Covid-19 Books II
In my last post about Covid-19 books, I said there were two new books on my shelf I’d not read yet - Spike and Vaxxers. Now I have.
In Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja’s book - Spike: The Virus vs. The People - the Inside Story - we get one person’s view of what it was like to be at the sharp end at the very start of the pandemic. Jeremy Farrah is currently the director of the Wellcome Trust and was first made aware of the outbreak in China on New Years Eve 2019 while coming back from an Ebola-related trip to Rwanda. This book lays out how his life changed from that point on. It covers the early days of the pandemic, the UK’s bad first wave, the development of vaccines, the missed opportunities, the mismanagement of the Track and Trace system, and ends with a chapter on what needs to be done now to handle the next (inevitable?) virus with pandemic potential.
Each chapter starts with a date, and the Coronavirus statistics on that day: laying bare the inexorable consequence of exponential growth. Farrar has many things to say about the Governments handling of the pandemic - none of it flattering. It is apparent that there was considerable chaos in the early days (which may be excusable) but that lessons were not learned and that there was a fundamental lack of understanding within the political classes of the power of exponential growth. This is why "you've got to go sooner than you want to in terms of taking interventions, you've got to go harder than you want to, and you’ve got to go more geographically broad than you want to” (Patrick Vallance, October 2021)
While Spike is a personal view that is mainly concerned with policy and the apparent disconnect between the political and scientific communities, Vaxxers is more concerned with pure science and technology. Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green have each written chapters on their particular areas of expertise as the pandemic unfolded and what became known as the Astra-Zeneca vaccine was developed. They share stories of the pressures involved, both personals and professional, in the vaccine’s development: from the excessive workload to trying to get initial funding and taking potentially risky bets by doing work before funding was in place.
They also talk about the changes that happened once Astra-Zeneca was on board. How the change in scale from a small lab making a few hundred doses at a time to AZ’s focus on billions was such a culture shock. Vaxxers also includes what is, to me at least, a fascinating description of how the vaccine was made, both in terms of the technology itself and the testing regimes involved.
One of the main concerns, it seems, of the vaccine-hesitant (as opposed to the anti-vaxxers who will never be convinced) is the speed with which the Covid-19 vaccine was developed. This book does a really good job of explaining how this was possible. First, there was the sheer amount of money and people thrown at the problem from the start. But perhaps the most important reason was that so many stages that are usually run sequentially were run in parallel and “at-risk”. Money was invested, manufacturing started even before testing was complete in the full knowledge that a failure in either safety or efficacy would mean all would be for nought. An example of government, private enterprise, and science working together for the common good.
References
Farrar, Jeremy and Anjana Ahuja. Spike: The Virus vs. The People - the Inside Story. Profile Books, 2021.
Gilbert, Professor Sarah and Dr Catherine Green. Vaxxers, The inside story of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Hodder and Stoughton, 2021.