It has been a race which has transformed vaccines: DOCTORS ARE READY TO GIVE VACCINE 2.0

Physician Ugur Sahin received an email late one Friday night near the end of January 2020. At the time, very few people had realised that a new coronavirus was about to take the world’s population in its grip. But as Sahin read the scientific article to which the email directed him, he understood what was about to happen – the beginning of a war against an enemy that had not yet demonstrated its full potential. And he decided to do something about it.

At that point in time, few knew about the new virus that had emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan and spread to the rest of China and a handful of neigbouring countries. The virus, which was later named SARS-CoV-2, had infected a total of 1347 people, of whom 41 had died of a new type of pneumonia.

In the scientific article that Sahin read, scientists from China and Hong Kong were describing how the infection had spread in a family. By studying the time period between infection and disease symptoms in each fam-ily member, the