IN THE SUMMER OF 2020 AS THE PANDEMIC RAGED,infecting more than 200,000 people a day across the globe, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin boarded an executive jet en route to the hilly countryside of Klosterneuburg, Austria. Their destination: a small manufacturing facility located on the west bank of the Danube River called Polymun Scientific Immunbiolo-gische Forschung. Bourla and Sahin were on a mission to get the company to manufacture as many lipid nanoparti-cles as possible for their new Covid-19 vaccine, which was on a fast track to receive emergency authorization from mRNA molecule; that's the easy thing," Bourla says. "It is how to make sure the mRNA molecule will go into your cells and give the instructions." Yet the story of how Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer managed to create that vital delivery system has never been told. It's a complicated saga involving 15 years of legal battles and accusations of betrayal and deceit. What is clear is that when humanity needed a way to deliver mRNA to human cells to arrest the pandemic, there was only one reliable method available-and it wasn't one originated in-house by Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech or any of the other major vaccine companies.
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