What is the Moderna boss hiding?
Does Stéphane Bancel, the boss of Moderna, have a secret? At least that’s what the rumors that are currently circulating on the internet suggest. BILD dares to try a fact check.
A missing Twitter account
The trigger for the current process is the fact that Bancel has apparently deleted his Twitter account in the past few days. He opened it in 2010 under the name @SBancel.
If you call up the page now, Twitter only reports an error message. A little more in-depth research shows that the account was actually deleted by the French – apparently probably on February 11, 2022. But even before that it was hardly ever used. Bancel’s last retweet is from April 2, 2019. The account was not verified (blue tick) by Twitter itself during the Corona crisis, but was last mentioned by the main Moderna account in November 2021.
Here the company pointed out that Bancel had received an award for its work on the corona vaccines.
Shares sold
So far, so harmless. However, the theory has now emerged on the Internet that there is a deeper reason for the deletion of the Twitter account. There have been rumors on forums that Pfizer might discredit Moderna with revelations regarding the mRNA technology in the two companies’ vaccines – and Bancel wants to save its fortunes from the ensuing crash.
The Moderna boss sold all his shares in the company in a cloak-and-dagger operation, closed his Twitter channel and is apparently preparing to withdraw.
Moderna has not yet commented on the events and BILD was not able to reach a spokesman for the pharmaceutical group over the weekend.
But maybe a look at the documents of the securities exchanges is enough to take a little pressure off the rumors: Because yes, according to the stock page, Bancel has Wallmine repeatedly sold shares in Moderna in the past six weeks.
In total, the manager has only sold around 114,000 shares in all of 2022 so far, and still owns over 7,000,000 shares in the company he heads. So since the beginning of January, Bancel has sold regarding 1.6 percent of its Moderna stock. A hasty curse from certain ruin looks different.
