History of Medicine: European Perspectives

Abstract

In mid-January 2020, a German biotechnology company started working on a potential covid-19 vaccine based on a new technology that uses messenger rna to trigger an immune response – a technology initially developed to fight cancer – rather than inserting a weakened or inactivated virus into the body.1 “Project LightSpeed” was backed by Pfizer, an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation, and Fosun, a Chinese conglomerate and investment company. On 10 March 2020, Austria issued an entry ban for non-Austrians coming from Italy. Over the following days, several European Union Member States independently imposed border closures or border controls, thus suspending the Schengen Agreement, considered as one of the cornerstones of the European integration process. On 21 December of the same year, the European Medicines Agency (ema) approved the Pfizer and BioNTech covid19 vaccine for use in the EU, 18 days after the vaccine was approved by the United Kingdom. This allowed the EU Member States to start vaccination just days later. The EU negotiated vaccine orders from the various laboratories for