The Pfizer vaccine was developed not by Pfizer but by a German company called BioNTech. There is an amazing story behind BioNTech, which was founded by a married couple, both of whom are children of Turkish immigrants to Germany. Thanks to the success of their vaccine, they are now billionaires but they don’t own a car. They are the kind of people that Trump’s strict bans on immigration would keep out of our country. The Washington Post profiled the couple.
BERLIN — At 8 p.m. Sunday evening, the phone rang with the call Ugur Sahin, chief executive of the German medical start-up BioNTech, had been anxiously awaiting. “Are you sitting down?” Pfizer chief Albert Bourla asked him.
The news that followed was better than Sahin had hoped: Preliminary analysis from Phase 3 trials of his company’s coronavirus vaccine showed 90 percent protection.
“I was more than excited,” said Sahin, speaking to The Washington Post on a video call from his home in the western German city of Mainz.
The interim results put the 55-year-old and his co-founder wife, Ozlem Tureci, in the front of the pack racing for a safe and effective vaccine. Global markets rallied, and stock soared for BioNTech — a small-by-pharma-industry-standards company that has yet to see a vaccine using its technology brought to market. For the corona-weary masses, it was a much-needed glimpse of a potential end in sight...
The husband-and-wife team behind one of the world’s top coronavirus vaccine candidates are the sort of people who don’t own a car and who took the morning off for their wedding day in 2002 before returning to the lab. Half a day was “sufficient,” Tureci explained.
Sahin and Tureci, both children of Turkish immigrants to Germany, met while working on an oncology ward in the southwestern city of Homburg. They found they shared an interest in getting the body’s immune system to fight cancer. Sahin was born in the Mediterranean city of Iskenderun and moved to Germany when he was 4. His father was a “Gastarbeiter,” or guest worker, at a Ford factory in Cologne.
Tureci’s family moved to Germany from Turkey before she was born, after her father finished medical school. “He schlepped me everywhere when I was young,” she said, “to the hospital and to see patients and such.” In her studies, Tureci was surprised by the gap between advances in medical technology and what was available to doctors and patients. She and Sahin decided the best way to close that gap was to launch their own company.
Founded in 2008, BioNTech’s work focused primarily on cancer vaccines using what is known as messenger RNA technology. While traditional vaccines require labor-intensive production of viral proteins, mRNA vaccines deploy a piece of genetic code that instructs a person’s immune system to produce the proteins itself.
Sahin said he hadn’t closely followed the science of the novel coronavirus spreading in China, but on Jan. 24 he received a scientific paper that rang alarm bells. It described both serious cases and an asymptomatic carrier. He Googled “Wuhan” and saw it was a well-connected megacity with an international airport.
“That’s the full pattern you need for a pandemic virus,” he said. It took a few days to talk others at the company into putting their resources behind a coronavirus vaccine, he said, as some experts were still dismissing the potential for a pandemic as hype. “In a company, it’s a matter of convincing people that they need to install a lot of energy,” he said. Energy is something Sahin exudes as he talks excitedly about the vaccine’s prospects.
It was a “snowball effect,” Tureci said. “He was very convincing that this kind of pandemic could develop.”
Within four weeks, the first wave of the epidemic in Europe was in full swing, and BioNTech had 20 vaccine candidates as part of what it dubbed project “Lightspeed” (no connection to the U.S. government’s “Operation Warp Speed”). With a team of more than 1,000 people in Mainz working “24-7,” Sahin said, the company narrowed its most promising candidates down to four. But it didn’t have the resources to conduct large-scale clinical trials or the production and distribution that would be necessary.
BioNTech approached Pfizer, with whom they had an existing relationship, working on influenza vaccines.
“The answer came immediately and was a yes,” said Tureci. In April, Pfizer invested an initial $185 million toward the vaccine development and said it would release up to $563 million more based on milestones in the development.
When the interim Phase 3 results came in, Tureci said, they took her by surprise. “As a scientist, I’m very cautious and tend to be a bit pessimistic,” she said.
Sahin said the news was “extremely relieving.” The United States had already ordered 100 million doses, with an option for 500 million more. The European Union on Wednesday agreed on an order for an initial 200 million. Amid the whirlwind of publicity, tweets from President Trump have brought some bemusement. “Complete nonsense” is how Sahin describes the accusation that the companies sat on the results until after the election. And as for Trump’s claims of credit: “I’m not sure where the U.S. government would have had input in this,” Tureci said...
Sahin and Tureci are now a billionaire couple, numbering among the 100 richest Germans, according to the German paper Welt am Sonntag. Sahin said he can’t avoid watching the stock price go up — “but it doesn’t really matter that much.” He’s more concerned about getting his first product to the market. “I don’t have a car. I’m not going to buy a plane,” said Sahin, who cycles to work every day. “What’s life-changing is to be able to impact something in the medical field.”
I’ve already shared this story on social media. Immigrants in the US are about 13% of the population, but they make up about 18% of small business owners. The Chinese have established their own network of banks that help small business owners get funding to start. Often immigrants are unable to borrow from regular banks. Our country was built by immigrants. Immigrants are a net plus for the economy, not the economic drain that the right wing claims they are.
One of the reasons that quality public education is so important is that nobody knows who will have the next big idea. All students need a strong foundation to pursue their talents and interests. The next big idea should not be reserved for the children of the wealthy that are the only people that can afford a superior education. In a democratic country we should not accept establishment of separate and unequal schools that establish a tiered level of quality. To some degree our public schools funded by property taxes are already unequal. We must work to establish greater equity in our schools so that all students attend well resourced, safe schools that provide lots of opportunities for students regardless of socioeconomic status or ethnicity.
You are absolutely correct. Sociology long ago has suggested that the portion of society that moves gives us a greater part of our ideas and advancements. Educational equity assures our country that we might benefit to the fullest extent from what these adventuresome souls have to offer.
As a denizen of a rural area that saw 150 years of out-migration between 1830 and 1980, I have seen the effect of out-migration on public institutions more than I have seen the effect of in-migration, even though the majority of my life has been spent during a time of population increase due to in-migration. Public perception of education expenditure is still colored by the local experience of seeing well educated people get a good education and then leave the area. Why do we want to give these kids a good education if all they are going to do is leave?
This is why much of the funding for education needs to be national and state level. Areas where the unsuccessful live become mired in pessimism if opportunity for learning becomes taken away by lack of funding.
You are not going to find this in the mainstream news, but I have sources that tell me that the Pfizer vaccine is producing silent urination in those to who in is administered.
Must be the silent P.
Sorry, I could not resist.
Now for a more somber observation.
Aside from the fact that the story is about an immigrant as a contributor to this scientific advance, it is also about the growing tendency we have to loo to science for the solution to all our problems. When the great flu pandemic was in full swing, much of the world found itself at the edge of science. Medicine had just barely become the idea it is now, with studied research being published and made available to practitioners. The pandemic that killed over a half a million Americans caused medical science to examine itself.
Today, we find ourselves a century older, but no wiser in many ways. Our trust in science is not shared by a skeptical public. Their skepticism is often justified by scientific blunders and coverups in the past, but more often the result of charlatans who try to exploit the needed natural skepticism of the people in order to plant seeds of doubt that increase their own power or monetary success. We have gone from a country which almost universally celebrated the Salk vaccine for Polio to a country that is edging toward acceptance of a vaccine that might save a lot of lives if produced and administered in a timely fashion.
Perhaps we should be wary. Science and technology are not gods. Still, our faith in authority must exist for a civilized society to take over from barbarism. We should have faith in the truth of a statement that comes from a knowledgeable person, and that person should be judged as authoritative based not on personality, but on the ability of others to duplicate research. We are in a cycle of skepticism based on the bare mention of questionable reality imposed in memes and tweets. This cannot but hurt society.
I predict that we will go through a period after the Covid either goes away or becomes less a problem during which our society will have to deal with many of these issues. My hope is that we can deal with them honestly, and without the rancor that has characterized the last 40 years. My fear is that we will be more torn asunder.
Here is what I don’t get: Pfizer is an American company. The COVID vaccine has been already given to people in the UK, not in the US. The distance between the two countries is, what, three thousand miles? But you can say, the vaccine is manufactured in Brussels, Belgium, which is only a few hundred miles from the UK. But other UN countries have been getting none of it yet, though Belgium is a member of the UN while the UK is not.
Since the vaccine is about saving people’s lives, is there an explanation that addresses this purpose of the vaccine?
I add that Germany is not distributing the vaccine either, though it was jointly developed on their soil.
Would Pfizer be better described as a multinational? I am asking, not arguing?
YES. How do I know?
A current US legal officer for Pfizer worked part-time for me as an undergraduate, decades ago. As an undergraduate she also earned the highest honors in French and worked free-lance as a graphic designer.
After graduation, she joined the Peace Corps (Niger), then completed a law degree. She first practiced law for clients in major industries regarding the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, energy, and consumer products
She is now based in the USA as Regional Compliance Director, Science, Medicines, Manufacturing at Pfizer. She is a member of Pfizer’s Global Investigations group, previously responsible for Pfizer’s investigations in Asia.
How do any of this (like multinational) explain any of the stuff I described?
I am no authority. I just figured the multinational might behave differently from a company entirely located in one country. I would assume the motivation for a corporation would be a combination of the monetary and the idea of consumer relations, which might be described as long-term monetary.
Mate Just speculating from what I have heard so far: In distribution, good scientific products become business products.
Hence, and as I understand it, the vaccine went to WHOEVER ordered it early . . . Trump didn’t get in on it back in the summer.
BTW, George Schultz turns 100 this month. He wrote a nice op ed which has to do with TRUST:
https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=597c3073ade4e26514d23e47&s=5fd602819d2fda0efb875b70&linknum=4&linktot=80
CBK
“…..though Belgium is a member of the UN while the UK is not.”
The UK is a member of the UN since 1945. Or did you mean the EU? The UK is Brexiting the EU.
Oops, I meant EU. And I meant EU everywhere in my messages.
When Salk developed the first polio vaccine, he did not even pursue a patent.
Because of price, some of these vaccines are going to be out of reach for people in the poorer countries.
I congratulate the developers of the vaccines, but question the idea that someone — anyone — should be becoming a billionaire off the research that went into the development especially in cases where the research was funded evenly partly with public dollars.
And even if the research specific to the covid vaccine might not have used public dollars, much of the mRNA research of the past (upon which the vaccine is based) HAS been funded with public dollars.
It’s well known that the US government supported at least the testing.
Whether the public funding came from the US government or another government is irrelevant.
The German government contributed about $450 million to the development of the BioNTech vaccine.
That’s public funding any way you look at it.
We shall see what they choose to charge for the vaccine. That will tell us all we need to know about their motivations.
BUT TRUMP CANNOT CLAIM CREDIT FOR THE PFIZER VACCINE. IT OWES NOTHING TO WARP SPEED.
ALL INTENSIVE RESEARCH REQUIRES GOVERNMENT FUNDING.
Agreed.
Medical breakthroughs are rarely the exclusive result of the work of specific individuals and treating them as if they were completely distorts the picture with regard to “credit” for developments.
And the idea that publicly funded research can be patented by companies who then charge what they please for badly needed medicine is just a grotesque abuse of the patent system.
Not incidentally, the fact that more than one company has developed a vaccine based on mRNA technology tells you that it is not a breakthrough specific to just two individuals. Some might even say it was obvious to those skilled in the art which would preclude the award of a patent, at least under the US Patent system.
The best way to avoid the issue of who owns the rights is simply to fund scientists at our own national labs (who could certainly have performed the requisite research) and cut out the money grubbing companies like Pfizer entirely.
If multinational corporations won’t develop vaccines without a huge ROI, that’s fine. We the public can do it ourselves.
But we have to have a Congress and a President willing to provide necessary funding to NIH when special need arises.
Patents are big issue. Poor countries often cannot do their own research because some US universities own the patent for a resource, like a particular bacterium or chemical. Though the resource was developed from public funds usually, like an NIH or NSF grant or the university itself is a public university.
Patents are also used by big companies to ruin small ones by patenting stuff that shouldn’t be patented but with lawyers you can achieve this. I have a colleague whose company got destroyed by MS this way.
I have never heard an acceptable argument for patents.
I’m not opposed to patents entirely, but there is a lot of abuse of the system (eg, by patent trolls like Microsoft) and by companies that patent living organisms, genes and other things that should never have been awarded patents and through award of patents to individuals for publicly funded research.
The USPTO has done a very poor job in recent years, probably because they are understaffed for the sheer number of applications.
Also, USPTO has awarded software patents for mathematical algorithms, even though they are supposed to be excluded entirely.
Mate LEGITIMATE patents are how creative people, working unfunded in many cases for years, can partake of the capitalistic monetary system they live in. Leave it to power-mongers in corporations to abuse them. CBK
Nah, it’s not just corporations. Researchers at public universities get patents all the time. And they are publicly funded.
If you wish to take part in the capitalist system, do not work at a public university—or any educational system. The chance for corruption is extremely high, almost inevitable.
Germany also provides free schooling (including university at public universities), and Mr Sahin was educated within the public system inGermany (getting MD degree at University of Cologne) and is currently a professor at University of Mainz, also a public university . So he is also the recipient of public funding in that regard.
One could also make the same argument about American billionaires who were educated at public schools, by the way.
Not saying it is true in Sahin’s case, but if the joke were not at our expense, the “I did it all myself so I deserve all the credit and money” attitude that many billionaires have is just laughable.
The most obvious example is Jeff Bezos, whose entire business iand fortune s based on publicly funded technology (internet) and infrastructure (roads to deliver his goods). Yet Bezos balks at paying his workers a living wage and at paying taxes.
SomeDAM BEZOS and his employees: How quick we are able to abstract ourselves from reality and fly away to Planet Mine. CBK
It’s not just that. Ivy league schools get more public funding than other universities through research grants and such. If they didn’t get those funds, top researchers would not go there and then the quality of those schools wouldn’t be so great, and hence billionaires or tobe billionaires would be educated elsewhere.
To tell you the truth, that’s how it should be: I do not understand why private universities should get public funding.
You are right.
For example, Harvard gets over $500 million a year in federal grants and several other private universities (some , like Harvard, with tens of billions in endowment) also get several hundred million per year.
And I agree, the private universities should not get public funds.
If the funds were given to the public universities instead, they could afford to pay their faculty more, which would tend to attract even the big grant winners (Nobel prize winners , for example) away from the private universities.
And the whole argument that the grants are made to individuals, not universities is actually flawed, at any rate, because any money that a researcher gets is money that the private university will not have to spend on salary, equipment, etc freeing up the money for other use.
Whatever equipment I bought from grants in the past, they all ended up being owned by the university. That ws the rule. I could keep the books but not, for example, computers.
It’s actually a vicious cycle because many of the private Universities achieved their current reputations at public expense, which makes them more attractive to private donors, which means they have even more money to buy faculty and infrastructure, which makes them even more highly ranked, etc.
And of course, then people draw the conclusion that the private education system is better.
There is absolutely no reason to separate higher and “lower” ed in this respect, btw.
Love the new pic, Mate? How are you feeling these days? Recovery going well?
Thx, I feel good. That’s an older pic, Bob. I look more cheerful nowadays, and I haven’t had beard for two years.
Very please to hear this. Thanks.
That isn’t supposed to be a question mark. The new pic is great. I look at it and see an extremely intelligent man with a twinkle in his eye.
I thought the only “equipment” mathematicians needed was chalk.
Albeit special chalk that ensures that you write only correct proofs.
So, are you saying they kept your chalk?
How could you write correct proofs without it?
When I was taking math in college, I could not write correct proofs even with special chalk.
So I guess you have to be at a certain threshold level before the benefit of the chalk kicks in.
Chalk belongs to all the people.
No one should be able to take it away from you.
I guess the chalk is supposed to ensure only that you write correct theorems, not proofs.
I haven’ used chalk for years. But we do our experiments on computer nowadays. Gauss and Euler filled note books with their calculations, we fill files and write some programs. Also, we write our papers and books on the computer. Since many universities drag their feet to give us computers (usually we get those which were used by admins for a few years), we either pay for them from our own pocket or use grants.
I also used my office computer to make free software available (like Linux) and administered mailing lists for free software developers.
But that’s neither here nor there for me,cuz I can’t write either.
Chalk one up to chalk
Chalk will never let you down
Chalk will never crash
Chalk will never make you frown
Like Princeton’s Johnny Nash
Chalk will never let you write
A theorem that is false
Chalk will show you what is right
While Windows simply falls
We use markers now. Insanely expensive because they last only a single lecture, but I think white board with markers are better than black boards, especially when it comes to colors and drawing pictures. . Chalks are romantic, no doubt, and they won’t let you down.
The extraordinarily repugnant Trump and his Propaganda Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller have NO FREAKING CLUE what the American Dream is about. And they both should be indicted by the International Criminal Court for Crimes against Humanity and remanded to, by the Biden Administration, for trial.
cx: to it; dropped a word in the editing
Throughout the Trump administration, our Liar in Chief has repeated, over and over, the complete lie that immigrants take American jobs. That’s red meat for his ignorant, extremely base base. But as the Brookings Institution and Forbes have reported many times and at length, there is a lot of economic research showing that precisely the opposite is the case, for two reasons: immigrants create businesses much more often than do nonimmigrants, and they hire both other immigrants and American citizens, and immigrants, like everyone else, use services and consume goods and so create demand, which creates jobs. DUH. Economists know this. Even the ones who work for Jabba the Trump know this. Trump probably knows it. But it doesn’t fit the fascist narrative.
As Stephen Miller’s own uncle has pointed out in poignant interviews, Miller’s own family wouldn’t have been let in under the rules Miller has pushed for, and Miller wouldn’t be where he is, at the vanguard of White Supremacy in the Trump Whiter House.
It is now up to President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris to restore the American Dream for immigrants coming here without wealth, without advanced education, but with a fervent desire to put their shoulders to the wheel and make something for their children. This is what America is supposed to be about. Trump, Miller, and their vile ilk are CLUELESS about this.
The American Dream
If you already have a million, you can become a multimillionaire.
And if you don’t already have a million, all is not lost. You can still become a millionaire by becoming a public “servant”.
Yes. That’s the latest product release. Now with new scrubbing bubbles! (for scrubbing away history and unpleasant contemporary facts)
Or winning the lottery.
Ofc, scapegoating immigrants and minority groups has always been a big play for wannabe fascist autocrats, right up their with Making [name the country] Great Again–the nationalist appeal to a mythical golden age.
Trump knows no history. Miller does. He has the traditional fascist playbook down cold. Very, very cold. Pathologically, psychotically, psychopathically cold.
I read this somewhere.
2/3 of Trumps wives were immigrants….Proving once again that we need immigrants to do jobs most American’s wouldn’t do.
James Polk
That president put you into moderation!
With that kind of wealth growth, Sahin will soon discover that he will have to cycle to work with a squad of bodyguards.
Here is another immigrant story related to COVID. This is a Hungarian immigrant.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/12/15/katalin-karik-biontech-senior-vice-president-mrna-cpt-vpx.cnn
I’ve noticed over decades that the strong work ethic practiced by new immigrants and migrants is exceptional, particularly in the produce harvesting sector. It’s hump-busting hard work that almost all second or third (and so forth) generation Canadians won’t tolerate for themselves, myself included.
Every time I observe them I feel a bit guilty, since, considering it from purely a human(e) level, I see not why they should have to toil so for minimal pay and not also I?
I can truly imagine such labourers being fifty to a hundred percent more productive than their born-and-reared-here Canadian counterparts.
To be clear, however, I’m not implying that a strong work ethic is a trait racially genetically inherited by one generation from a preceding generation, etcetera. Rather, it’s an admirable culturally determined factor, though also in large part motivated by the said culture’s internal and surrounding economic and political conditions.
I have also found that Western ‘values’ assimilation often means the unfortunate acquisition of a distasteful yet strong sense of entitlement.
Not to be misunderstood, I don’t favour importing very-low-wage labour from abroad while residents here remain unemployed, something I see as an unethical yet government-sanctioned business practise. Still, I too often hear similar complaints that are actually based on thinly veiled bigotry.
As for temporary foreign workers, I believe that once they’ve resided here for a number of decades, their strong work ethics and above-average productivity gradually diminishes as these motivated labourers’ descendant generations’ young people become accustomed to the relatively slackened Western way of life.
One can already witness this effect in such youth getting caught up in much of our overall urban/suburban liberal culture—e.g. attire, lingo, nightlife, as well as work.
(Frank Sterle Jr.)