Horizon Special: The Vaccine review – meet the superheroes who saved the planet

T here is a dizzying sense of scale imparted by the Horizon special on the coronavirus vaccine. On the one hand, you have the pathogen – so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye even as it replicates by fatal millions inside a host, although the damage it does is all too apparent. And then you have the uniting of entire continents’ worth of scientists, each with a world of knowledge to bring to the fight against the microscopic enemy. The wonder of it, the harnessing of intellectual might, the logistics, the commitment necessary to condense into months what could easily have taken a decade was all powerfully evoked by Horizon’s 90-minute film The Vaccine (BBC Two). Plus, it did all that without getting in the way of the science, the facts or the story itself.

And what a story. Horizon begins with Dr George Fu Gao of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who first read on 30 December 2019 that something was happening in Wuhan. He got samples from patients, used next-generation sequencing technology to identify a new pathogen behind a new disease within days, and released the information globally so that those five continents’ worth of virologists could get to work. Dr Teresa Lambe of Oxford University remembers “huddling over my computer in my pyjamas, designing a vaccine”. That was on 1 January 2020.

Oxford went with a viral vector vaccine. Dr Keith Chappell at the University of Queensland and his team decided on a protein vaccine (“the simplest type,” he said, airily, before outlining how you combine virus, chemicals and “a molecular clamp” from a tiny fragment of HIV to keep it all stable). China followed the inactivated virus path because they had the active ingredient all around them. And in the US, the National Institutes of Health, led by Dr Barney Graham and Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, led by Dr Kathrin Jansen with BioNTech’s Dr Uğur Şahin, decided to deploy an entirely new method – mRNA, never before licensed for use in humans.

Chappell remembers how quickly everything went from “thinking: ‘We can pretend we’ve saved the world!’ to: ‘Oh shit – this is the real thing’”. The film didn’t make the point overtly, but the demonstration of national character by each choice fitted the stereotypes so well (our solid option, China’s ruthless practicality, the US’s gung-ho spirit, Australia’s breezy stoicism) that you had to allow yourself a smile.

Horizon’s expertise in making experts comprehensible and concepts accessible was never better deployed. I cannot be the only scientifically illiterate viewer who understood the mechanisms behind the vaccine developments better than she did before – and indeed, better than she ever hoped to. The explanations were light yet detailed, but didn’t squeeze out the many other considerations those working on how to invent and deliver immunisation and safety to seven billion people worldwide had to deal with.

Again, the disparities in scale made you boggle. There was the equipment – $300m worth of materials to expand production capacity at Pfizer, factories repurposed, enormous storage freezers brought in by the dozen to newly built warehouses – at one end. And at the other, the individuals hunched over pipettes, test tubes, dots of data on screens, carrying out lab test after lab test, driving themselves daily to exhaustion and then driving themselves a little bit further. Contemporary footage shows some of them literally grey with fatigue. Prof Katie Ewer’s mother died as her daughter worked on the T-cell research needed to support the Oxford vaccine. She had, it seems clear, and may still not have had, any time to grieve.

Then small trials, larger trials, each country making their own adjustments to balance the need for speed against the risk of harm as Covid surged around the globe. Specific sociocultural problems sometimes interrupted what might have been smooth scientific passage – historical mistrust of doctors among the black community in the US, for example, made it hard to recruit clinical trial volunteers and a programme of education and encouragement was launched. The trial results almost everywhere, eventually, were astonishing in the best way. Only Australia didn’t make it across the finish line (the suggestion seemed to be that investors, including the government, took fright at some adverse results – or perhaps just the potential public reaction to them – and withdrew their money before a work-around could be found).

The film covered an impressive amount of ground without losing momentum. It touched briefly at the end on the need to avoid complacency, which would undo the incredible work done by its subjects. That it was broadcast in a week when our leaders prove to have failed yet again in that need gives it much unwanted resonance. There are many more films about many more people’s actions, of course, still to be made.