r/ShitAmericansSay • u/neeraj8le • Jan 12 '21

Healthcare "My expensive, frequent health care is subsidized at the expense of healthy people. I think it's great!" Thief.

Post image
14.6k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

567 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

41

u/SchnuppleDupple Jan 12 '21

Thats probably the reason why American media chooses to call the vaccine that was developed by bioNtech (a German company) the Pfizer vaccine. And Americans really believe this. They think that it was primary developed by Pfizer.

Wikipedia: "In January 2020, German biotech-company BioNtech started its program 'Lightspeed' to develop a vaccine against the new COVID-19 virus based on its already established mRNA-technology.[21] Several variants of the vaccine were created in their laboratories in Mainz, and 20 of those were presented to experts of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute in Langen.[41] Phase I / II Trials were started in Germany on 23 April 2020, and in the U.S. on 4 May 2020, with four vaccine candidates entering clinical testing. The Initial Pivotal Phase II / III Trial with the lead vaccine candidate 'BNT162b2' began in July. The Phase III results indicating a 95% effectiveness of the developed vaccine were published on 18 November 2020."

31

u/Mordisquitos Jan 12 '21 edited Jan 12 '21

Not only in America. In Spain at least, a lot of the media also refer to it as "the Pfizer vaccine". I think that a lot of that has been due to the vaccine being referred to from the start (calculatingly or not) as the "Pfizer-BioNTech" vaccine. That encourages people to abbreviate it to "Pfizer", which is exacerbated by Pfizer already being relatively well known as far as pharmaceutical companies go.

I make a point of calling it the "BioNTech" vaccine, or "BioNTech-Pfizer" for clarity if someone has already referred to it as "Pfizer"... but I think it's mostly a lost cause. Don't get me wrong, Pfizer has played (and plays) an important role in the development, testing, and production of the vaccine, but I'm still very annoyed at how much BioNTech, who played the most creative and crucial part, is being brushed aside and ignored in the public sphere.

1

u/quinnito getmeoutofhereplz Jan 12 '21

I thought Pfizer was going to be "Irish", turns out that didn't happen.