Biontech Lab announces the possibility of distributing its vaccine against Covid-19 before the end of the year

The director general of the German Biontech laboratory, which works alongside the American Pfizer, to produce a vaccine against Covid-19, announced Thursday that it is “possible” to obtain a license for a vaccine and start distributing it before the end of the year in the United States or the European Union.

“We are doing our best,” Ugur Shaheen said in a videoconference with AFP, explaining that the license application will be filed Friday with the American Drug Agency.

The researcher specializing in immunology added, “There is a chance that we are still able this year to obtain a license in the United States or Europe or in both,” and explained that “it is possible that we will be able to distribute vaccines in December”.

The European Medicines Agency is currently conducting an ongoing evaluation of the vaccine before it is licensed, and additional data will be provided to it “next week”.

The Biontech and Pfizer project, along with the American Moderna Laboratory project, are the most advanced in large-scale clinical trials and have demonstrated comparable efficacy (95 percent of the first vaccine).

Hundreds of millions of doses have so far been seized around the world. 

However, a number of governments announced that the doses will be directed at first to medical personnel and people who are most vulnerable in terms of health, and the rest will have to wait a few months.

Ugur Shaheen considered that if “all actors, including governments, pharmaceutical companies and the logistics chain, do a good job, we will be able to vaccinate from 60 to 70 percent of people by winter 2021”.

“If we achieve this, we will witness a normal winter, without a new stone,” added the co-founder of Biontech, which is based in Maynes (western Germany).

The Biontech / Pfizer alliance has signed several contracts, most notably with the European Union and the United States, and is currently negotiating “with 30 countries”.

The two labs are also talking with “several organizations”, including the United Nations, with the aim of “making the vaccine available in the whole world” and reducing its cost so that it is available to poor countries.

Shaheen (55 years) and his wife, Ozlem Torigi, director of the medical department and the co-institution of the laboratory, will “of course” use the vaccine as soon as possible.

Shaheen said he was “very confident” that the vaccine was safe. 

One of the issues that the authorities will have to solve is the people’s acceptance of the vaccine, in the context of growing suspicion about vaccines.

The two laboratories announced during a review of additional data on the trials on Wednesday that they had not detected so far “any serious side effect” during the large-scale tests.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel estimated Thursday that “these vaccines should be licensed without risk”.

But the duration of protection provided by the vaccine remains one of the questions that continued studies will answer.

In this regard, Shaheen added, “Reasonably, I say that the vaccine protects for at least a year, if not more”.

There is another challenge, as the product must be kept at a low temperature, below minus 70 degrees, during the distribution of the product, and it should not be stored for more than five days at the refrigerator temperature.

But the company says it is “well prepared” for the first phase of distribution.

In parallel, Biontec is working on a “second generation” vaccine that can be stored at lower temperatures.

“We are in the process of defining conditions that allow it to be transported at temperatures below 20 degrees or to be stored for a longer period in the refrigerator,” Shaheen said.

The founders of Biontech were not known to the general public until recently, and they also attracted attention with their careers, as they both descended from Turkish immigrants and were educated in Germany.

The couple founded the company in 2008 with the aim of developing a new generation of treatments for cancer patients.

Research in this field continues, and the Director General of Biontech stated that the innovative technology on which the vaccine project is based against Covid-19 paves the way for vaccines or other treatments “especially against cancer”.