Complete nonsense. Pfizer financed everything but the research was from a German-Turkish couple. Pushing Pfizer made no sense as they did not do the research and development. Scientists who do research cannot be pushed. They do research and they find what they find when they find it. They cannot work "more quickly".
These are the people who invented the vaccine:
In a record time of barely ten months, BioNTech developed a vaccine against the corona virus together with the American Pfizer. While Pfizer largely funded the search, the breakthrough technology comes from BioNTech - a German company founded by children of Turkish immigrants.
In January, Ugur Sahin (55), professor of oncology and CEO of BioNTech, saw an article from the renowned scientific magazine The Lancet. In Wuhan, China, a new corona virus had an ugly house. While there was far from being a pandemic, the researcher correctly estimated the risk of global spread.
With his company BioNTech - which he had founded in 2008 with his wife Özlem Türeci (53) - he researched cancer drugs, but together with his wife he immediately decided to shift the focus to the search for a vaccine. Their groundbreaking technology could also be used for this, they thought. This was what the world would need. And whether they were right.
Cancer treatments
As a four-year-old boy, Ugur Sahin came to Germany with his parents. While growing up in Cologne, his father worked in a Ford factory. Sahin later went to study medicine. In a hospital in Homburg he specialized in cancer treatment. There he met his wife, physician and immunologist Özlem Türeci. She was born in Germany as the daughter of a Turkish doctor.
It was this couple's fascination with cutting-edge new cancer treatments that would make them so successful - eventually resulting in a corona vaccine.
In 2016 they sold their first pharmaceutical company, Ganymed, for 1.4 billion euros to the Japanese Astellas. With BioNTech, based in Mainz, they had already started to develop a wider range of cancer treatments.
"Lichtgeschwindigkeit"
But when corona broke out, Professor Sahin gathered his team and told them that BioNTech shifted its focus to the virus. “We have to find something. It's our job, ”he said. Leave was canceled and a team of 40 employees was deployed on the project that was named "Lichtgeschwindigkeit" - it would be necessary to work at the speed of light.
After many trials with candidate vaccines, the substance called BNT162b2 came out on top with an efficacy of more than 90 percent.
State-of-the-art technology
The company used the ultramodern mRNA technique for this. “Based on the genetic code of Covid-19, which was put online by Chinese researchers on January 10, a piece of genetic material has been created that is injected into humans. The body then produces a protein and then antibodies against the virus. When confronted with corona, the antibodies anchor on all protrusions of Covid-19.
Rich
Thanks to their business successes, Sahin and Türeci have risen to the 100 richest Germans with an estimated fortune of 2.4 billion euros. But the couple has always remained humble. Sahin still teaches at the University of Mainz and goes to meetings by bicycle. “He is humble and modest. Outward appearance means nothing to him. He wants to create the structures that allow him to realize his dreams, which is where his ambitions are far from modest, ”Matthias Theobald, a colleague from the University of Mainz, told Reuters.
While Sahin and Türeci continue to build on their dream, they change the world.
