Catherine Green talks to Nick Higham

Covid-19 & Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus

Professor Catherine Green is one of the leading members of the vaccine team that developed and tested the successful Oxford Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

On 1st 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

Green, co-author with Gilbert of Covid-19 & Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, reveals 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. Green will share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm, separate fact from fiction, and explain how they made a safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching.

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.

Green heads the Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility. She is the Monsanto Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford and an associate professor at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford. This is the story of a race—not against other vaccines or other scientists, but against a deadly and devastating virus.

Green talks to Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and is a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.