Winning the fight

Despite hostility toward immigrants from this region in many Western countries, gifted migrant scientists are in the vanguard of the battle against Covid-19 which has infected more than 66 million people and killed 1.5 million as it spread across the globe. 

Furthermore, the breakthrough has been made by a couple of Turkish background and a businessman from Greece whose homelands have been at daggers drawn for centuries. 

British regulators have become the first to authorise for emergency use the covid vaccine developed by the German firm BioNTech and financed and distributed by the US multinational Pfizer. 

Bahrain became the second to approve deployment of the vaccine. Bahrain had already granted emergency-use authorisation for a Chinese vaccine made by Sinopharm and has inoculated some 6,000 people with it. That vaccine, an “inactivated” injection made by growing the virus in a lab and killing it, has been is being deployed in the UAE. Claimed to be 95 per cent effective, the BioNTec-Pfizer vaccine, due to be authorised in the US in coming weeks, was created by the small German firm headed by Ugur Sahin. 

BioNTech says it has already secured contracts to supply 570 million doses globally next year, about half it hopes to provide in 2021. 

The vaccine is based on a newly developed “messenger RNA” technology which stimulates anti-bodies to resist infection. Mainz-based BioNTech, which specialises in research for individual cancer immunotherapy and immunology, was founded in 2008 by Sahin, 55, and his wife Oslem Tireci, 53. 

Both are scientists of Turkish origin. 

He was born in Iskanderun in 1965 and moved to Turkey with his parents when he was 4 while his wife is German born. Sahin’s father worked in a Ford factory in Cologne where the boy received a solid scientific education and earned his medical degree and doctorate at the University of Cologne. 

He taught there before taking up professorships at Saarland University, Zurich University Hospital, and Mainz University Medical Centre. Ozlem Tureci is the daughter of a Turkish doctor who immigrated from Istanbul to Lastrup in Lower Saxony, where she earned her medical degree at Saarland University. 

She is BioNTech’s chief medical officer. Until covid made them stars on the world stage, the couple lived quietly with their teenage daughter in a modest flat in Mainz and commuted to work on bicycles although. Before covid, they were among the 100 richest Germans with a fortune of $5 billion (Dhs1.8 trillion). 

They will join the 500 world’s wealthiest due to the vaccine. An article which appeared in January in the British medical journal “The Lancet” alerted the couple to an unidentified illness emerging in Wuhan in China. 

They soon realised that the disease had the potential to become a worldwide pandemic and devoted 800 of their firms’ 1,800 employees to developing a vaccine. Since BioNTech was at that time working on a flu vaccine with Pfizer, the firms agreed to collaborate. BioNTech, located on a street called Gold Mine in German, is now valued at $29b (Dhs106b) and its founders are likely candidates for a Nobel Prize in 2021. 

The story of this Turkish-German power couple may compel nativist Germans to revise hostile views of descendants of “guestworkers” who travelled to Germany for employment, largely in low paying jobs, and stayed on. Without them, the couple’s energy and expertise, the world might not have the first vaccine which has given people hope that the pandemic can be controlled and ultimately defeated. 
“Lightspeed” was the name given to the project to create a vaccine to protect against coronavirus. Vaccines usually require a decade to develop but as the world was in the grip of the deadly and debilitating virus, experts argued it could take a year to 18 months. 
On Nov.18, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed the vaccine was 94 per cent effective in adults, is administered in two doses a month apart, and has only mild side effects in some recipients. 

The achievement was publicised by Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla, 59, a Greek veterinarian from Thessaloniki who studied at Artistotle University in that city. 

He joined Pfizer in 1993 where he served as technical director for the firm’s animal health division in Greece before moving up the ladder of the company’s administrators and executives to the top job. 

There is no contract for the vaccine between BioNTech and Pfizer: the Turkish-German scientists and the Greek executive enjoy complete trust. A fourth key figure in the vaccine story is Moncef Slaoui, 61, who is of Moroccan parentage and might have been excluded from the US by migrant bans. 

It is significant that the anti-Muslim Trump administration has put him in charge of “Warp Speed,” the operation for the distribution of covid vaccines to the people of that vast country. 
In last Sunday’s interview with CNN, he said it is not known how long any of the vaccines will protect those who have been inoculated but he believed that the body’s immune mechanism would be primed to act if a vaccinated person is exposed for some months and perhaps longer. 

He could not say if a vaccinated person could be infectious. The British AstraZenica vaccine appears to prevent transmission. 

A major drawback of the BioNTech vaccine is that it must be stored and transported at 70 degrees Celsius below zero. Pfizer has prepared special shipping containers for the transport of the vaccine at the required temperature but once they reach their destinations there could be storage problems and difficulties reaching vulnerable populations, including in the US itself. 

One of the most populous countries on the globe, Indonesia has said it cannot access the vaccine due to the need for deep cold storage. European Union member, Cyprus, where I live, expects to receive 48,000 doses, enough for two injections for 24,000 people, in coming weeks if the vaccine is approved by European authorities and has ordered fridges capable of reaching this temperature. Cyprus has ordered a total of 400,000 doses for delivery by mid-2021. 

The second US vaccine produced by Boston-based Moderna, is similar in properties to the BioNtech vaccine, but requires cooling to only 20 degrees Celsius, the temperature in common fridges.

The Oxford-based British pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, which uses another novel vaccine based on a modified form of the cold virus, has to be kept at only 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, easing distribution problems. Russia has already begun inoculating its population with a similar vaccine. 

The drive to save the world from covid is on. Vaccines usually require a decade to develop but as the world was in the grip of the deadly and debilitating virus, experts argued it could take a year to 18 months.