The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the Covid-19 Pandemic by Joe Miller, with Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, is out now from Jonathan Ball Publishers.

When the world stopped, all hopes rested on finding a vaccine.

One team answered the call and were ready to act. But how do you develop a life-saving drug when every second counts and one mistake could be catastrophic? Married couple and decades-long research partners Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci did just that within weeks of the pandemic breaking out. From convincing Big Pharma to support their ambitious project, to navigating political interference from the Trump administration and the European Union, the road to producing the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was by no means smooth.

But these cutting-edge innovators overcame every obstacle to provide more than two billion doses of the life-saving drug to countries all around the world in record time.

The Vaccine draws back the curtain on one of the most important medical breakthroughs of our age, containing contributions from the fascinating couple themselves, as well as more than 50 scientists, politicians, public health officials, and BioNTech staff.

Shedding a light on the science behind the breakthrough, The Vaccine tells the story of the trailblazers to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude.

More suspenseful than a novel, this is a real-life story of an extraordinary race against time to save the world.

About the authors

Joe Miller is the Financial Times’s Frankfurt correspondent who covered BioNTech’s Covid-19 project in real time, giving him considerable knowledge and expertise on the subject. The book also has considerable contributions from Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci themselves, giving rare first-person accounts. It contains contributions from more than 50 scientists, politicians, public health officials, and BioNTech staff. Dr Uğur Şahin and Dr Özlem Türeci are the husband-and-wife team that cofounded BioNTech, developers of the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine. The children of Turkish migrant workers in Germany, they trained as medical doctors and earned doctorates in molecular biology and immunotherapy. They have done extensive work in the field of translational oncology and written hundreds of scientific papers and patents. Şahin and Türeci received the 2022 Paul Ehrlich Prize for their contributions to research into mRNA technology.

Categories International Non-fiction

Tags Joe Miller Jonathan Ball Publishers New books New releases Ozlem Tureci The Vaccine Ugur Sahin