Did Injured BioNTech-Pfizer Vaccine Creator Experimentally Inject mRNA?

In my article last week on the partial facial paralysis from which Özlem Türeci, the co-creator of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, clearly suffers, I noted that, although the disability is a known adverse reaction to the drug, Türeci was suffering from it, at least to some extent, before the product’s rollout. But she does not appear to have been suffering from it as a young woman in the 1990s.

Juxtaposing some of the visual materials cited in my article, as an intrepid X-user has done, makes the difference extremely obvious.

In the article, I wondered whether her disorder could somehow be connected to the experimental work on mRNA drugs which she had been conducting for more than a decade prior to Covid. BioNTech, the company which she founded with her husband Ugur Sahin in 2008, had been working on the development of mRNA-based cancer therapies.

Could she have even perhaps injected an earlier mRNA construct into herself for experimental purposes? It seems incredible, unthinkable: the stuff of science fiction not of real science.

But in fact the Chief Scientific Officer of BioNTech’s main rival, the ‘other’ German mRNA company CureVac, did precisely that!

Thus in his recent history of synthetic mRNA vaccines in the European Journal of Immunology, Steve Pascolo notes that in 2003, when he was the CSO of CureVac, he became “the first person to be injected with synthetic mRNA”, in order to test “the safety and efficacy of ivt mRNA in humans”. See the below excerpt.

The resultant scientific paper on the experiment was published in the journal Gene Therapy in 2007, one year before the founding of BioNTech. It is available here. CureVac was founded in 2000 for the purpose of developing mRNA-based cancer therapies, which is exactly what Sahin and Türeci were trying to do.

In a LinkedIn post celebrating his second dose of the BioNTech-Pfizer COVD-19 vaccine, Pascolo notes that he was in fact injected not once, but three times with synthetic mRNA for experimental purposes.

With BioNTech in a position of having to play catch-up with the rival mRNA cancer-therapy company, which was founded eight years earlier, could Türeci have been inspired by Pascolo’s example to likewise inject herself with one of her company’s mRNA constructs, but with less cheerful results?

One thing is certain: if this is the case, Türeci would not willingly tell us. It is not the job of the Chief Medical Officer of a publicly-listed pharmaceutical company to destroy shareholder value. And, in any case, both Türeci and her husband themselves form part of BioNTech’s main ownership group, as can be seen in the table from BioNTech’s latest annual report to the SEC below.