> They didn't do the foundational research. They licensed a patent that came out of research from University of Pennsylvania and applied it to COVID.

Incremental research is still research. Application research is still research.

The over-emphasis on foundational research from the media & the general public has led to a myopic view of "revolution"-ism, wherein incremental progress in science is considered to be worthless relative to incremental improvements.

The discovery of penicillin was a medical breakthrough, but that doesn't mean that the industrial scale-up of penicillin production was comparatively worthless. In fact, in this specific case, the opposite is true: The benefits of penicillin wouldn't have been received if everyone thought that research into scaling up its production was worthless.

Moderna spent a few months on it before they had a vaccine ready for trials. The lab spent just under a decade building on decades of prior research. It's pretty clear who did the bulk of the work when it comes to the mRNA discoveries, and it wasn't Moderna or its shareholders.