Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla discusses his new book "Moonshot," progress on developing a fourth Covid-19 booster, and efforts to vaccinate refugees from Ukraine on "Balance of Power."
Questions asked in this interview
7
1:21Did they try to say you just don't understand, Doctor, it can't be done?
2:51What's next from your point of view? What are the priorities?
3:51I understand you don't have the data yet, but do you have a sense of a timeline when you think you will have data on, for example, under five or Omicron variants, or for that matter, fourth booster?
4:25How long do you think you'll have that protection and what sort of an income stream might that mean for Pfizer going forward?
We welcome now the leader of the team that won that race. He is Dr. Albert Bourla. He's Chairman and CEO of Pfizer and he's the author of the brand new book "Moonshot: Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible." Thank you so much for being back with us. Really appreciate it.
It's a fascinating book as I told you. It's a good read. I recommend to everybody. But I'm going to just read one passage because it takes us back to April of 2020 and we may forget now how bad things were, particularly in a place like New York City. What was happening in our hospitals, a lack of ventilators. And you had your team together. They'd worked hard. They came up with a really aggressive plan. They proposed it to you. They're very proud of it and you said no thanks. And what you said was it could not be done, that is to say really speed this up, but it had to be done. There is a time for consensus building and there's a time to push. This was the time to push. So take us back to that moment and how your team reacted when, as I say, they'd come up with a really aggressive plan and you said yeah, not good enough.
Well, they tried to understand what do I mean not good enough because they thought that this is the best that anyone could dream of having. And I knew that they were right, but also I knew that if we fail, then we have to deal with way bigger things than what could impact the company or America. It would impact the world. So I told them there's no option of failing and there's no way that we can do it because failure is not an option. And if not us, then who?
They were silent. I didn't leave much room to maneuver because I knew that if I would, then doubts would start sitting in their mind. So it was very clear to me we need to get it by October. This is when the new wave will come. Go and do it. And actually I told them, and it was a little bit of a psychological blackmail, go and calculate how many people will die if we're not successful with a vaccine by October.
So you basically said you've got eight months, more or less say eight, nine months to get this done. Something that in success, and it wasn't guaranteed there was any success, would be eight or ten years. So this is a revolutionary shift. How did they get it done? How did they reinvent the whole thing?
I fundamentally think that the goal was so hairy, so obscene, that they had to think out of the box. If you ask them instead of ten years to do it in eight years, they will try to improve the current processes. If you ask them to do it in eight months, they have to refigure everything. And this is what they did. The same is with manufacturing, which I call in the book the second miracle. At Pfizer, we were making 200 million doses of all vaccines across all manufacturing sites in a year. I didn't ask them now to make 300 million. I told them make three billion. They couldn't do it by improving the current processes. They had to think completely out of the box, and this is what they did. And so now we have this wonderful vaccine that so many of us have had, and it relieves a lot of the anxiety as well as some of the disease that we all have.
What's next for your mRNA? For example, an Omicron variant? Is that on the way? Is it a fourth booster? Is it young children? What's next from your point of view? What are the priorities?
Of course, first of all, I think we have the vaccines and we have the treatments. And when it comes to the vaccines, the goal is always to stay ahead of the virus. Actually, today in the morning before coming here, I was reviewing new data of all our studies. They look encouraging, but I can't speak enough. We need to wait until we see the full set of the data. But we are trying to bring something that is a new version that will cover equally well the old and the new variants, all variants, a pan-variant vaccine. And I think we are in a good way. But also on the treatments, we are already launching. We have already launched a treatment into the American and European marketplace. And this has the potential to be a game changer because if people that are sick get it, instead of 10 people going to the hospital, only one will go.
10 more exchanges in this transcript
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Bourla, A. (2022, March 8). Pfizer CEO on Booster Development, Ukraine Refugee Vaccinations [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/986877/
MLA
Albert Bourla. "Pfizer CEO on Booster Development, Ukraine Refugee Vaccinations." Bloomberg Television, 8 Mar. 2022. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/986877/.
BibTeX
@misc{bourla2022_986877,
author = {Albert Bourla},
title = {Pfizer CEO on Booster Development, Ukraine Refugee Vaccinations},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2022},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/986877/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
