We are in March 2020. Donald Trump, arms crossed, observes Stéphane Bancel, the boss of the pharmaceutical company Moderna. What the French businessman said at that time reassured the American president. One of his advisers in Washington even said: “This man may save the world”.
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More than two years later, with a pandemic coming to an end, we can indeed say that Stéphane Bancel has played a major role.
“I didn’t promise anything to Donald Trump. But I told him that our vaccine was going to work, because we had already done nine messenger RNA vaccines. We had also worked on another virus from the coronavirus family, ”he says in an interview with the Log.
An “impatient” president
He admits that the president “was impatient” and would have liked to have a vaccine on the spot. But all the leaders of the planet were on their toes. Fortunately, Moderna had taken a step ahead and was able to develop a vaccine in record time, like its competitor Pfizer.
“I was at the White House, at the beginning of March 2020, and the product was in clinical trials one or two weeks later”, he relates.
Very unpopular at this time of his presidency, Trump nevertheless invested significant sums in order to develop an American vaccine.
“The United States put in about $1 billion. The government funded the clinical studies from which all countries benefited. Because we submitted the files of the studies carried out in the United States to Health Canada, ”he explains.
Doctor Fauci, an ally
The Marseille-born boss has met President Trump only once, but he has worked very closely with the famous Doctor Fauci, the chief scientific adviser to the White House.
“The D.r Fauci is quite remarkable, already the fact that he is still working for Public Health when he should have been retired for a long time… But he was very available, very precise, it was a very good collaboration with them,” he says.
The Moderna boss is now one of the most well-known scientific figures on the planet. He still owns 9% of the company which took off on the stock market during the pandemic.
He is now part of the select club of billionaires with a fortune estimated at US$4.5 billion.