The story behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine

The scientists behind the Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine have produced a vivid account of the many challenges they faced and overcame.

The inspiration to write Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race against the Virus, published on 8 July by Hodder & Stoughton, came while Catherine Green, head of the University of Oxford’s Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility, was on a camping trip in August 2020. She happened to get into conversation with a woman who told her: “I’m not saying there is definitely a conspiracy. But I do worry that we don’t know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don’t trust them. They don’t tell the truth.”

Dr Green could only reply: “I am ‘them’. You couldn’t have known this, but I’m the best person in the world to tell you what’s in the vaccine. I work with the people who invented it…We ordered the ingredients, we made the first batch, we made more batches from that, like with a sourdough starter, we purified it down and we put it into tiny little vials…I know exactly what’s in [the vaccine], and you can ask me anything you want about it.”

Readers now have a similar opportunity to discover for themselves what goes on in a vaccine lab.

Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, explains the nature of “replication-deficient recombinant simian adenoviral-vectored vaccines” and how earlier research provided an essential basis for developing a new vaccine so fast.

“Some of the most important moments had actually happened before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19,” she reflects. “Because whenever you are working at the cutting edge of science, you are building on decades of meticulous and laborious work that has come before. The flip side of that, of course, is that if we had been better prepared, we could have gone even faster.”

Many factors, Professor Gilbert goes on, account for “why vaccines usually take so long to develop”. In the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, she writes, the World Health Organization “leaped into action” and a Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was set up. Yet though she had to devote much of a family holiday to putting in a full proposal to carry out some very focused research, it still took well over a year for the contract to be signed. “And we had achieved nothing beyond securing some funding.”

But these were far from the only obstacles the scientists had to overcome. Once the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was licensed and began to be rolled out, the two women faced a media circus – and often overt hostility – for which few academics are prepared.

Despite “the stunning success of the first three vaccines to report results – Pfizer, Moderna and our AstraZeneca vaccine”, Professor Gilbert reminds us, several other promising contenders were forced to drop out. So she did occasionally allow herself “to feel a bit sore…that we were continuing to get bad press for our successful vaccine, while others were receiving sympathy for their unsuccessful attempts”.

On the often contentious issues around women in science, Dr Green takes a fairly robust line, though she acknowledges that “some things…are particularly challenging” and notes that she and her female colleagues have sometimes been described in terms such as “Irish brunette mother of two”, “serious redhead mother to triplets” and “not your stereotypical Oxford boffin”. She also takes pleasure, “for the record”, in listing the hair colour of the three main men they worked alongside.

Equally irritating was the way that “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”. A particular trying moment was when voices within Europe seem to be both crying out for and trying to discredit one and the same vaccine. Professor Gilbert was reminded of “the joke about the two crotchety old women in a restaurant. First crotchety old woman: ‘The food here is terrible.’ Second crotchety old woman: ‘Yes, and such small portions.’”

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com