If COVID-19 Vaccines Bring An End To The Pandemic, America Has Immigrants To Thank

Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó believed in the potential of messenger RNA — the genetic molecule at the heart of two new COVID-19 vaccines — even when almost no one else did.

Karikó began working with RNA as a student in Hungary. When funding for her job there ran out, Kariko immigrated to Philadelphia in 1985. Over the years, she's been rejected for grant after grant, threatened with deportation and demoted from her faculty job by a university that saw her research as a dead end.

Through it all, Karikó just kept working.

If new COVID-19 vaccines help life in the U.S. get back to normal next year, the nation will have many immigrants like Karikó to thank. Scientists and investors born outside of the U.S. played crucial roles in the development of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. It's a remarkable vindication for the argument — often made by the biotech industry — that innovation depends on the free movement of people and ideas.

Now Karikó is a senior vice president at BionNTech, the company that partnered with Pfizer to make the first COVID-19 vaccine to get emergency authorization in the U.S. BioNTech is a company based in Germany and led by immigrants from Turkey.