Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus

"This is a fantastic account, absolutely gripping, by two of the principals involved in the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. There are all kinds of really interesting insights. One thing that interested me was how early people in the epidemiology community spotted the warning signs of the coming pandemic—well before it hit the headlines, and well before it came to the attention of people in Whitehall who are responsible for spotting trouble ahead. A bit like the financial crisis, there were some people who saw it coming well in advance, but it didn’t permeate through into the public consciousness or the policy consciousness as quickly as you might have hoped. “One thing that interested me was how early people in the epidemiology community spotted the warning signs of the coming pandemic” And—for somebody who’s in research—there’s a lot of very interesting material about how research gets funded and how hard it is actually to get the money for what might turn out to be fundamentally important research. You have to spend so much of your time writing proposals for short-term or relatively small pots of money, that it’s very difficult to sustain fundamental strands of research. So, kudos to the University of Oxford: they stumped up the money at their own risk for the vaccine development work to continue, before it was clear that it would get funded through the normal kinds of research channels. There’s also great material in the book about how to scale up, how to work alongside manufacturers, because the research facilities were quite small-scale and we needed millions, billions, of doses of vaccine eventually. So the discussions about how it got commercialised, how AstraZeneca came to be part of it and, actually, how well they come out of it in the sense of not taking a profit during the crisis, is all very interesting. Then, at the human level, these are mothers juggling responsibilities of what are busy jobs at the best of times, and the sheer pressure of working at pace and this intensity on something of such fundamental importance. It’s a description of science in action, of how important research is, and raises questions about the kinds of structures of work and research funding that we have in place. Quite apart from this current pandemic, it leaves those as open questions for the future and for other areas. This gets glossed in different ways. The science is clearly amazing, the vaccine development happening so quickly. I do remember back in March 2020 people talking about vaccines, and thinking, ‘but they take years and years to develop and get through clinical trials, how on Earth is that going to happen so quickly?’ So there is that fundamental awe at what the scientists have been able to do. But there are other structures that made it happen at such speed. There was a very interesting lecture by Kate Bingham, who headed the UK government’s Vaccine Taskforce , a couple of weeks ago. It was about how many barriers there were to getting things done that quickly and effectively, in terms of usual government procedures, and the battles she had to fight to overcome the risk aversion of civil servants, who wanted to go through lengthy procurement processes, and the lack of joining up across different departments in government."