First of all, Stefan, thank you so much for taking the time.

You come highly recommended from the whole world,

and we are super excited to share your story with the Norwegian population.

Well, thank you so much for the invitation.

Stefan, how did you first hear about the pandemic?

So I first heard about a new virus in China between Christmas, 2019 and New Year.

Actually, through reading the newspaper, you know, I've been in infectious disease for 25 years.

And I've been part of a capital outbreak, like, you know like Ebola, of course, H1N1 flu out of Mexico,

if you recall.

And so I always keep a close eye on new outbreaks.

And there was a Wall Street Journal article that I read when I was actually in South of France on vacation

just a few days after Christmas, 2019, that said there were

new cases of pneumonia-like disease in Wuhan, China, but from a new pathogen agent.

And so I emailed the NIH, the team of Dr. Fauci, to ask them, do you know about this new

pathogen agent? And they said, no, we're

tracking it, but we don't know what it is. A few weeks after, we know it was coronavirus, where it was

not SARS or MERS. It was a new one. So we waited for January 10 when the Chinese put the genetic

sequence online. So what did you think then? So we thought it was an outbreak.

At that time, I thought it was going to be an outbreak like SARS or Merce.

So we want to develop a vaccine and we're working on one right away.

But to help the outbreak, it's only when I'm in Davos the week of January 20

that I realized that this was going to be a pandemic like 1918.

...