BioNTech’s Covid vaccine: a shot in the arm for Germany’s Turkish community

Yesterday. it was announced that COVID-19 vaccine candidate from Pfizer and BioNTech had achieved 90% effectiveness in a phase 3 trial.  It was both a triumph of human ingenuity as well as an incredible immigrant success story. BioNTech founders Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin’s backgrounds as children of Turkish guest workers who came to Germany in the late 1960s is significant, Philip Oltermann writes for The Guardian. “In a country where a debate about the willingness of German citizens with Turkish roots to integrate into public life has never been far from the headlines for the last decade, the story of BioNTech’s founders is also salient.” In April, Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel “wrote that their success was ‘balm for the soul’ of Germans with Turkish roots after decades of being stereotyped as lowly educated greengrocers.” Now, they may quite literally save the world.

KJ