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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Vaccine: How BioNTech-Pfizer won the race

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It was over breakfast on the wintry morning of January 24 that Ozlem Tureci and her husband Ugur Sahin decided, “we need to fire the starting gun on this”. Sahin “had concluded from a publication describing coronavirus cases in Wuhan... that there was a high probability that a pandemic could be imminent”, Tureci recounted.


The decision by the couple, founders of a small German company called BioNTech, gave birth to Operation Lightspeed — in which the scientists in the company diverted all their resources from cancer therapy research to finding a vaccine to stop COVID-19.


“Since that day... there has not been a day when we took a break from working on this project,” said Tureci.


Four days later, on January 28, Germany confirmed its first case of coronavirus infection — also the first known human-to-human transmission on European soil.


What was an epidemic hitting China hardest soon morphed into a global health crisis, forcing governments to close borders, schools and offices and keep their populations at home to halt the spread.


As BioNTech and other pharmaceutical companies leapt into action in search of the winning formula, Germany’s army of “Mittelstand” companies and other bigger manufacturing and logistics experts would soon prove crucial.


GENIE IN A BOTTLE


Just a few minutes’ drive away from BioNTech’s headquarters in the city of Mainz, one such company quietly ramped up production.


Little known to the rest of the world, the 130-year-old firm Schott is in fact a major player in the pharmaceutical industry because of its little glass vials designed to hold life-saving vaccines.


Three-quarters of the more than 100 coronavirus inoculation trials across the world would end up using Schott products.


The company alone aims to produce enough vials to hold two billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2021, head of communications Christina Rettig said.


Schott itself had an early scare with the virus at its Mitterteich plant in Bavaria.


The town became one of Germany’s first coronavirus hotspots in March after a beer festival, and Rettig said several Schott workers from the Czech Republic ended up “not seeing friends and family for weeks” as borders slammed shut. With passenger flights mostly grounded, the buzz at Frankfurt airport’s terminals all but vanished to a hush in the spring.


Its freight area however kept humming. Tens of thousands of boxes of urgently needed surgical gowns and masks were transiting through.


The head of freight infrastructure at Fraport, Max Philipp Conrady, knew that was just the beginning for his division in the pandemic battle.


No one knew then which company would find a vaccine or when it would be ready, but Frankfurt is already Europe’s largest hub for transporting pharmaceutical goods.


And so planning had to begin for the unprecedented logistical challenge of transporting millions of life-saving vaccine doses worldwide.


Fraport’s vast temperature-controlled hangar handled 120,000 tonnes of vaccines, drugs and other pharmaceutical products in 2019. — AFP


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