Meet the billionaire scientist couple who invented Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is unlike any other out in the market today. While administered like other vaccines — via an intramuscular injection — it contains an anti-viral messenger RNA. This technique has never been deployed in the past against any disease.

The mRNA vaccine injects synthetic genes "programmed" to use the human body's own proteins to generate "fake" viruses similar to a target pathogen (like SARS-CoV-2) — which then trigger a response from our own immune system.