Most importantly, we did not need to design, make and test a brand-new vaccine. We had a tried-and-tested platform technology, that we had been working on for years – starting with a flu vaccine back in 2012 and including a vaccine against MERS, another coronavirus. That meant that before we even knew the pathogen’s genome, we knew the design for our vaccine – the gene coding for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, plugged into ChAdOx1 – and once we did receive the genome, we were able to design the exact DNA sequence we needed within forty-eight hours.
