To my knowledge Pfizer didn't really invest anything, it was the German population who financed Biontech through funds paid with taxes: the lab infrastructure pre-covid (through funded cancer research), the vaccine trials, and mass production (both directly and through pre-purchases before the vaccine existed).
Biontech invested in the early research. Pfizer invested a lot more into manufacturing and the trials. Both are needed at different times. What Pfizer invested in was a lot lower risk (don't confuse that with low risk - it wasn't except by comparison!), but they invested far more money.
Quit trying to sell either short - without both investments we would be in lockdown yet.
I really looked into that quite deeply. Biontech got so much money for funding the trials that they apparently had too much and put it in reserve for 2022. The public invested billions into building production capacity.
I'd be glad to see what Pfizer actually invested that wasn't backed by prepurchases.
I think the term you're looking for is capitalize. Pfizer made some investments in a technology that had wide applications, and now they want to capitalize on it. It's good business, and a lot of people are going to be helped in the process.
My understanding is that it has been known for years that mRNA is a viable vaccine delivery vector, but the R&D hadn't been completed for the other aspect of the business - production and safety at scale.
No, mRNA was suspected to be viable, but it was never proven. Like most new medical developments the early tests showed it didn't work and those needed to be worked around. Some believers did the research to make it work, but they had their detractors who said they were wasting there time as the problems weren't solvable. This time the detractors were proven wrong, but there have been other cases where more effort was put into something with no result (at least so far?)
Afaik, it was backed up behind a lack of safety trials.
Given how expensive those are to run, and how mRNA's primary benefit (speed of development) wasn't a competitive advantage in "normal" times, we had something that we thought was better, but no financial case to toss the gobs of money at it to get it certified.
If SARS-CoV-2 is remembered for one thing, it should be for finally breaking the logjam and "giving" us approved mRNA platforms.
