A Shot to Save the World: The Remarkable Race and Ground-Breaking Science Behind the Covid-19 Vaccines

Description

The story of the race for the Covid-19 vaccine as you've never heard it before This is the definitive account of the global effort to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, charting the failure and success of every major vaccine in use. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, 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 American Midwesterner obsessed with insect cells, a Boston scientist employing questionable techniques, a British scientist despised by his peers. 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. A number-one New York Times bestselling author and award-winning Wall Street Journal investigative journalist, Zuckerman takes us inside the top-secret laboratories, corporate clashes and high-stakes government negotiations that led to effective vaccines development and roll out. Meticulously reported and endlessly gripping, this is a dazzling, blow-by-blow chronicle of the most consequential scientific breakthrough of our time. It's a story of courage, genius and heroism, optimism. It's also a tale of heated rivalries, unbridled ambitions, crippling insecurities and unexpected drama. A Shot to Save the World is the story of how science saved the world.

Gregory Zuckerman is a special writer at the Wall Street Journal. He writes about business subjects like financial trades, hedge funds and private-equity firms, and about innovation and cutting-edge science. He's a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honour in business journalism. Zuckerman is the author of The Greatest Trade Ever and The Frackers, and he appears regularly on CNBC, Fox Business, and the BBC. He lives in New York.

The race to develop a COVID vaccine is one of the most exciting dramas in medical history, and A Shot to Save the World is a thrilling account based on great reporting and access to all of the teams. An inspiring and informative page-turner. * Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker * An appropriately breathless account of the business and scientific rivalries between researchers and companies behind the successful coronavirus vaccines. Zuckerman shows how a global catastrophe transformed the fortunes of tiny, visionary ventures, and huge pharmaceutical enterprises, as they raced to stem the pandemic's spread. -- Andrew Hill * Financial Times * Zuckerman conveys decades of complex scientific research in a gripping fashion. His focus on the slow burn of discovery makes for a fascinating angle and offers plenty of inspiration. The result is tough to put down. * Publishers Weekly *