Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green; Until Proven Safe by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley – reviews

The story of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is part manifesto for good science communications, part biomedical thriller, while a smart history of quarantines makes their utility resoundingly clear

On the first day of Wimbledon, Dame Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford's Jenner Institute, was treated to a standing ovation from grateful spectators on a packed Centre Court. Together with her Oxford colleague Catherine Green, Gilbert had delivered the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 in record time, and tennis fans, enjoying a rare maskless day out in SW19, were keen to show their appreciation. But as Gilbert and Green point out in their new book, Vaxxers, not everyone shares the Centre Court crowd's enthusiasm for vaccines, and as long as the coronavirus continues to mutate and conspiracy theories propagate on social media, their job is not over.

It is remarkable that Gilbert, a 59-year-old mother of triplets, and Green, a specialist in vaccine manufacture, found time to write this book, given the considerable technical and logistical hurdles involved in developing a new vaccine from scratch in little under a year. The previous lab-to-jab" record holder was the mumps vaccine, developed in four years in the 1960s. But because of the difficulty of raising funds for vaccine research and the various regulatory hurdles, it takes 10 years for most new vaccines to be licensed, and even then, a hurried press release or an errant remark by a politician can quickly undo your hard work.