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BERLIN: It was during breakfast on the cold morning of January 24 that Ozlem Tureci and her husband Ugur Sahin decided, “we have to fire the starting shot on this.”
Sahin “had concluded from a post describing coronavirus cases in Wuhan … that there was a high probability that a pandemic could be imminent,” Tureci said.
The decision of the couple, founders of a small German company called BioNTech, gave rise to Operation Lightspeed, in which the company’s scientists diverted all their resources from cancer therapy research to find a vaccine to stop COVID- 19.
“Since that day … there has not been a day that we stopped working on this project,” Tureci said.
Four days later, on January 28, Germany confirmed its first case of coronavirus infection, also the first known person-to-person transmission on European soil.
What was an epidemic that hit China hardest soon morphed into a global health crisis, forcing governments to close borders, schools and offices and keep their populations at home to stop the spread.
READ: Over 600,000 UK people receive first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine
As BioNTech and other pharmaceutical companies jumped into action in search of the winning formula, the German army of “Mittelstand” companies and other leading logistics and manufacturing experts would soon prove crucial.
GENIUS IN A BOTTLE
Just a few minutes’ drive from BioNTech headquarters in the city of Mainz, one of those companies quietly increased production.
Little known to the rest of the world, the 130-year-old Schott is indeed a major player in the pharmaceutical industry because of its small glass vials designed to contain life-saving vaccines.
Three-quarters of the more than 100 coronavirus inoculation trials worldwide would end up using Schott products.
The company alone aims to produce enough vials to contain two billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2021, communications chief Christina Rettig told AFP.
Schott herself had an early scare with the virus at her Mitterteich plant in Bavaria.
The city became one of the first coronavirus hot spots in Germany in March after a beer festival, and Rettig said several Schott workers from the Czech Republic ended up “without seeing friends and family for weeks” when the borders were slammed shut.
FREIGHT INCREASES
With passenger flights mostly on the ground, the bustle in the Frankfurt airport terminals all but died away in the spring.
However, his cargo area was still working. Tens of thousands of boxes of urgently needed surgical gowns and masks passed by.
READ: How COVID-19 vaccines are transported to Singapore and stored here
Fraport’s cargo infrastructure chief Max Philipp Conrady knew that was just the beginning of his division in the pandemic battle.
No one knew then which company would find a vaccine or when it would be ready, but Frankfurt is already Europe’s largest hub for transporting pharmaceuticals.
Therefore, planning had to begin for the unprecedented logistical challenge of transporting millions of doses of life-saving vaccines around the world.
Fraport’s vast temperature-controlled hangar handled 120,000 tons of vaccines, drugs and other pharmaceuticals in 2019.
The operator anticipated the demand for cold storage and encouraged investments in high-tech refrigerated “dollies” that would transport the hangars to the planes. She is now 20, so multiple freighters can be loaded at the same time.
COLD IS HOT
Fraport wasn’t the only one to increase investments in solutions to keep things fresh.
When it became clear that the BioNTech vaccine would have to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius, the expertise in managing the cold chain became the next hot item in town.
In the midst of the global struggle to solve the problem of keeping vaccines at the right temperature as they are transported around the world, there seems to be a German company for every unknown application.
Binder in Tuttlingen has its “super freezers” that were already used in March to cool coronaviruses used in laboratory research by BioNTech and another German vaccine developer, CureVac.
But the demand grew even more as BioNTech advanced in the race.
“It really started in August, when we got these requests from logistics companies … they knew we needed to equip our cold storage … with freezers to distribute the vaccines around the world,” said Binder spokeswoman Anne Lenze.
While Binder guaranteed static cooling down to minus 90 degrees Celsius, another company, Va-Q-Tec, makes moving boxes with an ultra-strong function for the actual transport process.
Using silica particle technology, the containers can maintain temperatures ranging from refrigerator-like to polar chills for up to 10 days “without the need for power input,” CEO Joachim Kuhn told AFP.
On November 18, BioNTech and its partner Pfizer finally announced that their phase III study showed about 90 percent efficacy against the virus.
READ: BioNTech Has ‘Scientific Confidence’ Vaccine Will Work On UK COVID-19 Variant, Says CEO
The news sent the stock markets into euphoria and was hailed as a turning point, a light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel.
By then, the logistics industry was eager to get started.
As Conrady of Fraport said: “We’ve been ready since August.”
“CHAMPAGNE IS NOT OUR THING”
Celebrating quietly, the founders of BioNTech knew it was too early to rest on their laurels.
“Champagne is not our thing. We sat and enjoyed a cup of tea and took the time to reflect on what had happened so far and what will come next,” Sahin told AFP.
Several hundred kilometers away in the German capital, 66-year-old Albrecht Broemme was placing a bunch of Lego figures here and there as he envisioned how to transform Berlin’s old airports into hubs for the unprecedented vaccination campaign.
Broemme, a former firefighter and former head of the THW civil protection agency, had been called upon to retire to help in the battle against the pandemic.
At first, he was instrumental in designing emergency sites in case the number of patients exceeded the hospital’s capacities.
In autumn, he was called back to conceptualize the vaccination campaign for the German capital.
“I came up with a system, thinking about how many (vaccination) booths we would need and how much space we would need to avoid bottlenecks,” he said.
Each visitor will follow a designated route from the registration to the actual jab, then to a consultation with a doctor, and finally to a waiting room while final checks are performed.
The patient should be in and out of the doctor’s cubicle in a few minutes, Broemme said. Including queues and waiting time, “we imagine this will all take an hour.”
1,100 QUESTIONS
On December 2, BioNTech’s vaccine became the first to get the go-ahead for use in the West, when Britain gave its approval.
While other nations from the United States to Saudi Arabia and Singapore followed suit, Germany impatiently lobbied the EU drug regulator to advance its December 29 decision.
The EMA finally gave the green light more than a week in advance, on December 21.
READ: Don’t focus on herd immunity, vaccination should be comprehensive: COVID-19 panel expert
That same night, the European Commission declared that the entire block would begin the inoculation operation as of Sunday, December 27.
With the first coups looming, officials rushed to put the finishing touches on makeshift vaccination centers across Germany.
In the largest in the country in Hamburg, doctors will be able to handle 7,000 strokes a day.
BioNTech has also held webinars for nurses and doctors who will soon be administering the injection, with 1,100 questions answered during the sessions.
Trucks carrying vaccines left the Pfizer factory in Belgium on Wednesday.
BioNTech said it would directly supply its vaccines to 25 distribution sites run by federal authorities in Germany, which would then send the allocations to 294 districts.
Local authorities will then further funnel the injections to 450 vaccination centers.
A large number of mobile units will also be deployed in hard-to-reach districts.
With their sights set on possible sabotage by a growing wave of anti-vaccine and crown skeptics, federal police with armed commando units escort the precious moving cargo.
First will be the most vulnerable in nursing homes, several of which have been affected by deadly outbreaks of the virus.
The vaccines could not arrive soon enough for Germany, which recorded a record number of daily deaths of almost 1,000 people during the week. At least one district has reported that its crematorium is full.
For Chancellor Angela Merkel, each blow means a life saved.
“When we see how many people die from the coronavirus, we can see how many lives the vaccine can save.”
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