Forbes includes scientists, healthcare entrepreneurs developing vaccines in billionaires list

The American magazine Forbes added the heads of pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Moderna to the list of 50 new billionaires who made a fortune in the health sector during the coronavirus pandemic, Report states, citing TASS.

Nearly a year after the first case of Covid-19 was reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the world could be nearing the beginning of the end of a pandemic that has killed more than 1.7 million people. Vaccination for Covid-19 is underway in the United States and the United Kingdom, and promising antibody treatments could help doctors fight back against the disease more effectively. Tied to those breakthroughs: a host of new billionaires who have emerged in 2020, their fortunes propelled by a stock market surge as investors flocked to companies involved in developing vaccines, treatments, medical devices, and everything in between.

Altogether, Forbes found 50 new billionaires in the healthcare sector in 2020. The most notable newcomers of the year are the scientists behind the two most successful vaccines for the coronavirus — one developed by Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech. The other by Massachusetts-based Moderna seen their net worth skyrocket since January: Uğur Şahin and Stéphane Bancel.

Virtually unknown at the outset of 2020, both men are now billionaires several times over. BioNTech CEO Şahin is now worth $4.2 billion; his French counterpart at Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, has a $4.1 billion fortune. Moderna’s meteoric rise also produced two more billionaires among its earliest investors, Harvard professor Timothy Springer and MIT scientist Robert Langer. Those vaccines will require billions of glass vials to safely transport them — enter Italy’s Sergio Stevanato, a new billionaire and the majority shareholder in the privately-owned Stevanato Group, which is making glass vials for several dozen vaccine efforts around the world.

On December 11, the Food and drug administration of the US Department of Health and Human Services approved a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, which has already begun use in the country. On December 18, the Moderna vaccine received similar approval from the FDA.