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Cetera's avatar

Thank you Igor for your dedication in digging into this stuff and getting the word out to the rest of us.

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Stegiel's avatar

The Moderna COVID‑19 vaccine, sold under the brand name Spikevax, is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by American company Moderna, the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Chinese scientists put the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus online on Jan. 11. Over the next two days, the NIH and Moderna used it to plot out a vaccine.

Afeyan remembers getting a key call about the development of the Covid-19 vaccine. “January 21st, my daughter’s birthday.... I got a call from Davos [during The World Economic Forum] from the CEO of Moderna,” he says. Bancel had been approached by a number of public health groups at the conference “urging” him to work on a vaccine. We literally decided overnight...to try and do this,” Afeyan said at MIT. Moderna delivered the first doses of its Covid-19 vaccine to the NIH for testing on Feb. 24, 2020, and “the first Moderna shot went into a volunteer’s arm in Seattle on March 16, 2020,” according to Afeyan.

So then whose idea was it to do the cancer component? NIH? NIAD? BARDA? Moderna on it's lonesome?

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