Page 51 - Great Elizabethans

SPECIALISING IN VACCINES
After studying malaria, Sarah became a vaccinologist - a scientist who specialises in vaccines. A vaccine is a type of medicine that is usually injected into a
person’s body while they are healthy. It teaches a person’s body how to fight off a particular virus that could cause a disease, so that if they do get infected with this virus, the body has already learned how to protect itself.
Sarah became a professor at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University. For a long time, she worked to find a vaccine that would protect against all kinds of flu virus, and to develop a vaccine for MERS (a rare illness that
affects the lungs). In 2014, there was a big, deadly outbreak of a serious disease called Ebola in West Africa, and Sarah worked on a vaccine for
the Ebola virus too.
But Sarah and other vaccinologists felt that the response to the
Ebola outbreak had been too slow. Too many people had been infected who should have been protected. It was important to have a plan for
the next serious virus that might start spreading around the world. So, in 2018, Sarah and her team began to plan for “Disease X” – whatever
that next virus might be. They took a cold virus that affected chimpanzees, and they prepared it so that it could be quickly adapted
into a vaccine against any new infectious disease.
“The scientific process means failing quite a lot. You have to get things wrong and learn from them.”
NO ONE IS SAFE UNTIL WE ARE ALL SAFE
On 1st January 2020, Sarah read about a new kind of pneumonia that was spreading fast in a city called Wuhan in China, and realised that this might be “Disease X”. It wasn’t long before this new virus got given a name – COVID-19 – and started to spread further around the world, causing a pandemic. In countries everywhere, governments started making plans to help stop the spread of this serious new disease and to find treatments and medicines for it.
Thanks to their planning, Sarah and her team were prepared to rush straight into action. Once they had more information about the COVID-19 virus, they designed a vaccine within a few days!
After it was designed, the vaccine against COVID-19 was tested on volunteers for several months to make sure it was safe (all three of Sarah’s triplets took part in early trials). Then it was ready to be given to the public, both in the UK and around the world. The vaccine was easy to store and transport too.
Sarah’s team worked with the company AstraZeneca, who could make their vaccine. It was really important to Sarah and her colleague Catherine Green that the vaccine would be affordable
for every country around the world. Sarah says that “No one is safe until we are all
safe.” Everyone needs access to vaccines, no matter where they live or how much
money they have.
More than a billion doses of the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine have now
been given worldwide, helping to protect people – and to give them back some of the freedoms that the COVID-19 pandemic took away.
In June 2021, Sarah was made a Dame by the Queen.