Our future hangs on the success of the Oxford vaccine.
This is the story of its creation, its makers and how science will ultimately beat the virus.
On 1 January 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever seen before. Twelve months later, vaccination is being rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19.
In Vaxxers, we hear directly from Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Cath Green as they reveal the inside story of making the Oxford vaccine and the cutting-edge science behind it. This is their story of trying to fight a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Sarah and Cath share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm; they separate fact from fiction; they explain how they made a safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching; and they give us hope for the future.
This is one of the most epic and pioneering moments in human history, comparable to the race to put a man on the moon, the discovery of DNA, or the first ascent of Everest. As we wait for vaccinations to release us from the grip of the virus, Vaxxers invites us into the lab to find out how science will save us from this pandemic, and how we can prepare for the inevitable next one.
