August 2020. The UK is eating out to help out, cocksure in the misguided certainty that the terrible travails of the Covid-19 pandemic are a thing of the past. Dr Catherine Green is on a camping holiday with her daughter, Ellie, and friends. Here, in a rural idyll beside a trickling stream, the Oxford University biologist hoped to get a respite from her punishing work developing a Covid-19 vaccine. There was no phone signal or electricity. There were scarcely 20 people in the campsite. And then, in a queue for a pizza van, Green overheard a fellow camper talking about the Covid-19 vaccine.
The woman had valid concerns, but she was ill-informed. “She was saying she didn’t know what was in it and she didn’t trust it.” For a moment, Green considered leaving her to it: she was on holiday, after all. But she couldn’t walk away. She took a breath, before introducing herself to the holidaymaker. “I can tell you what’s in it,” she said, “because my team made it.” The two women spoke amicably about how the vaccine was designed, before parting ways. Because when you’re creating a vaccine to literally save the world from a brand-new deadly disease, there’s no campsite in the world where you can get away from it all.
In just over a year, Green, 46, and her colleague, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, 59, have become two of the most recognisable scientists in the world. (It is fair to say that Gilbert, with her distinctive red hair and trademark square-rimmed glasses, is the more widely known – not that Green seems the slightest bit envious.) The memoir they coauthored of the year they spent developing the vaccine, Vaxxers, is a bestseller. Inevitably, there will be a movie adaptation down the line and inevitably Kate Winslet will be involved. There is already a Barbie doll.
You sense they want to slough off the celebrity. At this year’s Wimbledon Championships, Gilbert received a standing ovation, much to her visible mortification. “I didn’t know it was going to happen,” she says of the applause, “and would rather not have been filmed when it suddenly, unexpectedly did.” There are endless interview requests, unsolicited emails, constant encounters in the street. “‘Ooh, I know who you are,’” says Gilbert, mimicking one such interaction. “‘I want you to write a blog post for me!” She flinches. “Don’t give me another job.”
We are speaking via Zoom, Green from home, where she has worked throughout the pandemic, and Gilbert from her office. (The office – utterly drab and institutional – is instantly recognisable to me as the backdrop for the many media interviews Gilbert gave throughout 2020. When I observe this, Gilbert responds, “Because I’m always here.”) In person, Gilbert is more amiable than her slightly dour public image suggests, while Green is a wisecracking, exuberant presence – you sense she’d be good fun on a night out. The week we speak, Boris Johnson has removed all Covid-19 restrictions in England. Mask-wearing is voluntary. But her fame, Gilbert observes drily, is a good reason to “keep the mask on. Tie my hair up. Then I’m a bit less recognisable.”
Gilbert and Green began working on their Covid-19 vaccine in January 2020, in those last days of blissful complacency before the country was upturned like an empty flask on a lab bench. Gilbert was the one to get the ball rolling, having read about a “pneumonia of unknown origin” on an obscure medical news site on New Year’s Day.
A few days later, it became apparent that these deaths were linked to a new Sars-like virus. Gilbert had previously worked to develop a -vaccine for Mers-Cov, which is, like Sars, also a coronavirus. In theory, a vaccine for Covid-19 could be developed in much the same way as the Mers vaccine, meaning Gilbert was one of very few people in the world who, at that time, might actually be able to help. Gilbert enlisted Green to help make a prototype vaccine, using an ultra-rapid technology Gilbert had been developing for years.
Within a year, the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine would achieve regulatory approval. Given that vaccines normally take years, even decades, to develop, this was an unprecedented feat. Gilbert was made a Dame, Green given an OBE. But what is clear from speaking to both women is that none of this, at any point, was a given. Throughout 2020, both women prepared themselves for the possibility that their Covid-19 vaccine would be a dud.
“The scientific process [means] failing quite a lot,” says Green. “You have to get things wrong and learn from them. So there was always the possibility that, for some reason, the coronavirus spike protein wasn’t the right target to use for a coronavirus vaccine... It’s biology. It’s complicated. It wasn’t guaranteed to work.”
Gilbert interjects: “I’ve always said there should be multiple vaccines in development... You don’t know what is going to go wrong.”
Everyone who interviews them, Gilbert says, asks whether there was an “a-ha” moment, when things fell into place. “There wasn’t one,” she says crisply. “It’s all general development and lots of hard work.” What she is saying is that the Covid-19 vaccine wouldn’t have been possible without the work that had been done to develop an ultra-rapid manufacturing technique prior to Covid and her work on Mers.
The Covid-19 vaccine was the culmination of a lifetime’s work: endless papers, interminable grant proposals, tedious conferences in anonymous hotels. Professor Gilbert has an h-index (the score used to assess the productivity and citation impact of a scholar) of 91, which is higher than many Nobel Laureates. Theirs was a steady, slow trudge uphill, not a steep sprint to the top.
What becomes apparent from speaking to Gilbert and Green is that possibly we do not deserve the scientists that rescued us from the calamity of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this country, as in many developed nations, we treat our academics shabbily, pay them poorly and force them to perform a minstrel dance every year or so, begging for funding for their critical research.
“People don’t necessarily understand what a scientific career really looks like,” says Green. “It’s lots of short-term fixed contracts. You might have a job for two years and then a job for three years and then you have to reapply for your job or move around between institutions. And that’s very challenging, especially when you’re in your thirties and trying to have a family.”
Gilbert is nodding furiously. It is the most animated I have seen the impeccably self-contained academic in our entire interview. “I got my PhD when I was 24 and I didn’t have a permanent job until I was 58,” Gilbert says. But surely, I say, people must be throwing money at the great Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green now? I envisage them texting a government minister, who immediately disburses funds.
“No, no,” says Gilbert, faintly exasperated. Her implacable mien slips for a second. “There’s no money. I don’t know what is going to happen after next March. Because the big picture is science-funding councils get their money from the government and the government hasn’t told them what money is going to be available next year.”
“We don’t know what we’re doing next year,” Green adds.
Both women worry constantly about how they will secure funding for their projects and pay the people who work for them. Covid has not changed that. “That’s a huge stress,” says Green. “You’re constantly having to find money to pay your team.” Did she ever consider leaving to work in the private sector? “It’s always in the back of one’s mind,” Green says, laughing.
Gilbert did leave the academic world, working for a private biotech company, Delta Biotechnology, for four years. “We were doing interesting science,” she says. But, by chance, the parent company of the firm sold it and Gilbert was left with not much to do, so she rejoined academia. Only through chance did the academic world regain one of its greatest minds.
All of which is to say that the life of a vaccine researcher in the Covid-19 pandemic was not necessarily that much more stressful than the life of a vaccine researcher in non-pandemic times. More meals from vending machines certainly (“Thank God the vending machine saga is over,” jokes Green. “No more Bounty bars. I’ve got to lose all of those pandemic pounds!”) and more pressure, of course: the eyes of the world were upon them.
But at least during Covid, Gilbert and Green had the money they needed. “There were no international flights between the UK and Rome,” recalls Green, “so we had to charter a private jet to fly 500 doses from Rome to London. Madness!” Now things are approaching normality, both women are back where they started: scrounging together money to continue their research. As we speak, Green is desperately trying to get funding to expand her manufacturing facility, where the vaccine prototype was first made.
You would think after a year in which scientists literally saved the world from a deadly virus, our government would finally recognise the importance of investment in research to protect us from other emerging pathogens, especially as most experts agree that a deadly influenza pandemic is basically inevitable. But apparently not.
“There’s always going to be another pandemic,” says Gilbert. “Everyone who works in pandemic preparedness has been saying this for years... I hope there will be better preparedness but, as we were talking about, it costs money – and we need the money to invest. And there are a lot of demands for money at the moment.”
The pandemic is not over yet – far from it. The week we speak, cases are rising as the Delta variant runs amok. Hundreds of thousands of people are self-isolating, having been pinged by the NHS app. “It’s only a ‘pingdemic’ because cases are really high,” Green says irritably. “It’s not the app that’s doing it. It’s the fact that there are a lot of cases in the country.”
Many believe that booster shots will be necessary as immunity wanes. Gilbert is not generally in favour of booster doses in developed countries, when so many people around the world have yet to receive a first dose. (She makes an exception for those in older age groups with waning immunity, if the evidence showed it was useful.) “The most impact from the vaccine is with the first dose,” she says. “We get really high protection with the first dose, then it improves with the second. So if you want to think about getting the most protection across the world, vaccinate everybody once, rather than some people three times.”
Both women are concerned about the potential for further new variants to emerge, of course. “We do know that there is a lot of spread of transmission in many countries where people are not vaccinated yet,” says Gilbert. “And as that continues to happen, there’s always the risk that new variants will arise and that’s what we need to try to prevent from happening.”
AstraZeneca has pledged to make the vaccine available to the developing world at cost in perpetuity. “The details of the deal with AZ,” says Gilbert, “is something neither of us had anything to do with... [but] as a university and as a charity, we were always working for public health and public good and not for profit. The university was never going to just sell it to the highest bidder and try to make the most money.” Both women lobbied internally to ensure the vaccine would be affordable to low-income nations.
Working with the pharmaceutical giant led to a few surreal moments. “I make 1,000 doses maximum in my research team... and then people [from AZ] on the other side of the world are starting to say, ‘We’ll manufacture this and put it on this continent and there will be a billion doses,’” explains Green. “That was a penny-drop moment.”
A billion doses of a vaccine you manufactured in your lab, going into arms around the world – it is a remarkable, almost unimaginable achievement. Green permitted herself a moment of prideful self-satisfaction, taking a selfie when she received her first dose. “It was an emotional moment for me,” she says, “because I’m there along with other people receiving the AstraZeneca jab. And that meant a lot, because it was the culmination for us of the project that started back in January the year before.”
She thinks about the lives that have been saved due to the vaccine. “It’s now above 30,000,” says Green. “That’s real people, relatives that have been saved, 30,000 grandmas that wouldn’t be with us. That’s a humbling thing to have been even a small part of. And we are only a small part of it. But that’s something really important.”
Characteristically, Gilbert has not allowed herself such a feeling of accomplishment. “We’re still working,” she explains. Their work to re-engineer the vaccine against new variants is ongoing and both are attending to the vaccine research they neglected in order to prioritise the Covid vaccine. (Gilbert is also trying to improve vaccine manufacturing capabilities around the world, particularly in Africa, where there is currently no local Covid vaccine manufacturing taking place.) Because when you’re a vaccine researcher, there is always a new clinical trial to evaluate or a paper to publish. Gilbert and Green cannot afford to rest on their laurels, because emerging deadly pathogens don’t take time out either.
“It’s not over yet,” Gilbert says briskly. “We still have lots of different things to do.”
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