Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla Awarded Genesis Prize

Albert Bourla, the CEO and chairman of Pfizer, was awarded the Genesis Prize at a ceremony in Jerusalem Wednesday evening.

The Genesis Prize, created in 2014, is given to “extraordinary individuals for their outstanding professional achievement, contribution to humanity, and commitment to Jewish values.” Sometimes referred to as the “Jewish Nobel Prize,” it comes with a purse of $1 million, which Bourla has said he would donate toward a planned Holocaust museum in Thessaloniki, Greece, where he was born.

Bourla led his company to develop the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 in just nine months, successfully holding back the pandemic.

At the ceremony, he thanked Israel for its early adoption of the vaccine, which provided Pfizer with data that was vital for further development and the ramping up of production on a global scale. He also spoke about his parents, who were among the 2,000 Jews from Thessaloniki who survived the Holocaust; the city’s prewar Jewish population was around 50,000. He credited his mother, who was saved from a firing squad by a bribe just moments before she was to be shot, for instilling in him the belief that nothing is impossible.

The Genesis Prize was co-founded by three Ukrainian-born and Russian-born oligarchs, who have stepped down from the Genesis board after being hit with sanctions due to their links to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nevertheless, the award ceremony was met with protests by demonstrators who oppose the use of the oligarch’s money, as well as anti-vaxxers upset that Bourla was awarded the prize.