Pfizer CEO Says Spreading False Information About Vaccine is “Criminal”

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla stated on Tuesday that people who propagate false information about Covid-19 vaccines are “criminals” responsible for the deaths of unvaccinated people.

Bourla made his unusually forceful statements at an event held by the Atlantic Council think-tank. The Greek-American CEO was addressing those who attempt to sway people who are on the fence about getting vaccinated, using false information:

“Those people are criminals. They’re not ‘bad’ people. They’re criminals, because they have literally cost millions of lives.”

There is a myriad of different myths used by those in the anti-vaccination camp to dissuade people from getting their shots. Some believe that the vaccine is powerful enough to alter one’s genetic makeup. Others think that the vaccine contains computer chips that can harvest information from your body. All of these claims are completely baseless.

While more than half the American adult population is vaccinated, and in some states the overall vaccination rate exceeds 70%, there are still millions of adults who have not yet received the vaccine.

How Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s Jewish Greek identity inspired his work with the Covid-19 vaccine

Bourla was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, to Jewish Holocaust survivors. In an interview with Atlantic Council’s CEO Frederick Kempe, Bourla reflected on his Greek roots, and how his Greek Jewish identity influenced his fight against the coronavirus:

“The personality of someone is really built in the early days of his life, and then it follows in whatever they do. (We), living as a very, very small minority in Greece, we had to learn how to be able to thrive while we’re very, very different than everybody else. And the same is as a Greek coming to America with a very thick accent. Trying to be able to prove yourself also requires that you fight for what you believe is right.

“So that also followed me all the way to the COVID-19 vaccine. But the fundamental is that what really helped us and BioNTech and the teams that they worked very hard to develop in record time, such a success, were two things: One was that we really thought big. These teams really thought big. They didn’t try to do the eight years, seven years of development. They tried to do the eight years [in] eight months of development.

“And the second was that there was a very deep, instilled sense of purpose. We knew that what we were doing was not going to affect our lives. It’s not going to affect our company’s future. It’s going to affect the lives of the future of the world. That gives you a tremendous drive and this is what everyone on this team, in Pfizer and in BioNTech, did during these eight marvelous months.”