The son of a senior doctor working in the "pandemic epicentre" of Bergamo joined the Regulatory Affairs team at BioNtech in Dec 2019

What are the chances?

Robert Kogon

spotted this article published last month in the German magazine Stern (below headline is translated using Google Translate):

The article is based on an interview with Marco Rizzi, who “was chief physician of the infectious diseases ward at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital when the disaster struck Bergamo”.

Dr Rizzi also co-authored this article published 28 March 2020:

There are aspects of both these articles which read like carefully-scripted propaganda, but I am not going to comment further on that aspect here, other than to remark that - whatever any individual doctors “on the ground” recall about the events of spring 2020 -

Jessica Hockett

and I regard the “official” mortality curves for Bergamo as highly suspect, as we wrote here:

Yes, We Believe the Bergamo (Italy) All-Cause Death Curve is Fraudulent

For now though, I wanted to draw attention to an interesting coincidence spotted by Robert.

The article states this about one of his sons:

But what about the elder son?

Well, it turns out that he works at BioNtech - now as Senior VP Global Regulatory Affairs.

As the bio says, he worked as part of the BioNtech-Pfizer collaboration on the covid vaccine, responsible for “securing regulatory approvals” and “establishing trust-based relationships with global regulators”.

According to to his LinkedIn entry, and confirmed by the company bio, he joined BioNtech in December 2019, just in time for the “pandemic”:

Is Ruben Marco’s son? If you ask Perplexity.ai, it says it can find no evidence of a connection. A basic internet search comes up short too - though it’s possible that relevant mentions might have been missed as they weren’t in English.

However, the reason we know that Ruben IS Marco’s son is that one of the founders of BioNtech actually tells us so, in his book, described as a “real-life story of an extraordinary race against time to save the world”:

From pages 173-4 of the Kindle edition:

Ugur and Özlem were at home when the email came through, just before 3 p.m. on Tuesday 21 April. “PEI: study can start”, read the subject line of the message forwarded by BioNTech’s regulatory affairs whizz, Ruben Rizzi.

A formal response from the German agency was pasted within. “The certificates and test results are appropriate and thus fulfil the respective requirements as laid down in the clinical trial approval,” it said.

Above the message, Ruben, an energetic Italian whose father – an infectious disease specialist – was seeing to acute Covid-19 patients at an overloaded hospital in Bergamo, added, in block capital letters: “CONGRATULATIONS EVERYONE”.

The Stern piece is a retrospective, quite personal article, apparently reflecting the lived experience of a doctor at the front line.

The fact that Marco doesn’t mention his son’s involvement in the miracle vaccine is, to me, quite surprising. You would certainly expect him to have had a great interest in the vaccine just from his experience, and in fact he co-authored this article on antibody responses to the BioNtech-Pfizer product:

You’d have thought he would have been proud that another family member helped us - in his eyes - get through “the pandemic” in such an important way. So it’s surprising that he doesn’t get a mention, while the younger son (who lives at home) does, which looks to me like it may well be a deliberate omission.

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