I always thought the point of the pandemic was to push mRNA technology into mainstream societal use while skipping the part where Moderna existed for a decade while never getting past the animal trials for any mRNA tech, and they needed to skip the testing phase. The wealthy have clearly long believed mRNA was going to be the next magic pill (of money making), and I think a large part of their thinking comes from having left behind religion.

We have people who a decade ago were Christian and had the psychological comfort of an afterlife and never had to think about death. I doubt the neo-atheist rationalists ever really deconstructed that being religious was giving them that and confronted their fear of death - they just switched to a belief of transhumanism where technology would give them immortality through "hacking" their already written code or through the crazier transhumanist beliefs of Rothblatt that they're going to be able to upload their consiousnesses to a computer server for all eternity (or until someone unplugs them).

We're getting mRNA even if it's still emergency use and Biden declared the pandemic over months ago. It'll go from emergency use to fleshed out products that you can buy across medical industry without ever being held to account for being snake-oil.