Moderna CEO at Davos: Moderna Was Working on COVID Vaccine in Jan. 2020, Before COVID-19 Was Named

When did Moderna start developing its COVID-19 vaccine? Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel already made headlines at World Economic Forum’s (WEF) elitist Davos 2023 conference by saying he wants an mRNA vaccine factory on every continent and by confirming his negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to bring Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines to China. But there’s more: Bancel admitted on CNBC at Davos that Moderna was already working on a COVID-19 vaccine in January 2020 before the virus had reached most countries and before it even had a specific name.

Bancel went on CNBC at Davos to discuss a new Moderna RSV vaccine. But something far more interesting slipped out. “I’d like to go back,” the CNBC host said excitedly. “‘Cause the last time we were here in Davos in the winter it was January 2020, and I saw you at that point, and we were at a breakfast.”

Bancel smiled. “I remember.”

The CNBC host continued enthusiastically, “You came up to me in this small room and you were talking about how you had actually the — you were working on a vaccine for — for COVID. And at that point COVID-19 didn’t even really exist in our minds.”

Bancel, still smiling, tacitly confirmed the story by agreeing, “I think there was no name at that time.” So Moderna was somehow developing a vaccine for an unnamed virus before it reached most countries outside China?

According to the CDC, COVID-19 first surfaced in December 2019 but was not even identified officially as a potential SARS virus until Jan. 1, 2020. So how was Moderna making a vaccine for that still unidentified virus that same month? I know very little about how vaccines targeting viruses are developed, but I’m pretty sure viral sequencing is required. In fact, viral sequencing is how a new virus is identified. WebMD explained in a medically-reviewed piece:

Genome sequencing is how scientists found this new human coronavirus [COVID-19] soon after it popped up in people. At first, what they knew was that people in China were suddenly getting sick with respiratory symptoms. So scientists sequenced the genome of a viral sample from a person who worked at a market where they thought it might have come from. By comparing the RNA sequence to other viral genome sequences they had from earlier studies, they could tell right away that it was a coronavirus they hadn’t seen in people before.

If WedMD is right, Moderna had already sequenced and identified COVID-19 or received that sequencing from someone else and begun its vaccine production before the virus had an official name. Add to that the question — where did Moderna get the virus samples or sequencing from? From the CCP? And did Moderna start working on the vaccine in January, or had it already started in late 2019 before the world supposedly knew anything definite about the virus? Something about this vague timeline is awfully fishy.

I’m no scientist, but Bancel and CNBC seem to have accidentally raised a lot of important questions that need answering.