So that also followed me all the way to the COVID-19 vaccine. But the fundamental is that what really helped us and BioNTech and the teams that they worked very hard to develop in record time, such a success, were two things: One was that we really thought big. These teams really thought big. They didn’t try to do the eight years, seven years of development. They tried to do the eight years [in] eight months of development.
And the second was that there was a very deep, instilled sense of purpose. We knew that what we were doing was not going to affect our lives. It’s not going to affect our company’s future. It’s going to affect the lives of the future of the world. That gives you a tremendous drive and this is what everyone on this team, in Pfizer and in BioNTech, did during these eight marvelous months.
FREDERICK KEMPE: We all have particularly formative experiences in our lives. Could you share with us any particularly formative experience that you had before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic?
ALBERT BOURLA: You know, I am a veterinarian by educational background, and after I graduated from the veterinary school… I did a PhD in the biotechnology of reproduction. My ambition was to have an academic career and I was really geared towards that… Pfizer Greece was recruiting at that time, and they reached out to me to offer me a very good position in their animal health group, which in the beginning I was very reluctant to take.
