Why has this stopped working in JQuery

I had a Javascript which opened a modal and then replaced the .modal-body content with the href content (load an external page into the modal body), however it seems to have stopped working. the script is below:

$('.vs-modal').on('click', function(e){
      e.preventDefault();
//    alert("CLICK RECEIVED"+$(this).attr('href'));
      $('#ViewStarModal').modal('show').find('.modal-body').load($(this).attr('href'));
    });

when the alert is uncommented the alert works so the script is still triggering and it displays the url, but the line after the alert shows the modal but no longer loads the href url


and here is the link/trigger created using php

  <a class='btn btn-outline-success vs-modal' href='view-star.php?id=".$srow['id']."'><i class='bi bi-eye'></i></a>

I just cant see why it has stopped working :(

For some reason I can not post the source for the modal.

USING jquery-3.6.4.js
`