I feel like there’s a threshold for fame that needs to be met for giving credit in the English-language, mainstream media. A famous name like Stephen Hawking would get directly credited for a result. A less famous researcher’s result would get credited to their school (eg MIT). Outside of well known western names and institutions, the result would get credited to the country (eg China or Japan).
That’s my observation too. Whenever something is reported they try to attach a big name to the headline. Be it “Harvard”, “Elon Musk” or something else.
It seems this is another sign of inequality. The already famous get even more fame.
“eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous”
This might have something to do with national bias.
In Germany, where BioNTech is based, news articles (or rather: German-language articles) either mention BioNTech exclusively or cite them as the primary player in the BioNTech / Pfizer partnership.
> This might have something to do with national bias.
I would rather say nationalistic bias.
Because the fine German press never put a bombastic headlines like "Migrants invented Covid vaccine", or "Scientists of Turkish origin to save millions of German lives".
Somehow these facts are conveniently ignored, but when a person with migration heritage do something bad, it's vocally mentioned in all media, including the mainstream.
The opposite is true, the names of criminal migrants are usually suppressed in the media, for fear of riling up the right. The names of the BioNTech couple are everywhere, as ten seconds of research could have taught you.
The populist media is the same in every country: Migrant does something good, he's a local, pop the champagne to celebrate our nation's glorious achievement; migrant does something bad, he's <insert_foreign_nationality>, out with them foreigners.
Tribalism is still deeply rooted in our DNA and the media capitalizez on that since it gets them clicks on their articles.
Similar to the reason why most small biotechs don’t get credit when a big pharma company launches their drug - coming up with a drug candidate is critical and really hard, but it gets you about 1/3rd of the way to the market (at least as measured by dollars). Taking it through clinical trials, regulatory approval and manufacturing is a complex (and massively expensive) process that requires expertise typically only big pharma has (not to say smaller company don't roll their own, they do, but they are often slower and sometimes stumble).
And this is to not downplay BioNTech's role. Proving that your idea works in biotech takes some massive cohones. No doubt they took a ton of shit on their way to this point.
BioNTech is different from a small biotech that can only produce drug candidates. They have their own advanced manufacturing plant and can take it end to end. Their US branch, which my wife is a part of, has all the in-house expertise needed to take a cancer therapy or vaccine to market in the US, just like Moderna does.
If I’m not mistaken the reason for the partnership is the sheer size of the clinical trials needed (very different from cancer therapies) and the speed at which they need to be run due to the pandemic. Only big pharma can do that.
I didn't know they had manufacturing capabilities. Looking at their manufacturing page, they do have GMP manufacturing facilities, but it looks like they were built around their oncology pipeline, which would be customized for each patient and low volume (as you mentioned).
And unless I'm mistaken, they don't have any approved products on market? No doubt they have experts in house, but when you're racing to get a product to market, it can be very helpful having someone like Pfizer helping out who has successfully gotten 70+ products approved by the FDA (including several vaccines).
And interestingly, you'll even see these partnerships across big pharma. I worked for one company who was interested in bringing a gene therapy in house until we did our due diligence and realized holy shit, we know nothing about gene therapies. And this was a top 5 pharma company.
Unfortunately my wife leads a team coordinating R&D conversion to manufacturing so I have no idea what I can or cannot say that isn't on the website.
But from my perspective the regulatory process is a lot easier to navigate than the supply chain. Even if you get through all the trials, manufacturing a billion doses and distributing them across a supply chain is a special kind of hard that only companies like Pfizer can handle.
So while BioNTech doesn't need help bringing an oncology therapy to market (it just takes time because cancer is hard), it needs a company like Pfizer to actually get it to patients, both in phase 3 trials and after approvals.
FAZ (German press) portrays Ugur Sahin, BioNTech's founder and CEO, as kindof a nerd who doesn't like press conferences, sticks to facts, and rather spends his time in the lab.
For a particularly ridiculous example, see athletes in Northern Ireland; the British press often refer to them as British when they win, and Irish when they don't!
It’s called having a good PR firm, I’m pretty sure the press just write up the press releases. Certainly worked when a ship owned by one shipping company sank and Maersk got the blame in the press even though they were only chartering it.
The exception is underdog stories.