The Messenger

Prologue

Disease X

IN EARLY JANUARY 2020, STÉPHANE BANCEL WAS VACATIONING near cool, dry Cannes, France, with his wife and two teenage daughters. For the forty-seven-year-old CEO of the biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., it was a much-needed break sandwiched between closing the books on a difficult 2019 and upcoming travel that he hoped would make 2020 a good year. First, he’d jet to a health care conference in San Francisco to court investors, then cross the ocean to Davos in the Swiss Alps for the annual gathering of the global business elite.

Bancel was preparing to tell investors about the massive ramp-up of his company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had promised, for a decade now, to deliver an entirely new way of making drugs by harnessing ...