In 2020 BioNTech, the company of two doctors from Mainz, ran Projekt Lightspeed. Within only 11 months its COVID-19 vaccine went from the laboratory to a conditional approval. The speed had to be explained. On 21 November 2020 the newspaper taz interviewed Klaus Cichutek, president of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, which shares responsibility for approving vaccines. The interviewer began: normalerweise dauert es Jahre, bis ein Impfstoff entwickelt ist. Jetzt sind es Monate. Normally it takes years to develop a vaccine. Now it is months. Cichutek answered: Ich kann Sie beruhigen. Wir handeln nicht nach Bauchgefühl, sondern mit dem Kopf. I can reassure you. We act with our heads, not our gut. He added that the clinical trials had more test persons than usual. On 9 December 2020 he told an online symposium of the medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt: Wir haben beim Zulassungsprozess für die Impfstoffe nichts unterlassen, was nötig und üblich ist. We left out nothing in the approval process that is necessary and customary.
Here speed won acceptance once it was shown that no step had been skipped.