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The CEO of BioNTech, the German biotech company behind the first Covid-19 vaccine with Pfizer, said during a press conference on Tuesday that the coronavirus is not expected to disappear in the next ten years.
Uğur Şahin argued that “a new definition of ‘normal’ is needed”. “The virus will stay with us for the next ten years. We have to get used to the fact that there will be more outbreaks ”, warned the executive director of BioNTech, quoted by The Guardian.
However, he stressed that a ‘new normal’ could mean that people do not have to go to isolation, that companies do not have to close and that hospitalizations are no longer so common. “This could happen until the end of the summer,” he said.
The expert also said that the vaccine will not have an immediate effect: “This winter we will not see any impact on the number of infections. But we have to influence so that next winter is the new normal ”.
The biotech company is “scouting all the sites” to expand its vaccine production as much as possible, to boost what it called “shortages,” Uğur urahin said. The capacity at the end of 2021 is 1.3 billion doses.
On Tuesday, BioNTech said it could deliver another vaccine “in six weeks” in the event of a virus mutation, as it did in the UK. “In principle, the beauty of messenger RNA technology is that we can directly start designing a vaccine that fully mimics the new mutation,” the official added.
The BioNTech vaccine, developed in conjunction with the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, is licensed for use in more than 45 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and now the European Union.
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