The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

Graham had already proved the effectiveness of structure-based vaccine for RSV, and had applied similar approaches to MERS. He had arranged a demonstration project for Nipah, a particularly fatal virus that has no cure, using Moderna’s mRNA platform. He was about to prepare enough protein to take the Nipah vaccine through the first phase of human trials when he heard the news from Wuhan. Graham called McLellan, who was in a Park City, Utah, resort shop getting snowboard boots heat-molded to his feet. By then, Jason McLellan was a recognized star in the field of structural biology and had been recruited to the University of Texas at Austin and given a lab of his own, along with access to the latest cryogenic electron microscopes. It took someone who knew Graham well to detect the urgency in his voice. Graham said he suspected that China’s cases of atypical pneumonia were caused by a new coronavirus, and he was trying to obtain the genetic sequence. It was a chance to test their concept in a real-world situation. Would McLellan and his team like to get “back in the saddle” and create a vaccine? “Of course,” McLellan said. “We got the sequences Friday night, the tenth of January,” Graham recalled. “We woke up on the eleventh and started designing proteins.” Nine days later, the coronavirus officially arrived in America.