‘Inside the Great Vaccine Race’

Long before humans fell to fighting over whether to take the COVID-19 vaccine or not, the global pandemic united the scientific and research communities in an unprecedented fashion.

Inside the Great Vaccine Race, airing on CBC’s The Nature of Things and available on CBC Gem, documents the development of different COVID-19 vaccines through the experience of scientific teams around the world.

For Victoria-based director P.J. Naworynski, the opportunity to make the film was too great to turn down. As he says, the question went from: “Can it be done? Can you do it?” to “100 per cent, we’re doing this thing.”

Naworynski is adept at juggling the many parts of film production, having managed remote teams on different productions like High Arctic Haulers. But the challenges of making a film about a global pandemic in the midst of an actual pandemic stretched even his considerable organizational skills.

At the beginning he assumed he’d still be making a film in the conventional way, with a detailed production schedule. But lockdowns and travel restrictions soon put an end to this idea. With a good portion of the world shut down, Naworynski was suddenly reliant on teams in multiple locations around the world to be the eyes, ears and legs of the production.

Co-ordinating the film required vast amounts of screen time and endless meetings, but even that proved tough as each production team had a different way of communicating. Some preferred Zoom, others Facebook, still others Google Hangouts. Add in the many time zones, and voila! You’ve got complexity beyond belief.

Winnowed down from the hundreds of people working on a vaccine around the world, the film follows three researchers: Dr. Alyson Kelvin in Canada; Dr. Uğur Şahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci in Germany; and Dr. Xuefeng Yu in China.

Naworynski says that, despite the title of the film, the word “race” doesn’t really suit the nature of the challenge, as scientists were actually helping each other all along the way.

The questions Naworynski pursued at the start of filming were more conceptual, he says. “Is there going to be a vaccine in two years, three years or five years?” In those early days, he was riveted by the Johns Hopkins global coronavirus tracker, which tallied the growing case counts around the world.

It’s useful to remember how much conflicting information was floating about at the beginning of the pandemic, even without the outright mendacity and obstructionist ways of some governments and authorities.

But in early 2020, long before the general public became aware, scientists knew that something strange was going on, as information about a new disease began to emerge out of Wuhan, China.

As the viral spread began to pick up speed, different nations faced different challenges. Some, like South Korea, seemed to get a handle on slowing transmission at the outset, while others, like the U.S., foundered along political and cultural lines.

In Brazil, under the rule of President Jair Bolsonaro, things were especially harsh. The film’s Brazilian crew, embedded with ambulance drivers and paramedics, was on the frontline of the crises and witness to the pandemic’s brutal toll.

With the threat of the virus growing exponentially, research teams leapt into action. Some teams working on cancer treatments were able to pivot very quickly and adapt their methods to creating a vaccine for COVID-19.

The development of a vaccine usually takes years but, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, individual scientists like Dr. Alyson Kelvin made significant personal sacrifices to work on the project.

Kelvin left her young family in Halifax and moved to Saskatoon to work at VIDO-InterVac. Situated in the middle of the Canadian Prairies, the facility is one of the largest vaccine and infectious disease research institutes on the planet.

In some sense, Kelvin had been training for this moment her entire life, working on SARS in 2003 and the influenza outbreak in 2009.

As she says in the film, she needed to be there to help. “I am really scared of this… I can’t sit and watch and do nothing when I know I have the expertise. If I’m not doing this work, I’m not contributing.”

Some of the earliest frontrunners in vaccine development suffered unforeseen issues and were forced back to the drawing board. Despite having the full weight of the Chinese military behind him, Dr. Xuefeng Yu ran into problems with side effects early on in human trials.

As outbreaks flared up around the world, in Germany Dr. Uğur Şahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci from the small company BioNTech partnered with a pharmaceutical giant to create the first mRNA vaccine. Calling their quest “Project Lightspeed,” they laboured around the clock, with shifts of people working both nights and weekends.

The thrill of being able to document something that could save millions of lives was the project of a lifetime for Naworynski. “Seeing it on the inside, as a raw, unique, authentic witness, I was well-tickled by that. I knew what happened, because I was there.”

But as Naworynski explains, the battle to overcome COVID-19 might be just the beginning of an ongoing war. There are thousands of coronaviruses waiting to spill over into the human population. This will not be the last pandemic that humanity will face.

With this reality in mind, the U.K.’s Dr. Jonathan Heeney is searching for a broad-spectrum vaccine that will aid people in future fights. Heeney’s research with bats, which harbour viruses that are particularly virulent towards humans, requires hundreds of genetic sequences.

For this he relies on scientists in Ratchaburi, Thailand, where a Buddhist temple sits atop a limestone cavern that is home to 2.5 million bats. Under the direction of Dr. Supaporn Watcharaprueksadee, Thai scientists carefully capture the creatures to secure information that might help combat future outbreaks of new and perhaps even more deadly coronaviruses.

Did Naworynski think the development of the vaccine would happen as quickly as it did?

“Not at all!” The breakneck speed was astounding, he says, as well as the level of international commitment to sharing information.

“It wasn’t just PR lip service,” says Naworynski. “They were all collaborating, sharing information. There were Zoom meetings with 150 people on the call. Even witnessing it as a layperson, it was really inspiring to watch the world come together.”

This commitment to ending the pandemic, with its untold human suffering, renewed Naworynski’s faith in what people are capable of when they put aside their differences. If the rest of the world was as collaborative as the scientific community, we might be at the end of COVID-19’s rampage, instead of bobbing about in successive waves.

But for all the global scale, the personal experience is still one that lingers the longest for the filmmaker. “When I was making the doc, a lot of people were asking me for information. Would I take the vaccine?” he said.

“I’d never had a flu shot until last year. But I’m happy to take whatever would help protect my family and my parents.”

'Inside the Great Vaccine Race' is available to screen on CBC Gem.