This masterful, mind-boggling film gets up close with the scientists who huddled over computers in their PJs to save millions of lives. The wonder of it!
There is a dizzying sense of scale imparted by the Horizon special on the coronavirus vaccine. On the one hand, you have the pathogen – so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye even as it replicates by fatal millions inside a host, although the damage it does is all too apparent. And then you have the uniting of entire continents’ worth of scientists, each with a world of knowledge to bring to the fight against the microscopic enemy. The wonder of it, the harnessing of intellectual might, the logistics, the commitment necessary to condense into months what could easily have taken a decade was all powerfully evoked by Horizon’s 90-minute film The Vaccine (BBC Two). Plus, it did all that without getting in the way of the science, the facts or the story itself.
And what a story. Horizon begins with Dr George Fu Gao of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who first read on 30 December 2019 that something was happening in Wuhan. He got samples from patients, used next-generation sequencing technology to identify a new pathogen behind a new disease within days, and released the information globally so that those five continents’ worth of virologists could get to work. Dr Teresa Lambe of Oxford University remembers “huddling over my computer in my pyjamas, designing a vaccine”. That was on 1 January 2020.
