At the 2023 WEF meeting in Davos, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel indicates that in 2019, he had advance knowledge of a pandemic:
Sasha Vakulina, panel host: “How is the development, adoption and scaling of vaccine going on when it comes to different variants and subvariants? Because this is one of the big concerns, as we’re all here now and we’re discussing and we understand the context and this is a great deal.”
Bancel: “Sure. Good morning and thank you for having me on the panel. So the great news versus 2020 where we are today is we have manufacturing capacity.
“When the pandemic happened, Moderna made 100,000 doses in 2019 for the whole year. And I remember walking after hours into the office of Moderna manufacturing and I say, ‘How (can) we make a billion doses next year?’ And they look at me a bit funny, say, ‘What?’ I say, ‘Yeah, we need to make a billion doses next year, there’s going to be a pandemic.
“And so where we are now is we have plants in the US and in Switzerland. We’ve shown this summer that we’re able to adapt to variants very quickly.”