S8 Ep493: Gregory Zuckerman highlights Moderna's desperate struggle for funding and manufacturing equipment, which was finally resolved by a massive Wall Street investment during the pandemic's peak. 5
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.7 | Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:11.2 | Gregory Zuckerman, a shot to save the world. |
| 0:14.5 | His new book, The Inside Story of the Life or Death Race for COVID-19 vaccine. |
| 0:18.9 | The story so far, the world is slowly, slowly registering that something terrible has happened. |
| 0:27.8 | They don't know where, they don't know when, but they know it's coming. |
| 0:32.0 | What is to be done? |
| 0:33.3 | We know it now is COVID-19. |
| 0:35.1 | All that identification was slowly over the weeks in late December, |
| 0:40.8 | 19, early January, early February 20. The pursuers of the solution are not one group. They're not |
| 0:50.8 | talking to each other. They're in direct competition in the marketplace. |
| 0:55.8 | Moderna, a small company relative to the drug giants. J&J gets involved, a giant company, |
| 1:04.8 | a bio-and-tech, a little company in Germany, is attached now to Pfizer, a great big American company, and Novavax, along with |
| 1:14.1 | Oxford University, the Jenner Institute that teams up with AstraZeneca. |
| 1:20.9 | You need two parts here. |
| 1:22.2 | You need the research and you need the manufacturing. |
| 1:25.0 | You've got to get them all organized. |
| 1:26.9 | And that is impossible to do in less than a year and a half, less than five years. |
| 1:32.2 | Making vaccines is extremely arduous, very expensive, and you can miss. |
| 1:37.4 | So what happens to get them all moving in the same direction? |
| 1:41.4 | Competition, the marketplace, and cash. |
| 1:46.2 | Gregory, we begin with March 2nd at the White House. Always love scenes, giant opera scenes that you introduce in your |
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