Real Timely heroes
REALLY? Not the inventers of the COVID vaccine? A vaccine we were told was years away? Incredibly, Time magazine’s Person of the Year is a two-time presidential loser unenthusiastically put forward by his party as the best hope of unseating Donald Trump — and his running mate, at least a new face in national politics. (But she had to share.)
As if we needed any more proof that most mainstream media outlets remain brainwashed by Trump Derangement Syndrome, it’s the knee-jerk choice of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, a ticket so unexciting that their predicted landslide never came to pass.
In a year unlike any other — a global pandemic paralyzing the world, panic and fear our dominant emotions, a cratering economy, a generation of children suffering educational and psychological slides — it’s a nobrainer as to 2020’s undisputed heroes.
Heroes, it should be noted, who are apolitical. Two scientists, the married Drs. Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, who have yet to receive the global fame and recognition they so deserve. No one changed the world this year more than they have.
But here’s Time magazine, a dinosaur even in virtue-signaling.
Back in April, Bloomberg News warned that expecting a COVID vaccine within the year was unrealistic. In October, PBS reported that whatever vaccine the FDA fast-tracked wouldn’t be effective enough.
Yet here we are, about to emerge from this nightmare faster than expected. This vaccine is the equivalent of landing on the moon. What it means for science and progress is yet to be fully understood, but we have taken a quantum leap in beating back a novel pandemic.
Millions of lives will be saved. The economy will recover. We will be able to hug again.
Time announced their pick as the FDA considered final approval for the coronavirus vaccine. How relevant they would have been in choosing Drs. Türeci and Sahin.
But magazines are increasingly insignificant, and with this lame choice Time whistles past the graveyard.
Sahin and Türeci began working on a vaccine for COVID in January, well before the world saw it as a true threat. But after reading one article in The Lancet on a Friday, Sahin showed up at work the following Monday with one mandate: Stop everything and develop a COVID vaccine.
Sahin was sure a global pandemic was coming, even though enough of his top scientists were doubtful enough to complain about canceling their vacations.
By March, Sahin and Türeci’s company BioNTech had 20 possible versions ready for testing.
And their story has broader implications — hopeful, unifying ones.
Sahin is a Turkish Muslim who partnered with Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, a Greek — two immigrants whose native lands have long been at odds. Dr. Türeci, also Muslim, is the German-born daughter of a Turkish doctor.
The couple married on a lunch break from the lab in 2002 and went on to have one daughter. Despite their wealth — becoming the first Germans of Turkish descent to make that country’s version of the Forbes 100 — they live modestly, not even owning a car.
Their vaccine, by the way, was discovered as part of their quest to cure cancer.
Drs. Sahin and Türeci lead a team of scientists from 60 countries, half of whom are women. This team gave up holidays, days off, and mass transit in their attempt to build a vaccine in months — not years, as has been the norm. They called it Project Lightspeed.
We can look with hope to 2021, as well as to the eradication of other diseases, because of these doctors. As Sahin told The Wall Street Journal, this vaccine will “usher in a whole new category of medicines.”
Don’t you want to know more about these people? Aren’t they the world’s heroes — not just America’s? Wasn’t one of the criticisms of Trump that he turned America inward, away from our allies, into a self-interested, bigoted, navel-gazing country? Why wouldn’t Time then choose these Turkish-German-Muslim heroes?
After all, the alt-right continues to rise in Germany, and immigration is as controversial there as here. The success of two immigrants, partnering with an American company to cure what currently ails mankind, is a prideful moment for us all. How about that as a repudiation of Trump?