include:

Citigroup trimming its target to $28 with a neutral stance.
JPMorgan cutting its target to $25 and maintaining an underweight rating.
Wolfe Research reiterating underperform with a $17 target.
UBS remaining in the buy camp, suggesting not all large banks have given up on the story. ^[42]

In valuation terms, data from Finviz and others show:

No meaningful P/E (loss‑making).
Price‑to‑sales of about 4.8× and price‑to‑book near 1.1×, which is low versus the stock’s Covid peak but still richer than many traditional vaccine peers when adjusted for current earnings power. ^[43]

The message from the Street: Moderna is no longer priced like a hyper‑growth pandemic winner, but analysts are far from unanimous that today’s price fully reflects execution and regulatory risks.

Quant and technical models: mild near‑term downside

Algorithmic and purely technical forecasts add another lens:

CoinCodex models suggest the share price could drift down about 10% to around $24.90 by early January 2026, with a one‑year forecast near $23 and a very pessimistic algorithmic projection around $10–18 by 2030. The site characterises current sentiment as “neutral”, with a Fear & Greed Index at 39 (Fear). ^[44]
StockInvest.us, which also focuses on chart signals, currently classifies MRNA as a short‑term “buy candidate” after an 8.67% jump on 5 December, but still expects about ‑2.75% over the next three months within a wide trading band. ^[45]

These tools are math, not medicine: they extrapolate from recent prices and volumes rather than assessing whether a cancer vaccine will work in 2028. Still, they reinforce the idea that the tape is fragile, and that trend‑followers are not yet convinced the long downtrend is over.

The investment debate: bull vs bear case in late 2025

The bull case

Supporters of Moderna stock tend to emphasise:

A genuine platform, not a one‑hit wonder
- Multiple late‑stage vaccines (Covid, flu, RSV, Norovirus) and a growing oncology pipeline suggest Moderna could become a multi‑product mRNA company, not merely “the Covid stock”. ^[46]
Large cash pile and cost discipline
- With $6.6 billion in cash and investments and aggressive cost‑cutting plans, Moderna has years of runway to prove out its pipeline without constant equity raises. ^[47]
Seasonal vaccine franchise with recurring revenue
- If annual Covid and flu boosters become entrenched for high‑risk groups, and mRESVIA plus a Norovirus vaccine gain broad uptake, Moderna could have a durable, recurring “respiratory + GI” revenue base by the late 2020s. ^[48]
Optionality from oncology and rare diseases
- Success of intismeran or the rare‑disease programs could transform revenue, margins and sentiment in the 2030s. ^[49]
High short interest as fuel
- With nearly one‑fifth of the float shorted, any series of positive readouts or regulatory wins could trigger sharp squeezes that overshoot what fundamentals alone might justify. ^[50]

The bear case

Sceptics point to a different set of facts:

Covid dependence is still real
- Q3 revenue is still heavily tied to Covid and RSV, with total sales less than one‑sixth of the pandemic peak. Many investors doubt Covid boosters will remain a large, high‑margin business over the long run. ^[51]
Regulatory risk has escalated
- The FDA memo and the political controversy around vaccine safety could make future approvals slower, more expensive and more politicised, just as Moderna is trying to expand its respiratory and latent virus portfolio. ^[52]
Clinical risk is real, as CMV showed
- The CMV failure removed a potential multi‑billion‑dollar market from the medium‑term story, and it raises questions about other latent virus programs (like Epstein‑Barr or shingles) that are conceptually similar. ^[53]
Valuation vs near‑term earnings
- Even after a big drawdown, Moderna trades at several times current sales and negative earnings, while guidance for 2025 still implies low‑single‑digit billions in revenue – far below peak Covid levels. ^[54]
Crowded short interest for a reason
- The fact that Moderna leads S&P healthcare in short interest, despite high institutional ownership, signals that many sophisticated players see better risk‑reward elsewhere. ^[55]

Both sides agree on one thing: Moderna is no longer a sleepy vaccine stock. It is now a high‑beta macro and pipeline story, where scientific outcomes, FDA politics and sentiment will drive returns more than fine‑tuned DCF models.

What to watch in 2026

For investors tracking MRNA into 2026, key catalysts and risk factors include:

Regulatory decisions on seasonal vaccines
- Final approvals and label expansions for mRNA‑1010 (flu), mRNA‑1083 (flu/Covid combo) and broader use of mRESVIA will determine how big the seasonal franchise can become by 2027–2028. ^[56]
FDA rule‑making on vaccines
- Whether the FDA formally tightens its vaccine approval standards – and how it responds to pushback from former commissioners and industry – could reshape the regulatory moat around Moderna’s products. ^[57]
Oncology data readouts
- Interim and Phase 3 data from intismeran (mRNA‑4157) and other oncology programs are central to the longer‑term “Moderna as a cancer company” thesis. ^[58]
Execution against the cost‑cut and breakeven plan
- Quarterly updates on operating expenses, cash burn and margin improvement will show whether the company is on track for its 2028 cash breakeven target. ^[59]
Short‑interest dynamics
- Changes in short interest and borrow costs will influence how violent future rallies or sell‑offs may be, especially around earnings (next scheduled around 13 February 2026, according to some data providers).

References

Moderna (MRNA) Stock on 8 December 2025: Institutional Tug‑of‑War, FDA Shockwaves and 2026–2030 Forecasts