Kizzmekia Corbett Unlocked the Science of the Covid Vaccine

Next month will be the three-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaring Covid-19 a pandemic, on March 11, 2020. But in those fraught first few months of 2020, Dr. Corbett helped lead a team of scientists that contributed to one of the most stunning achievements in the history of immunizations: a highly effective, easily manufactured vaccine against Covid-19, delivered and authorized for use in under a year.

On Jan. 6, 2020, that goal started to take on a new urgency. As the number of sick people in China began to climb, Dr. 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 SARS and MERS, which each killed hundreds. Dr. 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 said. “So what I felt was excitement about being able to prove myself and my work to the world.”

Dr. Corbett, 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 the National Institutes of Health 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 on to healthy cells in the body — act as the doorway to infection. This research was part of the foundation, laid by scientists including Dr. Graham, Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, for the Covid-19 vaccine, the fastest vaccine ever developed.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/science/covid-vaccine-kizzmekia-corbett.html