The woman who co-developed the AstraZeneca vaccine on reassuring doubters, her new book and having a baby penguin named after her
ame Sarah Gilbert, 60, is a professor of vaccinology at Oxford’s Jenner Institute and author, with Catherine Green, head of Oxford University’s clinical biomanufacturing facility, of– a gripping narrative about developing the AstraZeneca vaccine that is wonderfully accessible and illuminating without dumbing down the science. She lives in Oxford with her husband and grownup triplets.
Anticipating what the virus will do next is the job of those who do surveillance in epidemiology. But if a new sequence is thought to be becoming dominant, our problem is that making a new version of the vaccine takes time and has to be tested and approved. What’s been happening, as we go through one wave after another, is that the virus has been too quick.
There might be something in that. In some countries, people do not want to be vaccinated because their government recommends it and they don’t trust their government. I don’t think that was a feature in the UK because, whatever people’s view on government, they recognise the input of the NHS. But a lot of the hesitancy among younger people was because they were receiving misinformation, sometimes through friends whose opinions they trusted.
Is there any risk that Covid-19, instead of becoming more transmissible and less deadly, might return as a more severe variant?
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