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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

Even Germany bought from Pfizer, not from Biontech, which indicates that the differences can't be as wide as you suggest (or as gp suggests)

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It may help to know that BioNTech were in fact the developers of the Pfizer vaccine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...

Sure, and they can be proud of it and make all that money, but if you are in the market to ramp up a vaccination programme, you talk to Pfizer and not to Biontech. Almost like you'd go to Apple and not to FHG IIS for buying an iPod.

(I'm pretty sure that this comparison is a wild exaggeration of what actually happened and that Biontech representatives were very much involved in all the talks, but I assume more in an expert advisor role than as someone with actual influence on the outcome)

> It may help to know that BioNTech were in fact the developers of the Pfizer vaccine

It may help to know that Pfizer directly helped with the development - not just the manufacturing & distribution - and deserves some credit as well (even if not as much as BioNTech).

From their March 27, 2020 co-development press release:

"Pfizer and BioNTech to Co-develop Potential COVID-19 Vaccine"

"Builds on 2018 agreement to jointly develop an mRNA-based influenza vaccine"

"The collaboration aims to accelerate development of BioNTech’s potential first-in-class COVID-19 mRNA vaccine program, BNT162, which is expected to enter clinical testing by the end of April 2020. The rapid advancement of this collaboration builds on the research and development collaboration into which Pfizer and BioNTech entered in 2018 to develop mRNA-based vaccines for prevention of influenza."

Pfizer surely did help monetarily (investments) and offers global distribution, but that doesn't mean they had any hand in developing the science and the product. Any big pharmaceutical company, like Bayer, could have done the same, but randomly Pfizer got lucky this time.

That’s discounting the difficulty of manufacturing these new vaccines, which only a few companies know how to do, and also required many subcontractors.

If it were easy, it wouldn’t have taken so long to scale up manufacturing, even by the largest pharmaceutical companies.

What's the endgame here - to point out "Pfizer is awesome!!"? Seems a little strange.

They started working together even before Covid.

https://biontech.de/sites/default/files/2019-08/20180816_Bio...

The Pfizer head of vaccine research seems to be from Germany as well.

Pfizer played a major role in the trials, which is an enormous part of the process.

Which, again, any big pharmaceutical company would have offered to a drug developer, and was in no way a special attribute of Pfizer.

I mean yeah, but it's still a large complicated task. I don't think executing major projects like this should be handwaved because there's alternative options.

This is equivalent to saying there's nothing special about biontech as any specialist in novel MRNA vaccines could have developed these. Which did happen, at moderna.

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