The Messenger

16

Just the Beginning

AT THE SAME TIME BANCEL AND HOGE WERE FEELING HUMBLED by the virus and its emerging variants, in the fall of 2021, they took a more confident tone with investors. “We know now that mRNA from Moderna works,” Stéphane Bancel said confidently just after Labor Day, addressing analysts and investors. “For the last ten years we believed mRNA should work. Today we know.”

Bancel was supposed to be delivering his message at a New York hotel, at an “R&D Day” that would have been Moderna’s first in-person gathering with Wall Street since the start of the pandemic. Bancel was eager to reconnect face-to-face with this constituency that held so much influence over the company’s financial fortunes.¹

But the Delta variant scuttled that. ...