You can also search for this author in PubMed                                       Google Scholar                                       Vaxxers:

The COVID vaccine makers tell all

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2021-08-04 02:00:08

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Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus Sarah Gilbert & Catherine Green Hodder & Stoughton (2021)

Last August, biologist Catherine Green was camping with her daughter in Wales when a chance conversation at the pizza van turned to a familiar topic: COVID-19. “We don’t know what they put in these vaccines,” a fellow camper told her. “I don’t trust them. They don’t tell us the truth.”

Green was uniquely placed to know. She runs a clinical biomanufacturing facility at the University of Oxford, UK, and is part of a team that had developed a COVID-19 vaccine that was in clinical trials at the time. Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca of Cambridge, UK, aims to produce three billion doses of this vaccine for distribution around the world by the end of 2021, significantly protecting people from severe disease and death. Yet, nearly a year after Green’s encounter, conspiracy theories continue to stymie take-up of COVID-19 vaccines, risking lives both in regions where doses are abundant, and in those where there are precious few. In April, the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation, based in San Francisco, California, found that 54% of US adults either believe common misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines or think that it might be true (see go.nature.com/3fyfaoi).

It was with the epidemic of misinformation in mind, Green says, that she and Oxford vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert decided to write Vaxxers, a behind-the-scenes story that attempts to humanize vaccine-making in the hope of boosting trust. The book, along with The Vaccine — a documentary commissioned by the BBC and CNN Films — offers a welcome glimpse inside the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines in the middle of a raging pandemic.

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