Afterwards, it was the security guards that Albert Bourla remembered.
It was Sunday November 8, 2020, 13.27 US Eastern Standard Time. Bourla, the chief executive officer of Pfizer, had called his executive team to the office in Connecticut. There, they awaited the results of their vaccine trial.
Some 46,000 patients had been recruited in six countries. Billions had been invested. Manufacturing of the vaccines had already begun. Now, this was the first opportunity to see if it had all been for nothing.
Over the weekend, statisticians had been rushing to analyse the interim data. Would it be good enough to continue the trial? Would it be bad enough that they had to abandon it? Would it be so good that they declared victory then and there?
Later, Bourla would discover that the entire process of analysing the data had nearly been held up because one member of the data monitoring board – the independent statisticians who sift through trial results – had lost his wi-fi connection.
This statistician had driven around town in a panic at 1.30am seeking a hotspot, until finding an intermittent signal at a petrol station. A police officer, suspicious, had asked him what he was doing. When the officer heard the answer, he stayed with him until the last packet of data was transferred at 4.30am.
There, in that small, glass-walled office, Bourla and his team at last learnt what that statistician had sent on – and the history of a pandemic swerved. "We had no idea what the results would be," he says, speaking from the same office. "It was a great, great day."
Yolanda Lyle, Bourla's chief of staff, appeared with a bottle of chilled champagne – she had been quietly preparing. Watching on were the executive protection officers – his constant companions, impassive and silent, just as they were trained to be.
But, recalls Bourla, what he remembers is these officers. "They had realised what was happening, and you could feel that they were seriously moved." One of them, he says, looked like he almost had tears in his eyes.
This was not just a corporate victory, although it was clearly that. It was not just a global victory, although it was that too. In the months that followed, Bourla would speak to most of the leaders in the world. The distribution of his vaccine – who got it, who didn't get it – would move markets and politics. It would be invoked by leaders seeking re-election, and by leaders seeking distraction from, for example, prosecco bottles and broken swings.
But seeing the reaction of his security guards that afternoon reminded Bourla it was also, though, a victory that affected everyone. His own family – his wife and grown-up twins – would get the Pfizer vaccine. Their freedom, your freedom, the security guards' freedom, would be to a large degree determined by its success.
Previously, Pfizer was best known for erection pills. Now it would be best known for helping end a pandemic.
"It became obvious at a certain point that we were the drivers of the largest hope for the most important thing in the world at that time," says Bourla. "And you can feel that weight on your shoulders." For now they had champagne. The security guards, professional as ever, did not. And the weight was only going to increase.
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"Believe it or not," says Bourla, with all the enthusiasm of a wide-eyed immigrant, "in New York you can find whatever you want. Anything that one can create, you will find it here."
In March 2020, eight months before that momentous day in his Connecticut office, what he wanted, as a relatively new CEO, was to find a way to thank his team.
He had been restructuring the company and he was looking for a way to acknowledge they had been under stress. He also wanted – perhaps – to apologise for the fact that he had been the cause of much of that stress.
That was when he found the Break Bar, a normal bar that serves normal drink but with the twist that you get to smash up the glass afterwards and – depending on the package you choose – the room too.
"When there is anxiety," marvels Bourla, as if describing the American dream, "you can go and for a small fee you can break everything."
Bourla, 60, has been with Pfizer for half his life – and the company in turn has made him a citizen of the world. He was born in Greece, the son of two of the last of Thessaloniki's Jews. He always knew that his parents' existence, and hence his, hinged on the banality of random fate.
During the German occupation, his father hid in Athens pretending to be ethnically Greek – calling himself Kostas rather than Mois. His mother went into hiding in Thessaloniki and was captured and arrested towards the end of the war. Her elder sister had married a Christian, who bribed the senior Nazi in the city, extracting the promise she would not be executed.
The elder sister, Bourla's aunt, did not trust the commander. Each day she went to see prisoners being loaded onto a truck, to be taken to be shot. One day, she saw her sister among them. Her husband bravely called the Nazi with whom he had made the deal. Bourla's mother was saved with minutes to go, pulled back from the wall against which she was due to be murdered.
He spent the first half of his life in Greece. But when he joined Pfizer, he and his wife, Myriam, began to travel with the job. Their own children were born in Poland – twins Mois and Selise. During the birth, Selise suffered a lack of oxygen, and as a result has cerebral palsy; Myriam, Bourla says, devoted herself from then on to ensuring it would not affect her life chances.
When we talk, it is Valentine's Day and he is congratulating himself on remembering to send flowers. Or, at least, on remembering to employ an assistant who remembered to send flowers.
There would be other countries and other, increasingly senior postings. Until, in January 2019, he took over as CEO in the US.
He never got to smash up the bar. Nor did his staff ever get to relieve that anxiety. Before they could enjoy Bourla's very Greek ideas about what to do with crockery, lockdown came – and the really stressful work began.
Across the company, employees began to work from home. Bourla himself asked to visit one of Pfizer's manufacturing sites. The request was refused; the CEO of the company was not deemed an essential worker.
In a call a few weeks earlier, he had already promised Donald Trump that the company would work on a vaccine. Now it needed to find one. And "find" is the right word.
There is a great injustice that we call it the "Pfizer" vaccine. Pfizer did not create the vaccine, nor engage in the decades of research that made it possible. It did not spend years in the scientific wilderness, refining and investing in a technology many had begun to suspect would not work. Instead, in the spring of 2020, Bourla got in touch with BioNTech, a German company that had done all those things.
Founded by a Turkish couple called Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, its main focus was on treating cancer. But Sahin and Tureci had faith that a particular molecule called RNA, a kind of genetic code, could change medicine. They believed that by encasing this molecule in droplets of fat and transporting it to our cells it could hack our cellular machinery, exploiting it for whatever we chose.
It could make proteins to defeat cancer or – they believed – it could make coronavirus proteins, to train our bodies to defeat the real thing. "Believed", though, is the operative word – BioNtech had never made a successful product in its history.
For Bourla, who had rejected government funding, it was a massive punt of shareholders' cash. But it was not a stupid one. Yes, there were more reliable vaccine technologies. There weren't faster ones though. The key, crucial advantage of BioNTech's messenger RNA or mRNA approach was speed. If it worked, it would be available sooner than any other.
He called Sahin and they agreed a deal. It would be weeks before they had the paperwork – science, manufacturing and trials can be sped up, lawyers can't – so they just did whatever the Zoom version is of shaking on it, and got to work.
If calling it the "Pfizer" vaccine is unfair, though, so too would be calling it merely the BioNTech vaccine. At the start, says Bourla, "We had nothing but problems.
"There was a concept that maybe RNA can be put in lipid nanoparticles and that can go into the cells of humans, and then they can produce a protein that will probably make your body produce antibodies, and that could control the virus. That was a nice concept.
"And for years people were trying to do it and they couldn't." Everything beyond the idea, says Bourla, "was in the imagination".
It wasn't just that nobody had shown the concept worked. Nobody had manufactured an mRNA vaccine in enough quantity to be able to do so. Pfizer had to do everything. They had to write software to direct the mRNA molecule into the little particle of fat. They had to build the machines to apply the software to making enough for a dose, and then a million doses.
Take just one stage in the process: delivery. The technology was so new that they did not have time to test how well the mRNA survived. To play it safe, they were going to transport it at minus 70C. How? They designed a special box, filled with dry ice, a thermometer, a GPS and a light detector. It would transmit its location and temperature and they would know centrally if it had been opened.
They did a back-of-an-envelope calculation. They would need 2 per cent of the dry ice supply of the United States, and the cold chain costs could be US$2 billion (NZ$2.95b). All of it would be written off if the vaccine failed. And even if it didn't, it would be pointless if they couldn't make enough.
The year before had been a big one for vaccines at Pfizer. They had made 200 million doses. If, says Bourla, he had told his team that that year they needed to make 300 million, "clearly it would be very challenging". They would squeeze in more equipment, look to optimise processes, maybe try to build another factory. They would, though, quite probably fail – at least, in the first year.
He wanted three billion doses. In a way that's easier. "If you tell them, 'I want you to do 20 times more,' suddenly they start rethinking from scratch." Rather than building new factories they made prefabricated modules. The police closed the highway so that these huge units could be transported to the manufacturing site at Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Bourla is talking because he has written a memoir of this time, Moonshot. It was a way, he says, to tell people about the "power of science". It is also a way to remember the time. Like everyone, his life was turned upside down by the pandemic. Like everyone, the professional bled into the personal.
He was working from home and his children – now at university – were back studying from home. ("We were all together. For me that was something I really liked. I'm sure they didn't.")
He might be an immigrant but often the book – which he wrote himself – is endearingly American. There are mission statements. There are descriptions of people ordering their own Pfizer-branded T-shirts with the logo "Science will win".
But there are also hints that it was a little less happy-clappy, a little more fraught. Bourla describes how he had little patience for people who brought him problems.
"For endless weeks and months, whenever someone raised a complication, a hurdle or a challenge, I would respond, 'People are dying. There is no excuse. Solve it.' I knew this was a kind of psychological or emotional blackmail," he writes.
"I regret a lot of the moments," he tells me. "I lost it several times. It's not good for a leader to shout and I did. I apologised to them. I'm sure they forgave, but they never forgot."
If they did forgive, it will be because of the end result.
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In the middle of November, a few days after Bourla popped his champagne cork, the Secret Service pulled up outside Pfizer's offices. In normal times, trial data is sent to the US regulator over the internet. These were not normal times. "Keep in mind that this was the most material information that one could possess in the world at that moment. More than nuclear weapons secrets," says Bourla.
Two large black cars pulled up outside, carrying two agents with two identical bags. They came to collect two hard drives. One hard drive had the data on. The other, identical, was blank – a decoy. There was a password: "Yellowstone".
I get the impression that Bourla enjoyed the process enormously. He mentions James Bond a couple of times. These things don't normally happen to pharmaceutical executives. Mind you, now that the vaccine worked, a lot of unusual things were about to happen to him.
The release of the trial results had been dictated not by Pfizer, but coronavirus. In order to have data to judge whether the vaccine worked required there to be enough infections among those involved in the trial.
For all of the billions of dollars already spent, ultimately they were beholden to people forgetting to wear a mask on public transport, singing too lustily at church, or ignoring a sniffle and heading out to the pub.
Only when around 100 had been infected could they unblind the data to see the most crucial statistic: were those infections evenly split between the control group and the vaccine group, in which case it didn't work? Or were they, as turned out to be the case, mainly in the control group, in which case it did?
Not that this argument held much sway with Donald Trump. From around the world, leaders were calling to congratulate Bourla. Trump, who had just lost the election, did not call. He never spoke to Bourla again – unless you count Twitter.
Releasing the results after the election, he claimed, was a conspiracy by those who "didn't want to have me get a Vaccine WIN, prior to the election, so instead it came out five days later – As I've said all along!" he wrote.
"He was bitter. He was very bitter," says Bourla. "He feels we did it on purpose."
This was just the start of the conspiracies. A rumour spread on the internet that Bourla had been arrested. He didn't mind that – the website that started it also claimed the Pope was arrested. Another rumour was started, though, that his wife had died after taking the vaccine. He was less amused. "It was all over the internet, 'Bourla's wife is dead because of the vaccine complications.' "
On the wall of his executive meeting room, Bourla has a picture of his daughter, Selise. It is a reminder, he says, that their job is to put patients first. Now, though, he was worried that his work was affecting his personal life, rather than his personal life inspiring his work.
"I worried about my kids: what if they see it? I started calling people to make sure they wouldn't be surprised."
So it was that Bourla's job became about handling what it was to be a public figure. That was not to say that he was untroubled by technical problems.
There was one week, he remembers, when everything seemed to go wrong. "I knew we had the vaccine, and then unexpected manufacturing issues emerged. I couldn't believe it. We were able to do the vaccine and suddenly these problems are coming that are threatening everything." Which specifically? "Things like that, I had three per day." It took him a week to resolve. "I was scared we were going to miss, big time, our launch timelines."
When you are manufacturing at the scale of the global population, details matter. A victory came when they found a way to cut wastage and go from five doses per vial to six.
But while Bourla was negotiating these changes, he was also negotiating in the geopolitical sense. In the months that followed, he says, "I had to navigate, frankly, a political minefield."
The leaders just kept on phoning. "I took the call no matter what. Sometimes they were good news; sometimes they were not good news. The thing I realised was that most of these leaders were very human and very stressed."
Some just phoned once, before going with a different vaccine. Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israel prime minister, phoned dozens of times. Israel's strengths in health data, and its willingness to share it, meant Pfizer used it as a test bed. It was the first to have a population double-jabbed, and became the first to provide the data showing that they needed boosters.
There were also several with Boris Johnson. ("He never lost a chance to tell me that the UK is the best place for investments in health science.")
In reports of these calls, from people on the other end of the line, it is clear it was not only joshing. Latin American countries said later they felt they were being bullied (for his part, Bourla says they are playing to their own countries, "using it as an excuse" to explain why they went for different vaccines).
African countries claimed, and still do claim, that by not waiving patents and allowing them to make generic versions, he ensured that the West was triple-jabbed while they got none (he says that the bottleneck was raw materials, not manufacturing – and that today the main impediment to using the Pfizer vaccine in Africa is a lack of supply infrastructure and vaccine hesitancy).
Even US officials accused him of trying to "play hardball" in a pandemic. Pfizer initially assumed it would get US$100 or more per dose – five times what the vaccine eventually went for. Actually, Bourla considered this a steal. Using their standard model, in which the company calculated the savings the vaccine would bring to healthcare systems, they thought US$600 was fair.
What is interesting is the way Bourla justifies eventually charging one thirtieth of that. It is, he says, sort of because it was the right thing to do; and sort of because it was perceived as the right thing to do. Pfizer could, he says, have made "way more billions. But we would stay in history as, we didn't offer to the world something. Now, I feel way better that, beyond any doubt, we didn't try to profit… There is something bigger than making a fair profit here." The bigger thing? "To change forever the reputation of the company."
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We are experiencing exponential growth in coronabooks. The R number of memoirs from key figures in the pandemic is well above one, with no sign that the publishing community wants to flatten the curve.
Bourla's book joins dozens of others. What is unusual for a man in his position, though, is that he took time out to write it himself.
He is still a very busy man. He is not short of kudos. Neither does he need the money – his last pay cheque was US$21 million. Yet he clearly wanted to tell his story. Why?
I believe him when he says he wants to remind us of the power of science. I also believe him when he says part of his motivation was simply to get his memories recorded, so he never forgets the emotions of the past two years.
There is though, I think, another motivation. I think he wants to remind people that this exit strategy came because of that great evil, Big Pharma. It was Pfizer that had the resources, flexibility and ingenuity to make a gargantuan bet and then realise it.
Partly as a consequence of those decisions, this week you can go to a restaurant, smash up a New York bar, see your granny. For many of us, as a consequence, our granny is still alive.
So yes, after making that bet, he doesn't want to relinquish his patents. Nor does he understand why, after agreeing to sell the vaccine a lot cheaper, we would assume he is somehow the baddie in negotiations.
Most of all there is an impatience in Bourla, I sense, about profit – and, in particular, about the idea that somehow, just because there is a pandemic, it is a dirty word.
When he tells me that Pfizer did not want to be seen to be profiting from the pandemic, I point out that it has nevertheless had a very good year, financially. To which he responds, "Thank God we have." Imagine, he argues, if it hadn't. Imagine if the company had failed to show all that effort was worthwhile?
"I can't think of a better reason why someone should make profit than because of saving the world."
Written by: Tom Whipple
© The Times of London
