Last year, Pfizer was one of several pharmaceutical companies to take on an incredible challenge: make a life-saving vaccine in a fraction of the time it usually takes to do so. Over the course of 2020, Pfizer and others tested vaccine candidates as hundreds of thousands of people died from COVID-19. Pfizer’s success at creating a vaccine with 95% efficacy in record time has landed it, along with its partner BioNTech and fellow vaccine maker Moderna, atop Fast Company ‘s Most Innovative Companies list for 2021 . Bourla and Pfizer’s head of vaccine research Kathrin Jansen , joined Fast Company Editor in Chief Stephanie Mehta at the Most Innovative Companies Summit for a conversation about how Pfizer created an effective vaccine so quickly. “The thing that scientists hate the most is bureaucracy,” says Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. “Innovation and bureaucracy is oil and water.” When Pfizer began work on a COVID-19 vaccine, one of the first choices Bourla made was to reduce stop decisions from having to go through multiple layers of approval. He also developed a close and trusting relationship with BioNTech’s CEO Uğur Şahin, with whom Pfizer collaborated on the vaccine. Innovation and bureaucracy is oil and water.” Albert Bourla “We had one meeting, we were all there, and we could all decide,” says Bourla. “That meeting was happening twice a week.” He said this was one of the reasons he decided not to take money from any government for their research. It enabled the company to make decisions at the speed of science, he says. “All of the decision makers came together and we made our decisions on the spot. Everything that could slow us down was put to the side.” Bourla also listened to his scientists. When Jansen came to him recommending the mRNA platform for the vaccine, he trusted her advice. “mRNA—if we were going to be successful with it—was not going to be the first COVID vaccine. It would be the first [MRNA] vaccine ever ,” he says
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Pfizer’s CEO: 3 key decisions helped it develop a COVID-19 vaccine in record time