Inside the Secretive Government Unit Saving American Lives Around the World
In a concrete hangar in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, Katrina Mayes is working with precision and purpose. Wisps of smoke surround her, wafting off the dry ice she is using to jerry-rig a cardboard vaccine carrier. Her task: to create a vapor phase vent to moderate the temperature of the cooling container from around minus 80 degrees Celsius (for storing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vials) to minus 15 degrees Celsius (to accommodate supplies of the Moderna vaccine). At 29, the biochemist and virologist has spent much of her professional life indoors, where the U.S. government has entrusted her to handle so...