Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made
The New York Times
The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics.
Thousands of miles from Dr. Barney Graham’s lab in Bethesda, Md., a frightening new coronavirus had jumped from camels to humans in the Middle East, killing one out of every three people infected. An expert on the world’s most intractable viruses, Dr. Graham had been working for months to develop a vaccine, but had gotten nowhere.
Now he was terrified that the virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, had infected one of his lab’s own scientists, who was sick with a fever and a cough in the fall of 2013 after a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.
A nose swab came back positive for a coronavirus, seeming to confirm Dr. Graham’s worst fears, only for a second test to deliver relief. It was a mild coronavirus, causing a common cold, not MERS.
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