From Lowest to Highest Reliability... Pfizer's 'Moonshot' COVID-19 Vaccine

[Asia Economy Reporter Seomideum] Painkiller Advil, supplement Centrum, erectile dysfunction treatment Viagra... These are all medicines that most people have probably heard of at least once. Their commonality is that they are products manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Pfizer, which dreamed of becoming the world's number one pharmaceutical company, recently embarked on a huge venture in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some worried that Pfizer might have to give up its position as the world's largest pharmaceutical company, but Pfizer took the risk, saying, "We must become the best, not the biggest." This is how the first mRNA vaccine to prevent COVID-19 was born. This is the so-called "Moonshot" (a term referring to the launch of a lunar probe).

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is a Greek-American immigrant who grew up under parents who were Holocaust survivors. In January 2019, he was appointed CEO of the major American pharmaceutical company Pfizer. The book "Moonshot" is set from 2020, when COVID-19 began to spread globally in earnest, to early 2021, and meticulously details how Albert Bourla and Pfizer endured political and social pressures and crises to become the first to successfully develop an effective and safe COVID-19 vaccine.

In his second year as CEO, he decided to develop the vaccine despite incurring billions of dollars in losses. He invested billions of dollars to strengthen production process assets and acquired four biotechnology companies within a few months. He significantly increased budgets for R&D and digital sectors while drastically cutting marketing and administrative costs. He explains that such "innovations that change patients' lives" made success possible.

Pfizer was the first to successfully develop a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. While traditional vaccines activate the immune system through parts of a non-infectious pathogen, mRNA vaccines teach the body to produce the vaccine itself without the actual pathogen. It was not an easy decision to stake the company's fate on a promising but unproven technology. However, the mRNA approach was the fastest way to find a solution among all available technologies.

Success soon became power. Requests for help flooded in from world leaders (presidents, kings, prime ministers, tribal chiefs). It was also politically sensitive. "If the vaccine is approved before the election day, some might think it is the result of political pressure from the White House. Conversely, if the vaccine is approved after the election, some might think it was due to political pressure from the Biden campaign."

Pricing was also a sensitive issue. Typically, drug prices are set by "calculating the value they bring to patients, healthcare systems, and society." This involves estimating and reflecting the economic value generated when the drug reduces costs that the healthcare system must bear. According to this calculation, the vaccine's price was truly "enormous." It was an opportunity to make a lot of money, but Pfizer gave up pricing the vaccine according to the standard value calculation method and set the price at the lowest level of existing flu vaccines ($20?30). This was roughly "the price of a meal." He insisted that vaccines "should be accessible to everyone equally, regardless of location."

Thanks to this, Pfizer became the world's number one preferred vaccine brand, the most influential CEO globally, and rose from being one of the least trusted pharmaceutical companies alongside the U.S. government and tobacco companies to the fourth most respected company after Apple and Google. The book details Pfizer's "Moonshot" in depth.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.