The woman leading covid 19 vaccine trials is not your average pocket protector scientist. скачать в хорошем качестве

The woman leading covid 19 vaccine trials is not your average pocket protector scientist.

The day President Donald Trump went to National Institutes of Health for an update on progress toward a vaccine for COVID-19, many of those who sat behind the presidential seal with him were white men well known in the worlds of science, medicine and now, national anxiety control: vaccine and infectious disease specialists Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. John Mascola, Dr. Barney Graham, and the man who lead the human genome project, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins. Sitting next to Graham was NIH research fellow Kizzmekia Corbett. In 2003, Fauci said at the event, NIH scientists managed to identify SARS and get a vaccine to stage-one clinical trials in 20 months. Now a team of scientists led by Corbett, 34, was poised to move to first-stage trials for a novel coronavirus vaccine — this time, in the span of about two months. That was March 3. Just 122 people had tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the United States. Reporters stationed around the edges of the room asked the president about virus-related travel bans and his Super Tuesday predictions. No one asked Corbett — someone Collins had just described as a “wonderfully talented young scientist in our midst,” the only woman and black person at the table — a single thing. Yet 13 days later, Corbett’s team began first-stage clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine, the first of its kind in the world and the fastest progress ever towards a possible vaccine for a novel pathogen. At least 40 distinct groups of researchers in China, Germany, the United States and other countries soon followed. But if Corbett’s team is successful — meaning phase one, two and three clinical trials prove the team’s work has produced a safe, working vaccine — something to prevent infection with the novel coronavirus could be ready for use in doctor’s offices by early to mid 2021. COVID-19 would become a preventable rather than potentially deadly disease.