Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla on Saturday said that has tested positive for COVID-19 for the second time in less than two months. Bourla, who heads the company that helped to create the widely used Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, said he was feeling well and symptom-free.
“I’ve not had the new bivalent booster yet, as I was following CDC guidelines to wait 3 months since my previous COVID case, which was back in mid-August,” Bourla said. “While we’ve made great progress, the virus is still with us,” Bourla added. Bourla previously announced on Aug. 14 that he tested positive for the virus and was experiencing mild symptoms.
“As we head into fall and begin to spend more time indoors, we strongly encourage anyone who is eligible to consider receiving a booster dose with a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine to provide better protection against currently circulating variants,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement at the time. The shots, which the FDA is referring to as “updated boosters,” contain “two messenger RNA (mRNA) components of SARS-CoV-2 virus, one of the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the other one in common between the BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.”