When Haller had answered a callout from a friend to “Fellow Humans” to participate in a 14-month medical trial, she’d barely blinked.
Had this virus come 10 years earlier – or even five – science would not have been ready.Īt the start of the pandemic, no one could have foreseen how controversial a COVID-19 vaccine would become – that the country would soon be stewing in anti-science and anti-vaccine sentiment, awash in misinformation and cleaved by mistrust. The liquid about to go into Haller’s arm was the culmination of years of research by a handful of scientists who, by virtue of incredible luck and incredible foresight, were prepared for one virus more than almost any other: a coronavirus. Anthony Fauci, who had quickly become the voice of the scientific community, was already predicting a vaccine within as little as a year, a projection many of his colleagues considered wildly optimistic.īut Fauci knew something many did not. Members of his team at the National Institutes of Health and an affiliated biotech company had been preparing for years for just this moment, just this vaccine. Now the country was in the grip of a disease that had infected 172,000 people, killed 6,700 and was accelerating unimpeded. Vaccines for HIV and Zika still elude scientists.
Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine came only after 50 years of trial and error. Their history was littered with missteps and disappointment.
It had been 75 days since news broke of unexplained cases of pneumonia seeming to emanate from a seafood market in Wuhan, China, and 66 days since scientists in the United States stared at the virus’s genetic code and vowed to conjure a vaccine to shut it down, at a record-shattering pace.ĭoing so was a bet that, a few years ago, would have felt as audacious as sending a man to Mars. When she arrived at the research center, not far from Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, the whole world was standing by. She wondered if that person might be her. The night before, she had read news online that the first person would get an experimental vaccine against the novel coronavirus at Kaiser Permanente in the morning. Her husband, always on her case about skipping breakfast, scrambled some eggs. Jennifer Haller layered a blue denim shirt over a gray tank top that morning, knowing she would later need to bare one shoulder.