Threading the needle

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2022 (1600 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s difficult to comprehend that COVID-19 has been with us for just over two years. In December 2019 and early January 2020, we began to feel tremors of a new virus that was causing significant concern in a Chinese city of which many had never heard. Most of us went on with our lives, thinking that this virus would behave like the swine flu of 2009 or the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak — minor blips that would fizzle out before a vaccine could ever come close to production.

But due to ingenuity, hyper-intelligence and luck, two German scientists knew that this new virus was different. Doctors Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin, married Turkish immigrants who would develop a leading edge biotech company called BioNTech, were the right people at the right time to ensure that millions of lives would be saved.

In The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic, author Joe Miller, the Financial Times correspondent in Frankfurt, captures the unfathomable miracle in real time that would eventually create the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine in less than a year. Tracing the scientists’ roots back to childhood and then to a courtship on a cancer ward in Germany, Miller creates a timeline of why and how BioNTech, and Tureci and Sahin, were the “secret sauce” for the development of a vaccine that has protected billions of people.

Originally a small pharmaceutical company devoted to finding cancer treatments based on mRNA technology, Tureci and Sahin were highly confident BioNTech’s genetic toolbox could be used to help create a desperately needed vaccine. In January 2020, Sahin did the math from their small apartment as he began to see reports out of Wuhan.

To his dismay, he knew we were in trouble. “I understood instantly that we were going to face two potential scenarios: either a very fast pandemic which kills millions within a couple of months, or a prolonged epidemic situation which will last for the next sixteen to eighteen months,” he says. As it has turned out, it was the latter; worse so, the virus was being transmitted by people who showed no symptoms. A perfect storm.

BioNTech set out immediately in January 2020 to begin to create a series of vaccines that might latch on to the now-famous crown-like protein of the coronavirus. Through existing but unproven mRNA technology and the backing of the billionaire oligarchy — a theme not critically analyzed by Miller to much extent — Tureci and Sahin assembled teams that worked around the clock to develop a lipid wrapper that would prevent the disintegration of the vaccine as it is exposed to the atmosphere. “For mRNA drugs to be viable, they needed to be shielded as they traveled through the body to find a cell,” they write.

Project Lightspeed, which was the name for the quest to find a vaccine, simultaneously had to ensure that it had the funding to keep the relatively small pharma afloat. Through last-minute deals with backers who scour medical journals for the next big thing — and an eventual deal with pharma giant Pfizer — BioNTech was able to create a viable product by March 27, 2020.

The problem, however, was that it needed to be tested. Due to the advanced technology that mRNA presented, Phase 1 and toxicology tests could be shortened. Furthermore, the BioNTech team was able to convince regulators in both Europe and the U.S. to speed up the process given the evidence produced through testing on rodents. By April 23, the first human volunteer received a jab from a BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, and by the end of May 2020 the vaccine was ready — a seemingly inconceivable task and one of the most significant scientific feats in human history.

And, famously, on December 8, 91-year-old Maggie Keenan of Great Britain was the first person to receive the vaccination. “Less than ten months after he and Ozlem discussed the possibility of developing an mRNA vaccine against an unnamed pathogen in China, their lead candidate had been found to be more than 90 percent effective at preventing disease,” Miller writes.

Since then, most Canadians who seek an end to the pandemic have had their jabs, have anxiously anticipated getting their kids to supersites and have encouraged their reluctant neighbours to get theirs. Vaccines are our way out of this pandemic, there is no doubt.

For Miller, whether overtly or not, the underlying story to the development of species-saving vaccines and cancer treatments is dependent on a billionaire class whose focus is to expand its fortunes. This tension is evident at every corner, as Tureci and Sahin, now billionaires themselves, had to navigate bloodthirsty capital at every step to avoid compromising the goal of Project Lightspeed — to save lives.

In the end, however, it was their relationship, integrity, intellect and unwavering dedication to humanity that propelled Project Lightspeed to success. According to Miller, and much like many of history’s turning points, it was “the character of Ugur and Ozlem” that changed the course of time. As he writes, “It is people, not papers, that really make the difference.”

Matt Henderson is assistant superintendent of Seven Oaks School Division.