The Gov't is often the earliest and most risk tolerant investor. I'm mainly thinking of DARPA (who funded Moderna to the tune of $25M if my memory serves) here, I have much less knowledge of how risk tolerant NIH is.
As the article points out, Modern was spending 500M a year on research before becoming profitable. Do you think a one time payment of 25M from DARPA was in any way relevant to their success?
If it happened at the very beginning when they had exactly $0 then yes it would be highly relevant. (I am not at all familiar with how Moderna got started)