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BioNTech is German and Pfizer is American. Am I missing something?

by jimbob45 6y ago

dan-robertson 6y ago
Pfizer has big factories in the US for making vaccines. How many does BioNTech have in Germany?
- csnweb 6y ago
  They (BioNTech) themselves have only a few in Germany (2 or 3), but it's produced by other companies for them now as well totalling to around seven according to this German source: https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-produktion-deutschland-338.html https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-.... I say around because not all do the whole production sometimes only parts of it as it seems. Didn't dig very deep into it.
- sitic 6y ago
  The current bottleneck in the Pfizer vaccine production is the last manufacturing stage — combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. There are currently two plants for it, one in the US and one in Belgium. The US plant only delivers to the USA, the Belgian to the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine#Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    What I would like to know is why did we not use the year we had to build out local manufacturing capability? Given the gravity and cost of the pandemic surely we could have thrown a few billion at it and done a conflict-style mobilisation to get manufacturing capacity far above what is needed as a redundancy measure.
    - vkou 6y ago
      Two reasons. 1. Planners are penny-wise, and pound foolish. 2. Everyone's just blindly hoping that we won't have to repeat the quarantine-wait-a-year-and-a-half-for-vaccines for the inevitable tide of COVID-19 variants, that will be evolving in the world's unvaccinated populations.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        I meant legitimate reasons. If those are the only reasons I'll be expecting significant jail time to be handed out.
        disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Those are legitimate reasons. Look, the people who should have been sorting out vaccines were running around like headless chickens trying to deal with a global pandemic. Nobody has experience with this, and pretty much all Western governments thought they were done post June 2020, which clearly wasn't the case. They focused on other things (and there were lots of other things to focus on), and it's caused massive problems now. I completely agree that we should have built more manufacturing, but we didn't know which vaccines would work at the time. To be honest, the only people who could have actually made this happen was the US Federal Government in 2020, and they were focused on different things.
        rorykoehler 6y ago
        Your expectations of the people we trust to manage society for us are way too low. Maybe this is part of the problem with the rot of western civilisation. We’ve let our standards slip to pitiful levels. If I could foresee this a year ago sitting at home on my sofa with practically zero experience they could too. It is their job to and lack of specific experience doesn’t excuse the lack of application of basic and universal risk mitigation strategies. It doesn’t matter which vaccines would prove to work or not. You ramp up manufacturing capabilities and tooling on the 10 most likely candidates. It’s called hedging and the whole world knows about this strategy for a long time. No epidemiologist thought it would be over in June 2020. All the messaging was and is 2 years at least.
    - youngtaff 6y ago
      I don't know what other countries did but the UK did start doing this. There was lots of talk about cronyism when Kate Bingham was appointed to run the vaccine task force but taking bets and investing early even when outcomes weren't know is one thing the UK seems to have done well in the last year https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/02/07/news/kate_bingham_interview_vaccines_covid_astrazeneca_uk_coronavirus_johnson-286384093/ https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/02/07/news/kate_bingh...
- nirv 6y ago
  BioNtech has entered into an alliance[1] with 13 European companies to boost the vaccine production, as well as Chinese Fosun Pharma[2]. The agreement with Pfizer was important for the initial trials and production launch of the vaccine, but it's not binding and BioNtech is free to license the vaccine to other manufacturers (most likely under a different brand name from Comirnaty). Also, BioNTech has partnered with German Evonik[3] and Merck[4] to accelerate vital lipids production by the second half of 2021. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boost-covid-19-vaccine-production-11615640401?mod=hp_lead_pos2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boo... [2] https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-test-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-in-china-and-scores-50m-investment/ https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-te... [3] https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic-partnership-with-biontech-on-covid-19-vaccine-152784.html https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic... [4] https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partnership-04-02-2021.html https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partne...

BioNTech is German and Pfizer is American. Am I missing something?

dan-robertson 6y ago

Pfizer has big factories in the US for making vaccines. How many does BioNTech have in Germany?

csnweb 6y ago
They (BioNTech) themselves have only a few in Germany (2 or 3), but it's produced by other companies for them now as well totalling to around seven according to this German source: https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-produktion-deutschland-338.html https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-.... I say around because not all do the whole production sometimes only parts of it as it seems. Didn't dig very deep into it.
sitic 6y ago
The current bottleneck in the Pfizer vaccine production is the last manufacturing stage — combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. There are currently two plants for it, one in the US and one in Belgium. The US plant only delivers to the USA, the Belgian to the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine#Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  What I would like to know is why did we not use the year we had to build out local manufacturing capability? Given the gravity and cost of the pandemic surely we could have thrown a few billion at it and done a conflict-style mobilisation to get manufacturing capacity far above what is needed as a redundancy measure.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Two reasons. 1. Planners are penny-wise, and pound foolish. 2. Everyone's just blindly hoping that we won't have to repeat the quarantine-wait-a-year-and-a-half-for-vaccines for the inevitable tide of COVID-19 variants, that will be evolving in the world's unvaccinated populations.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      I meant legitimate reasons. If those are the only reasons I'll be expecting significant jail time to be handed out.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Those are legitimate reasons. Look, the people who should have been sorting out vaccines were running around like headless chickens trying to deal with a global pandemic. Nobody has experience with this, and pretty much all Western governments thought they were done post June 2020, which clearly wasn't the case. They focused on other things (and there were lots of other things to focus on), and it's caused massive problems now. I completely agree that we should have built more manufacturing, but we didn't know which vaccines would work at the time. To be honest, the only people who could have actually made this happen was the US Federal Government in 2020, and they were focused on different things.
        rorykoehler 6y ago
        Your expectations of the people we trust to manage society for us are way too low. Maybe this is part of the problem with the rot of western civilisation. We’ve let our standards slip to pitiful levels. If I could foresee this a year ago sitting at home on my sofa with practically zero experience they could too. It is their job to and lack of specific experience doesn’t excuse the lack of application of basic and universal risk mitigation strategies. It doesn’t matter which vaccines would prove to work or not. You ramp up manufacturing capabilities and tooling on the 10 most likely candidates. It’s called hedging and the whole world knows about this strategy for a long time. No epidemiologist thought it would be over in June 2020. All the messaging was and is 2 years at least.
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    I don't know what other countries did but the UK did start doing this. There was lots of talk about cronyism when Kate Bingham was appointed to run the vaccine task force but taking bets and investing early even when outcomes weren't know is one thing the UK seems to have done well in the last year https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/02/07/news/kate_bingham_interview_vaccines_covid_astrazeneca_uk_coronavirus_johnson-286384093/ https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/02/07/news/kate_bingh...
nirv 6y ago
BioNtech has entered into an alliance[1] with 13 European companies to boost the vaccine production, as well as Chinese Fosun Pharma[2]. The agreement with Pfizer was important for the initial trials and production launch of the vaccine, but it's not binding and BioNtech is free to license the vaccine to other manufacturers (most likely under a different brand name from Comirnaty). Also, BioNTech has partnered with German Evonik[3] and Merck[4] to accelerate vital lipids production by the second half of 2021. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boost-covid-19-vaccine-production-11615640401?mod=hp_lead_pos2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/biontech-recruits-rivals-to-boo... [2] https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-test-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-in-china-and-scores-50m-investment/ https://endpts.com/biontech-teams-up-with-fosun-pharma-to-te... [3] https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic-partnership-with-biontech-on-covid-19-vaccine-152784.html https://corporate.evonik.com/en/evonik-strengthens-strategic... [4] https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partnership-04-02-2021.html https://www.merckgroup.com/en/news/biontech-strategic-partne...