Turkish health minister speaks to vaccine scientists

By Aybuke Inal Kamaci

ANKARA (AA) – Turkey's health minister on Thursday spoke with the two Turkish-German scientists who are at the helm of developing the world's first effective coronavirus vaccine.

“I made a phone call with Professor Ugur Sahin,” Fahrettin Koca wrote on Twitter.

Sahin along with his wife Dr. Ozlem Tureci, developed the vaccine against COVID-19 at their own company BioNTech in Germany, which attracted interest in scientific circles, Koca added.

“We discussed this development. As the ministry, we were in contact during the process,” he said.

The pharmaceutical company BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin and Dr. Tureci, founded in 2008, managed to develop an experimental vaccine together with its American partner Pfizer which was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19.

Both Sahin and Tureci were born to immigrant parents from Turkey who moved to Germany in the 1960s.