https://jewishjournal.org/2021/04/22/israeli-who-led-moderna-vaccine-effort-explains-road-to-success/

As Zaks explained, even before COVID-19, Moderna had been working with mRNA as a possible tool against infectious diseases – including in a collaboration with the FDA.

“The platform could be relevant to a pandemic,” Zaks said, adding that Moderna and the FDA “talked back and forth in October, November, December [2019] about which virus we would pick, how to get funding, etc.”

In late 2019 and early 2020, Moderna learned about a mysterious virus in Wuhan, China.

“When we started to see the pandemic first emerge, it became clear this was not a dry run but a live fire,” he said. “We all had to muster up.”

The NIH gave Moderna the go-ahead to start a vaccine trial in early January. Yet Marion Gruber, a member of the FDA team, expressed doubt that a vaccine could be ready by the end of 2020, Zaks recalled.