‘In the early hours of Saturday 11 January, Prof Teresa Lambe was woken up by the ping of her email. The information she had been waiting for had just arrived in her inbox: the genetic code for a new coronavirus, shared worldwide by scientists in China. She got to work straight away, still in her pyjamas, and was glued to her laptop for the next 48 hours. "My family didn't see me very much that weekend, but I think that set the tone for the rest of the year," she says...
‘That weekend was the first step on a journey to create a vaccine at lightning speed, for a disease that would, in a matter of months, claim more than 1.5 million lives. I have been following the efforts of the Oxford scientists since the start. There have been dramas along the way, including:
- A rush to charter a jet when a flight-ban prevented vaccine from getting into the country
- Dismay at totally false reports on social media that the first volunteer to be immunised had died
- Concern that falling infection rates over the summer would jeopardise the hope of quick results
- How an initial half-dose of the vaccine unexpectedly provided the best protection
- An admission from the chief of Oxford's partner, drug company AstraZeneca, that it would have run the trials "a bit differently".
Read here (BBC, Dec 14, 2020)
