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BioNTech Founders Expect Covid-19 Pandemic to Last Until Mid-2022
Mixing and matching of different types of vaccines could be necessary to end pandemic, company’s chief medical officer says
BioNTech Co-Founder: World Needs High Vaccination Rates
BioNTech Co-Founder: World Needs High Vaccination Rates
Ugur Sahin of BioNTech tells WSJ's Gráinne McCarthy, at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit, that high vaccination rates in the U.S. aren't enough. Photo: Ralph Orlowski/Reuters
By
Bojan Pancevski
May 4, 2021 10:07 am ET
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The surge of coronavirus infections in developing countries such as India amid a relative scarcity of vaccine supply means that the pandemic will keep spreading until mid-2022, according to the inventors of the first Covid-19 vaccine authorized in the West.
Because of the urgency, authorities should consider such measures as mixing and matching vaccines from different manufacturers, said the founders of BioNTech SE BNTX -0.76% at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit on Tuesday. The German company teamed up with Pfizer Inc. to test, manufacture and distribute its vaccine.
“We need to ensure really high vaccination rates world-wide. Otherwise, no one will be safe,” said Ugur Sahin, BioNTech’s chief executive officer. He said the pandemic would only end when herd immunity is accomplished world-wide.
“By mid-2022, even regions with high density populations like India will reach a high rate of vaccination and herd immunity,” Dr. Sahin said. “We will see in the next 12 months an increasing number of industrial, developing and low-income countries reaching this type of herd immunity just by increasing the manufacturing capacity of the currently existing players and adding new manufacturing sites.”
Dr. Sahin, who founded the company with his wife, Özlem Türeci, said that they were expanding their manufacturing alliance of more 30 companies in order to produce more vaccines to supply countries such as India.
Mixing and matching of different types of vaccines, including combining shots based on messenger RNA technology such as BioNTech’s with the so-called viral vector vaccines like that of AstraZeneca AZN -1.01% PLC, could be necessary to end the pandemic, said Dr. Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer.
“The more vaccines we have available, the better…We can obviously mix and match them in principle,” Dr. Türeci said. “Because at the end of the day, we want to achieve herd immunity. We want to achieve as many vaccinated people as possible.”
Dr. Türeci said BioNTech, which owns the rights for the vaccine it markets together with Pfizer, isn’t in discussion with companies in India or other developing nations to license production because it will only produce the shots within its validated and established manufacturing network.
The production process for mRNA vaccines is complex, which makes transferring know-how to new manufacturing partners a slow process.
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