The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the Covid-19 Pandemic

Financial Times correspondent Miller delivers a fascinating survey of the remarkable achievements of doctors Türeci and Sahin, a married couple whose groundbreaking work on messenger RNA led to the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccine. This gripping account walks readers through Türeci and Sahin’s extraordinary scientific work; as Miller notes, there was no “single breakthrough that underpinned the medical triumph” leading to the vaccine—rather, Türeci and Sahin, who founded the German biotechnology company BioNTech, and their colleagues built upon decades of prior efforts. In January 2020, Sahin told BioNTech’s chairman he thought a new method could be developed to fight the deadly disease: having immunizing antigens produced using “a code that let the patient produce their own drug.” The foreshadowing can be a bit heavy-handed (“Little did the couple know, however, that the technology they were on the cusp of perfecting would be catapulted onto a much larger stage in just fifteen months time”) and unnecessary given the narrative’s inherent drama and readers’ general familiarity with the arc of the pandemic. Still, lay readers interested in learning more about how the vaccine came to be will find this a fine place to start. (Feb.)