One Big Thing We Should All Have Heard About (And A Few Other Ignored But Important Stories)

The great problem in journalism is not that big news goes unreported. It’s that the people deciding what should be emphasized — placed on Page One — rarely put the focus where it should be.

Last week demonstrated that in striking fashion.

The biggest story ran in the business sections but not on the front pages. It came in an announcement by the pioneering mRNA company Moderna, and it’s probably more important than the Moon Landing or the Vietnam War.

On Wednesday, Moderna announced the results of a study it undertook on its personalized melanoma treatments. The study found that skin cancer patients given its new mRNA vaccines along with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) were 49% less likely to have a recurrence of their cancer over a 5-year period than patients given Keytruda alone. That’s an amazing result.

Here’s how Reuters reported the story:

Unlike chemotherapy, which kills both healthy and cancerous cells, or immunotherapy, which revs up ‌the immune system, personalized cancer vaccines train the immune system to specifically target mutations found only on a person’s tumor…[T]heir vaccine helped prevent the return and spread of disease in a large trial involving more than 1,000 melanoma patients. They had localized tumors that were removed surgically, but had a high risk of recurrence. Moderna expects that thousands of melanoma patients could benefit within the first few years of approval.

In other words, this new method can help people beat cancer without undergoing the standard cancer treatments, which are brutal and often ineffective. The new approach takes a patient’s surgically removed tumor, identifies its particular characteristics, and then uses that information to design a cancer vaccine especially for the patient.

Although Moderna’s experiment was on skin cancers, the technology can be applied to other cancers. In fact, the company is already testing the technology for lung cancers, bladder cancers and kidney cancers. Equally importantly, it can be refined. This is just the beginning. It can and will become far more effective as it comes into common use.

One of the few people to understand the significance of this was Elon Musk. Displaying his loyalty to President Trump, Musk criticized the use of mRNA Covid vaccines like the one that Moderna produced during the pandemic. But he then said, “Artificial RNA essentially makes curing diseases a software problem.”

That’s going too far. But it really is true that the cancer death rate among otherwise healthy young people could fall by 70-80% in the next ten to fifteen years. What scientists have been aiming to do for decades is moving past the trial stage. These individualized mRNA cancer treatments will be much more effective than chemotherapy, and they will eventually replace it for the greater number of patients.

This is especially notable as the number of cancer deaths in the U.S. is starting to approach the number of deaths from heart disease. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 683,491 heart disease deaths in 2024 as against 619,876 cancer deaths. The main reason that cancer is catching up with heart disease as a killer is that heart surgeons have improved their treatments (e.g. stents, angioplasty, bypass surgery, etc.), and people are living longer. That means people who would once have died of heart attacks now live long enough to get cancer.

The new mRNA cancer treatments won’t prolong your life indefinitely. Old people with weakened immune systems will still get fatal cancers that will be hard to treat. It’s revolutionary, nonetheless.

And it should be pointed out that AI is helping to improve cancer diagnosis. That means that we’ll be able to catch and treat cancers at earlier stages — before the cancers have spread and become inoperable.

Moderna was not started so that it could develop Covid vaccines. It was set up with the hope that it could accomplish what it’s doing now: using mRNA technology to produce vaccines that would be designed to treat cancer on a person-by-person basis. Founded in September 2010 as a private company, Moderna went public in 2018. It’s taken it almost sixteen years years to prove that its ideas work. In years to come, it will hone the technology, making it more and more precise. It will do this working alongside Merck, its pharmaceutical industry partner. In the meantime, other companies will begin to compete.

We’ll all be the beneficiaries. (Full disclosure: I own approximately $15,000 in Moderna stock…)

Meanwhile, Russia’s central bank reported that net withdrawals from the Russian banking system were over $7 billion (USD) last month. While that many not sound like much, bear in mind that the total M2 Russian money supply is only $1.734 trillion. In other words, money is being pulled from the banking system at an annual net rate of about 5% of the country’s total money supply. The equivalent in the U.S. would be net withdrawals of roughly $100 billion per month. Since Russia has detailed controls on the flow of money out of the country, this suggests that Russians — especially rich Russians — are taking money out and holding it as cash, fearful that a desperate Vladimir Putin might try to confiscate it.

That trouble compounds another problem: The Kremlin has forced the banks to make loans to financially shaky military contractors, and many of the banks are already close to insolvency. (Hat tip to John McCormack.)…