You tell us. You assured us the return we received wasn't fair.
How did you calculate it?
Clever rhetorical parry. I will tell you that -- according to the sources which tally as much as $10 billion in support to Moderna -- $400 million is a pittance. Using those two figures only, it is a very "fair" 1/25th of the "investment" -- a principal amount if one is speaking about starting deposit into an investment. That is not any "return" on an investment, but a loss of any actual "return" in a financial sense.
$400,000,000 / $10,000,000,000 = 0.04, or four percent if expressed as a percentage of the principal amount. Said in plain words, NO return on an investment, and not even a significant repayment of the principal.
The loss will magnify if the Biden bailout of Moderna is done. There has been no actual fiduciary "return."
Now you calculate your version of "fair." We can compare our points-of-view in numbers, and not rhetoric.
After all, you did write, "the research produced some useful technology and this is the payoff for the taxpayers. That's how it should work." Now show your math to bolster your claim that "this is the payoff."