A2 · Elementary
8 min
public healthbiotechnologyglobal economics
The Vaccine and the End of an Era
La Vacuna y el Fin de una Era
BioNTech, the German company behind the COVID-19 vaccine, announces it is halting vaccine production entirely. Fletcher and Octavio explore the history of the vaccine, the future of medicine, and what this means for global health.
BioNTech, la empresa alemana detrás de la vacuna contra el COVID-19, anuncia que para de producir la vacuna. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de la historia de la vacuna, el futuro de la medicina y lo que esto significa para el mundo.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| vacuna | vaccine | La vacuna es muy importante para la salud. |
| empresa | company | BioNTech es una empresa alemana. |
| enfermedad | illness / disease | El médico habla de la enfermedad. |
| ya no | not anymore / no longer | Ya no como carne. |
| cuerpo | body | El cuerpo puede luchar contra el virus. |
| salud | health | La salud es muy importante para todos. |
Five years ago, BioNTech was a company almost nobody outside of Germany had heard of.
This week, it announced it's walking away from the vaccine that made it famous.
Sí.
Yes.
BioNTech para de producir la vacuna.
BioNTech is stopping production of the vaccine.
Ahora solo Pfizer la hace.
Now only Pfizer makes it.
Right, and they're cutting about 1,860 jobs alongside it.
The official word is 'drastic restructuring.' Which is corporate language for: something has fundamentally changed.
La empresa tiene problemas.
The company has problems.
Alemania tiene problemas económicos ahora.
Germany has economic problems now.
That's the backdrop, yeah.
Germany's been in a prolonged economic rough patch, and BioNTech is not immune to that, even after the windfall years of the pandemic.
Antes, BioNTech gana mucho dinero.
Before, BioNTech earns a lot of money.
Ahora, no.
Now, it doesn't.
And that's a remarkable arc when you think about it.
In 2021 this company posted revenues of over 18 billion euros.
It was the Cinderella story of the pandemic.
A small biotech lab in Mainz, Germany, co-develops a vaccine that goes into the arms of billions of people.
BioNTech es una empresa pequeña.
BioNTech is a small company.
Pero la vacuna es muy importante.
But the vaccine is very important.
Very small.
Founded in 2008 by Uğur Şahin and his wife Özlem Türeci, both children of Turkish immigrants to Germany.
Which is its own remarkable story about where scientific breakthroughs actually come from.
Los fundadores son hijos de inmigrantes.
The founders are children of immigrants.
Eso es muy interesante.
That is very interesting.
It really is.
And then COVID arrives, and they pivot almost overnight to develop this mRNA vaccine technology in partnership with Pfizer.
The clinical trials, the approvals, the rollout, all of it happening at a speed medicine had never seen before.
La vacuna llega muy rápido.
The vaccine arrives very quickly.
Normalmente, una vacuna tarda muchos años.
Normally, a vaccine takes many years.
Typically ten to fifteen years from lab to arm.
The COVID vaccine happened in under a year.
And that speed made some people nervous, which is understandable.
But the underlying mRNA technology had actually been in development for decades before COVID gave it its moment.
La tecnología es vieja, pero la vacuna es nueva.
The technology is old, but the vaccine is new.
Es diferente.
It is different.
Exactly.
The science had been sitting there, waiting for the right problem.
Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-American biochemist who spent years being told her mRNA research wasn't worth funding, eventually won the Nobel Prize for it in 2023.
Decades of work, dismissed, and then suddenly it saves the world.
Muchos científicos no tienen dinero para su trabajo.
Many scientists don't have money for their work.
Eso es un problema grande.
That is a big problem.
A fundamental problem.
You look at Karikó's career and you have to ask: how many discoveries never happened because the funding dried up before the breakthrough?
Muchos, seguro.
Many, surely.
El dinero decide la medicina.
Money decides medicine.
No es bueno.
That is not good.
And now here we are with BioNTech stepping back.
The partnership with Pfizer continues, Pfizer keeps making the vaccine, but what this signals is that the COVID emergency chapter is, commercially at least, closed.
Pfizer es una empresa americana.
Pfizer is an American company.
Es muy grande.
It is very large.
Pfizer puede hacer la vacuna sola.
Pfizer can make the vaccine alone.
It can, and it will.
But here's what interests me about this moment: BioNTech isn't disappearing.
They're redirecting.
They've already got mRNA-based cancer therapies in clinical trials.
The same platform that made the COVID vaccine is now being pointed at tumors.
Sí.
Yes.
BioNTech trabaja en una vacuna para el cáncer ahora.
BioNTech is now working on a vaccine for cancer.
Es muy importante.
It is very important.
Potentially the most important medical development of our lifetimes.
A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, tailored to an individual patient's tumor.
We're not there yet, but the early trial results have been genuinely encouraging.
Una vacuna diferente para cada persona.
A different vaccine for each person.
Eso es nuevo.
That is new.
La medicina cambia mucho.
Medicine changes a lot.
It's a conceptual shift.
We went from treating cancer with blunt instruments, radiation and chemo that attack everything, to potentially training your own immune system to recognize and hunt down specifically your cancer cells.
El cuerpo puede luchar contra el cáncer.
The body can fight cancer.
La vacuna ayuda al cuerpo.
The vaccine helps the body.
That's exactly the idea.
Which brings me to the bigger question this BioNTech announcement raises, and I want your take on this.
What happens to pandemic preparedness when the financial incentive for making vaccines disappears?
Es un problema.
It is a problem.
Las empresas necesitan dinero.
Companies need money.
Sin dinero, no hay vacunas.
Without money, there are no vaccines.
And governments learned during COVID that they cannot build that capacity from scratch in a crisis.
The U.S., the EU, they essentially handed enormous contracts to private companies because there was no public manufacturing infrastructure ready to go.
Spain included, right?
Sí, en España no hay muchas fábricas de vacunas.
Yes, in Spain there are not many vaccine factories.
Europa compra las vacunas.
Europe buys the vaccines.
No las hace.
It does not make them.
And that dependency became very visible, very fast.
I remember the early months of 2021, the vaccine nationalism, the EU and the UK literally arguing over AstraZeneca shipments.
Rich countries were hoarding doses while poorer countries waited years.
Los países pobres esperan mucho tiempo.
Poor countries wait a long time.
Eso no es justo.
That is not fair.
Not fair, and not smart either, strategically.
A virus doesn't respect borders.
Leaving large populations unvaccinated anywhere in the world creates the conditions for new variants.
It was epidemiologically self-defeating.
El virus viaja con las personas.
The virus travels with people.
No hay fronteras para un virus.
There are no borders for a virus.
Exactly right.
And that's the lesson that health organizations like the WHO were trying to write into international agreements after COVID.
Whether those agreements have any teeth is, I think, another conversation.
But what this BioNTech news tells us is that the world is already moving on.
The market has moved on.
Para las empresas, el COVID termina.
For companies, COVID is over.
Pero para muchas personas, el COVID no termina.
But for many people, COVID is not over.
That's a real tension.
Long COVID is still affecting millions of people.
Immunocompromised individuals still rely on updated boosters.
The infrastructure for producing those is narrowing just as the public conversation has completely moved on.
Muchas personas todavía están enfermas.
Many people are still sick.
Pero nadie habla de ellas.
But nobody talks about them.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
There's a collective exhaustion around COVID.
Understandable, but it means the people still dealing with it are somewhat invisible.
Anyway.
There was something you said a few minutes ago that I want to come back to.
¿Sí?
Yes?
¿Qué digo?
What did I say?
You said 'ya no' a couple of times.
'BioNTech ya no produce la vacuna.' And I realized I use that phrase and I'm not entirely sure I understand its mechanics.
What is 'ya no' actually doing there?
'Ya' significa 'now' o 'already'.
'Ya' means 'now' or 'already'.
'Ya no' significa 'not anymore'.
'Ya no' means 'not anymore'.
Son dos palabras pero una idea.
They are two words but one idea.
So 'ya' alone is positive, and adding 'no' flips it to 'not anymore.' That's actually elegant.
In English we need that whole phrase, 'not anymore' or 'no longer,' but in Spanish it's just two syllables.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Ya no como carne.' 'Ya no vivo aquí.' Es fácil y muy útil.
'I no longer eat meat.' 'I no longer live here.' It is easy and very useful.
Alright, I'm filing that one away.
'Ya no soy un estudiante nuevo.' I've been using Spanish for three years, so technically that's true.
Fletcher, tú todavía eres un estudiante nuevo.
Fletcher, you are still a new student.
Lo siento.
I'm sorry.
And on that deeply encouraging note, we'll leave it there.
BioNTech steps back, Pfizer carries on, and somewhere in a lab in Mainz the same technology that got us through a pandemic is being aimed at cancer.
The world moves fast.