Makes for an interesting story. Apparently you can scam yourself to the top of the world and cause death and suffering all around even if you are not a big blue eyed turtlenecked white woman with a really deep voice.
One cannot enforce how to write or pronounce stuff in other languages, speakers of any language can call Turkey whatever they like in their language and what Erdogan decides has absolutely no value outside of Turkey.
Turkish here. Let politicians use whatever name they want. "Türkiye" is hard to pronounce in English and "Turkey" worked just fine for a hundred years. I'm not gonna report you :)
Speaking of Turkey, how is the IT business and startup culture in Turkey? Just generally wondering. One hears very little of this big country in an obscure corner of Europe.
He falsely claimed to have a Turkish MD and probably used the fact that BioNTech was founded by Turkish doctors (and what he claimed is similar to what they are experimenting with vaccines for) to make himself seem closer to the real thing.
Interesting idea, though maybe a bit convoluted. Also Uğur Şahin immigrated to Germany at the age of 4 and was educated there. Calling him a "Turkish doctor" isn't technically wrong, but...
I won't want to get into the accuracy of calling Uğur Şahin Turkish, but for a period of time the "COVID vaccine was developed in Germany by Turkish immigrants" was a really popular talking point, especially in relation to some political arguments that took place in English speaking countries.
If somebody says "Turkish doctor" I somehow assume he means a doctor who grew up and educated in Turkey.
I don't argue with people who identify as Turkish or German. I don't know if Sahin identifies as either or both. I know that it is harder for Turkish immigrants to get a good education in Germany, especially during the time he grew up in. I also don't care much about the debate of how useful immigrants are, because the result may very well be that they aren't on average that useful and that quite a large portion of criminals are immigrants. Usefulness or consequence to society should not matter for the rights of an individual. And immigration control always comes down to violating someones rights in order to somehow get rid of them if they are unwanted for some reason.