The Vaccine
Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winners of the Paul Ehrlich Prize
The dramatic story of the married scientists who founded BioNTech and developed the first vaccine against COVID-19.
Nobody thought it was possible. In mid-January 2020, Ugur Sahin told Özlem Türeci, his wife and decades-long research partner, that a vaccine against what would soon be known as COVID-19 could be developed and safely injected into the arms of millions before the end of the year. His confidence was built upon almost thirty years of research. While working to revolutionize the way that cancerous tumors are treated, the couple had explored a volatile and overlooked molecule called messenger RNA; they believed it could be harnessed to redirect the immune system's forces against any number of diseases. As the founders of BioNTech, they faced widespread skepticism from the scientific community at first; but by the time Sars-Cov-2 was discovered in Wuhan, China, BioNTech was prepared to deploy cutting edge technology and create the world’s first clinically approved inoculation for the coronavirus.
The Vaccine draws back the curtain on one of the most important medical breakthroughs of our age; it will reveal how Doctors Sahin and Türeci were able to develop twenty vaccine candidates within weeks, convince Big Pharma to support their ambitious project, navigate political interference from the Trump administration and the European Union, and provide more than three billion doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to countries around the world in record time.
Written by Joe Miller—the Financial Times’ Frankfurt correspondent who covered BioNTech’s COVID-19 project in real time—with contributions from Sahin and Türeci, as well as interviews with more than sixty scientists, politicians, public health officials, and BioNTech staff, the book covers key events throughout the extraordinary year, as well as exploring the scientific, economic, and personal background of each medical innovation. Crafted to be both completely accessible to the average reader and filled with details that will fascinate seasoned microbiologists, The Vaccine explains the science behind the breakthrough, at a time when public confidence in vaccine safety and efficacy is crucial to bringing an end to this pandemic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Financial Times correspondent Miller delivers a fascinating survey of the remarkable achievements of doctors Türeci and Sahin, a married couple whose groundbreaking work on messenger RNA led to the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccine. This gripping account walks readers through Türeci and Sahin's extraordinary scientific work; as Miller notes, there was no "single breakthrough that underpinned the medical triumph" leading to the vaccine—rather, Türeci and Sahin, who founded the German biotechnology company BioNTech, and their colleagues built upon decades of prior efforts. In January 2020, Sahin told BioNTech's chairman he thought a new method could be developed to fight the deadly disease: having immunizing antigens produced using "a code that let the patient produce their own drug." The foreshadowing can be a bit heavy-handed ("Little did the couple know, however, that the technology they were on the cusp of perfecting would be catapulted onto a much larger stage in just fifteen months time") and unnecessary given the narrative's inherent drama and readers' general familiarity with the arc of the pandemic. Still, lay readers interested in learning more about how the vaccine came to be will find this a fine place to start.
