Coronavirus: who is behind the B vaccine …

From berlin

The future of Germany, as far as Covid 19 is concerned, in the hands of the Turks?

Anyone who lives or has visited Germany, or more precisely its capital, Berlin, knows that the Turkish presence is more than significant. Neighborhoods like Kreuzberg nicknamed “Little Istanbul”, neighborhoods of Wedding or Neukölln, are a chain of road signs, markets and businesses. skewers. While in the city street stalls today more is sold Falafel what sausages.

More specifically, according to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, 3.7% of the population is Muslim (over 2,600,000 citizens), which exceeds the total number of foreigners in the European Union.

This is due to the so-called program Guest workers who brought them together as “guest workers” to literally rebuild Germany a decade after World War II. Low-skilled, cheap and predominantly male labor, which his family will soon join, regrouping among them, which, along with the serious prejudices due to obvious cultural differences, has never made integration easier.

Today, the pandemic once again puts on the table the strong contribution of the Turkish-German community, paradoxically, at the antipodes of the first migration.

This time it’s a marriage of ultra-skilled researchers, owners of one of the most successful and now millionaire biotech companies, BioNTech., who, as communicated last Wednesday with their capitalist partner, the American Pfizer, have in their hands the answer to covid 19 with a vaccine that is 90% effective in reducing the risk of infection in a preliminary analysis of phase 3 clinical trials, last step before approval by regulatory agencies.

The marriage of hope

They are immunologist Ugur Sahin, 55, and his colleague and wife, Öezlem Türeci, 53. Both children of Turkish parents, of very humble origin, are part of this first generation of immigrants.

Sahin, immunologist and oncologist, was born in Iskenderun and emigrated with his family to Germany at the age of four, to join his father, who worked at the Ford automobile plant in Cologne. With great effort he obtained his doctorate degree in 1990, and obtained his doctorate three years later in 1993. He worked in various hospitals in Hamburg and Cologne, where he met his wife, the daughter of ‘a Turkish doctor father, who in an interview with local media this week, he said in a humble and loving manner, that until his wedding day they worked in the lab. His passion and line of research has always been oncology and he has specialized in the study of the immune system as an effective response to cancer.

The couple sold the first company, Ganymed, for 1.4 billion euros and today it is estimated that the market value of BioNTech, the company from which they are leading the frantic race to find the answer to pandemic, exceeds 20,000 million euros. euros. Despite their commercial success, none of them stopped teaching at the University of Mainz. They are the parents of a teenage girl and they remain very discreet.

Returning to his current company and his discovery, BioNTech is the creator, among other things, of the mRNA method, which allows the production of vaccines more quickly than conventional methods. Thus, since March, BioNTech has used its more than 500 employees to use all its discoveries on vaccination to design compounds useful in the fight against the coronavirus. The initiative attracted the American pharmaceutical giant Pfize, a capitalist partner since then. In addition, BioNTech was one of the first to receive a contribution of 750 million euros from a Berlin program dependent on the federal government for the investigation into the coronavirus.

More vaccine? More than 50 million doses are expected to be produced already this year and they confirm that it has been tested in more than 50,000 volunteers around the world, including some from South American countries like Brazil. and Peru.

More of them? These days Sahin has appeared in local TV media explaining the extent and stages in which they are at with the vaccine, but most importantly the obsession he, his wife and all of his team have, to find prevention and The healing.

“Our obsession and the only daily occupation since January 2020 is to defeat the virus. It is our humanitarian duty and with this responsibility we take it ”, answers a Sahin always humble but at the same time in these days defeated by the harassment of the media of the world and especially of the Germans, for whom this scoop has attractive condiments from where you watch it.