The German-based BioNTech company – which recently announced that it had achieved a 90% success rate with a coronavirus vaccine it had developed with US-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer – was founded in 2008 by Dr. Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, the children of two refugee families.
Uğur Şahin, an immunologist and oncologist, was born in İskenderun in Turkey and immigrated to Germany with his family at the age of four. His father worked in a vehicle The German-based BioNTech company – which recently announced that it had achieved a 90% success rate in a coronavirus vaccine it had developed with US-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer – was founded in 2008 by Dr. Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahinfactory. Dr. Özlem Türeci, after serving on the Clinical and Scientific Advisory Board for ten years, became the Medical Chief of BioNTech in 2018. They have been described in the mainstream media as “the dream team scientist couple”.
“Germany has long struggled with the issue of how open it should be about immigration, and the post-war ‘guest workers’ programme has always been questioned”, noted Christian Odandahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, in a twitter post. He added: “Uğur Şahin’s father was one of these ‘guest workers’ who came to work at the Ford factory in Cologne. Now, his son may be the person who put an end to the pandemic around the world”.
It has been reported that vaccine producing companies plan to apply for emergency use approval at the end of this month. US-based Pfizer plans to launch 50 million doses of the vaccine by the end of the year and 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.
