Speaker 1: It's a cloudy, freezing Friday night in January. In Minds,
Speaker 1: a university town in central Germany, or Shine, a doctor
Speaker 1: and cancer researcher, bikes home from his lab in the dark.
Speaker 1: He makes a cup of tea and settles in to
Speaker 1: read the week's medical journals and starts with leading papers.
Speaker 1: Has spent more than twenty years of his life trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to use the body's immune system
Speaker 1: to target and destroy tumors. But tonight, a different disease
Speaker 1: catches his interest. An ominous new virus is spreading in China.
Speaker 1: Medical journal The Lancet has just published the first case
Speaker 1: descriptions for forty one people who'd gotten sick in the
Speaker 1: city of Juhan. Uger notices one thing right away. A
Speaker 1: new message in this paper was that one of the
Speaker 1: family members had the disease was VIBUS positive, but did
Speaker 1: not have fever or other symptoms. This was new. The
Speaker 1: asymptomatic cases meant the virus could spread in secret. The
Speaker 1: symptoms described in the article are serious pneumonia, heart injury,
Speaker 1: six deaths. Uer looks up the population of Juhan, eleven
Speaker 1: million people, bigger than central London. Then he checks flights
Speaker 1: between the city and the rest of the world. There
Speaker 1: are dozens of flights every day. It was extremely highly
Speaker 1: likely that this is going to be a pandemic, and
Speaker 1: we started to discuss what we can do. The next morning,
Speaker 1: he turns to the person he trusts the most, his
Speaker 1: wife and fellow researcher with them too, Ritchy. She's the
Speaker 1: one who challenges his big ideas, forces him to hone
Speaker 1: his hypotheses. He spends about an hour showing her what
Speaker 1: hend on. They both know the best weapon to fight
Speaker 1: what's coming will be a vaccine. They've been testing a
Speaker 1: new technology using messenger RNA and experimental cancer therapy, and
Speaker 1: had done a lot of lab work on a potential
Speaker 1: flu vaccine, but neither they nor anybody else had ever
Speaker 1: used the technology in an approved medicine for humans. After that,
Speaker 1: it was not about discussing. It was about asking the question,
Speaker 1: how can we make this happen? If we really want
Speaker 1: to contribute and try to engineer a vaccine, how quick
Speaker 1: this work. They had never even done a patient trial
Speaker 1: in infectious diseases before, just lab experiments. Nobody knew whether
Speaker 1: it would work, but they were about to embark on
Speaker 1: an unprecedented race to find a vaccine against COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: We decided to start a program because it was clear
Speaker 1: it was an obligation to do something. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: seventh episode of our series. In our last episode, we
Speaker 1: heard about how researchers Catalan Kariko and Drew Wiseman worked
Speaker 1: for decades and relative anonymity to lay the groundwork for
Speaker 1: getting m RNA into cells. With the pandemic, their work
Speaker 1: has a chance to make its way to patients far
Speaker 1: faster than what would have previously seemed possible. This time
Speaker 1: we're looking at the remarkable race to speed up development
Speaker 1: time of a COVID nineteen vaccine in the usual decade
Speaker 1: or so to a head spinning ten tranzied months. This
Speaker 1: is a story about the biggest scientific breakthrough with the
Speaker 1: pandemic mRNA vaccines. Now Suddenly, vaccines are the world's number
Speaker 1: one priority and the race to make them is on. Soon,
Speaker 1: hospitals and morgues will be filling up. Hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of people are about to die in cities around the globe.
Speaker 1: Every hour of every day is crucial as scientists race
Speaker 1: to do years of work and months. Whoever gets the
Speaker 1: finish line first, will make a name for themselves as
Speaker 1: science heroes, victors in a once in a century war
Speaker 1: with the killer virus. So many lives on the line,
Speaker 1: and for the drug companies billions of dollars in profits too.
Speaker 1: My name is Naomi Kraski and I'm a health reporter
Speaker 1: for Bloomberg News from the Prognosis podcast. This is Breakthrough,
Speaker 1: the story of the COVID vaccine race starts with a
Speaker 1: pair of young biotech companies. One is BioNTech, led by
Speaker 1: Or Shah and it slam too duchy when we just met.
Speaker 1: The other is Moderna, founded by Derrick Rossi, the stem
Speaker 1: cell researcher we met in our last episode, and led
Speaker 1: by a charismatic Frenchman. Needs to fund cell. Unlike BioNTech,
Speaker 1: which had mostly been a cancer company prior to the pandemic,
Speaker 1: Moderna was able to build on a lot of prior
Speaker 1: work and infectious disease. Here's to fund the CEO. We've
Speaker 1: been working on the mountain for ten years. We have
Speaker 1: been working on infectious disease of vaccine for most of
Speaker 1: those teneos. Moderna had started patient trials on nine other
Speaker 1: potential vaccines against other infectious diseases before this pandemic vaccine,
Speaker 1: so this was not new to us. We've been working
Speaker 1: on it a lot. In Moderna had started working with
Speaker 1: the US government to design vaccines. The project included mers
Speaker 1: A coronavirus that it hits out of Arabia and other countries,
Speaker 1: and the follows to fund. Briefed officials from the National
Speaker 1: Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease known as NAIAD on
Speaker 1: a factory the company had built in Massachusetts. It could
Speaker 1: produce new vaccines in just sixty days. Steffun invited the
Speaker 1: government officials to tour the facility. Sensing some skepticism, he
Speaker 1: offered to do a test run for a hypothetical pandemic.
Speaker 1: The agency would send Moderna the genetic sequence for an
Speaker 1: emerging viral disease. Moderna would see how fast it could
Speaker 1: get a vaccine ready. The agency was about to pick
Speaker 1: a virus to use when along came stars Covey two.
Speaker 1: It was a perfect test case. So we were made
Speaker 1: aware of the virus between Christmas and New Year of
Speaker 1: We got the sequence from the Chinese government in our
Speaker 1: January the tenth put online. By the fifteen of anyway,
Speaker 1: we had the vaccine design lockdown on the computer, because
Speaker 1: all in Silico we never touched a physical virus. Here,
Speaker 1: it's helpful to step back for a minute and review
Speaker 1: what distinguishes mRNA vaccines from conventional shots. In the old
Speaker 1: way of doing things, vaccines introduced dead or weakened bits
Speaker 1: of virus into the body primarily immune system to recognize
Speaker 1: and destroy the real thing. Messenger RNA vaccines work differently.
Speaker 1: They contain a template that cells will use to make
Speaker 1: the bits of viral protein themselves, essentially turning the body's
Speaker 1: own cells into vaccine making factories. The differences also extend
Speaker 1: to manufacturing. Conventional vaccines are grown inside live cells. Some
Speaker 1: even use chicken eggs. Messenger RNA vaccines don't need any
Speaker 1: of that. Making them is a chemical process, a little
Speaker 1: bit like cooking. Makes the ingredients together and you get
Speaker 1: the vaccine. That may sound simple, but it isn't. Stefan
Speaker 1: told us that going from the theory to actual drugmaker
Speaker 1: seemed like a long shot when he quit his previous
Speaker 1: job joined Moderna. But if he's going to work, you
Speaker 1: would change medicine forever. Great pandemic. Bion tech had been
Speaker 1: mostly focusing on cancer one thing it's scientists were able
Speaker 1: to do in those early days was pull off the
Speaker 1: method for developing rapid personalized versions of m RNA vaccines
Speaker 1: based on cancer patients individual tumors. So we had the
Speaker 1: technology that we could use a vaccine platform to come
Speaker 1: up as a new vaccine was in a few weeks.
Speaker 1: This is another really important point about mr anda of vaccines.
Speaker 1: The technology itself took decades to refine, but within that framework,
Speaker 1: designing a vaccine to target a particular pathogen is actually
Speaker 1: really quick. Before mr and A vaccines came along, the
Speaker 1: fastest vaccine project ever was the n and Drug Company
Speaker 1: American co licensed to Shop for Moms. That took four years.
Speaker 1: The scientists who led the project, Maurice Hillman, swabbed his
Speaker 1: six five year old daughter's throat in order to get
Speaker 1: the lab specimen he needed to make the shot. With
Speaker 1: m r and A vaccines, you don't have to do
Speaker 1: anything like that. You don't need swab samples. All you
Speaker 1: need is the genetic code of the virus cattle and
Speaker 1: carry co. The pioneering researcher who left academia to work
Speaker 1: at BioNTech, says this and the event of the Internet
Speaker 1: gives researchers a leg up. You know you you are
Speaker 1: very young, so you don't remember, but how long it
Speaker 1: took like for HIV to set up the test to
Speaker 1: recognize this infected recognizing the I mean it took so
Speaker 1: long because the technology was not advanced in minds. We
Speaker 1: were an earths them get a slightly later start than
Speaker 1: their US rival. They have their kitchen table conversation about
Speaker 1: committing to a COVID vaccine a few weeks after MODERNA
Speaker 1: is already working on the vaccine design, but they start
Speaker 1: moving quickly. To the day after their decision to start
Speaker 1: work on a vaccine, we were calls a series of
Speaker 1: meetings with his manufacturing team, pre clinical testing team, and
Speaker 1: business development team. The crowd into his office in Mines.
Speaker 1: It's a simple room with the desk, conference table, some
Speaker 1: family pictures tacked onto a bulletin board. It's on the
Speaker 1: same hallway as the labs. He asks everyone to start
Speaker 1: planning how they can divert resources away from their other
Speaker 1: projects to a new full court press COVID vaccine push.
Speaker 1: On this Monday, I had five or six meetings with
Speaker 1: different and we had to day thereafter a board meeting
Speaker 1: to discuss how this can be supported by other board members.
Speaker 1: The same day, the first COVID case is confirmed in Germany.
Speaker 1: It's a thirty three year old man living near Munich.
Speaker 1: He works at an auto parts company. We had just
Speaker 1: been in a meeting led by a colleague who was
Speaker 1: visiting from China. We were assigned twenty five people to
Speaker 1: work on a potential vaccine, setting up shifts that run
Speaker 1: through evenings and weekends. It's basically seven operation. We had
Speaker 1: to reduce the timelines. We tried to figure out how
Speaker 1: to do that, and in principle we came up as
Speaker 1: a number of really innovative strategies. One was doing things
Speaker 1: in parallel instead of doing it sequentially. It's a risky
Speaker 1: of a time saving decision. Usually companies don't prepare for
Speaker 1: a pay Asian trial until they have a potential drug
Speaker 1: to test. But Uger's teams start working on getting trials
Speaker 1: ready to go already. They figure they can add the
Speaker 1: details about the vaccine that's going to be used once
Speaker 1: they have it, they start making multiple candidates. You need
Speaker 1: to do a lot of detailed paperwork before you can
Speaker 1: test any kind of drug on people. So Uger also
Speaker 1: gets in touch with German clinical trial authorities. He knows
Speaker 1: them well because of bion texts work with cancer vaccines.
Speaker 1: He asked them for a meeting. Usually it takes three
Speaker 1: months to get a meeting date. So I called them
Speaker 1: and asked if we could come up just just data
Speaker 1: day and and they said, first of all, prepare a
Speaker 1: briefing book and if you've managed that, you can come
Speaker 1: next week. So Uger's team works night and day to
Speaker 1: write an ad page document describing there would be COVID
Speaker 1: vaccine project. They agreed to our plan. The only only
Speaker 1: challenge for us. They wanted to see a toxicology try.
Speaker 1: It usually takes six months, and we wanted to start
Speaker 1: in April. Yeah, so will be the beginning fable Abby
Speaker 1: and they they quested to have a talk study and
Speaker 1: they had to figure out how to do the talk
Speaker 1: in in less than less than three months. And the
Speaker 1: teams you get that out. Moderna is also doing things
Speaker 1: in parallel, setting up the next steps for bigger trials
Speaker 1: before the early ones are done. By February forty two
Speaker 1: days after it started, the company ships the first batch
Speaker 1: of vaccine to NAIAD. Remember that's the National Institute of
Speaker 1: allergy and infectious disease. Like BioNTech, they are relying on
Speaker 1: close partnership with regulators. Unlike BioNTech, they have a direct
Speaker 1: government partnership. The National Institutes of Health is the co
Speaker 1: developer of the vaccine. The Food and Drug Administration is
Speaker 1: taking their calls at all hours of the night into
Speaker 1: the weekend. Stefan says, I think one of the hero
Speaker 1: of this remarkable SENSEFIC achievement of twenty is vf D
Speaker 1: because you know, usually through the process is set up
Speaker 1: by the agency. You know it would sometimes take months
Speaker 1: to get an answer to a question. Well, here we
Speaker 1: had answers on questions seven with the NIH to help them. Well,
Speaker 1: Darrena moves forward without a big farm a partner for
Speaker 1: BioNTech in Germany, that's not the case we're in Aslam. No,
Speaker 1: they can't run the huge clinical trials needed for approval
Speaker 1: on their own. Neither do they have the kind of
Speaker 1: global distribution you need the ship of vaccine all around
Speaker 1: the world to succeed. They need a sponsor with deep
Speaker 1: pockets who picks up the phone and calls his contact advisor.
Speaker 1: The drugs behemoth based in New York. The companies had
Speaker 1: already made a deal in to work together on an
Speaker 1: m R and a flu vaccine. Phil Dormantzer, chief scientific
Speaker 1: officer for Viral Vaccines Advisor, remembers that call who are
Speaker 1: wanted to transfer people who are working on flu to
Speaker 1: the new virus really just swapping out the influenza and
Speaker 1: engine coding sequences and swapping in the stars COVID to
Speaker 1: ANDREW coding sequences, because we like to be really out
Speaker 1: in front of this new disease that's broken out in Wuhan, China.
Speaker 1: Remember when I said vaccine makers no longer needed live
Speaker 1: cells or swabbed samples to build vaccines, but that all
Speaker 1: you need is the genetic code of the virus. That's
Speaker 1: what Phil is talking about here, and this is a
Speaker 1: big deal. Ion Tech might not have had ongoing human
Speaker 1: trials with infectious disease vaccines, but they were already working
Speaker 1: in the area. Paddlan explains how far along the flu
Speaker 1: work already was. We were advancing those studies. Animals studies,
Speaker 1: monkey studies were finished, and we were just there to
Speaker 1: request the authorities work for the permission all of the sudden.
Speaker 1: Instead of influence, so we switched over to to Corona.
Speaker 1: By March two, they have twenty vaccine candidates that could
Speaker 1: spur a strong immune response against the virus, and lab
Speaker 1: animals and cell culture experiments. That day, Uber calls Katrin Jansen,
Speaker 1: visors had a vaccine research and development and Phil spots
Speaker 1: it doesn't take long to convince her. I remember there
Speaker 1: was a call on which Uger and Katherine Jansen, who
Speaker 1: who leads vaccine research and development advisor UM and I
Speaker 1: spoke about this and they said, well the work plan.
Speaker 1: So I'll literally get him overnight typed up a work plan.
Speaker 1: What are the things that we would do. The plan
Speaker 1: goes to Albert Berla, visor CEO. Albert basically said we
Speaker 1: are going all in on this, that this is clearly
Speaker 1: an emergency. Albert said, in this circumstance, we need to
Speaker 1: divert resources and do whatever is needed to bring the
Speaker 1: vaccine forward. So his expectations of timelines were far faster
Speaker 1: than anything that that that we would have imagine before. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the FDA signs off on Moderna's plans for a trial
Speaker 1: in humans. Stefan's team injects its first volunteers on March sixteen.
Speaker 1: About a month later, on April Bion second Fiser start
Speaker 1: their human trial in Germany. Less than two weeks after that,
Speaker 1: a US trial begins. I think we were the only
Speaker 1: company which really started was all ever having ever tested
Speaker 1: their their platform in infectas disease. And we've also the
Speaker 1: only company which tested multiple candidates in pavalum Ugar is
Speaker 1: talking about shoehorning in one more science experiment, he wants
Speaker 1: to test four different potential vaccines in the first human
Speaker 1: study to see which one is the best. It's risky
Speaker 1: because it could delay development. Well, Darren has already picked
Speaker 1: the full spike for its vaccine, but UGO wants to
Speaker 1: try to optimize their shot as much as possible before
Speaker 1: they give it to thousands of people. The question is
Speaker 1: whether to make a vaccine based on only a piece
Speaker 1: of the virus is spike or the whole thing. Picking
Speaker 1: the right bit of the protein for the vaccine could
Speaker 1: potentially make a big difference in how well it works.
Speaker 1: And you could find in the literature arguments for both
Speaker 1: and against both. And so we said, let's test both
Speaker 1: and get the clinical data, get the preclinical data, and
Speaker 1: then get the answers. In July, both Moderna and the
Speaker 1: Fiser BioNTech team announced early data showing their vaccines can
Speaker 1: produce antibodies in people. Biontechs first data is for the
Speaker 1: version of the vaccine that made only one part of
Speaker 1: the spike protein, something called the RBD domain. It's good data.
Speaker 1: The clock is ticking. Some people want to move forward
Speaker 1: with that version of the shot right away. We had
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure from the clinical teams just to
Speaker 1: go ahead domain it teams to insist on waiting for
Speaker 1: the data from the full spike to see whether it
Speaker 1: might wind up making a safer or more effective vaccine.
Speaker 1: They have to move fast. While the pandemic has ebbed
Speaker 1: in some places like Germany, the US is in the
Speaker 1: middle of a summer surge about to hit a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty COVID deaths. Experts warned that another wave will
Speaker 1: probably come in the fall. They rush blood samples from
Speaker 1: volunteers to labs in Germany and the US. The safety
Speaker 1: data shows that the full spike vaccine is even better
Speaker 1: than the partial spike. It might cause fewer side effects,
Speaker 1: gives a better immune response to so on July they
Speaker 1: decide to go with that one. Remarkably, three days later,
Speaker 1: on July, both Moderna and Fizer BioNTech start the huge
Speaker 1: clinical trials necessary to win regulatory approval. There are tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of volunteers. Their real life experience will show
Speaker 1: whether the vaccines can work outside the confines of a lab,
Speaker 1: whether they can make a dent against the virus in
Speaker 1: real life. That summer, Moderna also get one billion dollars
Speaker 1: in funding from Operation Warp Speed, the Trump Administration's effort
Speaker 1: to hurry along vaccine development. The money is allocated via BARDA,
Speaker 1: the Biochemical Advanced Research and Development Authority. I think this
Speaker 1: is one story that is not talked about enough, is
Speaker 1: what Balda and then Operation vout Speed did by you know,
Speaker 1: sponsoring six companies, giving us the financial resources to take
Speaker 1: a lot of business risk. Eiser doesn't take US government funding,
Speaker 1: although the partners signed a one nine billion dollar contract
Speaker 1: to sell one hundred million doses to the US government
Speaker 1: if the show works, that's its own form of security.
Speaker 1: Moderna has its own deal for one hundred million doses
Speaker 1: for about one point five billion, and BioNTech takes German
Speaker 1: government funds. They need the money to build a factory.
Speaker 1: They've never had to new factor for millions of people before.
Speaker 1: They searched Germany and find an old novartist vaccine factory
Speaker 1: in Marburg, close to Frankfurt. They close on the site
Speaker 1: in the fall and work on retrofitting it for m
Speaker 1: R and A manufacturing. But there's a problem with making
Speaker 1: a key part of vaccine. Or and Katherine Jansen talked
Speaker 1: about this earlier this year at a conference hosted by
Speaker 1: healthy website stat Yes that that was indeed the low points,
Speaker 1: so we had an effect the vaccine. We wanted to
Speaker 1: to produce one hundred million doses and then it turned
Speaker 1: out that's one off the components did not work as
Speaker 1: as expected. The problem was with lipid nanoparticles. These are
Speaker 1: tiny bubbles of that that worked like a protective coating
Speaker 1: for the vaccine. They keep the body's enzymes from destroying
Speaker 1: it before it can make its way to a cell.
Speaker 1: The lipid issue that we faced at one time, that's
Speaker 1: through a real monkey wench, and it's so not only
Speaker 1: did we have to keep the program on track, we
Speaker 1: had to have a significant number of our colleagues, you know,
Speaker 1: working through it and trying to understand it. It originally
Speaker 1: said that if the vaccine worked, it could make a
Speaker 1: hundred million doses. Because of the manufacturing issues, they had
Speaker 1: to scale that back to fifty million doses. Well, we
Speaker 1: faced enormous challenges like in in every in every development
Speaker 1: program and vaccine development program, you have enormous challenges and
Speaker 1: the difference why we usually those challenges of COVID ten years, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the same challenges a nine months. By this point, they're
Speaker 1: working NonStop to solve the manufacturing problems. But the biggest
Speaker 1: question is still open, just how well does the vaccine work.
Speaker 1: The answer will come in the huge study that Fiser
Speaker 1: is running. They've expanded. It's more than forty patient people
Speaker 1: all around the world who have volunteered to get two
Speaker 1: shots in the arm without knowing whether what's in the
Speaker 1: syringe is a vaccine or just a placebo. Then they'll
Speaker 1: go out and live their lives and see whether they
Speaker 1: catch COVID. If they get symptoms, the test will show
Speaker 1: whether it's the virus. The researchers themselves also don't know
Speaker 1: who got the vaccine and who didn't. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of time waiting to see how many people get sick.
Speaker 1: And all around the COVID pandemic is getting worse. The
Speaker 1: second wave is happening Europe heads back into lockdown. In
Speaker 1: the US, the death toll hits two thousand people in September.
Speaker 1: In only two months, another fifty people die. How we're
Speaker 1: not in a good place for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1: Cases surging in nearly every state, more than two new
Speaker 1: cases in just twenty four hours in this country, alas
Speaker 1: as a cruel much of Europe, the virus is spreading
Speaker 1: even faster than the reasonable worst case scenario of our
Speaker 1: scientific advisors. It's Sunday in November eight, almost ten months
Speaker 1: after the Sunday morning when it's them and UGO had
Speaker 1: talked about whether to tear up their company plan and
Speaker 1: chase after a COVID vaccine. They're waiting in their apartment
Speaker 1: for five or CEO Albert Burla to call. They're on edge.
Speaker 1: They've heard that the independent panel of experts that's monitoring
Speaker 1: the trial is reviewing the results. They're expecting the panel's
Speaker 1: predict at any moment. We both are very tense. The
Speaker 1: entire day. There was still the scenario that would be
Speaker 1: oh THEO at all. Yeah, and remember that that understood
Speaker 1: that I I was worried, and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: it does not matter what we hear later today, it
Speaker 1: might well be that does not look good, but anyway,
Speaker 1: it was worth it and it was of a moral
Speaker 1: obligation to at least try it. Finally, at eight p m.
Speaker 1: The phone rings. Albert is on the line. They put
Speaker 1: him on speaker. He said, do you want to know
Speaker 1: the Lisa, and I said no. I realized already from
Speaker 1: his voice that there would be a positive a message,
Speaker 1: but neither of them were prepared for just how good
Speaker 1: the results would be. Ure told me he was expecting
Speaker 1: efficacy in the range of against the virus. They have
Speaker 1: to hit at least fifty for the vaccine to be
Speaker 1: considered viable for the market. What they get is well
Speaker 1: above nine. This was incredible. Yeah, this was just wave
Speaker 1: taking and that in this moment he understood, Hey, days,
Speaker 1: a vaccine for mankind and corna is is a problem
Speaker 1: that can be solved. Across the Atlantic, Phil Dormantzer is
Speaker 1: sitting in his apartment close to find SoRs office when
Speaker 1: he gets a similar call. He's sitting in the small
Speaker 1: room where he does his work. Zoom calls and because
Speaker 1: there's an embargo on this information, nobody can know because
Speaker 1: nobody is supposed to trade on the announcement. His lips
Speaker 1: are sealed. Once I found out, I couldn't tell anyone.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was this was highly confidential material information
Speaker 1: until it was announced publicly. I couldn't tell my wife,
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell anybody. So so it was. It was
Speaker 1: actually a quiet moment. He has to keep quiet for
Speaker 1: less than a day. On Monday, November nine, at six
Speaker 1: am in New York, Visor and BioNTech send out their
Speaker 1: press releases and break the news to the world. Trials
Speaker 1: carried out by the U s pharmaceutical John Fisa and
Speaker 1: the German manufacturer bio in Tech suggest they have created
Speaker 1: a coronavirus vaccine which is more than nine effective. It
Speaker 1: is a great day for science. It is a great
Speaker 1: day for humanity, sort of like a bright ray of
Speaker 1: sun pushing all the clouds away. The good news is
Speaker 1: that science that has given us the vaccines that we
Speaker 1: have have been a spectacular success story. We probably all
Speaker 1: remember the moment we learned a vaccine is coming and
Speaker 1: it's almost certainly going to work. Since this is Bloomberg,
Speaker 1: I'll put it into financial terms, that Monday the vaccine news.
Speaker 1: Since stocks around the world soaring by more than one
Speaker 1: point eight trillion dollars after months of uncertainty, people see
Speaker 1: a way out of the pandemic. There are also some
Speaker 1: skeptical voices that first press release doesn't have all the details,
Speaker 1: the results of preliminary but it looks really, really good.
Speaker 1: The researcher who helped start it all, Cattle and Kerrycho
Speaker 1: gets the news in Pennsylvania. She'd been stuck in the
Speaker 1: US while the vaccine was being developed, running her lab
Speaker 1: in Germany. Via video chat after being in Pennsylvania and
Speaker 1: a visit with her husband when countries closed their borders,
Speaker 1: she tells CNNs Chris Cuomo she was confident the shot
Speaker 1: would work. I heard you celebrated with an entire bag
Speaker 1: of chocolate covered peanuts. Yeah it was Google. Yeah that's
Speaker 1: my favorite. But you know, I am not a kind
Speaker 1: of exuberant person who yeah, this is nice. In Philadelphia, JW.
Speaker 1: Wiseman breathes a huge sigh of really, he'd been nervous
Speaker 1: that great results and animals wouldn't translate. Remember how he said,
Speaker 1: my sly and monkeys exaggerate. I got it in the
Speaker 1: press release with everybody else. Um, so I was very nervous.
Speaker 1: I was nervous because we've worked on probably twenty different
Speaker 1: RNA vaccines or influenza, neuro virus, how HIV, a bunch
Speaker 1: of different diseases, and just about every one of them
Speaker 1: we had protection in our animal models. So I was
Speaker 1: nervous because I was worried that the that the human
Speaker 1: vaccine might be effective and we wouldn't know why and
Speaker 1: we wouldn't understand why. So when I heard they were effective,
Speaker 1: I was happy because that meant we saw in humans
Speaker 1: what we had seen and everything from ice, the pigs,
Speaker 1: the chickens and my cates to every animal we tried.
Speaker 1: A week later, on November six, Moderna announces its vaccine
Speaker 1: had been ninety four point five percent effective in a
Speaker 1: similar huge trial. After more analysis, Visor bumps up its
Speaker 1: trial results to From there, you know the story. The
Speaker 1: FDA and other regulators around the world clear the vaccines
Speaker 1: for sale. That jump starts a global race to get
Speaker 1: enough shots. The vaccines will almost certainly be this year's
Speaker 1: best selling drugs. The fiser BioNTech shot is on track
Speaker 1: for thirty six billion dollars in sales. Moderna had to
Speaker 1: scale back its targets because of problems getting all the
Speaker 1: vaccines it made into files and out to customers, but
Speaker 1: still it's seeming for up to eighteen billion dollars in sales.
Speaker 1: The vaccines can't end the pandemic all by themselves. Another
Speaker 1: wave is rolling across the Northern Hemisphere and a new
Speaker 1: highly mutated variant called Omicron has just emerged. Our ability
Speaker 1: to deal with both will be hampered by significant pockets
Speaker 1: of unvaccinated people who don't trust a shot that was
Speaker 1: developed so fast people still need masks. Countries with enough
Speaker 1: doses to go around are rolling out booster shots the
Speaker 1: top of community that seems to fade slightly around the
Speaker 1: six month mark. The vaccines are also increasingly being approved
Speaker 1: for kids. Lower income countries are in an even tighter
Speaker 1: spot as wealthier places gobble up the available doses. But
Speaker 1: as you were said, the shots have shown us the
Speaker 1: light at the end of the tunnel, and if they
Speaker 1: need to be altered to deal with the Omicron variant,
Speaker 1: that should be possible within a matter of months. In
Speaker 1: December eighteen, Catle and Curry Coo Andrew Wiseman go together
Speaker 1: to get vaccinated. Pennsylvania hospital had started giving shots two
Speaker 1: days before and we are collaborating ever since, you know
Speaker 1: we met at the xerox machine. They had come full circle.
Speaker 1: We're waiting the hashcare workers into in line there to
Speaker 1: get their vaccine, and you know, they collapsed and then
Speaker 1: then I dried. It was exactly what she had wanted
Speaker 1: why she left academia to take the job at BioNTech,
Speaker 1: the chance to see her research help people. M Next
Speaker 1: we come Breakthrough, We'll talk about what researchers like Catalan
Speaker 1: and Derek were originally hoping to do with m R
Speaker 1: and A your diseases. We'll look at whether success against
Speaker 1: COVID is just the first step towards helping people with
Speaker 1: everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis and malaria. Wherever protein
Speaker 1: is needed, it can be applied. That could be six
Speaker 1: thousand genetic diseases, oncology, cancer, mutated jeans. This episode of
Speaker 1: Prognosis Breakthrough was written and reported by me Naomi Krasky
Speaker 1: So for Foreheads as our senior producer. Carl Kevan Robinson Jr.
Speaker 1: Is our associate producer. Our theme music was composed and
Speaker 1: performed by Hannas Brown, Ema Court and Bob Langreth contributed reporting.
Speaker 1: Rick Shine is our editor Francesco Levi is the head
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already,
Speaker 1: and if you liked this episode, please leave us a review.
Speaker 1: It helps others find out about the show. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: M