2022 Franklin Institute Awards Announced: Covid Vaccine CEOs Honored For Business Leadership

The CEOs of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson were honored with the Bower Award for their work in developing vaccines to combat the pandemic.

In December 2020, the FDA authorized Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, just a few months after clinical trials began in April of the same year. Just a week later, Moderna’s vaccine received authorization, followed by authorization for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine in February 2021. All of these authorizations happened less than a year after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 pandemic. 

To get vaccines developed in such a short amount of time required redirecting company efforts – and spending a lot of money. In May 2020, for example, Pfizer told Forbes that it was willing to spend a billion dollars to develop its vaccine, even though no mRNA vaccine had received regulatory approval at the time. 

The willingness to take that risk – one that paid off for all three companies – is why the Pennsylvania-based Franklin Institute announced Tuesday that it’s honoring Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, Johnson & Johnson Chairman and CEO Alex Gorsky and Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla with its annual Bower Award for Business Leadership. 

“They made a conscientious business decision to go and begin development of a vaccine to stop the spread of this bug,” says Franklin Institute Chairman Donald Morel. 

The Institute’s awards program dates back to the 1820s, and was established to recognize achievements in science, engineering and invention. Its awardees include the likes of Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and more. The Bower Awards, one of which recognizes business leadership and the other scientific achievement, were established in 1990. 

The award for business leadership is typically granted to an individual, says Morel, but the board of trustees voted to move outside that rule this year “because of the unique circumstances around the Covid pandemic.”

In addition to the business leadership award, the Franklin Institute also announced the winner of the Bower award for achievement in science, which comes with a $250,000 cash prize. This award “is really directed towards a career,” says Morel. The 2022 award will go to  Paul Slovic. Slovic is a researcher at the University of Oregon whose work has focused on risk perception. He’s also studied the psychological factors that cause failures to intervene in major crises such as environmental harms or genocide. 

The recognition of both science and business in these awards goes to the heart of the institute’s namesake, Benjamin Franklin, himself a scientist, engineer and entrepreneur. For Morel’s part, he thinks the awarding of the prize to the three CEOs who helped develop the first Covid vaccines is a fitting tribute. “From the point where this decision is made in the first quarter of 2020 to the end of 2020, we get not only a vaccine, but a remarkably effective vaccine,” he says. “It’s never been done before in history.”