These days, perhaps the first question asked of a book about the uncommon success story of a corona vaccine should be its benefits: Can this book increase vaccination rates in the country?

Could it, if it were generously distributed, convince those who, out of indolence, indifference, skepticism or out of sheer opposition to politics and science, reject vaccination and thus endanger civil protection as a community goal?

Hardly likely.

At least it can't.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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In order to fight against buzzwords like “vaccination death” and “compulsory vaccination”, which are currently circulating in the media and aggressively disseminated by unconventional thinkers and anti-vaccination communities, solid, evidence-based information may be necessary for reasons of democracy. But Joe Miller, correspondent for the Financial Times, with “Project Lightspeed” certainly did not write the neutral success story behind which the critics of this pandemic and vaccination policy could also unite. Who knows, even in the irritable mood during the fourth wave, it may be the well-intentioned book at the wrong time. An ambitious Mainz scientist couple who, thanks to a few coincidences and irrepressible will, became veritable billionaires in the world's biggest health crisis for a hundred years,is at its center - and the pharmaceutical and big capitalist conspiracies ultimately belong to the core of vaccination-critical narratives.

But if you are really interested in this book, you are naturally looking for the other story. After the one that Miller begins with a rather daring and unoccupied sentence in the foreword. In it he admits that at the beginning of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 he would never have thought that forty kilometers from his place of residence "a small biotech company was about to manufacture the world's first and best corona vaccine". Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin, who run this company and are listed as co-authors on the book cover, are unlikely to have dictated this, at best, sales-promoting sentence to the British journalist. If only because there are no objective comparisons or even meaningful data to identify the “best” vaccine.But also because the two Turkish-born BioNTech co-founders, in their good academic and scientific tradition, repeatedly showed during the development what doubts they themselves had to harbor about the success of their mission.

This already indicates why it was so important to write down the breathtaking genesis of the mRNA vaccine. Miller, he says, spent a hundred and fifty hours in conversation with more than sixty people involved, most of the time sitting at the computer because of contact and travel restrictions. At times he meticulously reconstructed the events in Mainz, at Pfizer in the United States and also in Marburg and Berlin. That was not only a logistical challenge, but also a technical challenge. Because Miller is not a scientist. The effort that must have cost him to unravel and comprehensibly formulate the immunological processes, the biochemical subtleties and the historical background of cancer immunotherapy, he shows again and again.