Vaxxers: the inside story of AstraZeneca and the best of British science
The team behind the AstraZeneca vaccine had to counteract a sickening campaign, according to an enthralling new insider account.
In an interview in May to promote the latest comeback by 1980s pop band Duran Duran, keyboardist Nick Rhodes said while he was usually a fan of “modern things”, he chose to have the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine instead of the others on offer “because it’s old school”.
This random remark by a non-expert echoed through my reading of Vaxxers, the enthralling and engagingly personal account by two of the scientists principally responsible for the COVID-19 vaccine developed in the UK.
It does seem from the book AZ is old school in a good way. One practical advantage AZ has over the Pfizer vaccine is it can be stored using normal refrigeration rather than the ultracold freezer storage required for the latter, thus making it easier to distribute throughout the world.
Replete with 50 pages of appendices detailing technical aspects, Vaxxers is an engrossing tale of solid science that should reassure anyone who has already had the first dose or is contemplating opting for the AZ. The book will serve as an antidote to the equivocations of politicians and senior public health officials in Australia that have done so much to undermine public confidence in the national response to the pandemic. Not for nothing did Donald Horne famously describe Australia as “a Lucky Country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”.
Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green and their colleagues at Oxford struggled professionally and personally with the enormous challenge of trying to produce a safe and effective vaccine in 12 months rather than the years this process would take normally. The need was urgent and the workload crushing, yet there could be no shortcuts.
There was no eureka moment, as such. “We are not some kind of Lara Croft in a lab coat out in search of hidden treasure”, writes Gilbert. “Vaccines are not found. Even the world’s first vaccine, against smallpox, was the result of a carefully thought-out line of reasoning, not a happy accident.”
Gilbert explains AZ was developed by a team with considerable knowledge and experience. “We had a tried-and-tested platform technology that we had been working on for years – starting with a flu vaccine back in 2012 and including a vaccine against MERS, another coronavirus,” she says.
Indeed, Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford anticipated the emergence of a new coronavirus, which they dubbed Disease X.
“As we’ve been explaining in this book, we were not completely unprepared: we had been thinking about, and trying to prepare for, Disease X for some time. But one thing we had not thought about was this: how do you fight a pandemic when you are in a pandemic?”
One of the problems faced by the Oxford team as COVID-19 spread unchecked was trying to counteract public fear, mistrust and impatience, all of which were exacerbated by sensationalist media reports and divisive politicians.
While in some ways the pandemic brought together people of good will, in other ways it exposed existing conflicts. Gilbert and Green describe how the AZ vaccine has been the target of Russian misinformation and American isolationism, as well as being caught up in the heightened tension in Europe caused by Brexit.
“What none of us foresaw”, reflects Gilbert, “was how the vaccine would become a political football.
“Our year of constant, painstaking attention to detail resulting in a vaccine with the potential to save millions of lives around the world could be dismissed by a politician with a grudge. Carefully worded statements to the media, explaining the science behind the vaccine, would disappear in a Twitter storm of bias and misinformation, with incorrect statements repeatedly cited as fact.”
“Were we simply too idealistic? Too naive?”, she wonders. “Certainly, next time – and there will be a next time – we should add some political scientists to the team.”
On the positive side, the success of the AZ vaccine has highlighted the vital importance of well-funded, forward-thinking medical research, and, in particular, the role played by female scientists. Most of the people who worked on developing the AZ vaccine at Oxford were women.
Green writes of herself and Gilbert: “We realise that we are being seen as role models, and that is, I think, important. Women are still under-represented in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at school, at university, at work, and in senior positions at work”.
Another positive could be that Covid-19 makes us better prepared for the next coronavirus. “Disease Y is coming”, warns Green.
“There will be a next time. It is inevitable. Epidemiologists and specialists in zoonotic (meaning animal to human) transmission have already warned about how the trade in wildlife, and the pressures created by intensive farming on industrial scales, are creating the opportunities for Disease Y to emerge.”
Simon Caterson is a writer and critic.
Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus
Holder & Stoughton, Nonfiction
336pp, $34.99
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