COVID vaccines: “We flew the aeroplane while we were still building it”
Recently retired head of vaccine R&D at Pfizer, Kathrin Jansen, discusses the lightning speed development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines — and the implications for vaccine platforms.

How did you develop a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 so quickly?

Over the years we had built a strong infrastructure, particularly through the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine programmes. But COVID changed everything in terms of how to approach the end-to-end vaccine R&D concept, driven by the enormous urgency.

[In March 2020] when our CEO said, “Get it done before the end of the year,” I said, “This is crazy!” But money was not an issue — and, then, you can do amazing things in an amazing amount of time.

We got creative — we couldn’t wait for data, we had to do so much ‘at risk’. We flew the aeroplane while we were still building it.

All the bureaucracy fell away. We were doing things in parallel, looking at data and doing the manufacturing. Usually, manufacturing doesn’t get involved until years into a programme. I remember those calls with my manufacturing colleagues; I said, “We have four different constructs, get all four ready.” Then later we narrowed it down. We threw a lot away that wasn’t working, but we always had other things already at scale to take forward.

Belgarion wrote on Nov 13^th, 2022 at 10:26am:


No he doesnt. And, no he won't.

Stand by for Sir Nail posting some more pictures of people who have sadly died but he's trying to blame their deaths on the Covid vaccines (without him or anyone in the screenshots he posts actually saying that, of course).