Timeline for China/Pfizer Connections

I’m a member of Team 4.  While examining documents, I realized a timeline might be helpful for context and asked Amy if one existed.  She suggested I put one together so I’ve been researching various dates having to do with the vaccine development, etc.  After listening to your report on Steve Bannon’s show, another question that is looking for an answer has to do with BioNTech’s business decision to start developing a vaccine as early as January 2020.

You mentioned that in 2009 Pfizer opened R&D in Wuhan.  There are so many different dates given for the first cases of the virus but the CDC’s own website mentions the Chinese identified & isolated a novel coronavirus as the agent of the pneumonias virus outbreak on January 7, 2020 (https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html).  While reading about Operations Warpspeed  funding for the vaccines, I learned that BioNTech had a project called “Project Lightspeed”.  This project was started in mid-January 2020 after the SARS-Cov-2 genentic sequencing was made public to develop a vaccine based on mRNA.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed).

Another article mentions that one of the founders of BioNTech read a scientific paper late January and knew he had no time to lose get on a vaccine for this virus.

As Bannon likes to say, “There are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences.”  I find it interesting that Pfizer had an R&D lab in Wuhan where the first cases are “discovered”.  In less than a month BioNTech is starting research on a vaccine on the virus & then partners with Pfizer.  Was Pfizer privy to the information coming out of the Wuhan lab?  Pfizer & BioNTech had been working together developing other mRna vaccines in 2018. (https://scrip.pharmaintelligence.informa.com/SC144598/How-Pfizer-Crafted-Its-Own-Operation-Warp-Speed-For-The-COVID-19-Vaccine).  The speed with which the two firms agreed to work even caused their respective attorneys to be concerned because there were NO contracts signed:

“To the horror of Pfizer’s lawyers, the two agreed to begin work immediately, because time was of the essence, with no formal written legal agreement in place to govern the new collaboration.^[155] BioNTech transferred its know-how to Pfizer the next day.^[155] A letter of intent was signed three weeks later, and the formal commercial agreement between Pfizer and BioNTech for the COVID-19 vaccine was signed in January 2021.^[155](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine)”

With that much money at stake, who in the government would deny Pfizer/BioNTech their vaccine no matter the outcome?