Covid: How this woman helped make Covid vaccine possible

Kizzmekia Corbett had gone home to North Carolina for the holidays in 2019 when the headlines began to trickle in: A strange, pneumonia-like illness was making dozens of people sick in China.By the first week of January 2020, the number of infected people in China had climbed to the hundreds. Corbett, a viral immunologist, was back at her desk at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she served as a senior research fellow at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). And that’s when the news was confirmed: The mysterious illness was a novel coronavirus, exactly the category of infection that she had been studying for the past five years in a bid to develop a vaccine.Coronaviruses can cause all kinds of illness, like the common cold or more crippling diseases. Novel coronaviruses are new strains that are identified in humans for the first time. And when it came to the race for a vaccine against Covid-19, Corbett, who was part of important work on other coronavirus outbreaks, was at the vanguard. medium97912515Finding similaritiesMarch 11 will be the third anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaring Covid-19 a pandemic. In those fraught months that followed, Corbett helped lead a team of scientists that contributed to one of the most stunning achievements in the history of immunisations: A highly effective, easily manufactured vaccine against Covid-19, delivered and authorised for use in less than a year.On January 6, 2020, that goal started to take on a new urgency. As the number of sick people in China began to climb, Corbett huddled with her supervisor, Dr Barney Graham, the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory. Both noted that this new disease bore eerie similarities to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which each killed hundreds. Corbett’s work, and the work of her entire team, suddenly had urgent implications.“At the time, we had no idea it would become a global pandemic,” she says. “So what I felt was excitement about being able to prove myself and my work to the world.” medium97912550Corbett, 37, was used to having to prove herself. As a Black woman in science, she is accustomed to asserting her worth in rooms filled with white men. In early 2020, she had been at NIH for five years and had already published groundbreaking research about the structure of other coronaviruses and how the viruses’ spike proteins — which form a distinctive crown shape on the surface of the virus and latch onto healthy cells in the body — act as the doorway to infection. Fastest vaccine ever deployedThis research was part of the foundation, laid by scientists including Graham, Katalin Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, for the Covid vaccine, the fastest vaccine ever developed.Vaccines can take more than a decade to develop from scratch. The mumps vaccine, which was created in 1967 after four years, was considered a wild success of timing. By January 10, 2020, at the urging of scientists including Graham, scientists in China shared the genetic makeup of the virus that was sweeping through Wuhan. He and Corbett immediately saw that their research on other illnesses caused by coronaviruses like SARS could be adapted. medium97913265“Over the course of five years,” says Corbett, “we had already determined which parts of the virus would excite the body’s immune system in a way that would cause protective immunity.”Understanding that spike proteins were at the heart of an adequate defence against infection, Corbett and other scientists had created experimental vaccines against SARS and MERS. Now, by swapping in the genetic code for the virus that creates Covid-19, they had a prototype they could already use. Graham credits Corbett with playing a formative role in the vaccine’s development. “Around 2015, Kizzmekia decided that the coronavirus was the project she wanted to focus on,” he says, “and it was her work that led to what we knew about the coronavirus and prepared us for making that vaccine so rapidly.”Making historyIt took her only a few hours to prepare a modified sequence for a vaccine. By January 14, 2020, the NIH had shared that sequence with the vaccine developer Moderna, which used the code to create synthetic messenger RNA, the genetic material that holds instructions for how to build the spike proteins. Messenger RNA (mRNA) is the backbone of Moderna’s Covid vaccine and Pfizer’s vaccine. medium97913303By March 2020, Moderna was running the first human trials of its vaccine, and by December 2020 — less than a year after the first deaths in Wuhan were reported — it was authorised by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use.Thinking back on those intensely charged first days, Corbett says, “we weren’t racing against the pandemic, we were racing ourselves”. Initially, she was eager to prove that her earlier research could be widely applied. “But when hundreds of thousands of people start to die,” she says, “you realise how important the work you’re doing is”.She also felt pressure beyond the rapidly climbing death toll. Corbett earned her doctorate in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Carolina in 2014. She is still working to upend the status quo when it comes to who performs scientific research.“I try to make sure that my lab and the people I hire come from diverse backgrounds so that our thoughts and the way that we do our science shakes the table a little bit,” she says.She first came on the radar of many Americans on March 3, 2020, when photos circulated of her standing in the NIH laboratory, in a crisp white lab coat, amid a crowd of influential white men: President Donald Trump; Dr Anthony Fauci (then director of NIAID); Graham; John Mascola, director of the Vaccine Research Center; and Alex Azar, then the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. medium97913387But just out of the frame, two other young Black female scientists — Cynthia Ziwawo and Olubukola Abiona, both researchers on Corbett’s team — were watching their leader carefully.“I had never seen a Black woman scientist before working with Dr Corbett,” says Ziwawo, 25, who is now in medical school at Indiana University. “It definitely impacted how I view minorities in science, especially those running the room.”Her new missionIn May 2021, Corbett joined the faculty at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, where she is now an assistant professor in the department of immunology and infectious diseases. But she still carries the same kind of pressure she felt racing the clock in early 2020.“If I fail as a Black woman, this department at Harvard will overlook Black women until infinity,” she says. “People at the NIH would have overlooked Black women if I failed. Being the first in so many kinds of these spaces has so much pressure.”Announcing… The Kizzmekia S. Corbett Endowed Scholarship at @umbc - scholarships for Meyerhoff scholars who demonst… https://t.co/yY9nsdODdD— KizzyPhD (@KizzyPhD) 1654256390000She receives 10 to 20 emails a week from Black women and girls, she says, and whenever she talks to them, she makes a point to let them know that if they, too, want to be a scientist, “I will risk my all to make sure to stand up for them, as long as they are committed”.And in visits with Black churches, at community forums and on her active Twitter page, where she has more than 160,000 followers, she is vocal about combating vaccine hesitancy and decreasing barriers to health care, particularly among communities of colour.“At some point, you get to the point where you can’t beat what you already did,” she says. “But then you get to have a voice in spaces that you generally wouldn’t be able to. That’s where my mission and purpose is.” medium97913791World must thank intellectual property rights for Covid vaccines medium97913802