THE HASTE WAS THE KNOWN RISK: 1/8 A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine, by Gregory Zuckerman Kindle Edition
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Shot-Save-World-Life-Death/dp/059342039X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Few were ready when a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public-health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. Many of the world’s biggest drug and vaccine makers were slow to react or couldn’t muster an effective response.
It was up to a small group of unlikely and untested scientists and executives to save civilization. A French businessman dismissed by many as a fabulist. A Turkish immigrant with little virus experience. A quirky Midwesterner obsessed with insect cells. A Boston scientist employing questionable techniques. A British scientist despised by his peers. Far from the limelight, each had spent years developing innovative vaccine approaches. Their work was met with skepticism and scorn. By 2020, these individuals had little proof of progress. Yet they and their colleagues wanted to be the ones to stop the virus holding the world hostage. They scrambled to turn their life’s work into life-saving vaccines in a matter of months, each gunning to make the big breakthrough—and to beat each other for the glory that a vaccine guaranteed.
1918 CAMP FUNSTON, KANSAS
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the |
| 0:05.0 | CBS I on the world. |
| 0:08.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:10.0 | I welcome Gregory Zuckerman. |
| 0:12.0 | He is the author of the new book about the vaccine so far, |
| 0:16.8 | a shot to save the world, the inside story of the life or death race for a COVID-19 vaccine. |
| 0:24.0 | Gregory, congratulations and a very good evening to you and thank you for this. |
| 0:28.6 | I take you to a dramatic moment in your book. |
| 0:31.9 | It is January 2020. A Chinese researcher, |
| 0:37.7 | Zhang, headquartered at Fudan University in Shanghai. His lab is there, has received what he needs to map out the |
| 0:46.8 | genome of what he suspects is a new version of SARS or something odd that's been reported from Wuhan, the 11 million populated |
| 0:57.0 | city in the middle of China that is experiencing strange afflictions. He gets the material he needs to map the genome and he calls |
| 1:09.1 | his colleague Eddie Holmes in Australia. What does he tell him? |
| 1:12.6 | Good evening to you, Gregory. |
| 1:14.7 | Good evening and great to be back here. |
| 1:16.6 | And yeah, you've kind of pinpointed what I think is an overlooked |
| 1:21.9 | and very dramatic episode that was a turning point in history frankly. |
| 1:27.2 | So this scientist, as you mentioned in China, Zhang, a 58-year-old infectious disease expert. |
| 1:36.0 | He basically maps the genome of this new and really troubling and even scary virus. |
| 1:43.0 | They're not sure what it is yet, |
| 1:44.6 | but it seems like SARS, |
| 1:46.4 | and it seems more dangerous than the first SARS. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.