Dame Sarah Gilbert: ‘We don’t need to give vaccine boosters to everybody. Immunity is lasting well’ – Telegraph.co.uk

Dame Sarah is already on the record as not being a fan of jabbing children for the sake of it. She has pointed out that countries should consider vaccinating the small number most at risk, but otherwise is not convinced of the benefits.

If you cant prevent transmission by vaccination and the children are not at risk of severe disease and hospitalisation and death, which the vast majority of children are not, you have to ask yourself: What would be the benefits of vaccinating children?, she told Italian newspaper La Repubblica in July.

We are not going to eradicate Sars-Cov-2. Its going to continue to circulate. And at some point, schools will remain open when there are infected children because, ultimately, we have to move to the point where we are living with the virus.

Dame Sarah first read about a novel virus spreading through the Chinese city of Wuhan on New Years Day 2020. She had designed a vaccine for it within two weeks, which was granted approval for use just 351 days later, one day before the year was out. Her own triplets, all studying biochemistry at university now, took part in the human trial.

A few stuttering months of confusion prior to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) declaring the overall benefits of Dame Sarah's vaccine outweighed the risks of one particular complication (developing a rare blood clot), with the risk of the rare clot from the vaccine eight times less than the risk of a clot caused by Covid-19, according to an Oxford University study Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Dame Joan Collins included.

How frustrating it has been, then, for Dame Sarah who has since been lauded around the world, showered in medals and awards, had a Scientist Barbie designed after her, and even invited to sashay on to certain celebrity shows, of which more later to have been forced to spend the past year making clear that the vaccine is definitely safe, not having been chucked together in a lab at top speed like a cake made the night before the village fte.

Indeed, she and Dr Cath Green, associate professor in chromosome dynamics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and part of Dame Sarahs vaccine development team, have also taken the time to write Vaxxers (Hodder & Stoughton, 20), which explains clearly and in a very readable way how carefully and precisely the vaccine was developed.

We wanted to explain how we did this so fast, Dame Sarah explains. We appreciate it is natural for people to be hesitant.

But, in a nutshell, the vaccine came down to two things: advances in technology and development, combined with the reality of working in a pandemic: there was none of the normal hold-ups to slow down the team.

We were able to overlap processes that you would normally do sequentially, she says. We had less waiting to do between elements of work. But we still followed the normal regulatory pathway. Yes, we did it quickly, but we didnt miss any steps out. It is frustrating when people say development was too fast without saying why that would be.

Key to this was some unlikely help that came early on. At the start of January 2020, before the pandemic had been declared, Chinese scientists from Fudan University in Shanghai posted the fully sequenced genetic code for the new virus to enable the worlds scientists to move fast.

Vaccinologists, she says, are a close community. Weve always known that beating Covid was not winner takes all. There was no competition to come first. We need vaccines for everyone in the world.

This business-like approach is connected to Dame Sarahs biotech company Vaccitech, which she set up in 2016. Im a scientist to my core, she says, but Ive always wanted my science to make things better for people. Products can be developed better by a company than a university.

Vaccitech is already moving on, looking at way its vaccines could work in other conditions such as hepatitis B and prostate cancer. Thats the dream to have a targeted cancer treatment.

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Dame Sarah Gilbert: 'We don't need to give vaccine boosters to everybody. Immunity is lasting well' - Telegraph.co.uk