Professor Sarah Gilbert & Dr Catherine Green on their book Vaxxers

Virgin Radio

14 Jul 2021, 11:04

The 'Lennon and McCartney of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine' joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about their book on the gripping inside story of the making of the jab.

Catherine told Chris why they decided to write the book. She said: “I was queuing up for a pizza while camping in August 2020 and the lady in front of me was saying to a friend of mine how she was unsure about the vaccine.

"She was concerned that she didn't know what was in it and was concerned that it was made by 'them', some large global pharma company who can't be trusted and I had already been in conversations with people about whether we would ever write a story of the vaccine development over 2020.

"I think that was the final push for me to realise that perhaps we do need to tell this story, sit down and write it in a long form in a hopefully accessible way to explain to people who we are, that we're not them', we’re 'us'.

"We're just regular women, well, in fact, hundreds of scientists at Oxford University doing our job under difficult circumstances but the same circumstances that everybody was living in in 2020.

“We do know what's in this vaccine, it has been made in a very careful way building on decades of research... Sarah’s been working on this project for 20 years, we've been planning for how we make vaccines against either outbreaks that occur in limited geographical areas or perhaps with a pandemic. 

“So we did have a huge base of research on which we were building the foundation for vaccine development in a crisis situation and we did everything carefully and properly, and we will tell you exactly what's in it because we know what's in it because my team made the very first batch. We held it in our hands, I can really tell you what's in it."

On information being distributed inaccurately, she said: “With social media, it's very easy for there to be lots of of information out there and some of it comes from sources which are dubious or perhaps just slightly incorrect.

"I just wanted to tell her the reality and the truth of the situation and get good quality information out and available to people so that the decisions that they make are based on well informed information.

“In the early stages of 2020 when Sarah started to realise we might need to make a vaccine against this new Coronavirus SARS CoV-2, everything was in place for us to just get going. As we say in the book, what we needed was funding more than anything.

"Sarah spent a lot of time in February, March, even through to April trying to get the money to be able to go as quickly as we wanted to get the trial set up, but what we were going to do was never in question because of the history that we had.”

Sarah added: “We’ve done a lot of preparation before we know what disease we need to make a vaccine against and that's been going on for many, many years, all aspects of it, not just how to produce in the first place, but how we're going to manufacture it ready for clinical trials, how we're going to store it, what dose we want to use.

"All of that work has already been done and that means there's a lot less to do once we know what the disease is and we make the final version of the vaccine.

“Cath really galvanised her team and got them working on the vaccine in a very short space of time. They've done this many times before, they understand the process very well, but this time we needed them to go really quickly so they put in a huge amounts of effort led by her to get all of the work done in the shortest space of time.

"That involved working double shifts and working weekends. Normally it would be a slightly more leisurely process but that wasn't the case this time, they planned everything that they needed to do, they made sure samples were sent off for testing at the earliest possible opportunity and there was no delay anywhere in the process.”

Catherine added: “The problem is that the truth in science is often very complicated or at least more complicated than a quick headline or quick story and when people get facts wrong and they transmit around the world very rapidly.

"That's very frustrating because part of our job and part of our mission has always been to get the evidence and the data which is being generated on this vaccine out there in a completely comprehensive manner.

"We want to make sure that everybody can read it so our data is published, we do press releases but sometimes the story is more complicated than just a single number and so it's easy sometimes for journalists to when they're trying to compress the story into a short piece to miss some of the nuance or not have time to understand some of the nuance or perhaps copy another story that's already been out there and maybe slightly inaccurate.

"So that is really frustrating to us because it's important that we try and give clarity, but sometimes the reality is, things are complicated and nuanced and it takes a bit of time, and part of us writing the book is it gives us that opportunity to write things in a longer form and delve into some of the more nuanced and contextual situations.

"Science is complicated, we have to keep our cool. Scientists tend not to be too hot headed. We swear a bit at home about some of the headlines but we wouldn't say that in public.”

Vaxxers by Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green is out now.