“Helps” is a funny term. Probably a) “has to as a last line of defense” or b) “can’t reasonably ask anyone else because it’s after hours etc” or c) it’s high conscientiousness.
This probably won’t fly over very well on hacker news but the academic literature on CEOs and their work ethic, even down to physiological changes in their blood/saliva related to cortisol, suggests they work hard in general and make many sacrifices.
Imagine if it wasn't a lab(with all the positive associations of doing science), and instead they were middle managers or accountants. That kind of behavior would be considered unhealthy.
How many lives were saved by going into the lab on their wedding night, as opposed to the next day?
If an accountant works for Pfizer, aren't they indirectly involved in saving lives too?
I'm not even criticizing the fact that they went into the lab on their wedding night. I'm criticizing how unhealthy behavior that may be called out in other contexts is viewed as not only healthy behavior but commendable behavior if the reader has positive associations with the specific acts of unhealthy behavior.
You have a point but for some people, the sacrifice might be better justified when done with a "higher" goal in mind, like making a scientific breakthrough. That goal might make things that people usually see as important, seem unimportant.
Of course, what justifies the sacrifice is a matter of perspective.
Profits represent investible assets that enable people like this to create startups. Without profits, and the possibility of getting them, this type of research stops.
It depends on the lab work. Particularly when dealing with long-running biology experiments, not keeping up with certain "maintenance" can ruin months of work. And if a researcher is going on a honeymoon, they likely need to do some last-minute preparation for their absence.
I feel like there’s a threshold for fame that needs to be met for giving credit in the English-language, mainstream media. A famous name like Stephen Hawking would get directly credited for a result. A less famous researcher’s result would get credited to their school (eg MIT). Outside of well known western names and institutions, the result would get credited to the country (eg China or Japan).
That’s my observation too. Whenever something is reported they try to attach a big name to the headline. Be it “Harvard”, “Elon Musk” or something else.
It seems this is another sign of inequality. The already famous get even more fame.
“eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous”
This might have something to do with national bias.
In Germany, where BioNTech is based, news articles (or rather: German-language articles) either mention BioNTech exclusively or cite them as the primary player in the BioNTech / Pfizer partnership.
> This might have something to do with national bias.
I would rather say nationalistic bias.
Because the fine German press never put a bombastic headlines like "Migrants invented Covid vaccine", or "Scientists of Turkish origin to save millions of German lives".
Somehow these facts are conveniently ignored, but when a person with migration heritage do something bad, it's vocally mentioned in all media, including the mainstream.
The opposite is true, the names of criminal migrants are usually suppressed in the media, for fear of riling up the right. The names of the BioNTech couple are everywhere, as ten seconds of research could have taught you.
The populist media is the same in every country: Migrant does something good, he's a local, pop the champagne to celebrate our nation's glorious achievement; migrant does something bad, he's <insert_foreign_nationality>, out with them foreigners.
Tribalism is still deeply rooted in our DNA and the media capitalizez on that since it gets them clicks on their articles.
Similar to the reason why most small biotechs don’t get credit when a big pharma company launches their drug - coming up with a drug candidate is critical and really hard, but it gets you about 1/3rd of the way to the market (at least as measured by dollars). Taking it through clinical trials, regulatory approval and manufacturing is a complex (and massively expensive) process that requires expertise typically only big pharma has (not to say smaller company don't roll their own, they do, but they are often slower and sometimes stumble).
And this is to not downplay BioNTech's role. Proving that your idea works in biotech takes some massive cohones. No doubt they took a ton of shit on their way to this point.
BioNTech is different from a small biotech that can only produce drug candidates. They have their own advanced manufacturing plant and can take it end to end. Their US branch, which my wife is a part of, has all the in-house expertise needed to take a cancer therapy or vaccine to market in the US, just like Moderna does.
If I’m not mistaken the reason for the partnership is the sheer size of the clinical trials needed (very different from cancer therapies) and the speed at which they need to be run due to the pandemic. Only big pharma can do that.
I didn't know they had manufacturing capabilities. Looking at their manufacturing page, they do have GMP manufacturing facilities, but it looks like they were built around their oncology pipeline, which would be customized for each patient and low volume (as you mentioned).
And unless I'm mistaken, they don't have any approved products on market? No doubt they have experts in house, but when you're racing to get a product to market, it can be very helpful having someone like Pfizer helping out who has successfully gotten 70+ products approved by the FDA (including several vaccines).
And interestingly, you'll even see these partnerships across big pharma. I worked for one company who was interested in bringing a gene therapy in house until we did our due diligence and realized holy shit, we know nothing about gene therapies. And this was a top 5 pharma company.
Unfortunately my wife leads a team coordinating R&D conversion to manufacturing so I have no idea what I can or cannot say that isn't on the website.
But from my perspective the regulatory process is a lot easier to navigate than the supply chain. Even if you get through all the trials, manufacturing a billion doses and distributing them across a supply chain is a special kind of hard that only companies like Pfizer can handle.
So while BioNTech doesn't need help bringing an oncology therapy to market (it just takes time because cancer is hard), it needs a company like Pfizer to actually get it to patients, both in phase 3 trials and after approvals.
FAZ (German press) portrays Ugur Sahin, BioNTech's founder and CEO, as kindof a nerd who doesn't like press conferences, sticks to facts, and rather spends his time in the lab.
For a particularly ridiculous example, see athletes in Northern Ireland; the British press often refer to them as British when they win, and Irish when they don't!
It’s called having a good PR firm, I’m pretty sure the press just write up the press releases. Certainly worked when a ship owned by one shipping company sank and Maersk got the blame in the press even though they were only chartering it.
Not really. It's on of the older streets in Mainz, and is named like this as far as I can think back (I'm 41). It might have to do something with "Rheingold", but I couldn't find an explanation for the name, and google is not helpful with so many articles about Biontech and the name of the street.
I wonder how the fact that this is a German company relates to people in the US always being told that they have to pay multiples of international drug prices so the US companies can do the research the rest of the world is not doing.
One of the costliest things a pharmaceutical company does in R&D stage is clinical trials and scaling later on... and that's the reason why Pfizer was sought out for this. Of coure kudos to these German scientists, but much kudos should also be given to Pfizer for their integral role to play it out to the last mile.
The reasoning I've heard (and I can't say I disagree with) is that if drug prices in the US weren't market driven, big pharma would have much smaller war chests to work with when it comes to R&D.
As in this case, where Pfizer specifically chose not to take any government support, supposedly because they wanted to avoid any bureaucratic delays.
The headquarter of their company is only 10 miles from my home, in a university town, full of young people. So blessed that maybe a part of the solution to this crisis comes from "my" region.
I was born in Mainz, and lived there for 30 years! Beautiful city, if anybody is in the area, come visit (but don't go to the "Ebsch Seit"=Wiesbaden :)
The university has a particle accelerator (MAMI), they do tours!
Is that a double-joke? Or whatever it is being called. Like seemingly a blow against Mainz but what do you see across the Rhine from Kastel? Mainz. there's your superior view ... maybe I'm overthinking it.
Mainz-Kastel is a district of Wiesbaden, right across from Mainz. As the name implies, it used to be a part of Mainz, but after WWII, the Rhine was a convenient border between the French and US occupied regions, so it was made a part of Wiesbaden. Culturally, Mainz-Kastel is very much Mainz though, sharing for example the tradition of "Fassenacht", Mainz Carnival.
So most people there feel like being Mainzer, and enjoy the beautiful view from across the river onto the Mainzer Schloss (Palace).
Huh, neat. My father is from Mainz, and I still have family there (I'm Canadian). I've been over many times, last time for my Oma's funeral. My Opa worked for the city for decades, helped with post-war reconstruction, I believe the title was Baudirektor at some point, not clear. When I was 19 I went over for the first time and over several days he took me through the whole core of the city, building by building telling me the history of what was there before the war, what was there now, things he was involved in, where he went to school, his grandparents, their parents, and so on. Made a huge impression on me.
Maybe Mainz will give credit to Sahin and put him as a puppet onto a carnival progression car come next Rosenmontag, though I guess the vaccine won't come in time for this year's carnival season starting tomorrow to be fun.
I can't quite tell, are you being sarcastic? If so, I'd just like to point out that there's nothing wrong with being proud of the place where you're from or of the accomplishments of the people of the community there.
Well spotted, and you're absolutely correct - I was being sarcastic, and to be so on this site took an awful lot of consideration, especially as I refuse to use '/s'.
Further regarding my 'point' (dig?), I would have responded the same had the poster said '...as a German I apologize for [obvious historical things]'.
The irony that the couple are immigrants added an extra dimension.
I also refuse to tag sarcasm. Your typical computer nerd tends to be also a bit high on the autism spectrum which correlates with difficulties at identifying irony and sarcasm - which explains the downvotes even for statements which are in line with the HN mainstream (like your's). Keep the sarcasm coming!
.../s.
Because parochialism.
Using soccer (any sport) as an example -
City a fans hate local City b fans when they play each other. When a or b play c (out of local area) a and b fans are against c. Proud to be from a+b.
If a, b, or c play against d (very far) then a, b, and c become United. Ie, North-South divide.
At a national level a-z are suddenly patriotic and suddenly everything is America's fault.
God, I hate team sports almost as much as the misuse of commas and religion :-)
no idea why this is getting downvoted. This is super relevant. Germany has had at best handled their Turkish immigrants in a step-motherly fashion and until today you're automatically at a huge disadvantage with a Turkish sounding name / look in a lot of roles and industries. Heck the government even had a plan up until the 90s around "sending them back to Turkey".
So if anything the German media needs to do a way better job of highlighting this.
Yeah, even people who honestly believe that they are firmly pro-immigrant often have trouble accepting them in any role beyond cleaning services or running a kebab place. In reaction to this, some third generation descendants of immigrants seem to identify less with the country they have never left longer than a short vacation than their parents and grandparents.
It is very valuable for both immigrants (+descendants) and natives to see such a nice example of success far outside of typical immigrant roles.
It doesn't matter where they are from. This was the work of a group of dedicated individuals working together. Their national origins are irrelevant. If you want to end the "open racism", focus more on individuals and less on groups.
With the exception of the small group of racists and alt right nutjobs, I'm not seeing it. I see complaints against illegal migration, but that's not the same thing. We should not conflate the two.
I don't think anybody really thinks that, only a few pockets of ignorant right-wingers and left-wingers. USA is all about the brain drain against other countries and that's the way it should be for a successful nation. Immigration has been more successful with the USA than probably any other nation. Illegal immigration on the other hand does cause issues with schools, jobs, taxes, hospitals etc and for those with a vested stake in the area, they should be pissed about that.
Looks like this was a perfect combination to (maybe) save the world. A Turkish - German - American collaboration, so to say. Wow. Who would have thought.
The fact you're downvoted to grey saddens me. For heaven's sake this is a tech forum and especially us techies should very well know that immigration and open exchange of people and ideas is the key to success.
Because people are tired of identity politics being shoved down their throats, not because they're against immigration per se. The fact of someone's race or origin is far less interesting than the story of these individuals, their personalities, their minds. If race or origin comes into it, it's if it plays into these deeper stories. But we don't want people telling us that they should be "pointed out and repeated". It's both irksome and facile.
I don't think open exchange of people is useful, or ever has been. What has helped the U.S.'s "success" (in kicking ass, generally speaking) is one-way brain-draining of other countries.
There are many people in science who go to the US for research for a couple of years and then go back home - and people from the US going abroad to escape uncertain funding, enjoy new perspectives (CERN!) or the myriad of other issues that the US has (healthcare, discrimination, public schools, transportation).
Seems rather convenient to focus only on a positive exception and look away when the news paints a less rosy picture of the aggregate. For instance, a majority of Turks in Germany voted for Erdogan.
Rest assured that there is also a large fraction of Turks in Germany who have a fiery hate for Erdogan. I personally know some of them. But yeah, it's troubling whenever wanna-be dictators get so many votes. Do you know if this percentage is "of all Turks" or "of all who voted"? I could image that those who don't like him simply didn't vote.
From a logical standpoint: If this should be pointed out specifically, should the same be done for crimes commited by immigrants? If not, isn’t that technically disingenious or at least a double standard?
Do you want to have race based discrimination and murders? go with the selectively pointing out the crimes committed by immigrants are committed by immigrants. This will give the illusion of causation(Immigrants do this because they are ).
If you want to have a society where people are judged by merit but you still have people arguing that it’s the race we should be looking for, go with pointing out the success of the immigrants. This will break the "Turks commit crimes because they are Turks" claim and inspire people to look to replicate the success of the successful ones.
you make it sound like these people were successful BECAUSE they were immigrants or because they were turkish. the way I see it is that these are gifted people that were (more) successful because they moved to Germany. people that are against immigration fear their country adopting cultural/political ideas from countries that people emigrate from.
Is that really relevant? Plenty of technological breakthroughs are made by immigrants/children of immigrants, and everyone on this site already knows this.
The most visible group of Turkish immigrants are people whose ancestors came from underdeveloped backwaters of Turkey and who have effectively formed a bit of a conservative time capsule. When progressive urban Turks happen to come to Germany (this is rare) that group seems quite alien to them. Surely not as alien as Amish would seem to modern day Swiss or Germans (the German Turkish time capsule is much younger and clearly doesn't rule out technology consumption), but it's the same kind of disconnect.
That group is highly visible because all the others basically blend in with the natives, which creates the illusion that they are representative of all Turks. That's why pointing out successful individuals who are clear counterexamples to the antiprogressive time capsule is highly relevant. It can help natives to stop assuming that everybody with a Turkish sounding name is a time capsule victim until proven otherwise and it can inspire those at risk of growing up to be the next generation of time capsuleers.
In the future there are going to be similar stories about people inspired by president Obama and Vice President Harris because these models show them how far they can go.
It’s not about identity politics, it’s about showing people they can escape the box society appears to capture them in.
There are plenty of successful german Turks though, to the point where such propaganda might have the reverse effect: why would anyone assume they can't escape.
Indeed. For bad news, e.g. crime, the (German) media takes great care to mention whether suspects or convicts are immigrants or of direct immigrant descent. Attaching this information to good news is done less frequently but would be required to paint a more realistic picture.
That is news to me. German police and media normally go to great length not to mention names/personal information of suspects (and victims), a crass difference to the US.
Until 2017 this actually was a rule (not a legally binding, just the "honor code") for media, but this got changed after the AfD and other Nazis whined for years that police and media would not "tell the truth" about migrant crimes, "suppress" or "hide" them (https://www.migazin.de/2017/03/24/presserat-aendert-richtlin...).
Journalism should report the relevant facts to a case. And the nationality/ethnicity/skin color rarely is a relevant fact in a criminal case, with the notable exception of racist-motivated or ethnic conflict (e.g. Kurds vs Turks) crimes.
For "everyday" crimes, think of pub brawls, petty theft, robberies, sexual misconduct of all forms, the ethnicity is absolutely irrelevant and its mention by police/media is only likely to further racial hatred.
Governments are able to choose which nationalities are allowed entry via immigration policy.
Some might find criminal representation very relevant to that policy decision. Perhaps you do not. That’s certainly your prerogative. But outright denying the relevance is absurd.
If it turns out left handed people are significantly overrepresented in crime statistics, then yes, that would be interesting to know. Either something is wrong with the system or with left handed people. This notion of withholding information from voting adults just because it doesn't further a particular social engineering agenda is repulsive to be honest.
Oh come on, your argument is self defeating. If doxxing individuals would be the only way for a voter to learn "if left handed people are significantly overrepresented", you would need to make all properties of everyone public, because there could be significant overrepresentation for any property.
And if you already know that "left handed people are significantly overrepresented" from some other source, you don't have to make the information public for these cases -- you know it already. Probably from a proper statistic made by the government. Not by counting a media-reported incident also reported the person to be left-handed.
And your argument is a mix of a strawman and taking GP’s point ad absurdum. Not withholding information doesn’t equate to doxxing, and just because you can’t find out all the correlations doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even try to find any in the first place.
> Or are you saying we should only talk about a person's ethnicity when it's in a positive light?
Yes, because integration can only work when people have role models to look up to. This is also why (even if she's as "top cop" as it can get) the appointment of Kamala Harris is so important, or Barack Obama winning in 2008 - it is a "ceiling breaker" event, it shows to people that even if one is not part of the "usual old boys club" it is possible to achieve success.
Painting ethnicity in a negative light, especially when it's totally unrelated and irrelevant, however was judged as "potentially inciting or furthering racial division" in German media codex.
If they wouldn't haven given an interview, or otherwise indicated that they want the world to know, it's nobodies business which nationality they are, or that they are husband and wife. It's simple as that.
Well, your personal information are facts too. Would you like them posted? As long as the crimes are only alleged, not proven, there is no question to me that the interest of the people at large is second to the privacy protection of the suspects.
Which is personal information. But I don't think they write it that often. The reverse has become a meme on right-wing forums: "tHeY dOn'T SaY tHere[sic] NAme so We NOw[sic] wHich RaCE iT Is".
"Turkey has been moving further away from the European Union. Turkey’s accession negotiations have therefore effectively come to a standstill and no further chapters can be considered for opening or closing and no further work towards the modernisation of the EU-Turkey Customs Union is foreseen."
Yeah it's extremely relevant. Has never been more relevant. You have the American vice-president of a thoroughly racist administration claiming credit for this vaccine on Twitter, even though it was children of migrant workers in another country who actually did the science and all of the hard work. Credit where credit is due, especially since the ones who handed society this big win are from a marginalized and often unduly criticized background.
Most of the hostility is towards illegal immigration. As long as left-wing politicians and media merges illegal and legal immigration, and promotes abuse of asylum and rescue at sea systems for illegal immigration, such hostility will continue, and even increase.
So I've heard this is will be the first mRNA vaccine on the market, ever. How worried should I be, given the political pressure to get a COVID19 vaccine to market as quickly as possible?
I wouldn't sorry too much. We understand a lot of old worries and so we know they don't apply. They have a lot of data from previous forms of this type of things suggesting it is safe. We know the that injected "things" break down very quickly in the body, which again makes us believe there won't be any long term problems. Of course in the end who knows. There could be something, and we may not know for 10 years.
On the other hand, we know that Covid is killing a large number of people right now. We have enough data to confidently state that the long term adverse effects are overall less bad than Covid.
Sadly we cannot confidently state anything about the long term effects. Maybe mRNA has some horrible long term side effect that shows after a year. It’s unlikely but we can’t say anything about long-term yet.
What we can say is that we need this pandemic squashed and it’s a risk we as a global population are ready to take.
> We understand a lot of old worries and so we know they don't apply.
What are "old worries"? This is a new type of vaccine.
> They have a lot of data from previous forms of this type of things suggesting it is safe.
How does this make sense, given this is the first mRNA vaccine? The expression "previous forms of this type of things" is as blurry as it can get.
> We know the that injected "things" break down very quickly in the body, which again makes us believe there won't be any long term problems.
Heavy metals are "things", and when you inject them in the body, they don't break down, but stay there and slowly kill you.
> Of course in the end who knows. There could be something, and we may not know for 10 years.
This is not the attitude I'd take on something that potentially hundreds of millions of people will be subjected to. I'm aware that you can't ever prove something to be safe. I want to know if the specific risk brought about by mRNA vaccines are well understood or not, and why.
> On the other hand, we know that Covid is killing a large number of people right now.
It doesn't.
> We have enough data to confidently state that the long term adverse effects are overall less bad than Covid.
Splendid, I'm not going to ask for sources then, because I like the tone of your voice so much.
Old worries are whatever went wrong in previous medicine. (not just vaccines)
> given this is the first mRNA vaccine?
This is not the first mRNA vaccine, they have been using it against cancer for many years. They have had time to look for long term bad effects. If there are any they must be rare because none of been detected yet.
>Heavy metals ...
we also know when they are a problem and when not. This don't contain the bad forms. I don't even need to bother looking this up to state that confidently. The people working on this are not that stupid.
> On the other hand, we know that Covid is killing a large number of people right now.
> It doesn't
several hundred thousand dead already. And Covid is only around 9-10 months old. I didn't even get into long term effects of Covid. I personally have lost family to Covid, and have others who are having a hard time because of long term effects.
>I'm not going to ask for sources
The press release is the main one: no adverse effects noted.
I am going to wait for the science to be published before getting this (or any vaccine). However there is every reason to believe it will be good based on what we do know.
The worry is that an adverse effect would be discovered, but then every world leader would get on the phone one after the other, and call the lab to say "hey let's not let people know about this." Or more realistically, the same would happen but with lots of implicit gesturing and the design of subtle incentives, instead of direct phone calls.
"Better than covid" is also not a great bar to meet. The real bar is, "better than N months of covid, where N is the time until a better vaccine with fewer adverse effects is discovered."
So, these are both abstract speculations. It would be nice if you could put some knowledge to them. Do you think it would be possible for an adverse effect to go unreported, while being common enough to equal those N months of covid?
Disclaimer: It's late, and I need to confirm this statement from a immunology researcher in my network. If you are a R&D professional with the right expertise, please feel free to jump in.
There are two risks at hand here: (a) using the novel mRNA vaccine technology, and (b) using it with the SARS-CoV2 virus. While I can not say anything about the former, the aforementioned researcher in my network mentioned that as with Human papillomavirus (HPV) and other cancerogenic viruses, the SARS-CoV2 family might have tumor generating effects. Using it with a vaccine could be risky - getting infected could be risky, too.
> How worried should I be (...)
This is why we have multi stage clinical trials. Fast tracking a trial does not necessarily mean that it less testing will be done. On the contrary, the amount of resources behind these vaccine candidates are enormeous. Of course, long term effects are hard to catch. But the same applies for the long term effects of an SARS-CoV2 infection. Time and experiments will tell. Let's hope for the best.
Great story, it’s not quite there yet; finalisation of the testing, and mass production to be done.
But with the huge financial and credibility boost I hope the team can follow their passion to solve other medical issues.
Quite an insight to switch from cancer therapy to COVID-19 vaccine, and quite the opportunity to be able to deploy 500 researchers onto it at such an early stage.
I hope this bolsters their original search for cancer treatment.
Quite an insight to switch from cancer therapy to COVID-19 vaccine
Actually not at all. BioNTech's entire platform was customized RNA therapeutics that target the immune system to a particular patient's tumor. Basically cancer vaccines.
How can they make sure that the mass produced version of the vaccine doesn't have a "mutation" (extra/missing nucleotide) in some shots while producing the mRNA?
I think they could replicate mRNA into latge batch, then test it if it conains enough of correct mRNA.
If there is some slightly incorrect mRNA it will result in cells producing wrongly folded protein and if there's enough of it you'll get additional immunity to something slightly different.
Cells that produce the protein are to be killed by immune system anyways and natural viral mRNA is probably not perfectly replicated 100% of the time.
Everyone is excited about "90% efficacy", but nobody mentions the rate of side effects. Hmm. If this is injected into several billion people, twice into each person, wouldn't you want to know at least an estimate of the ratio before you do that? Especially with mandatory vaccination looming on the horizon.
The UK have been cautious to point out that they don't have the full safety data yet, and that that is the next step:
> The Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine has been tested on over 40,000 volunteers and interim results suggest it is proving 90 per cent effective at protecting people against the virus.
> But we haven’t yet seen the full safety data, and these findings also need to be peer-reviewed.
> So we have cleared one significant hurdle but there are several more to go before we know the vaccine can be used.
> [...] If the Pfizer vaccine passes all the rigorous safety checks and is proved to be effective then we will begin a UK-wide NHS led programme of vaccine distribution.
do you really think the thousands of scientists working on this just forgot to take into account the harm caused by the vaccine in comparison to covid?
i know we all trust US and european science more than others, but we need to be careful with press releases until proper research is published. e.g. remdesivir is generally a fiasco yet widely publicized
Mind reading doesn't work. I was merely pointing out there doesn't seem to be safety data yet, and it will be required to deploy this widely. This is PR pure and simple. It doesn't mean that "we have a vaccine" quite yet, unless you want to recklessly endanger a lot of people. We won't have it for a while.
there are many vaccines in trials. why is this one getting so much attention? american PR machine hard at work? sounds like they already have the movie plot perfected but they haven't published an article yet
Google suggests they hadn't started, or were only just getting permission to start their phase 3 trials by the time of that article.
Either way. It's a matter of semantics to say the sinovac vaccine had results first if it doesn't say anything about efficacy. What is being discussed is efficacy results.
Can’t get past the consent screen in chrome on an iPhone on either mobile or desktop page - agree button is off page. Surprising for a big site like Reuters
BionTech needs to hire a top tier marketing and PR team immediately, they are failing bad at early media mentions, press releases and coverage. Unfortunately it's probably not within their DNA and they may not realize what is happening around them.
This is a monster, monster opportunity and just 'existing' won't leverage it to the extent they can - it will help them fund, hire more, expand more, do more of what they are doing.
So that they will turn into a mega company with nothing but PR, capital and marketing? I think the fact that they are so focused on medicine and science should rather be the norm in medicine.
The fact that Pfizer can spin this story on their name is disturbing and dangeruous behaviour that should not be the norm.
This is a misunderstanding of what communications is.
The world works on information, if you don't take a seat at table, it will be taken by someone else.
The notion that 'communicating' and 'lab work' would be somehow 'competing time and/or resource pressures' overall at the company is nonsense. They are mostly separate activities.
Pfizer doesn't have to 'spin' anything, they are a legit partner in the deal, they can do the release in the US, they will have their brand up there, their name, do the interviews - and they don't have to do anything tricky, they can surely mention their 'no name partner' and win $1 Billion worth of free PR.
A tiny Germany company, knowing nothing about communications, will miss the opportunity to tell the world who they are, to tell their story, to make their name known to another generation of researchers and scientists who might want to work with them, to a generation of bankers, business people who will be 2x more likely to want to 'take the call and or do the deal' because of their reputation.
1/2 of business is communicating, the only successful businesses that don't understand this are the one's that hit on it accidentally.
Pfizer is already a global brand, this is the moment of a lifetime for 'the name of the company I already forget' (see what I mean?) - I had to re-look it up - 'BioNTech' - it's very much make-or-break. If this vaccine is legit they need to start talking about themselves now.
Most German companies work like this, they even have their own moniker: "hidden champions". It appears to work just fine, if you're not selling to the public, what's the point of wasting money making the public aware of you? Also, not every company needs to be a Silicon-Valley-style startup which spouts endless PR nonsense about how their stupid internet-connected coffee machine is going to "change the world".
Your cynicism is misplaced (and borderline arrogant).
1) Germany is ~1% of the world's population, and an economy shrinking in size relative to the 'rest of world' quickly, a 'hidden champion' in Germany is almost irrelevant outside it's borders.
The world is a very big place, name recognition matters even within industry settings.
2) BioNTech has been losing money for a few years, they need this deal and everything from it. The CEO has a responsibility to make sure every element of credit is given where it's due.
3) The commenter below mentioned they are 'not small' - this is not quite true - they are 1000 people, which is actually relatively small for such a firm, their massive $20-25B valuation likely comes from kind of earlier understanding that they had a vaccine that was probably working, and such info was slowly leaked out to market over time. The the founder is 'Stock Rich' to the point of '100th Richest German' is really not a big deal.
There going to have to get out there and try to be as well known as some of the bigger brands.
Edit: I should point out that both Space X and Tesla would absolutely not exist were it not for the kind of communications strategy that Musk has embarked upon. Literally his appearance on Stephen Colbert was not only a plea for cash, but a plea for people to 'join the movement'. These things pervade just consumer elements and helps give him power and attention within other, non-consumer facing business operations such as the closed world of 'space'. Having made himself a very famous person enables him to open quite a lot of doors, get a lot of meetings, raise a lot of money, hire a lot of inspired people, which creates a virtuous circle unto it's own once products are materially released etc.. He did a great job of that.
Lookup what "hidden champion" actually means, such companies are highly competitive and successful in the global market with extremely specialized high-tech products in a small niche. Because they have specialized in high-quality niche-products they can focus their marketing money where it matters: their potential customers. And those customers are other companies, not people like you or me. Those companies are also often family-owned and not publicly traded. What's the point of maintaining a big PR circus for this type of company?
Did you read the same article as me? The company started 2020 with slightly less than $5B capitalization. The owners are already top-100 wealthiest in Germany due to an earlier startup working a similar space.
As another poster mentioned [0], they also have US offices and advanced manufacturing capabilities.
Seems to me that they have all the PR they need: it was enough to convince Pfizer to partner with them on something unknown and invest a ton of money into taking their idea from a lab to mass production in just a few months. If they had tried this along it would have been years before this vaccine was ready (if it ever got ready - odds are someone else would have something working first, or they go bankrupt getting the paperwork together)
What would they get from that? Even more market capitalization? Unlikely, they are getting plenty as is. The second tier visibility might even help their stock price a little as some particularly uninformed speculants might still fall victim to the illusion that they know more than their peers when buying shares of "the secret behind the Pfizer vaccine".
They would get the ability to open a lot of doors all over the world for financing, distribution, R&D opportunities - a major increase in power.
Every serious investor is a human being - when the become more aware of an issue or person, it becomes more material to them.
The Saudi sovereign wealth assets probably are somewhere near a Trillion dollars, that's a ton of money they need to invest, same for Norway. When they see this on TV, and BioNTech wants to do a $3 Billion raise next year for expansion, then the CEO, already known to the bankers, will be a powerful figure to have on the roadshow. Brand matters far beyond just consumer appeal and marketing.
This would be the definition of pure passion and what it takes to accomplish something like this.
These people are a totally different breed compared to people I know. Kudos to them for their achievements.