the german company biontech and pfizer made a deal with the united states government to make 100 million doses of mrna vaccine by december 2020. the vaccine completed phase i trials and started its next trial on july 27, 2020. instead of being a phase ii trial or a phase iii trial, pfizer's team was trying to do both phases at once. if the companies could make the vaccine on time, the u.s. government would give them almost us$2 billion. the vaccine is called bnt162b2. biontech paid its employees overtime to do extra work. they called this "project lightspeed" because they wanted to develop the vaccine quickly.