The Half Past Nine One

I

On the morning of 16 March 2020, at a research centre in Seattle, a forty-three-year-old woman in a vest top [the photograph is everywhere] received in her arm the first dose of a vaccine that had been designed in two days.

Her name was Jennifer Haller, she worked at a small technology company and she had two teenage children. She signed up because she saw the trial advertisement, because she was healthy and because, she said, she wanted to do something [the whole trial was forty-five volunteers].

That same day the lockdowns were starting across half of Europe.

The virus sequence had been published on 11 January. The candidate vaccine was designed on the 13th. In sixty-three days it went from a text file with the letters of the genome to a needle going into an arm, which is the shortest interval in history between knowing and testing.

There was no ceremony. There was a nurse with a double mask, an agency photographer and four more volunteers that day.

II

It has to be said what was injected, because it is not what people think.

It is not a dead virus, like Salk's polio one; it is not a weakened virus, like the drops; it is not a protein purified in a factory, like many of the modern ones.

It is an instruction.

What goes inside the syringe is a strand of genetic material containing the recipe for a single piece of the virus, wrapped in a microscopic drop of fat so that it does not come apart on the way and can enter a cell.

The factory is the vaccinated person [the only vaccine that is finished being made inside whoever receives it]. The cell reads the recipe, makes that piece, puts it out on its surface, and the immune system finds it there and learns to recognise it.

That is why it could be designed in two days. Nothing had to be cultured and nothing purified. A sequence had to be written on a computer and sent to be synthesised.

III

I was given mine a year and three months later, in a sports hall, at half past nine in the morning.

I remember the zigzag queue between barriers, the smell of a gymnasium, the folding tables with civil protection volunteers and the fifteen-minute timer you had to wait out sitting down afterwards [just in case, and the just in case was very specific].

The needle is not felt. The liquid, a little.

That night my temperature went to thirty-eight and a half and my arm hurt in a specific way, as if I had been punched in the deltoid. I slept badly, with that first-hour flu sensation. The next day I was perfectly fine.

It was free [for me and for everybody in that queue]. I paid nothing, I signed no invoice and I saw no price anywhere.

That is the strangest thing in this whole series, if you think about it calmly. The only piece of the twenty-four in which the body of now has no figure to put at the end.

Somebody paid for it, of course. It was not me, and I did not notice.

IV

Inside, the delicate part is not the instruction. It is the envelope.

A strand of RNA on its own, injected into a muscle, lasts seconds. The body is full of enzymes dedicated to destroying loose genetic material, because loose genetic material usually means infection. That was the obstacle that kept this technology blocked for thirty years.

Two things had to be solved.

The first, that it should not be destroyed before arriving. That was solved by putting it inside a bubble of fat of minuscule size, which protects it and which besides fuses with the cell membrane and leaves it inside.

The second, subtler, is the one that earned a Nobel. A virus's RNA, on entering a cell, sets off an alarm: the cell has sensors that detect genetic material that is not its own and respond with an inflammatory reaction so strong that the vaccine turned out to be intolerable. Two researchers —Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman— discovered that by changing one of the four letters for a slightly modified variant, the alarm does not go off and the recipe is read just the same.

That change of one letter is what makes everything else possible; without it, the vaccine existed on paper and was useless in an arm.

Once inside, the cell reads the instruction with the same machinery it reads its own with, makes the piece for a few hours or a few days, and then the instruction degrades and disappears. It does not enter the nucleus, does not integrate into the genetic material and nothing is left.

That is the difference from the previous thing. A gene therapy inserts an instruction that stays for ever; this delivers a note that is read and destroyed.

V

What changed in 2020 was not the biology. It was the calendar.

Sixty-three days from the sequence to the first arm, and less than a year to the emergency approval. That, in an industry where ten years was normal, looks like magic and is not: it was done by overlapping stages that are always done one after another, manufacturing at risk before knowing whether it worked, and with an amount of public money that has no precedent.

None of those three things is a scientific discovery. All three are administrative and financial decisions.

So the lesson of this piece is uncomfortable for everybody. A good part of the time a medicine takes to arrive is not time of science. It is time of waiting between stages, and it can be compressed when there is will and money.

What we do not know is how much of that compression can be sustained without paying for it somewhere else.

Part of the bill has already been seen. The rare adverse effects, the ones that appear in one in fifty thousand, are not detected in a trial of thirty thousand people by definition. They were detected afterwards, with hundreds of millions of doses given, and each of those findings arrived as news and as suspicion instead of as what it was, a surveillance system working.

VI

The objection has to do with the privilege of the calendar.

I received mine in June 2021, free, in a sports hall, with an appointment by text message. That same month, in several countries, the proportion of the population vaccinated was below one per cent, and it stayed that way for more than a year.

The speed I am talking about is the speed at which it reached my arm.

There is a second thing, smaller and more my own. I have written that I did not have to pay anything and that I did not find out who paid. That last part is what best describes my position in this whole series: the system worked so well that it became invisible, and the invisible is hard to defend when somebody attacks it.

VII

Jennifer Haller did not know whether she had been given the vaccine or the placebo, because in that first trial there was no placebo: it was a safety trial, and everybody received product.

She has said several times that the worst part was not the injection but the messages she received afterwards, some thanking her and others accusing her of taking part in an “experiment” against people.

11 January 2020, the sequence published.

13 January, the vaccine designed.

16 March, the first arm; sixty-three days.

One letter changed in the recipe so that the alarm does not go off.

June 2021, half past nine in the morning, a sports hall.

Thirty-eight and a half of fever that night.

Price for me: none.