Discussion on COVID-19 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.