of the Coronavirus grow. Meg Tirrell, has some breaking news

from the CDC. Meg?

Hey, Wilf, well the CDC has confirmed the first patient in

the US diagnosed with this novel Coronavirus, a man in Washington

state who recently returned from Wuhan, China where this outbreak

has been going on since last month.

The piece that I think really worries me a lot is that he was

already everywhere that that the death rate was going up, you

know, very drastically very steeply in January in China

Investors trying to figure out just how this virus will disrupt

travel, to what extent and if it will also result in Chinese

consumers pulling back from making purchases.

I don't think any one of us knew what it would at the end do. We

will begin in China the latest on the Coronavirus, where the

total number of confirmed cases worldwide is now exceeding

60,000.

It was alarming to understand or to feel at least that we were in

this alone for so long.

Biotech company Moderna stock soaring this week on news that

delivered the first batch of its potential vaccine,

We say look, it's a good opportunity to try to help and

try to see how fast we can grow

Pfizer and Moderna were in this and they were both driving

really hard toward a goal that had never been accomplished

before.

It's nice to have people following your footsteps. It's

uncomfortable to have people following your footsteps

You can't be concerned about what others are doing.

The US death toll now stands at 14.

There's the circuit breaker 2549 48 and the bell. So we'll wait

here.

We calculated that we could come up within a few weeks with a

number of vaccine candidates.

Frankly, I didn't know that it would work until the last last

moment until November 8

breaking news from Pfizer this morning about its vaccine and a

90%. efficacy

What we're doing isn't playing in a sandbox trying to

demonstrate our technology, we're developing the vaccine

that's going to stop the pandemic

When you are forced to do something because failure is not

an option. You find solutions.

This is D-day. This is the turning point when we really

fight back against Covid.

As everybody's rooting both of these companies on, it's also

this fascinating dynamic of a David versus Goliath trying to

save the world.

So I was actually in France, it was just between Christmas 2019.

And, and New Year. And I was reading the Journal like every

morning, and I read about the new infectious disease agents

pneumonia like symptom in China. And they didn't know what it

was.

I remember waking up the first week of January, it was really

cold. I get up really early, but it's dark in in New England. And

I was sitting by our gas fireplace with a cup of coffee

at like 430 in the morning. And Stefan had sent like four emails

over the course of an hour.

I received an email from our CEO, Stefan, who had been

exchanging emails with Barney Graham at the vaccine research

center part of nyad

literally double click on my own button on my iPad. And I sent an

email to my team to say Hey, what is this

in classics different way it was like one liner emails, it was

like, we should pay attention to this. There's something

happening here and then forwarding links or forwarding

texts that he'd gotten from friends.

I was in Los Angeles at the end of January, I didn't feel

comfortable, to be honest. I mean, even traveling, you know,

they will then news that the virus was also appearing in

other places. And shortly thereafter, I'm in my, my

husband and I we really were like hermits in our apartment,

we wouldn't go out anymore. No in stores or anything other than

walking the dog.

The big aha moment was I was traveling in Europe. And I was

in my home country to speak to global economic forum, the

Delphi Economic Forum. That's a very big deal for Greece. And

they arrived two days before the conference so that they can

attend it in person, the prime minister was going to attend.

And then the day before I am receiving a note, it's canceled,

the forum is cancelled. That has never happened before.

It was in January on January 24. As well, I was just back from

the United States. And it was a Friday evening. And I was

reading a Lancet paper, which was the first publication

describing this outbreak in China

I only started to pay attention after, Uğur Şahin, my husband

came up with a Lancet publication. I did a number of

calculations, fast calculations and realized that that this

virus had already spread worldwide and it was clear that

it is already too late to stop the disease and that we are most

likely running into into a global outbreak and pandemic.

The CDC now confirming one case of the coronavirus in the United

States. And the Dow taking a hit intraday on that news. Meg

Tirrell joins us now with more on this developing story. This

is fascinating.

Developing and developing very quickly as of this morning, we

were just hearing about mounting case numbers in China and other

nearby countries more than 300 there and six confirmed deaths

so far here

Waiting any minute for word from the World Health Organization

after it has convened an emergency committee meeting to

determine whether to declare this a public health emergency

of international concern. This would be just the sixth time

they have declared such an international health emergency

after declaring it about Ebola twice before h1n1 swine flu

Zika.

So CNBC started covering Covid, probably in late January. And by

then the companies were already starting to work on vaccines and

potential drugs for this. So by the time the world kind of woke

up to the thread of what was happening in China, these

companies were already working. And so that was a lot of our

early work was a just trying to decipher the news that was

coming out of China, but be already trying to triangulate

and figure out what the pharmaceutical industry was

doing. And as it happened, it was pretty early, but they were

already doing quite a lot.

At the time, when we believe it's an outbreak, we say look,

it's a good opportunity to try to help and try to see how fast

we can go. As we've always believed the amount it could go

really fast. But we never had a test case to to do it.

Moderna was not a small company. I mean, I had a multi billion

dollar market value when it went into this, but it had never

proved itself with a vaccine that had reached the market. It

was this very sort of cheeky, bold biotech that made a lot of

big statements about how this technology that most people knew

nothing about and called mRNA was going to change medicine

changed the world. We hadn't seen that proven out yet

Moderna Therapeutics, a biotech that uses your cells to develop

treatments for previously incurable diseases, and to speed

up the pharmaceutical development process. Moderna's

technology gives patients cells instructions to create proteins

and antibodies to fight diseases from diabetes to certain types

of cancer.

What we do is we basically make the messenger RNA injected into

you and your own ribosome is gonna make your own protein,

right. So you make your own drug.

Even early on talking with Stefan, he always seemed to

exude this certainty that they could do it, that if it could be

done with mRNA, that they were going to be able to do it.

The beauty of a technology is that we are able to develop a

lot of drugs in parallel, which is very atypical from biotech

companies.

And I remember meeting with him maybe five years ago, or even

longer at this business lunch in in New York City. And he brought

their investor deck to me to show me the slides of what the

possibilities of mRNA technology are. And he was just, you know,

scrolling through the pages showing me it'll treat this

disease, it can treat this disease, it can do vaccines, it

can do rare diseases, just showing me the scope of what was

possible. At the time, I was kind of like, okay, you know,

we'll see how this plays out. And that's how he is I mean, the

CEO of a company like that, which raised so much money

privately, he really had to prove to the world that they

could do this. And the pandemic gave him this chance,

If you know Stéphane, from the first email, things were

starting to turn. And so from the very first week of January,

through a series of emails that I'd received, but he sent them

to Hamilton, he sent them to our research team, central

manufacturing, even saying, hey, we've got to go get ready. And

he was also actually quickly interacting with the folks at

NIH and Barney Graham and his team. And so by the time we got

to the actual sequence of the virus, people had all been keyed

up, to be ready to take that sequence, turned it into a

vaccine and start manufacturing. If you think about it, that's

really in just the first 10 days of January.

We had previously worked on coronaviruses. We knew what this

might look like. So when this happened, we said if we know

what this viral pneumonia is, so probably take us a couple days

to figure out what that antigen looks like and we'll get it into

phase one. And if we can move very quickly into phase one,

best case the pandemic subsides, it turns out to be a seasonal

coronavirus and it disappears. But we've got a product into

phase one. We've demonstrated proof of concept. And we can put

the product on the shelf and if it re-emerges in the fall, and

it turns into a seasonal pathogen. We can pull it off the

shelf and we can go conduct that larger clinical study.

The sequence was published on January 11. Up until then,

nobody knew exactly what the virus was and certainly didn't

know what part of the virus we'd want to make a vaccine to. We

thought it was going to be a coronavirus. Everybody believed

that it was a Coronavirus, a spike protein was the right

thing to do. But we got that information and then NIH and

Moderna independently went off said Okay, so we're going to

design a vaccine. What would it be like? So they sent us a

sequence. I think it was probably that Tuesday after the

sequence was published on the 14th, it was the same work that

we had been looking at ourselves. It matched all of the

conversations we've had. And we got that information and

together said, well, let's go do this. Moderna get busy

manufacturing and NIH get busy planning for the phase one study

In our bubble. We were all focused on this. But when you

left work, and you went to see your friends, and you're talking

with your family, who really weren't paying attention to it,

and people seem to think, well, it's not in the US yet. So we'll

deal with it later. I think it was really eye opening for a lot

of people that our borders aren't going to keep out these

The funny story is, we had agreed in November of 2019, with

viruses.

Dr. Fauci team to do in the second quarter of 2020, pandemic

mock up. Together, where they were going to send us the

sequence of a virus by email, pretending they just sequence

that new virus, and we're going to make the mRNA GMP, I mean to

go to go into clinical testing. And then we're going to start

the clock wash, see how fast we could go and send it back to

them. And the reason in November, we decided not to do

it in January, is because they were too busy in Q1. So they

said can we do it in the spring. I'm like sure we'll do it in the

spring. And then of course we know the rest is history.

We have it totally under control. It's one person coming

in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be

just fine.

Earlier today, I spoke with Stéphane Bancel. He's the CEO of

Moderna Therapeutics. This is a company that we listed as a CNBC

Disruptor.

I know Stéphane.

He told me that they are working with the NIH right now to try

and develop a vaccine for this very issue.