Palestinian doctor on Pfizer’s team that developed Covid-19 vaccine
Munich (QNN)- A Palestinian doctor was a part of Pfizer’s team that developed its Covid-19 vaccine, which was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19.
Dr. Nowras Rahhal (27 years old) worked as a part of a team of researchers at Max Planck Institute in Germany to develop a system allowing a COVID-19 vaccine to be applied to the skin, rather than injected into muscle.
He told Reuters the technique – targeting specialist immune cells in the skin that can trigger an immune reaction in the body – would require a far smaller dose per person, a big advantage when inoculating large populations.
Rahhal, born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, moved to Germany two years ago from Damascus. He is stateless, as he is now a refugee for the second time.
His father’s family was expelled from Haifa when ‘Israel’ was created in 1948. His father was an agricultural engineer, while his mother was an economist.
Before arriving in Germany, Rahhal spent years studying to the sound of bombings and artillery fire, using his phone torch to read when the electricity cut out at his Damascus home.
He spent most of his childhood in the now bombed out Damascus suburb of Darayya, went to a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency responsible for Palestinian refugees.
