the COVID-19 vaccine, his take on misinformation and politics in medicine, and his personal story. He, along with BioNTech co-founders Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, will receive the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Business Leadership Award on Wednesday, November 10. Below, edited for length and clarity, is Bourla’s conversation with Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council.
FREDERICK KEMPE: You’re a Greek-born American. You’ve called yourself a Greek by birth and American by choice, the son of Holocaust survivors from Thessaloniki, Greece. As I understand it, there were fifty thousand Greek Jews before World War II in Thessaloniki and only two thousand survived, and you’ve written this upbringing has shaped you. I wonder if you could talk about what it is your parents went through in their childhood and how these origins and how this history has shaped who you are today.
ALBERT BOURLA: You are right. From fifty thousand Jews, only two thousand survived, that’s a 96 percent extermination in the city of Thessaloniki in Greece, and among those two thousand were my father and mother. They met after the Holocaust. They decided to build a life together, and then they had me and my [sister]. And my parents talked to us a lot about their experiences, and that’s not very common because a lot of Holocaust survivors avoided speaking to their kids about their experiences because it was very painful to remember those stories.
