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Pfizer Vaccine’s Funding Came From Berlin, Not Washington
COVID-19
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I'll take one of those vaccines, please.
Edit: I'm hearing I'll need two doses. I'm ready when they are.
Danke
Bonjour to you too!
Your French is amazing!
Danke!
Je suce une bite
French is so elegant
Mit Swibel und alles?
Ohne schaf
Bisseli schaf
Mit alles, danke.
Sum hier?
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Mach Dreifusisch
r/doener has taken over
Ja aber kein Gurken bitte.
Und Schafskäse.
Ich auch bitte.
Ich bin ein vacciner
edit: awww you guys! I was having a really bad no good horrible day. And you’ve made it amazing. Thanks for all the lovely comments, awards and laughs. First time I’ve ever had a comment blow up. But most importantly you blew up my heart at just the right time. Thank you.
Since I earned my reward points by shitposting its only fair if I give them away for shitposting too and that was a really good one
Show me how you order 3 beer.
slowly cocks walther pointed at OP's groin
Two of them to make sure
This may be whooshing me, but the Pfizer vaccine is actually a 2 dose vaccine. Great news regardless!
First one makes you autistic, second one reverses it.
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r/CivPolitics
Nothing new about it. Germany has traditionally been a titan of culture and science. People choose to focus on 12 dark years out of 1000+ years of history.
But you fuck one goat...
Well two goats to be exact...
Allegedly it was an ostrich
I heards.... it was a.... sick...... ostrich.
Allegedlys.
Yeah but the first goat was getting fucked by the Germans friends and they got caught and blamed it on the german.
Wouldn't it be more like: "everyone else fucked a goat, but then Germany decided to fuck a goat and everyone made a big deal"
People choose to focus on those for a very good reason. That's why some countries elect Trump or Bolsonaro while we don't. You can see all around the world what happens when you don't focus on the negative aspects of your country
Btw Einstein would be in the history books as a German if it wasn't for those 12 years.
I believe socio economic justice and the quality of your democracy explains better why Germany managed to avoid voting for people like Trump, Bolsenaro, or a new Hitler. Even at the end of the 1st world war, during the treaty of Versaille, many prominent world leaders warned that a too harsh treaty would create an awful German situation that would inevitably lead to a 2nd world war. And they didn't think of that because they thought Germans would focus on their problems, but because they knew the treaty would create high inequality and other socio-economic problems.
And that's exactly what's happening in the US: flawed democracy, that is more of a plutocracy than a democracy, very high inequality (with 0.49 Gini coefficient, the US is a 3rd world country in terms of inequality), only two political parties making it very hard for Americans to express their anger in a constructive way, very unequal education levels (Some of the world's best schools are Americans, but in average, Americans are poorly educated due to schools being funded through estate taxes, and colleges being too expensive for the majority of the peopole), virtually no safety nets, no universal healthcare, etc. etc.
That's a ripe environment for Trump-like people to get elected surfing on the wave of anger and resentment among Americans.
And no amount of learning about the negative stuff can put a stop to that.
I could have a great relationship with someone for 50 years, but I definitely will remember and judge that week they tried to murder family with a hatchet more than the rest.
That's not unreasonable.
thing is that person is still the same one you knew 50 years ago. germany isn't anywhere close to the same country than 80 years ago, especially when looking at the population
The cost of scale and clinical trials is eaten by Pfizer (the manufacturer; already in vaccines business) not by BioNTech. -source: this is my field.
Yes, that was the reason why BioNTech was seeking partnership. But it's not only the cost but also the production capabilities and such.
This is how partnership looks like and not what Trump or Pence are thinking.
BioNTech has also never made a successful vaccine. The type they are using (mRNA based; similar to Moderna) has never been approved for in human use after clinical trials.
Yes, this is actually BioNTech's major innovative achievement.
Which raises complete new interest levels from govts if successful.
Under normal circumstances they would still be creeping around somewhere in nowhere but Coronatimes are dire times.
BioNTech was already making quite a name for itself in the industry before Covid. Of course this gave them a huge boost, but to say they would be “creeping around somewhere” is just not accurate.
The company may be newish (founded in 2008), but it has plenty of people with proven successes in the field.
They made cancer therapy before this, that's why they don't have other vaccines.
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Exactly this. It is phrased as if a lifetime basketball player had never made three consecutive three point shots (despite attempting to), when in reality it would be more like if a player mainly played in the post and had no reason to shoot three’s on a team with better shooters when it wasn’t practical, but when they enter the three point contest it’s an entirely different situation, because it wasn’t incompetence but rather lack of effort due to a previously terrible cost to reward ratio and no significantly impressive entity of large enough scale willing to take the risk to fund it
BioNTech is only 12 years old so none of this should be surprising.
But Pfizer turned down money from the US government. The point is that Pence and Trump had zero to do with it.
Not true. Trump provided the necessary high infection rates to be able to do Phase 3 testing of the vaccine in the US.
Flipping back and forth between deep shame, sadness, and reluctant amusement at this comment - an american
Don't say this too loud or the trumpeters might start yelling this out loud too.
Can we please stop calling it the "pfizer vaccine"? It's not the pfizer vaccine, it's the bioNtech vaccine
German news are calling it bioNtech vaccine. They just mention pfizer in the articles. I was really confused when I only read the headlines from my German news apps and reddit. Thought it was very interesting that two companies had the same success rate and communicated it at the same time. Then i realized/remembered that they cooperated
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The name sounds like something a Polish student would call his company. "You can't call your company kurwa. Oooh just you wait..."
I reckon Trump tried to buy CureVac, not BioNTech. Sauce
Covid => no hand shaking pls
Its very common for small biotechs to develop a new drug and then license it to a larger pharma to manufacture/distribute/sell all over the world. The larger companies finance the research with milestone payments to the smaller biotech, and if the smaller biotech comes up with a new drug, then the drug gets mass produced and distributed by the larger pharma (it is expensive to have a global network of sales reps, let alone manufacturing for anything bigger than a small molecule). In fact you can consider it outsourced R&D by larger pharma companies
From a operational viewpoint, scaling up is the strength of pharmaceutical companies, small biotechs are known to hit wall when it's time to scale. They usually do not have the human resource nor the facility to match the need.
can confirm. I work closely with the team that's doing the scaling for this particular vaccine at pfizer right now. It's a very hard process since since this vaccine is some completely new tech. It has not been an easy task to figure out how to make industrial sized batches.
Hey fellow pharma buddy! I was working on the packaging and logistics side of the clinical trial part of things.
So this would be your difference in specialization. You got your chemists at bioNtech creating the vaccine sample which is then given to the chemical engineers at Pfizer whose job is to scale. You can’t scale the vaccine through the same means it’s made. It’s not a 1:1 formula for scaling. Then you have the advantages of supply chains and distribution systems that are also provided by the pharmaceutical. So all in all the difference between Pfizer is that they are the industrial distribution component where as bioNtech are the actually scientists behind it.
It's also possible that other companies will be outsourced for manufacturing as well, especially given the demand here. So Pfizer can use their facilities or hire ones like Patheon (Thermo-Fisher Scientific) to manufacture commercial amounts. These manufacturing companies don't design or develop drugs themselves, it's purely development and manufacturing.
It's a big industry.
In this case it is Pfizer handling the trial and then the US production for biontech.
The production in europe is not through Pfizer. They brought a big german lab recently to scale it.
Yeah. If the biotech hasn’t done this i am pretty sure there would not be millions of vaccines being produced before they even passed trial.
Anyone who has remotely followed this and paid just a smidgeon of attention knows that the R&D was undertaken by BioNTech and therefore its a German creation. Pfizer only really became a significant partner at stage 2 after it had passed its lab tests and BioNTech needed to scale the operation
If it works well however, then within 6 months it'll be an exclusively American creation. If it begins to fail, then within 6 hours it'll be German again
Personally, I'm happy to call it the BioNtech vaccine, since its clearly their brains that have driven it (Pfizer scans off the tongue a bit easier though so that's what people will call it).
Ironically just going by the names of them one would think Pfizer is the German one while BioNtech is the American one.
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Huh, I quickly looked that guy up and he's even born 10 km from my hometown.
I actually thought he was of German heritage but assumed his family might have been one of the earlier settlers, because Pfitzer without a t sounds like it was Americanized or formed before some newer forms of German orthography were introduced.
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Not to downplay vaccine development, but for a massive vaccine rollout like this, production and distribution are just as crucial. That’s why most Covid vaccine candidates today are being jointly developed and produced by partnerships.
IMO it’s just a matter of news reporting - Bloomberg (and most of the big media companies that have reported this) are American and went with the US company because it was more relevant to them / more known to their audiences. In the same way German outlets reported it as a BioNTech vaccine.
Here in Germany it is called the bioNTech vaccine.
It’s Tesla/Edison all over again.
Edit: In terms of recognition.
Except that all the scientists who did the work and figured it will probably never be known in the public world.
All the papers will be published, and they will be listed as authors. Biotech is better than most industries about recognizing scientists.
I'm pretty sure there will be some Nobel Prizes for this vaccine.
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Tim Pfizer
No no all the prizes goes to trump who actually came up with vaccine. Pence was there too but trump used his big a brain.
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The innovation is that they have developed the first mRNA vaccine shown to work and be safe in humans. (potentially)
Please corect me if I am wrong but I don't know of any other mRNA vaccine in use yet.
Which one of these companies is an insane genius who will later be canonized by the online community based on dubious achievements?
Melon Eusk
You're all incorrect, I saw it called the "Trump Vaccine" today.
I'd love a vaccine against Trump
That's the election and it has a 100% efficacy.
Takes awhile to kick in but it’s indeed 100% effective.
Oh boy, my father said Trump's ideas somehow contributed greatly to the vaccine. Unless it's Lysol and sunlight in a syringe, I'm gonna have to doubt it.
What's with the capital N though? With a name like that no one wants to try saying it. Is it Bion Tech or Bio and Tech?
It's like Bio'n'Tech. German news pronounce it that way.
They're in business together, let's just merge the names and be done with it
Thats actually hows it's done for nearly every drug these days. Watch the commercials carefully at the end, it's always a couple pharma "Pfizer-Lilly", rarely one single company alone
PfioNzech
Pfech
Danke Deutschland
Kein Ding ~ Deutschland probably
Thank you for voting out that clown of a president!
Lets start working together again!
As much as I would like my adopted city of Berlin to get all this attention, the main company behind the vaccine is from Mainz.
I think by Berlin they mean the german government
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Huh, TIL!
Really good word of the day IMO.
Even better example of one:
Oh sure, learning new words on Reddit seem great at first... But then you go and try to use it in a conversation to seem smart and realize you have no idea of how to pronounce said word... Is it like a syna
goguedouche?Sounds about right.
They say the funding came from Berlin meaning the Government, as it is the seat of the government.
Just like with Washington they mean the USA.
Huh, so when nations become allies and work together, everyone wins? 🤔
Sounds like Commie talk to me
"Let the galaxy burn."
-Trump voters
Yeah, it's weird. Almost like having more collaboration between teams would result in faster processes, more data, and quicker reaults.
The CEO of Biontech, Uğur Şahin, is the child of a turkish "Gastarbeiter" who immigrated to Germany, working manual labour jobs. I just thought this was pretty inspiring, as immigration as a concept has come under fire in last 4 years.
The guys from crytek who made crysis have a similiar background
Maximum armour
dies after 8 shots, not 6
Yeah, those guys are from Coburg, Bavaria! My birth place, and the neighbour city of my hometown!
Good games but they themselves are a bad example. They've done some very questionable things since then.
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His wife Özlem Türeci is the CMO of BioNtech. So it's a family affair.
The company employs over 1.3k people though, has a CFO and COO, and is publicly traded … can you really call that a "family affair"?
it is true that Uğur Şahin is having an affair with his wife
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Imagine thinking everything happening in the world revolves around the politics of one party from one country
Some people have been calling covid a hoax intended to discredit and get rid of trump since it started. The idea that the entire world would shut down and wreck its economy just because they don't like trump seems perfectly reasonable to them. This is nothing compared to that.
True, that was even worse
small town small mind my guy
You could point out there are 8 others in the same stage as this one, including the Oxford vaccine which got to this stage months ago. But the others haven't released the results of their testing yet.
It's not like there's suddenly a vaccine.
There are 47 vaccines in all stages of clinical trials around the world. There is a handy tracker on the WHO website. Not all should be expected to be efficacious and safe, but we will likely have several good vaccine choices available during 2021. Multiple vaccines should help with the manufacturing and distribution hurdles.
You could link them the articles saying "we think it'll be late November" for like, months now
Well because the vaccine was developed by biontech a German company.
Thanks Germany
FINALLY someone says it.
The vaccine is literally called "BNT162" which obviously does not stand for "Pfizer" but for the German company "Biontech". It's a cooperation with Pfizer, because you need to be extremely large to produce meaningful quantities.
I think Biontech is going to get alot of money from organizations like WHO or seperate countries.
Thank god Cheeto Mussolini was ousted, he literally attempted to pull the US out of the WHO.
Let us not forget that one of the most popular pain remedies for about 130 years - Bayer aspirin - originated in Germany. I want one o' them there vaccines...
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Aber davon reden wir nit...
Bayer have created some very controversial products and have a very controversial history.
As does literally any german company founded before or during WW2.
It isn't exclusive to Germany. IBM provided the third reich with a punchcard system to keep track of Jews. Those number tattoos are literally matched to the systems IBM sold them.
Fanta was created by Coca-Cola so they could sell a non-Coke product in Nazi Germany.
Google capitulated to the Great Firewall of China and the Western World rolled over.
Nestle is one of the shittiest most amoral companies in the world and are .
Its almost like these huge amorphous profit-driven entities are soulless and unscrupulous. Weird.
Edit: Wrong about Nestle origins. Coca-Cola not as strong as argument.
Don't take away Fanta from us. Fanta is a German invention, invented after having trouble sourcing Coca Cola ingredients. Doesn't really fit here imo.
Not to forget the popular cough suppressant Heroin
I mean heroin works well as a medicine. So well that it is still used for pain management in hospitals. It's just that just like other opioids, like Oxycodone, it has high addictive potential when misused or overprescribed.
First they engineered the Sham-wow and now a Covid vaccine, what can’t those Germans do?!
Diese
Kommentare SpalteKommentarspalte ist nunmehr Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪🍺🍻🍺🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪*Kommentarspalte
Wie hast du meine Freundin genannt?
I'm pretty sure several months ago, Trump had tried to bribe Germany or something, I can't fully remember.. I feels like it was decades ago so much shit has gone down, but I distinctly remember some sort of plot
News in Germany weren’t completely clear on what precisely had happened but Trump supposedly looked into buying exclusive rights to an eventual vaccine from another German company (CureVac), which then apparently was prevented by the German government.
It was prevented by the owner who then fired the CEO who wanted to make that deal.
You're right. The owner went public vetoing the deal, so any suggested behind-the-scenes government intervention may not have been necessary or happened at all.
edit: I imagine it like that: Merkel calling Hopp, "Dietmar, you're not seriously considering this, are you?" "Hell no, people hate me as it is."
Dietmar Hopp, the owner, also funded the rise of one of the most disliked football (soccer) clubs in Germany and is notoriously insulted in stadiums.
Second most disliked. We dislike RasenBall even more Ü
Of course :) And as much as I dislike Hoffenheim, I can understand what Hopp did. If I had that kind of money, my club might also be way better off than they are.
Edit: grammar
Because the company is funded by the german government
Even if it hadn't, the Government would have stepped in. They have the authority to do that when countries like the US get the crazy idea they can rule Germany and German companies and/or shit on the greater good of the German people like that.
Not only. The German government has the right to nationalise any company deemed system necessary. So if that company tried to sell exclusive rights to the US Government, the German government could've just taken the entire company.
Nah, he just wanted to straight up buy a company with U.S. government money or sth similarly insane.
Chairman said no, because when we develop a vaccine, everbody will get accesa to it for free anyways.
No idea if it was the same company though but I doubt it.
Mike Pence trying to take credit for this vaccine is both hilarious and pathetic.
I trust German with this vaccine more than anyone else and I’m Polish. That says something.
In Germany, if you want to get something done, you need to to go through a shitton of bureaucracy. There so much safety and environmental protection regulations that it takes ages to get something done. For example: Railroads werent allowed to be completed, because suddenly animals decided they want to nest in that area. If they applied the same level of caution to the development of this vaccine, which im sure they have, I wont be worried to take it at all. Especially after the Contergan scandal they didnt take any risks anymore.
I (a German) enjoyed your comment very much!
I perceived it as a joke and are quite uncomfortable with the Reaktion of some of my fellow Germans!
What nazi Germany did to your country was bestial and even though I don’t feel guilty for that I feel responsible for preventing something similar again! To endure smaller Insinuations is also part of it, especially when you understand that it sometimes takes generations to heal wounds
Germany, you are awesome.
I posted this in reply to Trump's tweet yesterday, boy did I catch some abuse from his cult!
Good old German engineering
I live in berlin and this makes me so happy. this is a vaccine I'm willing to take
The Germans save the world. Tell me if you’ve heard that before...
Don't stop us this time
The obvious answer to that is Bagger 288 https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow
German science is the best in the world!
Wait till you try our bread
Thank you Germany!
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To be honest... The biggest contributor was the European Union. Not Germany alone
A €375 million grant from the German government, and €50 million from the European Investment Bank (i.e., EU). Largest private investor is a fund from Singapore ($250 million).
Before Covid-19 became a thing and all that money came rolling in, they had already received $55 million (with the potential to go up to $100 million) to work on HIV and Tbc, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill and Melinda? Cue the antivaxxers who don't want to get chipped with 5g.
Ngl, having 5g connectivity in my body would probably be pretty dope, I'd be a walking talking hotspot.
Real 5G though, not that 4G with a facelift that att and verizon are peddling.
How the hell is germany doing everything right from after WW2. It’s just amazing, good on them.
Well its like crashing your bike face first into the asphalt. After doing that twice you'll be very careful when riding a bike again
Yeah, tell that to America. Or even better, tell that to my home country, Argentina, voting the same corrupt ppl over four terms (16 years).
I'd love to. Truth is, even though people on reddit always joked about Europe having fun in seeing the American elections, most people here in Germany were genuinely concerned that racism and fascism is on the rise again, something our grandparents and parents still had to suffer from. And its probably even worse in some other countries so I can just hope that your history will lead into a better future than my ancestors history did.
America is still in the process of sliding over asphalt.
It hurts right now, but hopefully the realize something went wrong after coming to a stop and realizing they substantially fucked up their face.
We are not doing "everything" right. Its just rather easy to shine compared to the US right now lol
They had an amazing industry pre-ww2 aswell. They just moved on from war to other things.
Made in Germany was originally a mark used to shame German products and for consumers in the rest of Europe to not buy German goods.
They were so good that the stamp backfired, and Made in Germany became a seal of quality.
Because they were the bad guy in WW2. They looked at themselves in the 90's, after being divided for decades and figured out ways to figure things out.
It also doesn't hurt that Germany values education incredibly much. I mean, Merkel is a physicist.
So clearly people in Germany somewhat like to have educated people at the wheel.
Merkel is a physicist? Wow, how did I not know that. That's awesome.
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She has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a PhD in quantum chemistry, pretty smart lady
As a non german eu citizen, I don't give a damn if Germany gets all the credit or not.. As long as that damn vaccine works.
Yeah, most of all it was developed by humans for humans.
So its actually the "Merkel Vaccine" ? Ayy eat shit trump lmao
I mean technically I gave around 6€ of my taxes to the funding so it's like 1/80.000.000th the "Sockratte-Vaccine". You're welcome!
Sockratte und Sumpfbieber - for a better tomorrow
Saving this for my future hipster indie watch company.
Sockratte und Sumpfbieber
The time is now.
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"Pfizer's vaccine" did not come from Pfizer. It came from the German biotech firm BionTech.
Great. I’m so glad that America has had such a warm and close relations with Germany since the 1950’s. Im sure the German government will be sure to specially help the Americans out with limited vaccine supplies. I haven’t paid attention to much international news in the past few years. I hope Donald Trump continued to further strengthen that relationship? /s