President Trump is said to have partnered with Moderna-NIH to begin producing a COVID-19 vaccine, piggybacking on November 2015 collaborations. [1, 2]
On March 2, 2020, Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bance, told President Trump that “we’re able to move very, very fast from a few phone calls to getting a vaccine made, ready for the clinic” because of existing MERS working relationship already with DARPA and NIH. He said “in only 42 days from the sequence of the virus, [we sent] our vaccine to Dr. Fauci’s team at the NIH“. [5]
Using this brand new vaccine platform and in the fastest time ever, on January 13, 2020, the NIAID spike protein design team in collaboration with Moderna “finalized the sequence for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine” and “mobilized toward clinical manufacture” and “the first clinical batch was completed on February 7, 2020.” “Mutations were made to the spike-encoding gene so that the protein it encodes stays in a stable, “prefusion” form.” [3]
On 24th February, 2020, Moderna ship their “first batch of [mRNA-1273] its candidate mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 for phase 1 study”
Moderna (formally called ModeRNA) who has never before brought a product to market, they attribute their technology to an operating system. [4]
Later a $1.5 billion deal was struck with Moderna under Operation Warp Speed. Moderna received $483 million taxpayer funding from US government for the development. On Feb 4, 2021 pharma giants were granted immunity from liability.