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Biontech founders Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci
Photo: Stefan F. Sämmer / imago images
There is hardly anything that the Germans are more in agreement about at the moment than in their jubilation over the Mainz entrepreneur couple Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin.
Your corona vaccine is considered the best weapon in the fight against the epidemic and your company is a flagship for Germany as a location for innovation.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will soon award the two researchers the Federal Cross of Merit, and the "Bild" newspaper calls them, with unusual reverence, "our vaccination heroes".
Almost as popular at the moment, of course, is the demand to wrest one of the two researchers' most important tools: patent protection.
A broad alliance of politicians, physicians and non-governmental organizations supports the proposal by India and South Africa to release the exploitation rights to the vaccine formulas worldwide.
The World Trade Organization has stopped the plan for the time being, but it is by no means off the table.
In order to distribute the drugs fairly around the world, the Green Party leader Robert Habeck, for example, demands that the state must resort to compulsory licenses as part of an "emergency vaccine industry."
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