Fact check: Post misinterprets Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel's comments on vaccine supply

Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Moderna CEO admits company produced 100,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses before pandemic

A Feb. 8 Instagram post (direct link, archived link) shows a screenshot of Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel speaking at a World Economic Forum event.

"URGENT – Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel Admits Company Produced 100,000 COVID-19 Vaccine Doses In 2019 Before The Pandemic Started," reads the text in the post.

The screenshot is from a Substack article by James Cintolo, who has previously spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines.

The post generated over 700 likes in less than a week. Similar posts have amassed hundreds of interactions on Instagram.

Our rating: False

The claim stems from comments Bancel made at a January panel discussing how many vaccine doses Moderna produced in 2019. He never said the stat was a reference to COVID-19 vaccines specifically. Moderna did not begin developing the COVID-19 vaccine until 2020, according to a Moderna spokesperson.

Bancel's words misinterpreted

The claim is "totally incorrect," according to Kate Cronin, a Moderna spokesperson.

The Substack article shows a clip featuring journalist Sasha Vakulina, Bancel and other speakers during a Jan. 18 panel session called “State of the Pandemic” at the World Economic Forum’s 2023 conference in Davos, Switzerland.

In the session, Vakulina asks Bancel to discuss vaccine development, adoption and scaling in regard to different variants and subvariants.

Bancel says in response:

"So the great news versus 2020, where we are today is that we have manufacturing capacity. ... When the pandemic happened, Moderna had made 100,000 dose in 2019 for the whole year. And I remember walking into the office of my manufacturing and I say, ‘How about we make a billion dose next year?’ And they look at me a bit funny and say, ‘What?’ And I say, ‘Yeah we need to make a billion dose next year, there’s going to be a pandemic."

He never said the doses were for the COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna made approximately 100,000 vaccine doses in 2019 across all of the company’s products, Cronin said. This does not include the COVID-19 vaccine, which the company had not developed yet.

Moderna has worked since 2011 to develop mRNA technology, which uses a genetic code to teach the body’s cells to make a certain protein that trains the immune system, according to the company website.

Cronin said Moderna did not have the COVID-19 genetic sequence until Jan. 10, 2020, when it began developing a COVID-19 vaccine using mRNA technology. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

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Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine gained emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in December 2020, as USA TODAY reported.

Bancel has made similar remarks in other interviews. In a November 2021 interview with the American Heart Association, Bancel said Moderna was on track to ship up to 800 million COVID-19 doses, whereas it "made less than 100,000 doses of any vaccine in all of 2019."

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment.

The Associated Press, Lead Stories, AFP and Reuters also debunked the claim.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Post misinterprets Moderna CEO comments on vaccine supply