Prior to the advent of COVID-19, BioNTech, the German developer and owner of the so-called ‘Pfizer’ vaccine, had only ever done trials for cancer therapies. This was the company’s focus, not infectious diseases. But none of those trials got very far. None of BioNTech’s experimental cancer drugs had ever made it to a large-scale phase 3 clinical trial, and one of the just three phase 2 trials registered by BioNTech prior to 2020 was “prematurely ended” for unknown reasons. All in all, BioNTech had only tested its drugs on just over 400 – for the most part, extremely-ill – cancer patients