Thread by @thetimes

Eighteen months. Half a billion doses in 178 countries. Thousands of lives saved.

The scientists behind the Oxford vaccine, Professors Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, tell @whippletom how they pulled it off. thetimes.co.uk/article/the-ox…

They called it a “Disease X” situation.

At some point, a completely new pathogen would emerge for which a completely new vaccine was required. And at Oxford’s Jenner Institute at the start of 2020, they were ready. 💉

The small problem, says Professor Sarah Gilbert, is that when Disease X arrived, no one had anticipated a very specific scenario. What if they themselves – the people working on that vaccine – ended up being in the same country as the disease?

“The idea of having to live through a pandemic while we developed a vaccine to get us out of a pandemic?” says Gilbert. “We hadn’t planned for that.”

By the spring of 2020, with empty shelves, pasta panics and a closed canteen, that flaw in planning was most keenly felt in the office vending machine.

“We ate nothing but Mini Cheddars and Bounty bars for two weeks solid,” says Professor Catherine Green.

This was a period when the Oxford vaccine team, the hope of a nation – the hope of the world – was fuelled by chocolate and cheesy biscuits. “All of us,” says Green, “were getting spotty.”

They needed trials, pipelines, pharmaceutical companies. They needed to do things concurrently that had previously been done consecutively. At the start of 2020, this was what they resolved to do.

“We had to get everything moving,” says Gilbert. “Start the manufacturing, make the starting materials, get the clinical trials off the ground – phase one, phase two, then phase three trials in different countries.” 💉

“There have been times when it’s just so totally full-on that all we can do is focus on the next half-hour, and then the half-hour after that. It’s been quite traumatic, frankly,” says Gilbert.

She remembers a call with Matt Hancock, the health secretary, in March 2020. “He said, ‘What can I do to help? What do you need?’” She needed to get the vaccine clinics up and running and replied, “PPE.”

“You could see he was thinking, ‘Not you as well,’ ” she says.

Green and Gilbert are speaking to The Times because, with the help of a ghost writer, they have written a book about their fight against Covid. 📖

Green said her motivation for writing the book was, in part, because of the conspiracy theories.

“We are normal people doing our job to the absolute best of our ability. All the challenges – no pasta in Tesco, no toilet roll, not being able to see your mum and dad – we were experiencing them too,” says Green.

“So this concept that the vaccine manufacturers are ‘them’? We’re not them. We are us.”

Read the full interview: thetimes.co.uk/article/the-ox…