Dr. Albert Bourla

Bourla's perspective, as Pfizer's CEO, gives him a very different perspective on the race to develop and deliver a Covid vaccine. While it is from a high level, there are enough details, from a wide enough variety of areas, that the story remains interesting, complementary to the other vaccine books I've read recently.

While the content and tone is mostly good, Bourla does occasionally come across as a bit of a slime. For example, when he complains about news of his stock sales, he neglects to mention his $25 million/year compensation. He talks about the need for shared sacrifice, while the only sacrifice he can name for himself is taking phone calls from prime Ministers occasionally at odd hours. I am sympathetic to the drug industry, but his arguments for higher drug prices are also fairly tone deaf.

> We will move materials for our existing product out of our current warehouses to temporary locations and convert these warehouses to freezer farms, each the size of a football field.” “Freezer farms?” I asked. “Yes, freezer farms. We will install five hundred big freezers that each has the capacity to store three hundred thousand doses. In total we can store over one hundred million doses there. We will do the same in our manufacturing site in Belgium for the European production.”

> We huddled together as a team, studying the data we had and projecting what was possible. Even though there was a lot of white space in the second puzzle, it appeared to be more promising. With our original deadline approaching, we decided to wait another week for more data, because we sensed that the choice we made would make a huge difference in the success of the vaccine. Postponing our deadline by a week on this project was a very big decision

> We jumped from our chairs and started celebrating. Sally, Doug, and Yolanda were screaming. I felt like I was wearing one of those wingsuits, flying above mountains and green valleys. … As we toasted this amazing moment, I remember my eyes being drawn to the two Pfizer executive protection officers who were with us that day. They were silent as they usually are, but they had realized what was happening, and you could feel that they were seriously moved. One of them almost had tears in his eyes.

> I started receiving news that President Trump was extremely dissatisfied with Pfizer and me personally because the results had come after the November 3 election. He was forming an opinion that this was done on purpose to hurt him and that if we’d wanted, we could have had the results before the elections. The same sources were telling me that Health and Human Services Secretary Azar was thinking the same and was among the people who kept feeding the president’s anger. … President Trump never called me, either to thank Pfizer or to complain.

> After we announced the results of our Phase 3 study on November 9, the stock crossed the limit price at one point during that day, and Fidelity executed the sale automatically. I was not even aware that the sale was executed for an additional day until Fidelity informed me about the transaction. Once this information became public, the same TV shows and newspapers that had been glorifying me two days before started casting doubts, as if my sale were motivated by something I’d known would happen on November 9. I was not used to this kind of attention, and I was devastated. I could feel for the first time in my life the other side of being a public figure, and how fast things can change, even if just two days ago you “saved the world.”… (más)