Breathless by David Quammen

Author:David Quammen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

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The saga of vaccine development against SARS-CoV-2, which unfolded slowly over many years and then culminated with extraordinary quickness, is not one story, with one beginning, one denouement, and a handful of characters. It’s more like the Mahabharata: an epic, braided from a thousand threads. Some of those threads come out of Hungary and Germany and the University of Pennsylvania and lead toward the Pfizer vaccine. Some threads emerge from Janssen Vaccines, in the Netherlands, and from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, and (money threads) from BARDA, that biomedical development agency in Washington, D.C., from which Rick Bright was sent into exile. Those threads lead toward the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, better known as the Johnson & Johnson. Some come out of China, in two distinct bundles, passing through Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco, Bahrain, and Pakistan, among other places, on the way to the CoronaVac and the Sinopharm BIBP vaccines. Some threads tangle their way from Oxford, England (Sarah Gilbert’s lab, and those of several colleagues, for research and development) to the Serum Institute of India, in Pune (for some of the manufacturing) and elsewhere, yielding the Oxford-AstraZeneca, which became the world’s most widely applied and lifesaving Covid vaccine. Out of Russia, by way of Abu Dhabi and Italy, wind other threads leading to Sputnik V. And then there’s the story of the Moderna vaccine, which begins more than thirty years ago in the laboratory of Barney Graham.

Barney Scott Graham grew up near Paola, Kansas, a farm boy who helped with the cows, hogs, and quarter horses, his father a dentist when not tending livestock, Barney soon a tall young man bright enough to be valedictorian of Paola High School and headed for Rice University in Houston. After college, and then medical school back in Kansas, he found himself, in his early thirties, chief resident for internal medicine at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. That didn’t exhaust Graham’s ambitions to make sick people well and keep others from getting sick, so he got a doctorate in microbiology and immunology and became a professor of medicine. He also did research, beginning in the mid-1980s, focused largely on vaccine efforts against HIV and on a more common, less notorious, but still serious pathogen: respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which can seriously afflict children and the elderly. RSV gets around, infecting nearly every human child by the age of three, bringing only coldlike symptoms to most but severe respiratory illness to many, causing about three million hospitalizations per year. Graham started work on RSV in 1986, and stayed with it, because there was no vaccine.

He left Nashville in 2000, joining the newly established Vaccine Research Center, within NIAID, which in turn is part of the vast National Institutes of Health (NIH) complex in Bethesda. He was one of the Center’s founding investigators. Graham carries a recollection of the VRC creation story, as recounted to him—recounted to many people, over the years—by Tony Fauci. Bill Clinton, around the midpoint of his presidency, got very interested in the imperative of conquering AIDS.

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