Breakthrough: The race for the Covid vaccine

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr Kevin Fong talks to the people who have seemingly achieved the impossible and created a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of months. Speaking to the scientists who’ve spent the past 12 months with the eyes of the world on them, Kevin wants to know how they tackled the science and what are the biggest barriers they’ve faced. There have been tensions along the way between science and politics, science and morality. But through it all, do we enter a new year with our faith in science been renewed?

Transcript

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0:00.0	12 months ago everything suddenly changed. A new virus broke out and spread across the world
0:07.0	interrupting all of our lives. If you told me then that 12 months later we'd have developed not one but a raft of successful
0:15.6	vaccines I would never have believed you.
0:18.9	But what scientists have done this year has been truly extraordinary. I'm Dr Kevin Fong and I want to know how
0:27.2	they did it. In this program I want to find out what it's really like to face down one of the biggest crises the world
0:35.0	has ever seen.
0:37.4	This is the story of an extraordinary year through scientists' eyes. On the BBC World Service, this is breakthrough, the race for the COVID vaccine.
0:50.0	Why was I skeptical?
0:54.0	Polio myelitis.
0:56.0	Widespread in Europe, North America and Australasia.
1:00.0	In the first half of the 20th century,
1:02.0	the virus everybody feared was polio.
1:05.0	No country is known in which the virus of polio does not exist.
1:10.0	Scientists had been trying to find a polio vaccine for decades without success.
1:18.0	The first safe vaccine took seven years to develop.
1:25.0	For 30 years, medical science has sought a vaccine against polio.
1:30.0	In 1954, this work reached its peak with the scientific test of a vaccine produced in the University of Pittsburgh.
1:40.0	The polio story had a happy ending, but it would take another two decades after that report
1:46.6	for polio to be eradicated in the United States and another 30 years for it to be eradicated from the Western Hemisphere.
1:58.0	The challenge of developing a vaccine to fight a new disease is enormous. And the question still remains, when will we be able
2:07.4	to return to normal?
2:11.0	Welcome to 2020.
	...

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