The New York Times reports:

Each workday morning in March, Noe Mercado drove through the desolate streets of Boston to a tall glass building on Blackfan Circle, in the heart of the city’s biotech hub. Most residents had gone into hiding from the coronavirus, but Mr. Mercado had an essential job: searching for a vaccine against this new, devastating pathogen.

Parking in the underground lot, he put on a mask and rode the empty elevator to the tenth floor, joining a skeleton crew at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Day after day, Mr. Mercado sat at his lab bench, searching for signs of the virus in nasal swabs taken from dozens of monkeys.

The animals had been injected with experimental vaccines Mr. Mercado had helped create. The monkeys then had been exposed to the coronavirus, and now Mr. Mercado was finding out whether any vaccine had protected them. One morning, after he loaded all the data into a software program, a single telling graph set his heart beating: Some of the vaccines, it appeared, had worked.

Mr. Mercado hurried around the lab to share the news. Given the times, there were no hugs, no high-fives. And he did not bask in glory for long. Making a vaccine demands patience, attention to detail — and a tolerance for bitter failure.

“Yeah, I’m excited, but I’m also thinking about the next step,” Mr. Mercado later recalled. “What if it doesn’t pan out?”

The coronavirus has now infected about 13.8 million people worldwide and killed at least 590,000. Millions more may die. The only hope for a long-term protection, literally the only shot at a return to normal life, is an effective vaccine. [Continue reading…]