Albert Bourla, the boss of Pfizer, CEO of the year 2021 according to CNN business

Audio 04:01

The president of the American laboratory Pfizer, Albert Bourla, during a press conference in Puurs, Belgium, April 23, 2021. JOHN THYS POOL / AFP

By: Anne Verdaguer Follow

2 mins

Albert Bourla is the man behind the world's best-selling Covid-19 vaccine.

The boss of Pfizer, CEO of the year 2021 according to CNN business, is a businessman with an atypical career and a meteoric rise, who claims his origins.

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He is the one who has achieved the impossible, offering a vaccine nine months after the start of a pandemic that has paralyzed the whole world.

Opportunist for some, genius for others, Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, claims to be a fighter.

In the book he published shortly after the pandemic, he explains that his background helped prepare him for his responsibilities as a business leader.

A Jewish upbringing in Greece and the story of a family that escaped the Holocaust in Thessaloniki in 1941.

Albert Bourla, whose real name is Abraham Bourla, is a gifted student who is passionate about animals.

He obtained his veterinary degree, then his doctorate in reproductive biotechnology at Aristotle University where Professor Nikolaos Papaioannou, now rector of the prestigious institution, was his classmate.

The young Abraham, spotted by Pfizer, left for Athens where he became a doctor of veterinary medicine and technical director of animal health for the American group.

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Albert Bourla will then experience a dazzling career: appointed in five countries and eight different cities, then it is the trip to New York in 2000 where he will climb all the levels within Pfizer, until being appointed CEO in 2018.

We know the rest of the story: the anti-Covid-19 vaccine which is breaking sales records, a turnover at Pfizer which could exceed 100 billion dollars in 2022, i.e. twice as much as before the pandemic and the name of Albert Bourla forever associated with the fight against the pandemic.

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