AstraZeneca Covid vaccine scientist’s tea mug sums up genius and graft of great British boffins

ON Dame Sarah Gilbert’s desk at Oxford’s Jenner Institute she keeps a tea mug emblazoned with the words: “Keep Calm And Develop Vaccines.”

It caught colleague Dr Catherine Green’s eye on January 21, 2020, as the pair met to discuss a new illness sweeping through the Chinese city of Wuhan.

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Was this the dreaded “Disease X” that professor of vaccinology Sarah had long believed could spark a global pandemic?

What happened next was a brilliant mix of British ingenuity, resilience and hard graft — summed up nicely by that mug.

And yesterday it was announced that this work of genius has resulted in ONE BILLION doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca jab being shipped around the world.

In the UK alone, vaccines have helped prevent 60,000 deaths, deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said last night. Many of those still alive have the Oxford vaccine to thank.

And yesterday, the Government announced it was beginning to roll out nine million more of the jabs — made in Oxford and packaged in North Wales — to “the most vulnerable countries”. It is the first part of a pledge to donate 100million jabs before the middle of 2022.

The vaccine is nothing short of an astonishing British success story — but it has been far from plain sailing.

AstraZeneca has had to fend off bitter barbs from European neighbours, whose rollout programme lagged woefully behind Britain’s.

STANDING OVATION

In January, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed the vaccine was “quasi-ineffective” for older people.

Experts rubbished the claims yet to begin with France only approved its use for under-65s. And the development programme was targeted by anti-vaxxers who said the first volunteer in the clinic trial had died after taking the vaccine. It was a sick lie.

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The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine’s success is largely down to its early preparation.

In a breathtaking drama, surely destined for the Hollywood big screen, Gilbert and Green were part of an Oxford team who had made the first dose just two months after their January 2020 meeting — just as Britain went into its first lockdown.

By April, jabs were injected into volunteers’ arms — 10,000 of whom signed up in a single day — as trials began.

But it was not enough for the jab just to be effective, the Oxford team insisted it should be sold at cost price during the pandemic. They wanted to jab the world.

Just short of a year after that initial meeting in Sarah Gilbert’s office, the first Briton — Oxford born and bred kidney dialysis patient Brian Pinker, 82 — received an authorised jab of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.

Getting vaccines into circulation usually takes years, sometimes even decades.

Yet the Oxford AstraZeneca jab has already gone to hundreds of millions of people across the world.

Little wonder then that Sarah received a tear-jerking standing ovation when she attended Wimbledon this year.

The mother of grown-up triplets — who all volunteered for the clinic trials — she describes the moment as “extraordinary”. In their book Vaxxers, out this month, Sarah and Catherine say there was no “eureka moment” for their project, which was supported by taxpayers’ cash.

Sarah writes: “Cath and I were just two scientists among many in the right place at the right time to fight back.

“We don’t have cleaners, or drivers, or nannies, and like everyone else we had other things going on in our lives.

“There were days when we swore or cried with frustration and exhaustion. We lost sleep and gained weight. Nobody had really planned how to develop a pandemic vaccine during a pandemic. That was something we had to do.”

It meant finding a commercial partner who would start producing the vaccine before it was known if it actually worked.

There were fruitless negotiations with several large firms before they signed a deal with British-Swedish multinational AstraZeneca — headquartered in Cambridge — on April 30, last year.

Cath, who runs Oxford University’s Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility, said she experienced “peak stress” in the spring of 2020.

She writes: “I was trying to juggle a lot of problems that felt out of my control and was missing physical contact with others. My worried friends offered food deliveries, and bunches of flowers started showing up.”

Since Mr Pinker’s jab on January 4, the vaccine has saved countless British lives. Yet the Oxford team had long insisted that was never enough. They knew the whole world needed immunity.

At Cornwall’s G7 summit last month, the world’s richest nations pledged to donate one billion vaccine doses to poorer countries. And on a visit to an AstraZeneca factory in Oxford yesterday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the donations were “moral” and in Britain’s “direct interest”.

He added: “We won’t be safe in the UK until everyone is safe in the world.”

And he said the donations demonstrated that, “Global Britain is a lifesaving force for good in the world”.

It is a fitting response to those rallying words on Sarah’s tea mug.

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