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Vaccine-maker Moderna has become the most shorted company in the S&P 500, with its share price slumping to its lowest level since before the Covid-19 pandemic as people skip jabs.

After months of anti-vax rhetoric from US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, the number of Americans getting Covid shots is down about 24 per cent from this point last year, according to a November 21 report from Jefferies, an investment bank.

Despite plenty of supply, analysts have said vaccine fatigue was contributing to lower Covid vaccination rates in the past few months compared with 2024 or 2023.

“It’s not a huge surprise vaccinations have not picked up as they have in the last two years,” said Seema Shah, medical director of epidemiology and immunisation for San Diego county.

Vaccine shipments were delayed this year, prompting paediatric healthcare providers to wait to administer shots until supplies were stocked, she said.

“Those [delays] definitely caused a slow pick up compared to the last two years,” she added.

Boston-based Moderna has been the S&P 500’s most shorted stock since the end of September, according to S3 Partners. Short sellers had about $622mn of unrealised profits in the company in 2025, S3 said. Moderna shares closed at $23.72 on Friday, down 43 per cent so far this year, and matching its share price in February 2020.

When it joined the S&P 500 index in July 2021, Moderna’s fortunes were flourishing. That year, the US government bought hundreds of millions of Moderna Covid vaccines. Chief executive Stéphane Bancel became a multi-billionaire. Moderna’s 2021 operating margin was higher than Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

But Moderna has been unprofitable since 2023, well before Kennedy brought his vaccine scepticism to Washington this year. Its revenues have dropped by more than 80 per cent from 2021.

At an investor day on Thursday, Moderna executives touted a turnaround starting in 2026. The company is expanding sales in markets outside the US and is racing to apply its mRNA technology to attack cancers.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Moderna’s chair, Noubar Afeyan, said the short interest in Moderna’s stock had not changed the company’s behaviour.

“We are concerned about a lot of unknowns. I don’t know that the shorting is adding to the unknowns,” said Afeyan, who is chief executive of Flagship Pioneering, a Boston investment firm that founded Moderna.

People should not forget the detrimental effects of Covid-19, he said, adding that more than 10mn people were living with the long-term symptoms of the virus.

“People have lost the narrative that they are essentially a source of infection for other people,” he said.

“Why should you follow traffic laws? You don’t just put yourself in harm’s way. This is a transmissible disease.” And by not getting vaccinated, “you are not just an innocent bystander but a culprit”.

The US health secretary is a long-standing vaccine sceptic. In June, Kennedy fired all the members of a top vaccine advisory committee, and two months later limited the government’s recommendations for Covid shots.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of Kennedy’s department, changed its website to say: “Studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

In Washington, Moderna has spent more than $1.2mn on lobbying already this year, a record amount for the company.

Because of its exposure to vaccines, Moderna did not make a great acquisition target for giant pharmaceutical companies, said Myles Minter, an analyst at William Blair.

“You need to see some pretty compelling oncology data” for an acquirer to get interested in buying Moderna, he said.

While big drugmakers were looking to refill their product offerings, “I’m not convinced that declining Covid vaccine revenue is the way to fix that for a big pharma” company, he added.

For now, Moderna said sales to Australia, Canada and the UK would help it to increase revenues by up to 10 per cent next year. In 2027, a Pfizer deal to sell Covid vaccines to the EU expires, opening the European market for Moderna to compete.

Ultimately, Moderna is hoping that its vaccines can generate enough cash to fund its cancer work. 

“We see a turning point in our finances and we believe we have a line of sight to break even in 2028,” said Jamey Mock, Moderna’s chief financial officer.

The dearth of data on the state of the US economy caused by the federal government shutdown is set to continue after the Bureau of Economic Analysis postponed two releases that had been due on Wednesday next week.

The BEA said on Thursday that its planned releases of data on third-quarter GDP and September inflation would be rescheduled to dates to be advised, adding to investor uncertainty after fears of tighter than anticipated monetary policy contributed to the jitters hitting stock markets in recent days. With the Federal Reserve due to make its next decision on interest rates on December 10, the postponements risk leaving policymakers with even less to go on.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected GDP to come in at an annualised pace of 3 per cent in the three months to September 30, down from 3.8 per cent in the second quarter. Despite the expected decline, a 3 per cent reading would be a further sign that the economy has held up after a negative reading in the first quarter.

A separate Reuters poll showed inflation holding steady, with the index of core personal consumption expenditures — the Fed’s preferred metric of inflation that strips out volatile food and energy prices — expected to have risen 2.9 per cent in the month, unchanged from the rate in August.

The BEA’s double postponement came after the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that its closely watched report on non-farm payrolls for October had been cancelled outright.

Fed chair Jay Powell said last month that the lack of adequate data caused by the shutdown would be a factor in policymakers’ thinking. “What do you do when you’re driving in the fog? You slow down,” Powell said, adding that there was “a possibility” this would influence the debate at next month’s meeting.

Questions have also surfaced over the true health of the world’s largest economy and whether investments in artificial intelligence have masked other issues. Last month, the IMF upgraded its outlook for the US but warned that an “investment surge” in AI had helped the economy avoid a slowdown. Alexandra White

What will the UK Budget mean for sterling?

The pound has weakened in recent weeks, falling to its lowest against the euro in two years as weak inflation and poor economic data opened the door to more Bank of England interest rate cuts.

Also weighing on sterling have been fiscal concerns, underlined by the UK government dropping plans to raise income tax in Wednesday’s Budget — with investors closely tracking the government’s commitment to balancing its books.

“There’s a lot of bad news already priced into sterling,” said Steven Englander, head of FX research at Standard Chartered, pointing to the government’s fiscal “black hole”.

Analysts say this could go one of two ways. If investors view the government’s policies as doing enough to restore health to public finances — with a comfortable margin of spending “headroom” — then “the pound will appreciate, because some of this risk premium will be priced out”, said Tomasz Wieladek, chief European economist at T Rowe Price. If not, the pound could stay low, or weaken further.

“The issue will be whether the market believes that the policies that are announced are going to be effective, and getting to the objectives they’ve declared,” said Englander.

But many analysts see the Budget as likely to be negative for the pound if the government tightens the public finances, sapping growth, but also manages to enact measures that reduce inflation.

“Anything that over the next year or two reduces the disposable income of households, the Bank of England will see as a shock to demand, and cut rates more than expected,” delivering bad news for sterling, Wieladek added.

There is also the continued undercurrent of a potential leadership challenge to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, especially if the Budget proves unpopular with those on the left of the ruling Labour party.

“Lingering political risks are unlikely to allow for a full removal of [sterling’s] risk premium, even in the event of a smoothly delivered budget from a market perspective,” said Shreyas Gopal, FX strategist at Deutsche Bank. Rachel Rees

Will Germany continue to disappoint?

After the November flash estimate for Germany’s purchasing managers’ indices on Friday suggested that manufacturing in the country had fallen ever deeper into contraction, all eyes will be on a flurry of economic data to be released from Monday.

The all-important Ifo business climate survey, to be published by the Munich-based think-tank at the start of the week, is expected to edge up by 0.1 points to 88.5, as analysts polled by Reuters forecast that the assessment of current conditions will have improved a bit in November.

Europe’s largest economy narrowly avoided a technical recession in the third quarter as it stagnated after a 0.1 per cent decline in the second. The Bundesbank said on Thursday in its monthly report that the economy could continue to grow “slightly” in the final three months of the year. The country’s statistical office will release data on consumption, domestic investment and exports for the third quarter on Tuesday.

Despite the long-lasting economic slump, Germany’s labour market is still holding up strongly, with analysts expecting that unemployment, to be reported on Friday, will have remained flat at 2.9mn people in November. Inflation, also to be reported on Friday, is forecast to have risen by 0.1 percentage points to 2.4 per cent, well above the ECB’s medium-term 2 per cent target for the overall currency area. Olaf Storbeck