BioNTech vaccine creators: Covid isn't so scary any more... We have tools to cut deaths dramatically

Once again, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci were addressing the world. By last Wednesday it had been just under two years since the husband and wife had sat over breakfast one morning, with their teenage daughter. There, in their two-bedroom apartment in Mainz, Germany, Sahin had discussed his thoughts about a paper he had spotted in The Lancet that described a new disease in a city in China.

It was a little over a year since the pair, co-founders of a drug company that had never made any approved drugs, announced they had made the first vaccine against that disease.

And this week, they were back — to confirm what most already knew.

Thanks to a new variant, that vaccine — now commonly known as