Luck, foresight and science: How an unheralded team developed a COVID-19 vaccine in record time
Credit for Moderna s COVID-19 vaccine belongs in part to discoveries dating back 15 years. The team behind it was inspired by two infant deaths.
David Heath and Gus Garcia-Roberts, USA TODAY
Published
9:25 pm UTC Jan. 31, 2021
Credit for Moderna s COVID-19 vaccine belongs in part to discoveries dating back 15 years. The team behind it was inspired by two infant deaths.
David Heath and Gus Garcia-Roberts, USA TODAY
Published
9:25 pm UTC Jan. 31, 2021
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Barney Graham, Kizzmekia Corbett, Anthony Fauci, Jason McLellan, Derrick Rossi and Luigi Warren
Aimee Picchi
Special to USA TODAY
Emergency room nurse Louise McLellan recalls her life prior to contracting COVID-19 in March: She liked to kayak with her husband and make her signature cookie – the peanut butter explosion – to bring to work the next day.
Ten months later, McLellan, 53, still hasn’t fully recovered. She struggles to bake, and kayaking is out of the question because of lingering lung problems that leave her out of breath. That made it difficult to perform her job when she tried returning to work in June.
“I lasted two hours,” she recalls.
The physical demands of an emergency room nurse were too taxing to given her long-haul symptoms, she says. And when she asked to switch to a desk job, her efforts went nowhere. In the end, McLellan went on short-term disability.
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Grace Hauck and Harrison Hill, USA TODAY
Published
7:11 pm UTC Jan. 21, 2021
EVERETT, Wash. – It s been a full year since the first known U.S. case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Snohomish County in a 35-year-old man returning from Wuhan, China.
He was admitted on Jan. 20, 2020, to Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett. The world shifted for us, and the world shifted maybe a little bit earlier here, but it shifted for all of us, Mayor Cassie Franklin told USA TODAY last week. Our city is transformed by this and we still don’t know all the ways because we aren’t through it yet.
5:49 pm UTC Jan. 19, 2021
EVERETT, Wash. – Hundreds were ill and six had died in China when a 35-year-old man touched down in Seattle after a three-month trip to visit family in Wuhan. He got sick the next day, a Thursday, saw a doctor Sunday and was admitted to the hospital Monday.
He traveled alone. He lived alone. He went into isolation. Alone.
At Providence Regional Medical Center, he spoke to doctors on the other side of the glass window through a telehealth robot and asked for a phone to call family.
It was Jan. 20, 2020, and the United States first known case of the novel coronavirus had been reported in Snohomish County, an area of fewer than a million residents north of Seattle, flanked by the Puget Sound on the west and the Cascade Mountains on the east.