Pfizer Scientist Discusses COVID-19 Boosters and mRNA Vaccine Development

This video here is from October sixth, twenty twenty-one.

I had a meeting with my manager, Kanwal Gill, a principal scientist working on the vaccine formulation at Pfizer.

In this meeting, I asked her if it was okay to give people another experimental injection regarding the booster shots or if it was a drive for money.

So are we- But we are still- Like, do we know that, like, I mean, just thinking, like, ethically, like, is it okay to, like, give people another experimental injection? Like, are, are we sure it's gonna be safe and effective, or are we just rolling these out because we wanna roll them out for money? Like- Yeah.

This is a real-time data that we are generating. We don't even know.

When we started vaccinating people, we had no idea how it's gonna look like.

Yeah. mRNA vaccines have been there for fifty years, you know, but nothing went to clinical. Why? Because mRNA vaccines have been known to have side effects.

Right. But- Moderna was-- has been working on it for ten years.

This is not the new thing, right? But why it did not reach trial was because of all these side effects. We, Pfizer and Moderna, used the emergency and the pandemic to kind of get through it now.

Okay. But, you know, we didn't... But even CDC model, we don't have data.

So it could never get FDA approved until, until we had this emergency, right?

Like, we had to try something new, so. But why didn't we try, like, a vaccine formulation that has been effective in the past, like with egg yolk or something that you-- they use with flu, right?

Uh, so- Yeah. So we here did not do it because we already have collaboration with BioNTech on flu- Mm-hmm ... before actually COVID happened. So mRNA...

So what hap-- what a story behind we starting on this because BioNTech guy, Üçüncü, the BioNTech CEO, he called Kathrin Jansen.

Üçüncü? Yeah. He called Kathrin Jansen, and he's like, "Hey, I have this technology, but I don't have resources to make it big."

So Kathrin was like, "Well, we have-- we had a collaboration in place before for flu," so we, we wanted to give it a shot.

It is a new mRNA thing. Nobody knew anything about it.

We never had it. We never had this. We are sta-- Everything is just fresh from last year.

Trying, learning on the fly. So we had... We were starting-- It was on a fly.

Pandemic, just roll it out, roll it out, roll it out. There was no time to think.

It was a time to act.

Who Kanwal was mentioning in this clip is Kathrin Jansen, the former head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer.

I'm Kathrin Jansen. I develop vaccines which help millions of people around the world to be protected from nasty and deadly infections.

Currently, I'm developing a vaccine candidate to help prevent COVID-19.