Hardback: Vaxxers: The Inside Story Of The Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine And The Race Against The Virus (2021) is a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a The Sunday Times Bestseller. It is chosen as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Prospect, Guardian and The Times.
This is the story of a race - not against other vaccines or other scientists, but against a deadly and devastating virus.
On 1 January 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever seen before. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19.
In Vaxxers, we hear directly from Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Catherine Green as they reveal the inside story of making the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and the cutting-edge science and sheer hard work behind it.
This is their story of fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Sarah and Catherine share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm; they separate fact from fiction; they explain how they made a highly effective vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching; and they give us hope for the future.
Vaxxers invites us into the lab to find out how science will save us from this pandemic, and how we can prepare for the inevitable next one.
About the authors: Sarah Gilbert is Professor of Vaccinology at the Jenner Institute within the University of Oxford. Having devoted her career to developing vaccines against infectious diseases, since January 2020, she has been the Oxford Project Leader for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Professor Gilbert has over 25 years of experience in the design and early development of new vaccines, and a commitment to increasing public understanding of science. In 2021, she was awarded a Damehood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Dr Cath Green is Associate Professor in Chromosome Dynamics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, a Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College, and Head of Oxford University’s Clinical BioManufacturing Facility. As a specialist in manufacturing vaccines for clinical trials, she is an integral part of the Oxford Vaccine project. In 2021, she was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Deborah Crewe is an experienced editor and ghostwriter. Most recently, she edited Sunday Times bestseller Blowing The Bloody Doors Off, working closely with international star and British legend Michael Caine. Before that she co-wrote the ideas book Factfulness with authors Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Factfulness is a New York Times bestseller, Sunday Times #1 bestseller, and was on Bill Gates’s and Barack Obama’s summer reading lists. It has sold over 600,000 copies internationally. Previous projects include Kind of Blue with Ken Clarke; Coming Up Trumps with Baroness Trumpington; and Last Man Standing with Jack Straw. Deborah is perceptive, efficient and discreet. Her work is consistently commended for its lucidity, its humour, and the authenticity of its voices.
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