Pfizer chief Albert Bourla beamed into a WebEx video call with the leaders of the American pharmaceutical giant’s vaccine research and manufacturing groups. The two teams had worked late into the night on a robust development plan for Pfizer’s experimental Covid-19 vaccine and told Bourla that they aimed to make it available lightning-fast. It could be ready sometime in 2021.
On the first Monday of May, Pfizer dosed the initial batch of healthy American volunteers in Baltimore with an experimental Covid-19 vaccine it developed with Germany’s Bio-NTech. Bourla was informed immediately. The following day, in an interview from his home in suburban Scarsdale, New York, he pointed out that it normally takes years to accomplish what Pfizer had just done in weeks. “How fast we moved is not something you could expect from the big, powerful pharma,” he said.
In preparation, the company is shifting production at four manufacturing plants to make 20 million vaccine doses by the end of the year and hundreds of millions more in 2021. Bourla says Pfizer is willing to spend $1 billion in 2020 to develop and manufacture the vaccine before they know if it will work: “Speed is of paramount importance.”
Over the last few years, scientists have become intrigued by the idea of using messenger RNA, the genetic molecule that gives cells protein-making instructions, to develop medicines for cancer, heart disease and even infectious viruses by transforming human cells into drug factories.
On March 16, Bourla convened Pfizer’s top executives and informed them that return on investment wouldplay a role in the company’s Covid-19 work. “This is not business as usual,” Bourla told them. “Financial returns should not drive any decisions.” What makes Pfizer’s approach unique is that it’s testing four distinctive vaccines—different mRNA platforms that are supposed to induce a safe immune response. The complex trial will start by testing different dosing levels of the four vaccines in 360 U.S. volunteers and 200 in Germany, eventually expanding to around 8,000 participants.
The unorthodox way Bourla took to the pinnacle of corporate power started in Greece’s second-biggest city, Thessaloniki, a northern port city on the Aegean Sea. He grew up middle-class—his father and uncle owned a liquor store—as part of a tiny Jewish minority that survived the German occupation and the Holocaust.
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