![]() This time-lapse image shows technicians at BioNTech’s facility in Marburg, Germany, filtering batches of the vaccine, in one of the final stages before shipping it out. Scaling up vaccines: The Pfizer- BioNTech mRNA vaccine became a major protective shield against COVID. Then on January 13, 2020, the World Health Organization published instructions for a PCR-based diagnostic test based on that genome. The full genome sequence was published just two days after that. Eight days later Chinese scientists identified the pathogen as a novel coronavirus. On December 30, 2019, an epidemiological surveillance network published the first English-language note about a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan, China. This vast collaboration moved quickly and effectively in several areas. Large-scale surveys of scientists done in 20 show that roughly a third of researchers in the U.S. The scale of cooperation and collaboration is staggering. Scientists with scant experience in public communication learned to work closely with journalists, informing a worried public about what was happening, what to expect next and what people could do to keep themselves safe. And other researchers from across the scientific ecosystem-economists, physicists, engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, and more-dropped everything to learn about COVID and figure out how they could contribute. Biologists such as the two of us, along with virologists and immunologists, all pivoted to focus on the new pathogen. Just a few months earlier no one had ever seen the SARS-CoV-2 virus.įor researchers, the emergence of the disease was an all-hands-on-deck moment. Yet we knew next to nothing about the nature of the threat. In early 2020 COVID spread around the globe. Working in small teams on highly specialized projects far from the public eye-that is what most of us are accustomed to doing.īut a calamity upends everything. Researchers toil away for decades at obscure limits of human knowledge, collecting and analyzing data, refining theories, writing, debating, and advancing our understanding of the world in tiny increments. Most of the time science is a slow and tedious business. ![]()
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