The first Covid-19 vaccine gives us reason to hope for the future of humanity 

The race for an effective Covid-19 vaccine appears to have been won by the US-German pharmaceutical partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech. The latter’s team is led by a German-Turkish husband and wife: Dr Ugur Sahin and Dr Ozlem Tureci. Monday’s announcement that their vaccine has passed preliminary trials with a success rate of more than 90 per cent sent markets soaring and prompted Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, to declare that he was “hopeful that it may prevent future waves” of this coronavirus.

This is great news. Before we throw caution to the winds, however, a few caveats need to be borne in mind. It will take weeks, if not months, before the vaccine is authorised by the US and other regulators and can be distributed to hospitals. The requirement that it be stored at an extremely low temperature until the day it is used may impede distribution in countries without specialised refrigeration facilities. This is not a cheap drug and two doses per person will be required, doubling the already considerable cost. And we still know nothing about how long the immunity it confers will last. 

The good news is that the Oxford vaccine, and perhaps others too, are likely to show similar results before the end of the year. So the US-German vaccine’s success strongly implies that within a short time doctors will have a repertoire of similar but usefully different vaccines from which to choose. And as time goes on, they will learn which ones are most effective for each category of patients. Such variety and competition can only be good from a pharmacological and a financial point of view. The more vaccines, the merrier — provided they are fully and safely tested.

The anti-vaxxers will doubtless seek to discourage take-up, spurred on by the already notorious Russian campaign of disinformation. It is to be hoped that Donald Trump will not be among them. The outgoing President was quick to cast doubt on the “nefarious” timing of the Pfizer announcement, immediately after the US election. Even if the news had come a week before, however, it would not have prevented Joe Biden’s victory. The fact is that Trump’s erratic handling of the pandemic had already cost him dearly in public trust. He refused to listen to his own chief scientist, Dr Anthony Fauci, who reciprocated by casting doubt on the President’s competence. The fact that Trump fired his Defense Secretary yesterday for no obvious reason other than to show that he still had the power to do so suggests that the electorate made the right decision. If Covid-19 is to be beaten, calm, rational and objective leadership is required, not least in the White House.

It is striking — and gratifying — that the oncologist couple to whom the world owes the Covid-19 vaccine breakthrough are both members of an immigrant community that is still on the margins of society in Germany. While Dr Tureci comes from an Istanbul medical family, her husband Dr Sahin is the son of a Gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) who worked in a car factory. Combining European and Asian antecedents, the duo also unite East and West within the Federal Republic: Dr Tureci calls herself a “Prussian Turk”, while Dr Sahin hails from the Rhineland. Already highly successful pioneers of new cancer treatments, the new vaccine will quite possibly make them the wealthiest medical family on earth. Their company, BioNTech, is already worth €20 billion — more than such German household names as Porsche or Deutsche Bank. Dr Sahin reportedly still cycles to work. Perhaps he and his wife can now afford a bicycle made for two.

Looking ahead to next year, the world can take heart from the capacity of the market economy and modern science to overcome even the deadliest threats to humanity. The pandemic has elicited a global response: American investment made possible a breakthrough by a team led by Prussian and Rhenish Turks. If the vaccine fulfills the hopes of humanity, Dr Tureci and Dr Sahin not only deserve to share a Nobel Prize. They will also be in a unique position to promote peace and prosperity, rather than war and hostility, as the solution to global problems. Albert Einstein, like other  Jewish refugees from Europe, helped to ensure that America beat the Nazis to the atom bomb. After 1945, however, he became the world’s most powerful spokesman for the avoidance of nuclear war. In the same way, the conquest of Covid-19 could offer a platform to those who seek to draw humanity back from the brink of a new geopolitical conflict. Following “the science” could acquire a whole new dimension if it helped to perpetuate peace on earth.

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