The Shape of a Pandemic: Boom, Bust and Recover

At the peak of the pandemic boom for biopharma in 2021, venture capital dollars topped $30 billion for biotechs over 446 deals. There were 99 initial public offering with $15.6 billion total raised.

But the volume of deals and cash flying around proved to be unsustainable. Those sky-high values have come down precipitously. Meanwhile, biotech bankruptcies have spiked in recent years, with experts tying them back to the sector’s gold rush.

The conversation in the industry over the past couple of years has been focused on recovery and reestablishing a new baseline.

Below are essays from each of BioSpace’s editors about their experiences as journalists covering the life sciences industries during the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantined like the rest of the world but hard at work from our home offices.

I had interviewed NIAID Director Anthony Fauci before. Now he was a very busy man, and a household name—the face of the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.

I’d been a science journalist for a little over a decade, the entire time spent at The Scientist, when COVID rocked the world and the life sciences industries in particular. The types of stories I was writing and editing became exponentially more critical to vastly bigger audiences, and we saw that reflected in our site traffic numbers. We covered the basic science of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its effects on the body, as well as the vaccine development efforts led largely by biopharma companies—with Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna and J&J also becoming household names—and backed by government funds. And more than we ever had before, we covered the public health issues that challenged societies around the globe.

We unpacked the science that supposedly informed those decisions, and in the parallel pandemic of misinformation that came with COVID-19, that was meaningful work. Ultimately, however, interest in COVID news waned and, like many publications experienced, traffic to the site plummeted starting in the spring of 2022. At BioSpace, Heather McKenzie saw it too.

Starting at BioSpace in July 2020 after a hard career pivot from business conference production, I was thrown into the world of biopharma journalism in the midst of the still-young pandemic. I spent the next two years ensconced in the historic race to develop a vaccine. I watched and covered several milestones as Pfizer and BioNTech pulled through first, then Moderna, J&J and finally Novavax.

For nearly two years, interest in COVID-19 vaccines and treatments was insatiable, and for BioSpace, the interest translated into new readers and overall yeasty numbers. At the same time, the world didn’t stop—though it sometimes felt like it had—and other diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington’s disease and cancer continued to wreak havoc.

The COVID pandemic—while devastating—was, for me, framed with a sparkling silver lining because I finally found my calling, telling the story of ingenuity and global unification in the face of this catastrophic tragedy. Today—as we face a different sort of tumult in the biopharma industry—I remain just as committed to communicating the key facts and elevating important voices.

My pandemic quarantine from the offices of S&P Global Market Intelligence lasted one week before I gave birth to my first son. After 10 weeks of maternity leave on lockdown, I got antsy and went back to work, joining my team as we followed the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were many angles to tackle, from the immediate business disruptions to the influx of investment into the colossal effort to develop vaccines and treatments for the evolving virus. I never remember working a set number of hours—time didn’t really mean anything in quarantine after all, and we felt that the information we were putting out into the world was critical and time sensitive.

I remember a Friday evening when Moderna was expected to get the FDA’s greenlight for its COVID-19 vaccine. As usual, there was nothing going on, so I spent my evening with a fellow editor based in Pakistan chatting over Teams about the merits of the various Marvel characters, waiting for the decision to come down so we could share the news with our audience.

It was a wild time to be a biopharma journalist. We threw everything we had into our work. A few months later, I was laid off from that company amid a pandemic shake-up. I was not exactly prepared for the business disruptions I had been reporting on to hit so close to home. But I landed on my feet, and now in 2025, I’m happily at BioSpace reflecting on this pivotal moment in my career.

I started out as a biochemist, purifying proteins in the cold room for years on end, before getting my first job out of grad school working on prions for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In my 20s, it wasn’t yet clear to me that what I had been doing locked inside windowless labs did, in fact, have some bearing on the outside world, and that people not only wanted but needed information about highly technical developments in biology and epidemiology. Then COVID broke just as I was starting out in science media.

I had been the editor at the late great Massive Science for maybe six months, my first full-time job as a journalist, when all those portentous stories of a new disease brewing in China came out in early 2020. We covered the news dutifully, though at first mixing in some jokes. I remember Photoshopping silly mustaches onto my face for a story about some analysis about how facial hair could interfere with how effective masks are—something that’s quite serious in hindsight.

It soon became clear, however, that the world was shutting down in the face of a very real global threat. And as my colleagues and I stayed on top of the latest science, I learned just how impactful journalism can be. That people like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, scientist-writers I grew up reading, were not just disseminating factoids for fun but delivering knowledge that influenced people’s behavior and lives. When a science journalist writes, say, about a potential new cancer cure, from the angle of its mechanism of action, or the clinical trials, or the business dealings that supported it, how the journalist presents the work truly does influence readers down the line.

By May 2022, the appetite for COVID-19 news seemed to reach a saturation point, and our traffic numbers came back down to earth. To be honest, this journalist, too, reached a COVID saturation point, to the point where I hesitated to even suggest this five-year reflection.

But it’s important—actually imperative—to remember, and to learn, from recent history. Unfortunately, it seems the world has already forgotten. Topics like antimicrobial resistance and bird flu fail to get the eyeballs given to subjects like obesity and U.S. political drama.

So it’s critical to remember that in a global, concerted effort, biopharma delivered vaccines for COVID-19 in just nine months—saving countless lives and cementing the unique potential of this industry to impact our world. I, for one, am honored to have played just a small part in telling the story.

Today, five years from when it all officially started, COVID is now endemic, with vaccine development efforts continually underway to stay on top of novel strains of virus. But we’re in the midst of political transition and upheaval, with Fauci’s arch enemy now sitting atop all of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci, the influential antivaxer condemned Fauci’s management of the country’s pandemic response. Now RFK Jr. is dismantling the agencies he oversees such as the FDA, NIH and CDC—including canceling vaccine advisory meetings such as one planned to select strains for inclusion in the upcoming 2025–2026 flu season.

Should we revisit this exercise in another five years, we could be writing any number of personal accounts. None of us can begin to predict what the U.S. healthcare, biopharma and the broader life sciences landscape will look like.