The Sunday Mail
The scientist behind the first Covid-19 vaccine to clear interim clinical trials says he is confident his product can “bash the virus over the head” and put an end to the pandemic that has held the world hostage in 2020.
The German company BioNTech and US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced via a Press release on Monday last week that their jointly developed vaccine candidate had outperformed expectations in the crucial phase 3 trials, proving 90 percent effective in stopping people from falling ill.
However, the lack of full data sets from the ongoing trials has left unanswered the question of whether the vaccine is also effective for those with asymptomatic infections.
In his first interview with a British newspaper, BioNTech’s chief executive, Ugur Sahin, said he was optimistic.
“If the question is whether we can stop this pandemic with this vaccine, then my answer is: yes, because I believe that even protection only from symptomatic infections will have a dramatic effect,” Sahin said in a Zoom call from his home in Mainz.
Until Monday’s trial results were revealed, the scientist said, he wasn’t sure whether his vaccine would trigger a strong enough reaction from the human immune system.
“It was possible that the virus isn’t really targeted by the vaccine, finds its way into the cells and continues to make people ill. We now know that vaccines can beat this virus.”
While current trials of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine will not formally prove that it prevents transmission of the virus, as opposed to merely stopping infected people from falling ill, the 55-year-old said the high efficacy results have led him to assume it can.
BioNTech, a company founded in 2008 by the German scientists and married couple Sahin and Özlem Türeci, as well as the Austrian oncologist Christoph Huber, developed its vaccine with mRNA.
While conventional vaccines take genetic information from a virus and cultivate it in a human cell, the mRNA method merely requires the virus’s genetic code, thus shortening the production process by almost three months.
Pfizer’s expertise with mass-market vaccines and quick action from regulatory authorities helped speed up the development process to 10 months rather than years, Sahin said.
“There was practically no waiting time. Imagine you want to get from one end of London to the next and there are traffic jams everywhere. You would need half a day. For our project, the streets were empty.”
The most effective candidate to emerge from the company’s trials, Sahin said, attacked the coronavirus “in more ways than one”.
“The vaccine hinders Covid-19 from gaining access to our cells. But even if the virus manages to find a way in, then the T-cells bash it over the head and eliminate it.
“We have trained the immune system very well to perfect these two defensive moves. We now know that the virus can’t defend itself against these mechanisms.”
Some crucial questions regarding the vaccine’s efficacy will only be answerable in the coming weeks and months, Sahin said.
Establishing for certain whether it can also stop asymptomatic infections could take up to a year.
Further insight into whether the vaccine offers different levels of protection to different age groups, he said, was expected in about three weeks.
The interim trials have also not yet fully established whether the vaccine works differently on people from different ethnic groups.
Sahin said he hoped that those who received the vaccine, administered via two injections in the arm three weeks apart, would be immune from the coronavirus for at least a year.
