Biography | Albert Bourla — The Portage Floor the President Walked With the Vaccine Chief

The finishing line sat in Portage, not in Manhattan.

On 19 February 2021 President Joe Biden came to the Pfizer campus here with Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Albert Bourla.

Official White House photographs by Adam Schultz record the three of them on the tour.

Detroit News and Michigan Advance both place the walk inside the warehouse staff called the freezer farm: hundreds of ultra-cold units holding finished doses.

The address on federal filings for the complex is 7000 and 7171 Portage Road.

EPA TRI coordinates sit on this parcel.

The campus is Pfizer's largest manufacturing site and, in that winter, the sole U.S. finishing plant for the company's COVID-19 vaccine.

First U.S. shipments had left here on 13 December 2020, two days after FDA emergency authorization.

The visit had been postponed a day by ice.

Biden then spoke inside the building after the walk-through.

This is a public presidential stop at an industrial campus already on the national record.

It is not a pin on anyone's private office or current home.

The plant predates the pandemic.

Upjohn and then Pharmacia worked this ground for decades.

Pfizer took it in the 2003 Pharmacia acquisition and later poured hundreds of millions into sterile-fill expansion.

The cover is the White House photograph from that Friday. The portrait is a 2021 World Economic Forum still, not a floor-level candid.

Photo: Adam Schultz for the White House, 19 February 2021, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.