“I remember walking into the office of my head of manufacturing and I said, ‘How will we make a billion doses next year?’ And he looked at me a bit funny, ‘Say what?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we need to make a billion doses next year, there’s going to be a pandemic”.
While the posts mentioned earlier used this quote as proof that Bancel knew about the COVID-19 pandemic, this is baseless. Indeed, COVID-19 first started as an outbreak in late 2019 and was already monitored by international organizations. According to the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH), U.S. organizations decided to start working on a vaccine in late December 2019 to early January 2020.