“Scientists who made the Covid Vaccine possible.”
The Summer of 2020
( This is the beautiful story of the doctor couple Ugur-Tureci who took 14 years penance in oblivion to bring the first Covid-19 Vaccine. In this fiction, I have kept the immunology facts authentic. )
R.K.Mahapatra
It had been an unusually quiet summer.
The 5000 acres of the Frankfurt airport, the base station for the Lufthansa, that has the capacity of ferrying a whooping 65 million passengers per year was lying totally desolate. Not a single soul was around except for the monotonous tic tac blink of the airport’s huge display board.
The Greek Jew scanned around the empty hangar. A raging pandemic that is claiming 200,000 persons a day across the Globe has closed transport everywhere. A ghostly silence hung thick from the fragrant air of a late German summer.
His eyes spotted immediately the lone Turkish Moslem standing in front of their company’s executive Jet that will take both of them to the hilly countryside of Klosterneuberg, a small country town on the West Bank of Danube in Austria.
They did not shake hand.
Albert Bourla the Greek is the CEO of Pfizer. He was meeting Ugur Sahin the German of Turk descent for the first time physically though they had been working on Operation Light Speed, this Coronavirus vaccine project of Pfizer-BioNTech for six months.
They had a difficult mission ahead.
Bourla and Sahin were on a target to locate an unknown manufacturing facility that is the only company that can forge a lipid nano particle wrapper for their mRNA vaccine.
“Creating a mRNA platform is the easiest part of the job. I have been creating separate mRNA constructs for each of my cancer patients individually by his name for the last 13 years. Each tumour cell of a cancer patient is unique like his own fingerprint. We have to take a sample of his tumour cell, open up it in our lab, select one of the signature protein in it. Then our scientists prepare the exact mRNA construct for that particular protein. It is like your dentist taking a mould from inside your mouth exclusive for you."
The drug manufactured from such mRNA should home in specifically to the heart of the tumour mass killing only the identified cells without touching the adjacent things. There is no collateral damage as you usually come across in the cancer Chemotherapy or Radiotherapy.
Ugur Sahin was a cancer guy. Bourla knew.
Infectious diseases are different from Cancers. Vaccines are a totally different options. Of course the Sahin couple were trying to prompt our body to make antibodies against our cancer cells inside our system. But in a way, It works like a vaccine against the millions of cancer cell. Thought Bourla. He had to make a hard choice. After all, Pfizer his company will be betting one Billion USD on this uncharted technology, mRNA platform. he should better be 100% sure.
Development of vaccines take years.
ramakanta mahapatra
No, not years, it usually consumes decades.The shortest time on record for development of a viral vaccine was held by Mumps. It was 4 years. All other vaccines before them like Measles, Polio had taken decades.
That was before 2020. In those days, we would catch a piece of virus, then kill it or make it non-infectious ( a process known as attenuation). This piece when goes inside us should be strong enough to trigger immunity in us but not strong enough to start the disease. This usually took decades.
But Ugur Sahin had other ideas. He was not a virus guy. He was working on mRNA to fight cancer. He and his wife Tureci have started a company to help our body to make antibodies against cancer cells of stomach, breast and ovary. If our immunity can kill viruses, bacteria, fungi why not cancer cells, they asked. Ultimately the most potent weapon on this earth is our immune system. It has the reportoire to make a billion different types of antibodies. You just have to challenge it in its own language. Both Sahin and Tureci have been working on this and have decoded the dialect in which our cells communicate with each other. It is only a matter of time before cells can be instructed to perform as we decide. The medium of instruction they have selected is mRNA. For this the husband and wife duo have started a biotech company in Cologne of Germany, The BioNTech. But biotech companies need plenty of cash. …Then a new virus struck in China. BioNTech wanted to use a mRNA agent to fight this virus. But it needed cash. So Ugur dialled one of his contacts at the Pfizer for funding this project.It was January of 2020. People have not started using masks yet.
The man at the other end of the phone laughed.
He had famously said,
” These Coronaviruses will go away on their own. You see, we had the SARS-1 in 2003. It disappeared. Then came MERS. It is also gone. In fact those who have prepared a vaccine against the Ebola are yet to recover their lab cost. Sorry, Pfizer is not interested.”
( This will go into the annals as the most shortsighted quote.)
“But this is different. We may be looking at a huge Pandemic.” Persisted Sahin. The phone clicked off at the other end.
That was past. Now Pfizer has a different management. So the Greek CEO of Pfizer has joined the Turk from German in search of a manufacturing facility for their joint venture
But his brain was spurring into an idea.
“How long do you take to prepare such a new mRNA construct for a particular person’s tumour ?”
“Six weeks”.
“If this virus mutates as often as the reports say, how long will you take to come out with a variant specific construct ?”
“Six weeks.” Quipped the Turk. The Gold amulet hanging from the Turk’s neck glistened.
“You see nothing changes. The lipid nano wrapper, our manufacturing set up, everything remains the same. A few computer strokes and the sequence of the mRNA code is adapted to this new variant gene”.
“The appeal of mRNA vaccines – and a key secret to their speed – is they are plug-and-play: The mRNA vehicle does not need to change, only the specific genetic instructions it carries is modified. If the virus changes or mutates, the details of the instructions can be altered accordingly.” Ugur seemed to be pretty confident.
“The whole mRNA platform is not how to build an mRNA molecule; that’s the easy thing. It is how to make sure the mRNA molecule will go into your cells and give the instructions.” “DNAs are the stablest storage device nature has formulated and incorporated inside us humans. Earlier Mother Nature has used the simple but exciting mRNA genes in Viruses and lower life things. To her horror, she found that though the mRNA chip though simple and exciting but it is error prone and unstable.
Every forensic lab will ask for a sample of blood for DNA test. In paternity test you do not use the mRNA test. Why ? Because the volatile mRNA is the first thing to disappear from the crime scene.”
“That will be an advantage to us. After the vaccination, the modified mRNA that we have injected will not leave any permanent mark in the gene of our clients”.
“Our problem is to find out how to carry this piece of mRNA inside our cell and coax the cell to be immunised.”
It has taken the Turkish moslem guest worker of the Rheinland and his doctor wife 14 years to come out with a radical idea to forge out their trademark patent: a Liquid Nano Particle (LNP) to courier their gun inside our cells. The idea was singular. Because it exactly mimics the identical outer coat of the virus that has already infected 10 million human beings worldwide. The mRNA vaccine is just a man made RNA virus created in our lab. With the tweaked mRNA of the BioNTech wrapped around with the lipid layer manufactured at the nameless Austrian company, they have perfected a benevolent manmade RNA virus inside their Marburg labs ready to infect billions of humans.
On November 18, 2020, these stealth bombers were given the green signal by USFDA to take up the SARS COV2 virus head on towards a logical end. 14 years “Banawas” of the Sahin-Tureci couple was finally over.
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