Joe Miller - The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic

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To my parents, thank you for staying safe

Writing a book about a pandemic, during a pandemic, was a surreal experience. I was able to meet just a handful of the sixty people I interviewed, for a combined total of over one hundred fifty hours, in person. I could only travel to two locationsMainz and Marburg.

Consequently, sketches of characters and places occasionally rely on descriptions provided by others. Understandably, memories of a taxing year proved sometimes to be imperfect, and the dates and times provided by witnesses to the same events were contradictory. Wherever possible, I have independently verified the facts, but some events in the book are based on the best recollections of one or two observers. Similarly, quoted speech represents an approximation of what was actually said, built on the reports of those involved, and, when feasible, sense-checked with others who were in the (often virtual) room.

Some place-names and identifying features have been changed or omitted at the request of security services charged with protecting BioNTech and its suppliers from ongoing threats. Other parts of the supply chain have not been defined in detail, for similar reasons. None of these choices undermine the integrity of the story.

There were a thousand ways to tell this tale, and I had to choose one, in the time allowed. This is the first draft of history.

Joe Miller

It was the shot seen around the world.

On a frigid December morning, soon after the clock struck half past six in the outpatient ward of the UKs University Hospital, Coventry, ninety-year-old Maggie Keenan lowered her spotted gray cardigan, rolled up a blue MERRY CHRISTMAS T-shirt, and averted her gaze while a nurse emptied the contents of a syringe into her left arm. Under the glare of a dozen TV lights, the retired jewelry shop assistant, pearly eyes sparkling above a blue disposable mask, became the first patient on earth to receive a fully tested and approved vaccine against a virus that had already claimed the lives of 1.5 million people. For eleven months, humankind had been almost as defenseless against COVID-19 as it had been when the so-called Spanish flu killed tens of millions, including thousands in Coventry, over a century ago. Now, science was fighting back. In the hospitals parking lot, reporters adjusted their earpieces, looked down camera lenses, and brought the news to weary viewers across the globe: help was on its way.

Recuperating inside the hospital with a cup of tea, Maggie, who was to turn ninety-one the following week, told reporters the jab was the best early birthday present and talked of how she was looking forward to finally hugging her four grandchildren after months in self-isolation. who paved the way for modern vaccinations in 1796 by inoculating his gardeners son against smallpox in an English town just seventy miles from where Maggie had received her lifesaving drug. The exhibit, curators hoped, would forever tell the tale of how, in humankinds darkest hour for a generation, COVID-19 was quashed by the timely arrival of a medical marvel.

What the small ampoule will not convey, however, is just how unlikely its existence was at the end of 2020. Although vaccine technology had come a long way since Jenners experiments, the process of creating and testing a new drug remained fraught with risk. A study of thousands of clinical trials that had taken place in the twenty years prior to the discovery of the novel coronavirus found that even when backed with billions of dollars of funding from the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies, roughly 60 percent of all vaccine projects failed. The World Health Organizations chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, predicted that it would take eighteen months for a viable jab to emerge, never mind be authorized for public use.

Nine months later, an extraordinarily effective vaccine, based on a platform that had never before been used in a licensed pharmaceutical, would be available thanks to the efforts of two previously sidelined scientists in the German city of Mainz. For decades, the husband-and-wife team had believed that a tiny molecule shunned by the pharmaceutical establishment could herald a revolution in medicine by harnessing the powers of the immune system.

They did not think it would take a deadly pandemic to prove them right.

For the first time in weeks, Uur ahins calendar was clear. It was a Friday morning and the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife, zlem Treci, and their teenage daughter was unusually empty. In the silence, he scrolled through his Spotify library and settled on a well-worn playlist. As he sat at his computer, cradling a steaming-hot cup of oolong tea, the Turkish-born immunologists makeshift office filled with the soothing sounds of recorded birdsong.

Uurs inbox was overflowing, and he had barely begun to look through submissions from his Ph.D. students when zlem and their daughter, back from work and school, popped their heads around the door to remind him that it was 4:00 p.m.: time for ph and banh mi at their favorite Vietnamese restaurant. The family rarely skipped this weekly ritual, especially if one of them had recently been away. It was the early evening before they all returned home and Uur could return to his desk to indulge his only real hobbycatching up on reading.

A constantly active mind, this was the professors idea of relaxation. Disdain for time-wasting was one of the many traits Uur shared with zlem, whom hed met almost thirty years earlier on rotation at a cancer ward. He was a young physician; she was in her final year at med school. The couple, now partners in science, business, and life, had never owned a TV and stayed off social media, relying instead on select online publications they considered worthy of their attention. Uurs home workstation, consisting of two large screens that would not look out of place on an investment banks trading floor, was their portal to the rest of the world.

Opening his internet browser, Uur started methodically making his way through a list of bookmarked websites. It was January 24, and the year 2020 had started slowly in Germany. Local media outlets in his adopted city of Mainz were covering an environmental protest in which schoolkids had blocked traffic for miles. Der Spiegel, one of Germanys most respected magazines, led its home page with a story on the rise, and questionable ethics, of German gangster rap. Inside the weeks digital issue were articles speculating whether infighting in the Democratic Party would effectively hand Donald Trump reelection in the United States and an analysis of the cyberwar being waged by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which stood accused of hacking Amazon founder Jeff Bezoss phone. Tucked away in the science section was a report from the Chinese megacity of Wuhan, which had been beset by a novel respiratory illness.

The fifty or so cases of this illness monitored by local authorities seemed to have been traced back to the Huanan wholesale wet market, which sold seafood, live poultry, bats, snakes, and marmots, some of which were slaughtered on-site. Although it was too early to draw any conclusions, the evidence pointed to a development that sent shivers down the spines of epidemiologistsso-called cross-species transmission. In other words, a virus had probably passed from animals to people, catching humans completely off guard. An evolutionary arms race was underway between this frightening new foe and the combined forces of the human immune system.