"The platform was funded by private investors. The platform was not funded by the government," Bancel argued. "What the government did—and we're very grateful for it and I think they got a lot of value out of it—is to accelerate the development of a vaccine. We would have funded the vaccine, it would just have taken longer," he said. The company also "didn't get a penny" from the government to help with manufacturing, he added.
Amid the pandemic, Moderna received nearly $10 billion in federal funding to develop, test, and provide vaccine doses for the US population.