The Vaccine
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The Vaccine
| Full title | The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic |
|---|---|
| Author | Joe Miller, Özlem Türeci & Uğur Şahin |
| Published | 2021 |
| Pages | 272 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | How BioNTech — a Mainz company built to make individualised mRNA cancer therapies, with no vaccine product and no manufacturing at scale — designed a COVID-19 vaccine candidate in a weekend in January 2020 and had it authorised before the year was out, told from inside the firm by its founders Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin with FT journalist Joe Miller. |
The Vaccine
Where I heard about it
- University of Austin — assigned in Foundations of Science II on its Fall 2025 reading list (November 2025), alongside Doudna and Sternberg on CRISPR, Francis Collins on belief and Nick Lane on mitochondria — the course’s case study in how a scientific platform becomes a deployed product under time pressure. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.
About this edition
It covers the pivot decision, the Pfizer partnership, the scramble for lipid nanoparticle supply and fill-finish capacity, and the regulatory compression — the messy institutional half of science that a textbook leaves out.
Connections
- UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
- Power, Sex, Suicide — the other Foundations of Science II text in this shard.
- Moderna — the other company that brought an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to authorisation in 2020, on a parallel track.
- Scientific Progress — a compressed-timeline example of it.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.