"That year, 2020, Uğur told the crowd, would be the year BioNTech proved the doubters wrong.

There was no time to lose. Soon after he’d finished his talk, Uğur hopped on a plane to Seattle, where he met with a team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which had recently signed a $100 million agreement with BioNTech to develop a slew of new drugs. Hours later, he moved on to Boston, to stop by a small cancer immunotherapy company that BioNTech was about to purchase in a $67 million deal. The purpose of the visit was to reassure staff that he, a fellow scientist, was interested in advancing their innovations and was not a vulture disguised in a lab coat who had come to gut the firm and slim down its workforce. At this point, Uğur was still fairly oblivious to events in Wuhan. He walked around the biotech firm’s foyer, introducing himself to dozens of soon-to-be employees, shaking each of them vigorously by the hand."

Joe Miller is a journalist. He shares his story and discusses the book, The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic.

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